Hate!

Do you know what's wrong with the media at the moment? It's this pathetic stance they take where everything that happens has to have two sides. I half expect them, at some point in the future, to allow paedophiles the right to reply. We first saw this kind of bullshit during the pandemic, when the BBC allowed people to question everything about Covid - from the existence of the virus to the vaccinations. We've had it with climate change and on the other side of the coin we see less scrutiny of politicians - specifically right wing politicians. News dissemination isn't part of the entertainment industry but it often feels like it is.

In the last week, we've seen people being given air time on TV and radio expressing reasons and excuses as to why we're having riots across England and in parts of Northern Ireland and the argument seems to be that people are angry and they're looking for someone or something to take it out on. Is this one of the more pathetic excuses for rioting and looting that has ever been used or have I missed something?  I mean, these rioters are threatening the lives of not just non-white people but anyone who lives in the communities. They are destroying the infrastructure they are supposed to be protesting about. They are looting shops because, somehow, this is making the country better for their kids. 

These people are torching communities and it reminds me of the time when I used to work in Youth Justice. I'd work with car thieves and one of the first questions I'd ask them was why they did it. Usually I'd get some mealy response such as 'they have more than me' or a variation of. When I pointed out to 99% of these kids that actually the only cars they could steal were old models, usually driven by poor people who probably had fewer things than the thief, there was this weird thing going on behind their eyes; like the penny was dropping but they didn't dare acknowledge it. These arseholes trashing communities are trashing the places where they live. They are literally shitting in their beds and stamping in it.

When right wing wankers like Farage, Anderson, Tice and Tommy 'Ten Names' Robinson spout nonsense like the rioters have legitimate concerns, they are doing nothing but inciting more violence. These people do not have legitimate concerns and if you have to give them one iota of an excuse then that is what we're going to be looking at in the coming paragraphs. How these wankers became wankers because of people with privilege...

We've all seen the headlines of the Daily Mail, Daily Express, the Sun, the Telegraph and we've heard the shite that pours out of GB News - anti immigration headlines, anti-Muslim, anti-hope; headlines that pour petrol on the frustration of people who want something to blame for their shit lives. The drip drip drip tactics of white privileged right wing arseholes who do propaganda so well Goebbels would be proud. What about the BBC, or ITV or other media outlets that give voices to the likes of Farage or 30p Lee Anderson; why is that? Why, in a febrile volatile landscape, are media outlets giving voices to the people who are indirectly responsible for the problems that are happening at the moment? Why is that?

What about the 14 years of Tory rule we've suffered and are probably more responsible for this than anyone else? They brought us Brexit, which exposed the huge divides in the country that might not have dominated the landscape of the UK for the last eight years. They called migrants 'swarms', they harped on about 'the boats', they brought us the 'hostile environment'. They stopped processing immigrant applications so that instead of sorting these problems out they allowed backlogs of migrants needing to be housed somewhere therefore causing stress to the people with little brains. They stoked the fires of racism and then wandered around saying 'it wasn't me.'

There's this thing called cognitive dissonance - defined as: a term for the state of discomfort felt when two or more modes of thought contradict each other. This means, in layman's terms, as: if you believe something and it is proved that what you believe is not true, you refuse to accept the facts and continue to believe what you believe. If you've read my political blogs over the last eight years you will have seen a common theme throughout many of them - belief politics. That's not actual politics, it's essentially people who believe things that they've been told and therefore this is what they believe so it must be correct even if they're given proof that what they believe in is wrong. 

Brexit was a belief politics. Trump is belief politics. Illegal immigrants are belief politics. If you believe something then you cannot be swayed to believe in the facts. It is like some aspects of religion, usually, in my experience, Born Again Christians. Their belief is so strong they almost get emotionally unstable when someone questions their beliefs. The humorous but quite disturbing thing is the White Anglo Saxon Person's belief of what a Muslim is while simultaneously questioning the alleged extreme beliefs of a Muslim. 

The problem with cognitive dissonance is even if someone you trust and respect tells you that you're wrong, these people suddenly become the enemy and are believing the propaganda that's being fed to us by the establishment. Remember when people believed vaccines were full of things that they shouldn't be - microchips, animal or human foetuses, all kinds of stuff that would control you? Rather than listen to 100% of doctors and nurses, these people suggested that 100% of doctors and nurses were all being controlled by the establishment; the same doctors and nurses that we applauded during the pandemic and then condemned for wanting more money. people are simply fucking stupid and that is down to the governments we've had since the 1970s.

"We're losing control of our country. There's too many foreigners. There's not enough services because migrants are using them all the time." ... Let's look at that last sentence for a start; the one about there not being enough services due to people who aren't white. The reason there isn't enough public services - for everybody - has ZERO to do with migration and everything to do about governments cutting public sector funding. The reason you can't get a doctor is because the governments have run the NHS into the ground and people don't want to work there any more. Because there's no money for them. There are no buses because if bus routes don't make money they get cut. Trains are shit and expensive because private train operators are more interested in their profit than providing a service. Our bins don't get collected weekly because it's cost effective to do it every other week. We have no public services, especially in 2024, because of the Tories not because of an asylum seeker who is fleeing war or oppression. The reason you see so many brown people in A&E is because so many white people beat them up.

