The Lockdown Files are important- nobody would deny that. Equally, we cannot lose sight of a broader, more terrifying picture in the swell of information from Hancock’s phone. The government continues to attack trans rights, demonise “small boat migrants”, platform ignorance and sow deeper division over Brexit. By all means pay attention to this story- but don’t forget about the rest.
No information in the “lockdown files” has shocked me. So Hancock leaned on the press not to report an influx of cases due to Sunak’s “Eat Out to Help Out” scheme- is anybody shocked that “people mingling during pandemic spread the virus” was a thing? Hancock should be arrested for industrial manslaughter- so should Sunak. Families who lost loved ones due to their hare brained schemes and self indulgent idiocy should be allowed to sue them. They should be castigated, reviled from high to low, never allowed to forget. But these are not shocking revelations that I don’t think anybody ever expected: I mean, really, dear reader- is it absolutely mind blowing to you that Matt Hancock, a man shallower than a Wilco’s spoon pushed to look after his public image? I already knew the man was a seething moron because I had to listen to his waffling prestiges on the news every day. Are you particularly surprised that our Prime Minister Sunak would watch your nan choke on her pleural fluid if it meant an extra £12 in taxes collected? It’s about as surprising as finding out that, shock horror, Boris Johnson likes to shag a lot of people he’s not married to.
But the government’s behaviour prior to and during this pandemic has demonstrated exactly who they were, are- and will continue to be.
Rather than knuckle down, they buckle- refusing to review economic models that have been thrown into abject chaos with the double fisted throat punch of brexit and the pandemic. Instead of focusing on how to protect and enlighten the British public, to combat disinformation, to improve British lives- they sow culture war seeds then use the sweat of red faced nationalists to water them. If it’s not small boat migrants or trans people or “THE GAYS” it’s people of colour or women, all bothering everyone with our polite requests to be treated with a modicum of respect. The government and a compliant media relentlessly feed us with the idea that we need to pull ourselves up with our bootstraps, that it’s nobody’s fault but ours – unless its migrants or LGBT+ people or our mothers, sisters and daughters.
The most frustrating part of the Lockdown Files is that it’s predictably being used by the media to justify a narrative that we were forced to abide by inhumane conditions. Perhaps we were- but what alternative was there? Should we have all taken the risk, never followed any restrictions and just hoped that getting infected with covid multiple times wouldn’t kill or disable us or our loved ones?
Lockdowns were awful. I grieved for my mother in total isolation, couldn’t even hug my father or touch her coffin to say goodbye to her. I didn’t do it lightly. I did it because my mother’s death from cancer was not a simple passing into the afterlife- her body was failing and, much like covid, her lungs filled up with pleural fluid and she drowned in front of me. And if I knew that there was a one in a million chance of suffering that fate, much less passing it on to someone else, someone with a wife and kids, I’d never have done it. I don’t know how much the government misled us- I’d like to. But I don’t regret being in lockdown if it meant that I didn’t get covid more (I’ve had it twice and am currently trying to find out if I have permanent lung damage from last time) and that I didn’t play a part in making more deaths inevitable.
The tories are scum. I’ve no doubt they manipulated us- because that is the essence of the tories. But they didn’t need to do it by enforcing lockdowns… The sleepwalking public in the UK has allowed them to decimate our protest and strike rights, made barely a peep as they enforced harsh new voting laws which currently have an estimated 2 million people without ID, they have unleashed a hurricane of hatred towards minorities and vulnerable people. All of this in plain sight, all of this widely spoken about.
As the tories continue to firm up on their nonsense plans to “stop” the small boats “crisis” one has to roll their eyes. Today, Braverman was quoted as stating that she hopes to “break the business model of people smugglers” with harsh new directives aimed at punishing… the people they smuggle? Firstly, if you aren’t going to do anything to the people smugglers one would assume they won’t care. Secondly- people smugglers. Not known to be the nicest of folk. They don’t and won’t care what happens to the people who get here- because they got paid already. Thirdly- there are ways to easily deal with people crossing on small boats. Opening processing centres in key countries would mean that those seeking asylum could do so from abroad and be retrieved should they be successful. But the government does not wantto solve the “small boats” issue. Because if they did, who would they blame for their uselessness? The moment the government actually makes a depreciation in small boat crossings it will be hailed as a victory but they will never actually try to solve the root issue- because these crossings make a convenient scapegoat. The same with every other minority with whom the government is playing chess right now.
From transgender rights and equalities being the subject of casual debate now, to Badenoch, our “women and equalities” minister who ignores myriad studies about benefit schemes for those suffering menopause, who cheers the bravery of a woman who says she would vote against equality for lesbian, gay and bi people- this government is utterly bereft of policy, they are without direction and vision and rather than any attempt to do better, to help the British people – they unfurl new banners to rally behind in culture war after culture war. The conservatives themselves are the rot at the center of our society- Boris Johnson was the first prime minister found guilty of breaking the law in office, Sunak has now broken the law twice. Braverman has been warned her rhetoric is akin to that of Adolf Hitler and she “refuses to apologise for it”. Hancock mocked the British public, saying we needed to be ‘scared into compliance’- treating us as cattle, rather than human beings with whom he could reason.