As for there being too many foreigners and we're 'sinking like the Titanic because there's too many of them.' 82% of the UK's population is white. If you include 3rd and 4th generation non-white people that figure goes up to 96%. That's NINETY-SIX PERCENT of the population who call themselves British, that's whether they're Muslim, Sikh, Hindu, Greek Orthodox, Jedi or even - god forbid - atheists. So, the problem these rioters have isn't the 'illegal immigrants' - a term which is actually a misnomer because we don't give illegal immigrants anything because they're illegal. Illegal immigrants tend to be unknown to the authorities, because they're illegal. Look at it this way; we don't have a registry of burglars in this country, like we have a register of lawyers or even sex offenders.

So what we're dealing with is racists and dog whistling far right politicians using this racism to incite violence which bleeds [if you'll excuse the term] into ignorant peoples beliefs. The fact we have white Muslims gets forgotten about because what these wankers are looking at is the colour of your skin. Look at the riots in South Belfast; a protestant area - ie: Loyalists not republicans. These people doing the damage are targeting only non-white businesses; one of the businesses is run by Hindus, another is a Christian African; so this really has nothing to do with Islamophobia - which is a major problem - but to do with not liking brown people...

Consider this: when we had weekly rallies in London supporting Palestine, the Tory government called the protestors all manner of horrible things, from terrorist sympathisers to hate pushers. The Tory MPs who were making these colourful metaphors are absent in their condemnation of what has happened in the last week. Why is that?

Oh and while we're talking about it, let's not disregard Confirmation Bias, which is described as: "the tendency to search for, interpret, favour, and recall information in a way that confirms or supports one's prior beliefs or values. People display this bias when they select information that supports their views, ignoring contrary information, or when they interpret ambiguous evidence as supporting their existing attitudes. The effect is strongest for desired outcomes, for emotionally charged issues, and for deeply entrenched beliefs." This is important. Possibly more important than cognitive dissonance because confirmation bias appeals to emotions whereas cognitive dissonance is about facts. This is what the internet and social media targets in people; people have been drip fed nasty propaganda for so long, they're looking for the one thing that confirms their beliefs - it doesn't matter if there are 99 things that don't confirm it, these people are looking for the one thing, from wherever or whoever it comes from, that makes their belief right. 

The other major problem with this kind of racist is there are no circumstances where a foreign person is entitled to anything, not tolerance, nothing, not a single penny, because the gammons will argue that any money an asylum seeker gets should have gone to pensioners or homeless veterans. This is a difficult thing to argue against, especially when you're dealing with confirmation bias. How do you argue against this? If you argued that literally ALL homeless veterans are homeless through choice and have mental health problems that aren't dealt with because we have piss poor mental health provision and that is because of public sector cutbacks and nothing to do with immigrants, your average gammon simply wouldn't believe you. They can moan about the government on a Monday and be cheerleaders for them on a Tuesday. We're dealing with fickle contrary arseholes.

So... how do we solve this problem? We'd need 50 years, because it's something that needs to be slowly taught and we need for kids to get it and these kids to gently re-educate their parents, to challenge their parents. Except that probably won't work, all you'll do there is cause more divisions in families.

The irony is if we got rid of every non-white person in the country, then it would become people who aren't Christians or Catholics; then it would become Christians only and then when everyone the gammons hate are driven out of the country (to who knows where) who would they start blaming then? The disabled? The unemployed (except there shouldn't be any because, you know, we've taken back control all of our jobs)? Single parents? Gays? Lesbians? Trans people? Short people? Really tall people? People with brown eyes? Where does it end for these people if their lives don't get better because of all the eradication of things they hate?

Maybe we need to have a kind of neo-authoritarian government who clamp down on the sources rather than the people who react? Maybe we need to slap gagging orders on the right wing newspapers; charge them with hate crimes if they target an individual or a religion? Maybe the BBC needs to stop door stepping Farage or 30p Lee? Maybe Farage needs to be NOT invited on Question Time? Maybe we need to stop giving this utter shit stick air? Maybe he needs to be investigated by the House of Commons for not being a proper representative MP? Maybe next time he goes to the USA to try and cosy up to his mad friend Trump we need to tell him he can't come back into the country because he's a terrorist? Maybe the likes of Yaxley-Lennon and Andrew Tate need stopping - full stop. But to do this we need wankers like Elon Musk to shut them down, not give them more space and endorse them by suggesting the UK is heading towards a civil war. We know governments are powerless to shut down the likes of Facebook or Xitter by legal means, so maybe it's time to shut these things down and stop people from getting them. Ban these kinds of social media from the UK... Except, we know that isn't going to happen, so we're not going to come up with methods to stop this shit from happening. 

Hate has its natural home on social media and social media isn't going to clamp down on it because the people who run them are above the law and are fucking barking mad mega-powerful nihilists. Maybe we need to boycott social media and go back to using the telephone and actually visiting friends; maybe we need to lose the FOMO feeling that made social media such an important part of peoples' lives. However, we won't do that, so we have to accept that we are, quite simply, doomed. 

Fright Wig Night

So... That's that then. A massive Labour majority and I should be cock-a-hoop. Today should be a fabulous day, full of joy and optimism. The problem is I stopped supporting Labour when it lurched to the right. I'm not a moderate. I'm not a centrist. I'm barely a centre leftist and like the 40.4% of eligible voters who didn't vote, I have no enthusiasm for any of the political parties based in England. I have some enthusiasm for the Scottish National Party, but I'm in the minority there as well. 

Labour needs to do an awful lot over the next five years to instil me with any sense of optimism and if what Obi Wan Kier has been saying for the last year or so is anything to go by or is what we're going to get then I can't see people being happy. 

Sunak was a defiant twat to the end, but at least he was magnanimous. Good riddance to him and the shite that got beaten; especially Liz Triss, Grant Shapps and fucking Jacob Rees Mogg. They won't suffer for losing, but I wish they would.

At least we've seen the last of the scumbags who have destroyed this country and kingdom. We just need the people who have replaced them to restore us to some level of competence. I'm not optimistic but I won't be dismissive.

Let the rebuild begin. 

Why?

Why would anyone want to vote Tory at the General Election?

It's an easy question to answer; there are people out there who don't feel they've done a bad job. For all the scandals, corruption, waste and contempt they have shown the rest of the country, there are people who will think that Labour will do worse. Quite what they're definition of worse is can't really be quantified, but there are people out there who are lifelong Tory voters and they simply cannot see themselves wanting to vote for anyone else; not even Reform.

I was the same. Not about the Tories but about Labour. I've voted Labour at every election bar one since my first vote was cast; 1981 to 2017 equals nearly 40 years of support and very little to be happy about. I couldn't imagine voting for anyone else and then I moved to Scotland and realised that there was an alternative. Maybe not the ideal one, but as Labour has lurched to the right since 2019, the SNP represents the closest I can hope for that align with my own politics.

What puzzles me about Tory voters is like Labour they're almost unrecognisable to the party I grew up with. Margaret Thatcher would probably be spinning in her grave at this bunch of corrupt chancers and you don't realise how much that pains me to say. So why do ordinary Tory voters think that sticking with this shower of shit is the only option for them? Do they really think that anyone else is going to be worse than the last eight years?

You could argue that the core Tory vote are people who are well off; who don't really worry about the cost of living crisis and view anyone who doesn't live in suburbia as oiks. I watched a video about voters in a town I lived next to in the 1980s - Radlett, in Herts - and the arguments coming out of the Tory voters mouths ranged from "But Angela Rayner is so awful" to "We need stability" - this says to me that it's a mixture of snobbery and ignorance. Snobbery because Rayner is from Manchester and ignorance because the last decade has been anything but stable.

The thing is everyone is worse off because of the Tories; even Tories are. Yes, they might not even notice the way food and energy prices or the general cost of living has escalated, but unless they only use helicopters to travel by (and aviation fuel has doubled in price), they still have to use the roads, which are now more dangerous than an oik with a machete. They still have to exist and even if private schools have been exempt from the decay, their children are growing up in a world that is so divided and unhappy they can't avoid it. Everything is worse than it was 10 years ago. Nothing is better. There's no sign that anything is going to improve. We're living in a country that is isolated, unhappy, fearful and angry about almost everything.

So why would these people who vote Tory want to keep this mob of shysters in power? Do they think they're going to benefit from it? Is it all about greed or is it more about conditioning? I know people who really believe that all the other parties are going to make things worse. Worse than what? I want these people to tell me what is good about living in the UK at the moment. Just one thing.

I do agree with the Tories on one thing, but not for the same reasons. I do think a Labour massive majority would be a bad thing. Not for democratic reasons, but because we really need more representation in parliament and this General Election is fast becoming the perfect place to elect one of the minorities parties. I'm not saying it will or even can happen, just that it's the best time for it to happen. It would be great if we had 50+ Liberal Democrats; 10 Green; 20 independent MPs; 40 SNP MPs and much fewer right wing parties. It would be a very positive move by the electorate if - like a couple of European countries recently - they told the far right to fuck off; that they only represent the most ignorant and dangerous people and these people should have an appropriate voice - a small one that is largely ignored by decent people.

We're never going to get Proportional Representation in my life time, so we need today's young and disaffected voters to look at alternatives and give them a chance. If Labour really can win by 200+ seats, then the best advice I can give you is Vote Tactically, especially if a minority party has a chance and if they do have a chance try and persuade others to vote the same as you. There are at least four seats in the UK at the moment that could return a Green MP, it just needs voters of the other minority candidates to hold their nose and elect something or someone different. The same applies to Plaid, to the SNP, to progressive Independents and even the LibDems. Having a multicoloured parliament might be good for the country. Maybe ten years down the line we might be ready to have a Rainbow Coalition in charge who will do things for the many and not the few? Wouldn't that be refreshing?