The conservatives are not good for the British public- they are malignant, a stain on our country. They help nobody, stand for nobody, stand for nothing. They should rightly be punished for every scrap of information leaked in the lockdown files- but this is not their only transgression, their only crime. They have spent years letting us down, severing our ties to a better economy, a brighter future, deepening our immersion in fake news. They play to the basest crowd, ignoring the majority of the UK who are decent people wanting for better. So if we are to hoist them by their own petard, let that petard weigh heavy with the shrapnel of the tories in totality- not a mere sliver of their crimes, neglect and abuse.
The rise and rise of polarisation has been a theme of everything I’ve been speaking about for a great many years now. From politics to consumption to the increase of moral panics, and then into the responses to the coronavirus pandemic, humans are being confronted by issues that pose great danger to us. So why are huge proportions of the human race determined to go with outlooks that may damage- or quite literally destroy- us?
There are two main arguments that absolutely flummox me every time they come up- and they do come up, every day. Climate change, and coronavirus.
Studies going back decades show that climate change is a huge threat. Sea levels could rise, the earth could heat up enough to disrupt sea currents which would cause mass death of marine life, the weather could be so destructive that we’d see mass death as crops wither in the fields. The main contributors to this emerging disaster are big businesses who refuse to do anything that may damage their profits- the main enablers are governments, who accept what we can probably call “legal bribes” to legislate protections into law for these businesses to continue. But behind the scenes, those businesses have also sunk money they could have used to change their models for something more green, to flood the internet with disinformation about climate change- and for some reason, a huge subsection of human beings- not big business owners or the politicians they pay for, but just everyday people have taken this information and fashioned it into a fight.
Climate change is not something you can deny if you believe in science. It’s happening. You might not be able to see it every day, but it is happening. It’s like denying the existence of the sea floor- you may have only seen it on documentaries but it is there… Yet these individuals are convinced that it’s all a scam, designed to tell us how to live! The core thinking that seems to revolve around this type of mindset is, as I’ll lay out here, rooted to the idea that essentially these people are extremist libertarians who don’t want to be told how to live. Oddly they’re fine with the laws that say they can’t be gunned down or robbed, that they legally own their own home and so on- just the suggestions they could throw paper and plastic in different bags are the ones they don’t like.
We see the exact same mindset with the coronavirus deniers- because yes, in 2023 people still exist who think coronavirus is a scam, made up. Having caught it in November and still having lung problems now, I can assure you it’s quite real and though my second brush with COVID-19 didn’t kill me, having lung problems 3 months later and having been forced to lie in bed for a solid week, death isn’t the only way viral illness can affect your life. But still, if they don’t deny covid they refuse to imagine a world where we’d continued on as normal and likely almost a billion people would have died. A survival rate of 97% sounds good until you realise that that means if everyone on earth was infected once, 240,000,000 deaths would have occurred just from viral infection. I, though, have been infected twice, some people multiple times. Three and a half United Kingdom’s worth of people would have died just from COVID, then those who needed healthcare outside of viral infection would have died due to overwhelmed hospitals. Supply chains would have completely fractured, goods would have ceased production. Famine, death en masse, long term health issues. All a worthy price to the people who think covid is a scam though!
The prevalence of these mindsets seem to revolve intimately around one thing- a cocksure attitude that you’re so right that it doesn’t matter about the possibility of being wrong because you aren’t, so these heinous scenarios could never occur.
Frustration buds from two main points here: if I’m wrong about climate change, we sink a lot of money into new energy solutions that hasten technological development and we harshly tax businesses for refusing to update their business model. I’ve no doubt a harsh pursuit of green solutions would cause societal change that would cause issues to the populace but we already have issues causing the populace problems -floods in Pakistan that wipe out whole villages, days so hot in the UK that asphalt melts, crop failures in vast patches of eastern Europe due to abrupt weather changes. Complaining about problems when there are problems is reminiscent of those who took pictures of empty shelves during early 2020 and posted them to social media saying “this is what Corbyn’s England would have looked like”, failing to see the irony of posting photos of Johnson’s England looking like their apparent idea of a worst case scenario. No, there is no easy way to pursue green solutions- but when the cost of not doing so is a smouldering crater for a planet perhaps it’s worth doing so.
You, when raising this, will predictably be met with people who will scoff: It won’t happen at all, it won’t happen for a long time or it won’t be that bad. The same absolutist confidence that I see as one of the main reasons humankind is doomed.
The world doesn’t have to follow the worst case scenarios for it to be a disaster. We don’t have to face ecological wipeout for climate change to ruin millions, tens of millions of peoples lives. If the seas currents do change it will affect those whose living relies on the sea not doing so. If the sea levels rise it will affect coastal living. If the climate stays the same as now the horrific flooding and storms and weather irregularities will continue- and that is a disaster already occurring. But the possibility of worse to come is still not enough- because the people who push the oppositional thinking aren’t directly affected; or are, but are not invested enough to care.