Diversity Gone Wrong

The main problem I'm always going to have when I touch on a delicate subject is my age. Being 62 apparently now makes me a Boomer, despite the fact the goalposts have moved. When I was growing up it was always people born between 1945 and 1960, but it seems it's now 1945 to 1965 and I'm sure at some point in the next few years that will move to 1970. It seems Baby Boomers are people who moan about things Gen Z and Millennials don't have a specific opinion about. I'm saying this because Boomers tend to be picked out for their 'out of touch' opinions, so the following opinion might be out of touch...

Something that bothers me greatly is the depiction of race in the UK. With immigration hatred and racism flourishing here, thanks to the likes of Nigel Farage and right wing Tory rhetoric, even talking about the minorities make up of the UK is to walk on dodgy ground. You can't have a view about ethnicity or sexual orientation now, unless it's positive. You will get people crawling out of the woodwork to call people racists, homophobes and any other derogatory name; but equally you'll get a proportionate amount of people doing to the same to call people woke, lefties or virtue signallers. You can't win with opinions and therefore moderate people are almost actively encouraged to remain silent about anything that might end up having a label pinned on them.

I'm one of the most left wing people I've ever met. My contempt for right wing politics, fascism and people with extreme views is well documented and therefore when I have something that bothers me - something controversial - I tend to remain silent, or talk about it with someone I know isn't going to be judgemental. Last year, I admitted to being something of a TERF - trans-exclusionary radical feminist - when I admitted this to at least two 'right-on' friends you'd have thought I was saying kiddie fiddling is okay in its place. The thing is I support the TERF movement because I believe that the entire trans debate has ignored the concerns of biological women and as someone who is also well documented as being a huge supporter of the feminist movement, ignoring the feelings and beliefs of biological women is tantamount to allowing Victorian principals back into sexual politics. When the SNP passed its controversial gender rights bill in 2023, what I heard from almost every single woman I know is it seemed to ignore what they felt and what their concerns were. The trans community is ridiculously small in the grand scheme of diversity, while women make up about 50% of the population and if my female friends were angry and concerned about their voices not being heard then I'm on the side of my female friends. It has nothing to do with my feelings about trans people - I know several, I'm friends with a few and I have respect for all human beings, except right wing wankers and advocates of exclusionism. 

I have a mate, he's married to a 'brown' woman and he like me has a problem with the disproportionate amount of certain ethnic minorities in television and film (and he's a Gen Z-er). He also feels the same as me; certain subjects can't be discussed openly for fear of alienating people we know or care about. It seems we can have all kinds of hatred for our own demographic, but if we venture into an area we are not a 'member' of, then we have no right to comment and our opinions are classed as extreme. So when both of us have noticed that there seems to be a disproportionate amount of Afro-Caribbean people in TV, advertising and film, it's something we can't discuss in an open forum. The problem is it's not like I have a problem with the number of black people in the entertainment industry, it's the fact we seem to have far more of them than say Asians, Chinese, Turkish, Middle Eastern, South Americans, Native Indigenous peoples. If you look at the non-white British demographic you will see that there are more Indian and Pakistani Asians in this country than Afro-Caribbeans; by quite a wide margin. 

Now, while that gap has been addressed in recent years, we're getting ethnic minorities in films and TV shows where they simply don't exist or in more prominent roles than they would have been. It's like the entertainment industry doesn't want to depict history like it was for fear of being called racist. So when a film like Wicked Little Letters is released and 30% of the major roles have been recast with black or Asian characters in 1920s England, it might not 'spoil' the entertainment, but in a historical drama it does devalue it because someone doesn't want to offend. But surely having a woman of Indian origin in the police force in 1920 - is incongruous; the first serving Asian police woman didn't happen until 1971- over 50 years later. Would this film have been ruined if it had been historically accurate? This film also had the female protagonist having a relationship with an Afro-Caribbean man when the actual woman was married to a white Irish man.

Take a number of historical dramas in recent years, having black or Asian characters in them, but not having Chinese characters, who were actually far more prevalent, especially in cities in the UK before the First World War. You were far more likely to see someone of Chinese origin in London in Victorian times than you were an Afro-Caribbean or Indian Asian, yet we never ever see correct historical depictions. There would never have been black people mingling with the upper classes of UK society and when Pocahontas and eleven of her Native American tribe came to the UK in 1616, they were treated with "scorn and fury" even though the aim was to convert them to Christianity and for them to become part of the United Kingdom. Britain might be a mongrel race, but the entitled, titled and upper classes would not entertain them in 'polite society' and if they were it was on display like some circus freak. Now this is indeed distasteful and probably shouldn't be something you see in, say, Doctor Who, but by placing black and Asian people in societal environments at a time when they would never have been there isn't diversity, it's [ahem] whitewashing a past that probably needs to be emphasised a lot more in these increasingly xenophobic times - if only as a warning.

The same applies to homosexuality; this is something that has never been the norm in society before the 1970s. There are examples of the establishment shutting down homosexual acts, passing laws and alienating those believed to be practicing it. It is probably something that has attracted far more bigotry than race, if such a thing were possible. Yes, it has always existed but it was also something that literally spent centuries in the closet. In the 21st century about 8% of the UK population sees itself as falling into the LGBT+ community, but there is a disproportionate amount of radio, TV and film coverage for this particular demographic. Let's put some perspective on this, however facile one might think the comparison is: the number of vegetarians and vegans in the UK, at the 2021 census, was approx 12%; that's a third more people are practicing vegetarians than the total LGBT+ community, but there is literally tokenism coverage of people who don't eat meat; almost every food show on all channels focuses on the 88% of people who have meat in their diets. I suppose vegetarians and their beliefs are not classed as contentious enough to be at least a tenth of the food show coverage?

So, there you have it. I'm obviously a racist and a homophobe because I want a fairer distribution of coverage and a closer - truer - historical depiction. We are seeing more disabled people in TV and films, but nowhere near the actual % of people who suffer from a disability; isn't that discriminatory towards the disabled? There are certain parts of the UK where Turkish, Greek, Eastern Europeans, or any other ethnic group that is comparable to Afro-Caribbean's, yet for fear of seeming to be over-egging the pudding; you don't see these people in television adverts, but almost every television advert will have someone of Afro-Caribbean origin in them and they represent about 4% of the total population of the UK. It's almost as if the entertainment and PR sectors are deliberately stoking racist fires by not giving a fair distribution of ethnicity in their products. 

Yawn...

The General Election preamble is only two days old and already I'm bored shitless by it. That's what being politically bereft does for you. I mean, I know who I'm voting for on July 4, all I hope is that other people in D&G realise there's only one political party that can unseat Alistair Jack and a vote for Labour or the Liberals will probably mean the Tory gets back in. If just one of these two 'making up the numbers' parties had pulled out of the last election and told their voters to vote SNP we would have had one less Tory seat in Scotland...

So, why am I politically bereft if I'm voting for the SNP. Well, because I'm fed up with politics and the mainstream press's relentless attacks on the SNP (and Corbyn's Labour and the Liberals) might not have made me change my mind about them, but they have worn me down to the point where I'd like to have a General Election with genuine candidates with coverage that is not weighted in some way towards the Establishment in England. Don't get me wrong, I'm used to politicising, but when you get Scottish Tories moaning about the SNP's handling of the NHS or education and you only have to look south of the border to see the chaos rained down on England by 14 years of Tory strip mining, it seems a bit rich when Scottish Tories complain about how the SNP are doing when we all know the country would almost be as bad as England if these narcissistic wankers were in charge up here.

As a 'life long' Labour supporter (or at least that's what I believed I was until Kid Starver started ripping up the Labour handbook), I am not tempted back to this once great political party, at least not while they run around acting like not-so-bad Conservatives, because they think that 20% of swing voters mean more than anything else, especially at a time when a fucking bath sponge could stand against most of the Tories and win by a country mile. 

A dear friend of mine once said to me, "All that happens is we just get the government back in, doesn't matter what colour flag they wave, they only care about us when we have to vote, after that we just become collateral damage." I've looked at politics for best part of the last two decades and felt we need something new, something honest with some integrity that puts the people first and worries about everything else second. A politics that explains to the idiots, wankers and ignorant about the real benefits of all the things they've been taught to hate - why immigration is a good thing; why disabled people need looking after; why it isn't everyone else's fault the country is in a mess; why it's the lack of investment in people and services that has made it difficult to see a doctor or go for a swim without someone's shit floating past your head; why the roads are more like the Somme than tarmac. Yet we live in a land where it must surely be single mothers' fault that everything has gone to the dogs.

This is a country that froths at the mouth when someone receiving benefits gets a fiver more than YOU think they deserve, but shrugs its shoulders and ignores it when millionaires get tax breaks or avoid paying their fair share or that shareholders get all the money that should be used to fix the public services they've destroyed. This is a country where attacking the innocent is far more fun than complaining about the fact everything is broken and no one wants to fix it.

So, here we are, in a General Election that I'm totally ambivalent about because none of the likely winners are saying anything that I want to hear and aren't really saying anything any other ordinary people wants to hear either. We're going to get useless soundbites about GDP and not being enough money and austerity 2.0 and any other meaningless bullshit that means they can avoid answering the questions that need to be answered. Oh and while we have pointless journalists who won't or don't ask the right questions, we're still going to wait until the end of time for the answers we want.

My best advice? You have to vote tactically. If you want the Tories out, then find out which party came second last time and whether there's the support for them this time around. Don't think about voting Labour if the Libdems or SNP or Plaid or Independent can win; sometimes a vote for Labour allows the Tories to win and sometimes allowing Labour to win a seat that a Libdem, SNP or some other could win is absolutely just as bad.

If you don't like politics, or football, or sports in general and the weather continues to remain shit, all you have is my deepest sympathy for the coming three months. It might be time to find a new hobby.