Looking at covid- this is not a virus that is simply going to vanish. Thousands of people a week are still dying. “What would you have us do” they will reply, “another lockdown that ruins peoples mental health and does nothing”. I don’t actually know how we could ever tackle coronavirus, but the issue is- there’s a gulf between “doing nothing” and “zero covid” and people refuse to budge one inch, refuse to wear a mask because “they aren’t effective” (I just finished reading my third study that shows they are). I asked an anti masker once, why do they bother you so much and after cornering her enough she confessed the truth. “I just don’t like being told what to do”. The terror I feel, being surrounded by a not insignificant number of people who will risk becoming a vector for a virus that’s ruined my lung capacity because they get offended at not being asked politely if they don’t mind very much to cover their face for five minutes is immeasurable. I can’t not go into this without mentioning how ridiculously obvious it is that these people are wrong. I keep seeing people posting about “adverse reactions to vaccines”. Yes, there were always going to be adverse reactions to vaccines; it’s been a known side effect since vaccines were created, and when you scale that up to billions of doses, shockingly those side effects that we already knew about- happen. You know what didn’t happen? The explosion of severely autistic people you were all talking about 5 years ago. If vaccines caused autism I suspect giving out over 16 billion vaccines might have caused a spike in people with autism… and yet here we are.
When it comes to covid and our thinking- if we’re wrong, you look a bit stupid because you’re wearing a mask when you don’t need to. Masks don’t cause any of the nonsensical rubbish people talk about, if they did, doctors and cleaners and builders would all be sick constantly. The worst that happens if we’re wrong is that you look weird in public. If you’re wrong, you are spreading a disease that can be as bad as a nasty cold and having had a few it’s rude and gross to spread that anyway, it can cause illness severe enough to take a 34 year old off his feet for a week and give him long term health issues, or it can mean someone ends up choking to death as their lungs fill up with pleural fluid. Is it worth that risk? Still, for many of these people, yes- hence my semi withdrawal from a society I was, until now, unaware was absolutely filled with people ranging from deluded to frighteningly callous.
The reason we’re told masks cause disease is because they can’t just rely on “I don’t want to” as an argument on an international scale. The reason we’re told that green solutions would decimate industry is because they think those industries won’t be decimated by an earth that becomes close to uninhabitable. And when it comes to other arguments- about marginalised groups etc, you will often find that it’s not enough to simply dislike others, no- people of colour are causing a “white genocide” just by existing, gay people are corrupting your children with drag, trans people are trying to sneak into spaces not for them… I often wonder if the people who fall into these utterly ridiculous ways of thinking genuinely believe them or they know that “I just don’t like them and I don’t want to change my mind because being wrong equals losing” is a stupid mindset.
Being wrong is not a sin
People seem determined to conflate incorrectness with losing. Being corrected on something you’re wrong about is not losing. Rejecting correct information and clinging to bias, bigotry or abject nonsense because you cant possibly be seen to be wrong is. Being wrong is usually a huge part of how we learn. We study at school and we write our sentences out and the teacher corrects our spelling and grammar and we learn. We make errors in our calculations and we’re shown where we make a mistake and we do better. Why does the idea of being corrected suddenly go from par for the course to equivalent to “losing” as soon as we leave mandated education.
The reason culture wars are such lucrative social currency is that the world has decided collectively that it’s better to fall into a tunnel of disinformation that backs up a lie than to bend to the acknowledgement of the objective truth. And many people without morals exist who are all too happy to partake- from Tucker Carlson whose show is so wildly unreliable that he has had to declare that he does not tell news but is a fictional show, to pundits in the UK like Jeremy Clarkson who is so blithely unaware of his radical hatred of women he writes columns about flogging and sexually assaulting women he doesn’t like.
Hartley-Brewer, Oakeshott, Coren, Johnson- these people’s careers are built on spinning the idea that the objective truth- of good relations with the EU, of climate change, of viral mitigations- are all bad. That we should be able to do exactly what we want, where and when we want because it is our right- and yet when your rights conflict with others physical safety, when your simple wish to display your face to the world consists of an unbalanced risk of viral disease, why is it suddenly feeling over fact, for the people whose moniker has always been, fact over feeling? Fact, climate change is real, you can see it happen in real time. Fact, masks work, vaccines work and covid kills. But we live now in the world of alternative facts, of fake news, a whole deep pool of comforting mistruths that people can dive into if simple reality is too much.
Ultimately, I wish I could say I didn’t care. I wish it was as simple as letting people get on with it. If you want to end up choking to death because of covid or going hungry because you set the world alight, I wish I could let you get on with it. But you’re dragging us down with you. The stupidest most selfish humans in existence are using the rest of us as collateral. And I am sick of it. If you want to die- die. I won’t stop you. But stop wrapping the noose around my neck too, and telling me to stop complaining about it.