The End of the World is Nigh

Off the top of my head: Gaza, Sudan, Yemen, Haiti, Ukraine and Syria - these are the 'countries' that are currently crashing and burning. Wars have ravaged these places and every day the news has some story spinning out from them. Remember, Hamas are classed as a terrorist organisation by the UK government; the Houthi rebels are the enemy according to the friends of Saudi Arabia; Russia is a nasty aggressive country according to the Western World. Israel are either enemies or heroes depending on which side of the coin you prefer. There are conflicts all over the place, as many as I can recall in my nearly 62 years...

This morning the phone-in discussions of Channel 5 and BBC2 were both heated - and I mean really heated - debates on Nike's new look England flag on the collar of the extravagantly priced new England football team replica shirt. I mean, we have nearly half a million more children than we had in 2016 in extreme poverty and yet two women can argue with each other to the point where one of them openly insulted Nicky Campbell because he was trying to calm them both down. Over a flag, for fuck's sake. There are wars everywhere, poverty is rife, the world is burning and two middle class women are arguing over the English flag. This is where we are now. Climate change doesn't exist but Nike fucking with the red and white flag of Ing-er-land is high fucking treason.

Meanwhile, when the press isn't speculating about Kate Middleton, then the keyboard warriors are coming up with more theories than the JFK assassination - everything from humorous ones - she's had a Brazilian Butt Lift - to horrid ones - she's ravaged with cancer. Princess Kate has probably had a hysterectomy, it's probably something she nor the royal press department really wanted to talk about. She might have three children, but you know, heaven forbid, what if all three died in some freak accident and allowed Harry to become king by default? That would be the worst thing ever because he has a brown wife and his children might be a bit... you know... brown too.

The Tories continue to crash and burn the country and what does Labour offer as an alternative? "We're not as bad as them! We still don't give a fuck about you, but we're not blue, even if we think Margaret Thatcher was a visionary." It makes me want an independent Scotland so much more than ever before. When the Libdems offer that they're not as bad as the other two and the Green Party has suddenly got a lot of questions to answer about whether they really are ethical or not, you have to really worry about the state of politics; not just in the UK but all over the world.

Donald Trump is likely to get re-elected and while some people think this is a good thing, very few of them have more than half a dozen brain cells. this is a man who admires Vlad Putin - who, to be fair, isn't probably as bad as we like to make him out to be, but let's not go down that particular rabbit hole. Trump also wants to spend his first few weeks in power sorting out all the people who done him wrong, pardoning all the people who almost caused an insurrection and probably having the army round up all the Muslims in the USA and offer them a choice: Afghanistan or death. Trump is the madder of the two aged wankers vying for control of the 'most important country in the world' and I expect once he's served this 'second term' he'll argue that he deserves more or that one of his offspring should automatically replace him. This will happen and his rabid supporters will be furiously waving their erections around in one hand and their automatic weapons in the other. The USA is on the verge of becoming the new Russia and China rolled into one; everyone should be afraid.

We've discovered over the last few months that some religions are like third class citizens of the world; if you're Muslim then you can die with little or no consequence because, you know, Islam. It doesn't seem to bother people (if they want to believe it) that right wing Christian terrorists cause twice as much terrorism than Muslims in the world last year, because when Muslims defend themselves it's an act of war, but when Christians do it they're just protecting what is theirs. Oh and let's not mention the Jews because while about 80% of all Jewish people on this planet deserve our love and respect, there's about 20% of them who demand our love and respect even if they act like Nazis. You know the kind, they think killing women and children is an allowable punishment for some nasty Hamas people who did a bad thing once - in retaliation for years of bullying and being treated like 4th class citizens. The irony here is you could shove a photo of Hitler up their arses and they still wouldn't get it.

Did you know that China is a real threat to the world? Did you also know that China is the only major country on the planet that is taking decisive action against climate change? For every new coal mine or oil drilling platform the UK is opening, the Chinese are building hydro-electric facilities, constructing millions of acres of solar farm and putting wind farms up in some of their most remote places. but we need to remember they're a bunch of bad people because their culture is different to ours, so whatever they're doing to help the planet is nasty and evil and has an agenda... For fuck's sake...

We live in a world that is becoming more xenophobic; that cares little for the future generations, because, you know, they can solve all of shit when they inherit the planet. Science is always going forward, maybe some whizz kid young scientist can come up with a way of saving the planet because we don't want a fucking wind turbine 30 miles away ruining the view we see once or twice a year. We'd rather argue about a football shirt than argue about the future of the planet. Thousands of species became extinct last year, but we didn't recognise any of them so it doesn't matter, eh? Why should we worry about climate change when it's just a bit of extreme weather? Why should we be more 'socialist' when all that means is giving someone we don't know or won't want to like something we might be able to have, but probably won't. Why teach our children to respect things when they need to prepare for the survival fight that's probably just round the corner? They need to be able to wrestle toilet paper off of incontinent pensioners - this is a skill set that is far more important than recycling. I mean, why recycle when you can burn it, especially when your neighbours have their washing out. Fuck them, they have more than me anyhow.