On the 20th March 2020 my mother finally passed away after days of agonising struggle due to terminal cancer. The pandemic shrank to a dot in my periphery as the woman who raised me passed slowly away before my eyes. As she let out her final breath I knew my world was immutably changed. And whilst this is not a unique experience, the world of isolation I then awoke to days later was: mourning in isolation was agonising, but I, but my sisters, but my dad, but many other people did it. And as we awoke daily to a world of death and sickness, mourning our loved ones, Prime Minister Boris Johnson threw unashamed parties at the seat of British democracy. So the question now is: consequences or a shirking of the rule of law… do we live with democracy or mockery?
I remember the first day of lockdown, sitting in my flat watching the news, petrified to even open my front door. I lived in a high rise at the time, my neighbours door directly next to mine, neighbours further down the hall left and right. Our hallway became a danger zone: what if they had it? What if I went for a walk, for my mail, for some milk- and caught coronavirus? Fortunately for me, I was too absorbed by trying to make sense of a world where I couldn’t text my mum and ask her questions: how are you? How was the day? That was ripped away by cancer, and all too many people face this horrific reality. But others are lucky: they have family, friends, a support system.
Not only did I have to face a world bereft of that voice of comfort I’d had since birth but I couldn’t even be around another person.
At first it wasn’t a struggle: I just wanted to be alone to absorb it all. But as it began to dawn on me that I was that much more alone the weight began to pile onto my shoulders. I kept picking up my phone to text her and realising I couldn’t. I kept finding things I’d ask her: what can I read, what’s good on TV, what was she eating? Gone. But then the memories: seeing her getting weaker, smaller, paler, sicker. I just wanted to talk to someone about it and as I sat there alone with those awful thoughts repeating I coined a phrase for it: I just wanted to get the venom out. I wanted to talk to someone to remove the poison from those memories, to seek comfort.
I didn’t.
I was alone for the entirety of the first lockdown bar running into my ex and close friend down by the river in Leeds. We stood feet apart petrified of infecting each other. I knew coronavirus would probably make me very sick judging on what’s happened to me before when I’ve had other viruses. So we said our hellos, I said some brief fluff about coping and then went back to my flat alone where I found a wine glass mum gave me and cried.
I don’t want or need sympathy for it: losing your mother is an unfortunate inevitability for vast swaths of people. Losing your mother to aggressive cancer is also too common. But facing the enormity alone was bizarre.
Eventually I started going for daily walks and ironically, instead of following the towpaths down by the river or any of the usual nature rambles I headed into the city: because every normal walk was packed with other people. I walked desolate streets, turned around when I saw others making sure I avoided people at any cost. All the while, my brain liked to replay the horror over and over again.
My mother’s passing was the opposite of what you’d want for your loved one. It was not peaceful, there was no dignity. Only a slow agonising crawl to the end. And I relived that over and over, day and night. Alone.
Fast forwarding over a year of grief and much isolation, we approach the time of the partygate leaks.
My instant reaction was to laugh: I was so numb to tory corruption, ineptitude and disingenuousness that at first I thought it was funny that these people couldn’t even apply the laws they created to themselves. Then the laughter stopped. I thought about how I wasn’t allowed to carry my mother’s coffin because of risk of confection. I thought about how I had to speak to four people, all socially distanced at Carleton Crematorium. I thought about how I couldn’t hug my dad as he openly wept as I read out my mother’s eulogy. And I remembered my mother’s co workers gathered feet apart near the doors of the chapel as we left, unable to come in. And a sense of injustice so profound I could barely contain it welled up in me, so strong I could barely contain it. I wept openly to my friends that night (on voice note because omicron was spreading at the time)- isolated again and facing this news.
The balance of this piece is not ever to say that the laws were unjust: anything that contained the horrors of coronavirus and protected people was necessary. It is a rallying cry to action for those who lost family, friends and more, or for those who just did the decent damn thing. We sacrificed months of our lives gladly to keep people safe, to “stop the spread”, we “hands face space”d, we “got boosted now”. Meanwhile the foetid government’s corrupt members, from lowest administrator to the very highest man himself, eschewed responsibility to themselves, to each other -to us, their electorate, for the sake of quaffing wine and beer, for Christmas parties, leaving do’s and more. Photographers caught jolly moments we couldn’t fulfil ourselves. We did what we had to do whilst our highest elected officials, those we used to be able to expect the most from betrayed us, our trust and our country as a whole.
I’ve had my upset around being alone to mourn written off as “gutter journalism”, “political fluff”, “nonsense” and more by conservatives more bothered about keeping their own jobs (and second jobs no doubt, for they have dropped any proceedings into the fallout from the Paterson scandal) than decency, justice, political surety.
Ineptitudinal attitudes around brexit will eventually scar over into functional trade as, down the line, adults step in to undo the damage of a Johnson tenure. Economies will recover, world esteem will rise. But our loved ones will not undie.