The world has slipped down a causeway of death and destruction over the last eight years - the end of the world is indeed nigh and anyone seen hanging around Hyde Park Corner with a placard saying as much should be taken into an alley and beaten to death because we don't want that sort spreading the truth around, it'll spoil the day of someone who thinks the St George's flag needs to be red and white, because that's more important than AnYthINg ElsE!!!!!

Everything is Broken...

Last week, I said the the wife, "Honestly, I think if any political party came out tomorrow and said, 'we're going to spend money fixing the roads, the schools and the hospitals before we do anything else' they would probably win the next election". That is, of course, if people believe anything politicians say any longer. I cannot remember a time in my 60+ years when politicians and the people have been so far apart. The divisions highlighted in this country in 2016 have widened to the point where certain political parties are branding people who want peace and unity in the world as extremists and when something like that happens you kind of realise you're on the wrong side of history.

The talk is we're headed for a General Election in November, but it could be May, depending on whether Rishi Sunak wants to oversee the destruction of the Tory party or the complete annihilation of it. Things have gotten so bad even a poor Labour party looks destined to achieve an overwhelming landslide victory - something, once upon a time, I would have welcomed with open arms, but now fear it almost as much as an unlikely Tory victory. The reason is simple, Keir Starmer's Labour doesn't appear to be offering anything apart from Tory policies that were unpopular 14 years ago, but seem far more palatable than policies the Tories are offering now.

We all live in bubbles; we surround ourselves IRL or on-line with likeminded people (which is a generalisation for some people, but is largely the case) and therefore we have our beliefs confirmed by people who agree with us or we agree with them. That doesn't mean there aren't many people out there who vehemently disagree with what you or I might believe in. I had a conversation about this with a right leaning friend recently, about how Britain is broken and his opinion was that people moan too much; that we live in a country where people have been given too much freedom to complain and therefore they complain about everything, even if it isn't broken as much as they claim. This is one of those intransigent cover-all sweeping generalisations that is difficult to argue against in a way that doesn't lead to more divisions. The problem I see is that people moan more because the country is in a far poorer state than I can remember it being in, even in the dark days of the 1970s.

My friend isn't a free market, modern Tory by any stretch of the imagination, but he is set in his ways and is as immovable in his beliefs as I am in mine. Whereas I see a broken country riddled with divisions, he sees a problem that needs overcoming. The dilemma is he votes for a party that has no desire to fix things because malcontent is, in many ways, a vote winner especially for the disenfranchised who still put an X on a ballot paper. It's why the 'Red Wall' became blue in 2019. Boris Johnson told unhappy voters that he would make it better for them by getting Brexit done and because they'd been fooled once they allowed themselves to be fooled again. The dilemma for the rest of the country is whether Labour has any desire to fix things or do they intend to just make people feel a bit better about themselves while pandering to the highest earning 10%?

The truth is simple - you turn on the news, read a newspaper or listen to - so-called - politically savvy people and all you see is misery, hopelessness and people trying to make the best of a bad thing. Do we deserve life to be like this in 2024? Surely we want nice roads, good schools, functioning hospitals, public services, less crime, less prejudice and blame - it didn't seem that long ago that we were on the cusp of a bright future, but over the last 14 years that future has been whitewashed over with hate, mistrust and division. 

The future, at least the immediate one, doesn't appear to be optimistic. Labour talk like the Coalition talked in 2010 about there not being any money, about tough choices needing to be made all the while shifting their position from a party of hope and optimism to one that is gaslighting us into realising that they're not bringing anything to the tables apart from not being Tories. This simply confirms the old adage of it doesn't matter who wins the election, the government always gets in. A Labour government appears, at the moment, to be promising more austerity, more support for wars, more marginalisation, the same for London while the rest of the kingdom has to tighten its belt buckle. Fewer green policies because we have too many voters who simply don't believe that the climate crisis is anything that can't be solved by the next generation of scientists - if it exists at all - and so what if its a few degrees warmer, we all like a barbecue or a bit of sunbathing.  

To be even handed, even the Green Party are beginning to look like politicians. The Libdems are largely anonymous, lurking in the wings hoping to pinch Tory seats from voters who can't hold their noses and vote Labour. The SNP, if you believe the press - which you probably shouldn't - appear to be suffering from having been in power too long and the Reform UK party - formerly UKIP - appeal to racists, bigots and people who like a fight after the pub on a Saturday night. The kind of people who want smoking bans lifted and people who aren't white deported to another country as long as it isn't "are country". We have a political landscape that feels dystopian... 

And I'm sorry, but I haven't got a solution for you. This isn't going to be a long list of what's wrong and here's a way to fix it - not that it would make an iota of difference anyhow. We're a poorer country because of Brexit. We'd rather our politicians play whataboutery than fix things; we're happy with them blaming everything on everyone else and some of us are even happy for the Tories - in POWER for 14 years - to say the country has been taken over by Islamist extremists, woke lefties and whatever this week's insult for people who still care about others is. The people who like this kind of rhetoric don't appear to have the emotional intelligence to ask the question - if this is really the case, how come the Tories have allowed it when they've been in power for so long? Whose fault is it?