The conservatives cannot be trusted, must NOT be trusted to continue to drag this great nation to it’s knees, to prostrate our justice before the altar of hedonism that is right wing populism and Boris Johnson in particular must be cast from his starring role as charlatan in chief, with his puppet Rishi Sunak in support as bank robber. Nadine Dorries and her clueless gesticulations over a media she is undoubtedly not in control of yet oversees, Dominic Raab’s “ships passing in the night” acquaintance with justice… the list goes on 539 times.
Britain deserves better than this. We, you, I- deserve better than this. When people say Boris Johnson tried his best it matters not whether it is true. If it is not true and he did not try his best, he was not fit to be prime minister. If he did try, and this is his best: he is not fit to be prime minister.
Daviemoo is a 34 year old independent writer, radicalised into blogging about the political state of the world by Brexit and the election of serial failures like Trump and Johnson. Please check out the rest of the blog, check out Politically Enraged, the podcast available on all streaming platforms and share with your like minded friends! Also check him out on ko-fi where you can keep him caffeinated whilst he writes.
Roll up one and all and see the greatest performance ever given by politicians! A play so absorbing that its enthralled a nation of those willing to buy the unlikely story that a group of people responsible for nearly 200,000 deaths due to a preventable disease, who have overseen scandal after scandal from blackmail and bullying to their stirring performance as reverse Robin Hoods- stealing from the poor to give succour to the rich- were ever interested in making our lives better.
We live in a remarkable time. Many things have contributed to the through the looking glass state of affairs we find ourselves in. 9/11, the incompetence of the Bush administration, Blair’s descent into useful lapdog and overt liar who pushed an agenda of war on us for the sake of the black lifeblood of the planet- oil. There’s a distinct delineation between the performative lies of someone like Blair and- as a byproduct- Starmer: they lie about sticking to promises and policies because they genuinely think and perhaps know that lying for the greater good benefits the majority. I do not hate those politicians who lie thinking they must do so for “the greater good” but lying, nonetheless, leads to the sort of crushing disgrace that ended Blair’s tenure.
But this type of performance, this lying is different than the insidious lies of people like Trump, Johnson, Patel and almost every single member of the conservative party “functioning” in the uk today. It is not to excuse it- but a lie told in isolation is different than the constant performance of roles that has encompassed the tories for the last 12 years.
The theatrics of Johnson’s red faced rants at the despatch box are meant only to absolve him of culpability in his now myriad well advertised crimes, some of which are listed above. A man who oversaw wholesale death at the hands of a plague then stood in an expensive press room, studiously dishevelled as only a man running a disaster can be and who barely contained his scene-breaking smirk as he blamed everyone from NHS staff to care home workers to the individuals ourselves, failing at every turn to grasp the depths of the role he plays- his own vital and completely unfufilled role as arbiter of safety. A man who somberly promised there were no parties- but then there were parties but he didn’t go- but then he did go but he didn’t know it was a party- but he did go and he did know it was a party but parties are ok: bravissimo! Johnson truly outdid himself as an actor through those scenes; I know were it me, I would likely have broken and laughed at the obscenity of such poorly written lines- but he performed them with gusto!
The playbook which this government has functioned from has always been written to shirk blame: you will note that not once has any tory, even performatively admitted responsibility for the outcomes of brexit on our economy, of coronavirus and the deaths therein, of rising hate crimes, of the knighthood of a man who oversaw the worst exam results because he would not factor in a pandemic, of the lobbying scandal or of a doctored race report or even of Johnson’s apparently strenuously rehearsed insinuation that Starmer was responsible for the monster that is Jimmy Saville. But that is because any person- not a minority, not even the majority, matters in this play we’re swept up in. Johnson tore up the playbook of politician and is rewriting as he goes, forgetting to refer to his own source material. That’s hardly surprising- Johnson’s prose has always been harshly critiqued by anyone unfortunate enough to delve into it. His half baked lies about political correctness being an import from the EU, fallacious claims of government ministers potential homosexual affairs… he may be an actor. A great writer he is not.
As a man, and a government obsessed with market prominence, the market itself took on the role of judge, jury and indeed executioner of coronavirus. If you couldn’t afford to stay home then perhaps you should have worked a bit harder, studied more, perhaps you should have saved more to get a mortgage then you didn’t HAVE to go out to work: you could have been offered a more prominent role in the play of modern Britain: But we weren’t all offered the stage Johnson was, we worked for our meagre bit parts and we were shunned from the spotlight- a man such as he would never understand this life because it’s so alien to his own. Every pundit who worked as his agent to install him knew he would deliver a brilliant performance as a prime minister, but when it came to fulfilling those duties he would, and has, and is, and will continue- to fall flat, miss the notes, forget the lines.
This mindset so common amongst the elite is not surprising. Those born to be stars are so used to it that it fades into the background. What’s surprising is how successfully this government has played it’s role, plying the working class with this message- and how many have accepted their bit part at the coliseum of conservative- how many working class people stand and cheer at the interval, crying “yes, yes our lives are worse, we’re poorer, more unhealthy, our family and friends died, we can’t afford to heat our homes- more, more!” They leave rave reviews for a government performatively talking about wanting to be the party of tax cuts as taxes go up, the party of individual responsibility as they shirk their own duties- they go off book every day on stage, speaking contradictions to their character and yet the proletariat rise from their seat, applauding.
9% of the UK tested positive for coronavirus last week. Where was the scene of a PM worried for the health of his nation? Was it cut from the play? No. Because the UK are bored of hearing about covid, because the government and a less than useless media are not pushing the message- there are many reasons. But most of it, to my belief, boils down to a prime minister who stands unflinching at the despatch box, his brows knitted in consternation as he orates about how well we’ve done (despite having the highest deaths in Europe), how great our vaccine rollout (which is now woefully low on the world table and doesn’t even factor in children) is, how we’re levelling up (as 1.1 million people are due to drop into the trenches of poverty). Johnson’s lines are well rehearsed, and of course, complete nonsense.
The prime minister’s bluster is performed by a master of wordplay with absolutely no substance. I often imply that he is a stupid man, and I do believe that there is a dearth of common sense in that head- but to deny he is consciously complicit of his decision to let the market dictate death is to offer him a disservice- I credit Mr Johnson with knowingly leading us into mass death and a decimated economy. Because Johnson and huge swaths of those who gather to watch him perform are fans of hope. They want to live off the great glory of a Britain that never existed. “Built by hard working people” they will extoll in parliament. Built then by slaves imported in droves to fulfil the wishes of our ancestors, and built now by the poor whose earnings are being pared down to nothing by a government who will take our taxes and stuff them in the coffers, ready to drip drip drip feed us until the run up to an election they hope to storm. Suddenly the magic money tree will bloom and Johnson will cry ‘ITS BECAUSE OF ME- I WORKED TO GET YOU THIS MONEY’. A performance worthy of Shakespeare- a man Johnson is writing a book about and being paid more for than I will earn in 5 years no doubt.
Boris Johnson could, tomorrow, convene parliament and do all manner of things to help the cost of living crisis. Energy companies cannot just up and leave; their earnings should be capped and the extra money reinvested into consumer savings, or into green energy which would and should be cheaper. But he would have to eschew the role he’s played for so long. Out would go the spotlights and in he would step, the caricature lost, and we would finally see a contrite, a worried, a selfless PM who would do what he could to help us: but this is a role Johnson is utterly incapable of fulfilling: he is typecast. He will not change.
He could have worked collaboratively with the EU on a brexit deal that didn’t involve heinous red tape and therefore push up the price of goods, ruin businesses that rely on import/export expedience. He could fairly tax the hyper rich, close the tax loopholes that the EU was working on so those who earn obscene amounts of money pay fairly and proportionately. But Boris Johnson will approach the despatch box with his sneering surety that Britain must suffer under his guidance because the market dictates it so. So it is with this that we must realise: Johnson is not a prime minister, he is an actor on a stage, performing a brilliant imitation of a businessman running the country like a firm to maximise profit even at the expense of the workers. As long as the CEOs are rich our lives or deaths do not matter.
Johnson and his allies have each stepped up to the spotlight to perform wonderfully convincing soliloquies, each convincing us of a different reason for the play we’re unwittingly performing: it’s the people of colour, the foreigners, the LGBT+ who have stolen the show, made the whole performance about them: but it is the minorities who simply ask for time on stage- we didn’t write the play. those who proceeded Johnson’s government did, and this government’s wilful continuation of a storyline of deflecting blame is the true reason we are here.
As the audience of the Johnson government’s play dwindles due to covid deaths, due to starvation, hypothermia in their own homes, due to rising hate crimes one must wonder: who will be alive to witness the curtain fall? Will we be lucky enough to survive the full tenure of the Johnson government- and of those who do make it to the final act, who will stand and cry “encore”.
Daviemoo is a 34 year old independent writer, radicalised into blogging about the political state of the world by Brexit and the election of serial failures like Trump and Johnson. Please check out the rest of the blog, check out Politically Enraged, the podcast available on all streaming platforms and share with your like minded friends! Also check him out on ko-fi where you can keep him caffeinated whilst he writes.
Boris Johnson has bound the hands and feet of the nation. His slavish allies have picked us up, and carried us to the altar of his ego. Today Johnson is set to slit our collective throats on the altar of populism. Our lifeblood is set to be spilt into the foetid grounds of populism, and thousands of people will die… to save Johnson’s tenure in office… Do you think the deaths of thousands who wouldn’t have died had we kept mandates in place is a worthy sacrifice for a less than mediocre politician to stay employed?
Look to the social media of any prominent scientist and watch them, agog in horror at the behaviours of the conservative government and the wet eared cowardice of their supporters who simply cannot bear another moment of coronavirus restrictions. It’s been so hard to follow the guidance they say, as if they ever did. Selfish people cackling about you wearing a mask in the fruit aisle of Tescos, who never stopped visiting relatives for Sunday lunch and who look down on you for following scientific advisors’ dire warnings. Maybe you do it because you lost someone, or more than one someone, to covid. Maybe you had the virus and it frightened you just how sick you got- or maybe you’re just a decent person who realises that the world didn’t slow to a crawl for almost 2 years for no reason, no insidious plot of replacement theory to be seen except in the rheumy eyes of these freedom fighters who didn’t show up to protest against literal human rights being debated in parliament.