The Daily Mail or Express will try and say it's Labour's fault for not being effective opposition (they've done this before, accused Labour for why the Tories are failing) while simultaneously gaslighting their readers into believing that brown people or Europeans or Remoaners have brought the country down; to say the UK is led by blame culture now is pretty much accurate - no one takes responsibility any more, they just blame others for it and if they can't blame others they make them pay. Look at it this way, the Post Office scandal has been going on for over 20 years and despite everything we've seen and learned, the Post Office is still trying to avoid responsibility. In a half decent world this mess would have been sorted out as a priority, but subsequent governments - who own the PO - appear to be doing everything in their power to ensure that nothing is done.

Take the Grenfell fire? Nearly eight years after the event there are still 15 tenants living out of suitcases in hotels and temporary accommodation and the only accusatory fingers being pointed are at firefighters and the fact that many of the tenants were extremely poor. No landlords or councils have been implicated, no cladding firms sued and no justice has been served, because you know... people. People don't deserve proper justice, especially ones who have ethnic or other religious backgrounds - the people who made the country tick are the least important - you need to realise this.

While politicians stoke the fires of racism it allows them to ignore problems that need solving; to strip mine communities of their resources, because they know that eventually people will get used to or accept there is no safety net and create one from volunteers rather than rely on governments and councils for support. All David Cameron's Big Society idea amounted to was 'we're taking money away from things the poor need and we're hoping philanthropists will fill that financial or work time gap' - but, don't despair, you can feel good about yourself for helping keep your local library open by volunteering six hours a week - think of the money that can be saved for shareholders and PFIs?

We have so much poverty now in sectors - fuel and food specifically - yet companies are paying so much in profit dividends it's amazing we haven't had some kind of revolution. Supermarkets have benefitted from mega inflation and are posting profits that are eyewatering and insulting to even well off people - yet still ask customers to donate to food banks. Energy companies are the same, yet we don't get people asking why the average price increase in Europe for energy bills was just 4%, but a staggering 54% in the UK? This figure is also staggering because Europe depends on Russian gas and oil, whereas the UK gets most of its gas and oil from... Norway. The problem is you don't see journalists asking MPs questions like why is it like this, because we don't really have journalists any longer; we have people who are told what and when to ask things. The absurdity of it all is that if a proper journalist asked an MP why energy prices are so high in the UK as opposed to the rest of Europe, they're likely answer will be to blame someone else - probably Russia, despite Russia having no discernible relationship with our energy usage. It's probably Islamists or Just Stop Oil supporters driving the prices up and gammons will lap this kind of fantasy bullshit up because it makes far more 'sense' than the actual truth. All we get is dog whistling and whataboutery because politicians don't want to upset the rich; they can't afford to upset any applecart because, arguably, they are in thrall to them all.

And there in lies a huge dilemma for the country as a whole; if we do not hold governments to account then they do things like the current one is in the process of doing. With the knowledge that only a seismic miracle will see the Tories retain power, they are deliberately making it difficult for Labour to solve issues and install some optimism, especially for the poorest in society. Every decision that has been made since the autumn of 2023 until the dissolution of parliament three weeks before the election has or will be to make whoever wins have such a problem that the voters won't trust them with anything but a single term. How can we allow a situation where our duly elected MPs can make life so difficult for everyone and prevent their successors from making life better and not be held to account?

The national debt is three times higher now than when the coalition came into power in 2010; we have seen public services decimated, corruption go through the roof, the country's infrastructure falling apart and MPs suspended or sacked for breaches of rules; in fact, we've seen unprecedented levels of incompetence since 2014 to the level had it not been the Tories in power, we'd be suffering an onslaught of headlines and TV coverage demanding the government are removed, yet despite the lives of the majority of people getting worse over the last 15 years, the Tories have not only held onto power, they've increased their number of seats! The party of fiscal responsibility is anything but, yet we're told almost every day that they're the best we can expect so we need to keep hold of them and still there are many hundreds of thousands of people who will vote for them because they seriously believe that under someone else it would be worse...

Let's be straight about this - the country is broken, almost beyond proper repair; no political party could have caused so much havoc and division in such a short time; not even a communist takeover. We have lived through an era where the poor have become not only poorer, they've been joined in their ranks by people who 15 years ago would have considered themselves financially secure. Yet we have idiots trying to blame this affront on humanity on anything else but the sitting government. If it isn't the disabled or immigrants, it's people not being positive enough about Brexit. Single parents, woke lefties, Islamists, atheists - if the charlatans in power can tell you it's someone else's fault but theirs they will and in a lot of cases they will be believed. It's amazing that after nearly 15 years in power, our current government has been powerless to stop all these things that have ruined their plan for a better Britain and if it has been everyone else but them, they couldn't have been that good to start with if they allowed all of this shit to happen on their watch.

The bad news is it isn't going to change. The more disillusioned the public become with politics the lower the turnout, the fewer people decide the fates of the many. The UK hasn't got a political party waiting in the wings to do radical progressive politics, it has different cheeks of the same arse.