Experts like Professor Pagel have, the entire time, erred on the side of caution because she, like most decent humans, believes that everyone deserves the chance to live through the pandemic. But today, Johnson is revealing his plans to “live with the virus”, which involve payment for testing, obfuscating numbers and allowing those infected to be able to wander around positive without any mandate for staying home. Boris Johnsons’ plans for living with coronavirus will kill people. Hundreds, thousands of people, who will die because he has become a populist fundamentalist, who seems to think you are free to become a vector of mass infection if you want to, and the cherry on the cake is that we simply won’t even know it’s happening because he refuses to even keep tabs on it.
Why has he done this, you may ask? Because it distracts us from the sheer, unquestionable fact that Boris Johnson is terminally inept (quite literally), selfish sheister, a terrible PM, a man who is more vacuously obsessed with his ability to keep reflecting back British law like the flesh of a Y incision so he can carve out the still weakly shuddering heart of British democracy and hold it aloft as a prize before losing interest and casting it off.
Since Johnson took power in 2019 he’s appointed someone who committed something tantamount to espionage as our Home Secretary, a man who wants to repeal the human rights act to justice secretary, a woman who was surprised people use YouTube to learn (what did you think it was for Nadine?), has had a doctored report on racism produced which stated it consulted with experts who were shocked to see their names included. He’s presided over the worst death rate in Europe, lied about the EMA’s capabilities of stopping vaccine rollouts and taken credit for the NHS’ stellar job in the first deployment- speaking of the NHS, he’s continued to slowly pare away funding for it and has thrown GPs to the wolves to distract from his role in covid mismanagement. Whilst many of us were burying relatives by zoom or saying goodbye to people we love via FaceTime he was throwing back Moet with colleagues, convinced by virtue of political party or class that they were exempt from the rules they themselves created.
He’s presided over the most disastrous outcome for Brexit, and rather than face up to that has circled the wagons of the British press to disseminate distractions about trans athletes in bathrooms or other such nonsense, instead of showing 12 hour queues to drop off goods- he blamed COVID for Brexit issues, Brexit for COVID issues and not once through all of these debacles, not at one time- has he ever said “It’s us. We’re sorry, we made mistakes”.
Whilst Hancock and he were breaking the law with PPE procurement, he never once paused to wonder if this was the wrong thing to do, the wrong way to act. Because to Johnson, the job of PM is simply a badge of honour, the next “to present” on his CV. He doesn’t care about decency, the rule of law or any freedoms but his own. Our highest office, the most vital political job in the UK will be used as fodder for dinner parties down the line. He’ll sit, clutching a designer glass of designer champagne telling people about the time a billionaire oil baron shook his hand and he came away richer than he was before, skipping over the shambles he’s left the country in. No matter how poor, or miserable or sick you or I or our friends or family get, Johnson’s future is writ large: as long as he can continue his decadence we could all die tomorrow. It won’t change a thing for him.
Now as we all walk, open eyed into a country with no covid restrictions some of us see three lions, strutting down the street proudly as the “winners” of the pandemic. But others see vectors of infection, a populace strolling sullenly into the maw of the beast, wondering who we love will die or become disabled now because the libertarians amongst us think that’s a worthy sacrifice. The sad thing is, people genuinely believe that it’s worth people dying for them to be able to go into Tescos without a bit of cloth on their face. This is where the poison of populism has gotten us to – everything is the enemy. Masks, vaccines, Corbyn supporters, the left, the woke, everything out to stop people living how they want- but the people who deeply believe this don’t seem to realise that we don’t live how we want – because of them. This imposition of their imaginary freedoms has now stretched to being a climate denier- the seriously bad weather was the enemy this week, how dare that woke storm stop me from… doing what? It’s cold, wet and rainy, just stay in the house and antagonise social justice warrior on twitter like normal you losers- but they didn’t did they. Just to spite the weather(?) people went on walks and got blown over, and that’ll show… Mother Nature I suppose, that these people can’t be stopped from their stupidity. Michael Gove said we’re “sick of listening to experts”. Apparently we are, but we have an unending zeal for listening to absolute morons.
Johnson stands as leader on the cusp of a potential war. Look at the outcome of brexit- more expensive goods, a cost of living crisis unprecedented even when the country’s covid debts are already repurchased, lower world standing, worse quality of life. Look at the outcome of covid- worst death rate in Europe and still going, a stalled vaccine programme, no attempts to even mandate safety via healthcare workers and literal capitulation to anti vaccine terrorists (I’ll use that word even if the press won’t). If Johnson remains in charge for war I suspect the country will suffer untold levels of misery there too, starving in the street as our pleura fill up with covid pneumonia fluid, homeless because we couldn’t afford the rent- and still the Johnsonites will cry “but imagine what it would be like under Starmer”.
I normally urge people to stay safe, to wear their masks, take their vaccines, to social distance- but it’s actually reached the point where I don’t think it’s pointful. Too many people have become inured to death and misery and just do not want to try to avoid it. Some even take a strange and perverse pleasure in being as obnoxious as possible. So I suppose now I must change my signoff from that to – I hope you survive, dear reader.
viemoo is a 34 year old independent writer, radicalised into blogging about the political state of the world by Brexit and the election of serial failures like Trump and Johnson. Please check out the rest of the blog, check out Politically Enraged, the podcast available on all streaming platforms and share with your like minded friends! Also check him out on ko-fi where you can keep him caffeinated whilst he writes.
Forgive me for the rambling -As I write this on my lunch break at work I’ve posted a video I recorded this morning about some of the sacrifices I made during lockdown which have yet again been made fruitless by the incompetence of a government unable to follow their own rules. It’s past time that this blustering, self aggrandising mobster government be sent to the gulags of history and judged as a failure- not just because they are criminally inept at the job, but because they are criminal full stop.
A very American problem
The right have many a method to stay in power. In America, Donald Trump never won a popular vote- but won his first term as president due to an antiquated votership system, the Electoral college -and may have won again were it not for the valiant efforts of supremely invested politicians like Stacey Abrams who worked tirelessly against gerrymandering and voter disenfranchisement. Abrams should go down in history as one of the truest patriots America has ever seen, and her heroism is unsung because America still fights in it’s hear for freedom from a dictatorial cancer – not “conservatives” or “republicanism” but the monster these two types of right wing populist politics have created- the GQP, a bent and blunted force for uneducated Americans to rally around, blaming the blacks and the fags and the jews for their woes- and not long standing contempt for working class Americans, not a broken health system which will bankrupt you for the sin of developing cancer, a deeply propagandist education system more interested in teaching the masculine values of waving a flag and a laughably flawed justice system which allows the gunning down of an innocent sleeping paramedic or protester with automatic weaponry.
Where is England’s Stacey Abrams?
The toxicity of tory
In the UK, the voting system in combination with the differences in voter demographic, mixed with a terminal indifference to politics for younger people have led to the continuation of the tory government. Right wing parties dropped out of the running in areas where tories could gain seats to prop up Johnson, and though over 50% of the UK voted for left wing parties we have in place a tory government with an almost unprecedented control of the house of commons. There is the first piece of evidence to my claim – instant switching of alliegance to tory just to win, even if you didn’t believe in their aims- you just wanted that 52 to 48 result respected. But do you know what else we have after twelve years of tory rule? Under the conservative government, poverty has risen, income inequality has skyrocketed- quite literally as Richard Branson achieved his wet dream of space flight as the rest of us wrote costing sheets to make sure we can afford rent and bills. Anti LGBT+ hate crime has escalated over 300% in 4 years.
The concerns of women about corruption in the police force, both from female officers and hapless women harassed in the street were met with ridiculous sneering contempt – flag down a bus, they were told by flippant Met Officers who backed and still back the tory government- why? Because they are given unique power to attack thsoe who stand against them. Meanwhile the met completely fails to investigate repeated, open, obvious breaches of the covid laws and restrictions which have seen over 5000 Londoners in court paying fines- and, I hasten to add, rightly so. To break lockdown is to thwart attempts to control and curtail a dangerous pathogen. So why are the tories uniquely protected against prosecution, as Cressida Dick wags a bony finger at journalists to dissuade further questions that may bring out more queries?
We have politicians who try to hold the government to account – Zarah Sultana is prodigious and fearless, Dawn Butler passionate and eloquent, Rosina Allin-Khan a front line worker who still finds time to visit parliament and beg the government to explain it’s lacklustre efforts. As an aside each one of these women of colour have been met with belligerent repudiation, told to “mind their tone”- a sentiment oft- weaponised against people of colour and especially women of colour who do not play to the demure-seeking demands of bigots.
The crux of this post is to make people realise that right wing people will do what others simply won’t because of decency. Be it solemnising a company then, before the company is even formed lobbying it to parliament to supply PPE (as a tory lord did), creating a VIP supply lane, using problematic language to slap down women of colour, or- as today’s news displays, showing pathological indifference to the suffering of people trying their best to curtail a pandemic’s deadly spread.
This pattern of thinking leads to a question I’m often asked- do you think all tories, all brexit voters, all right wingers are racist, homophobic, bigoted etc? Not necessarily no- but they do what I won’t. They compromise on these issues. “Oh I don’t hate foreigners at all, i just *insert reasons for voting here*”. It seems to me that if I didn’t hate foreigners I wouldn’t vote for something that gave the strong and close to undeniably did in fact do that. And always with these voters they’re allowed plausible deniability. Brexit was for taking back control -of what? Our borders? We had more control in the EU. Of our legal decisions? The tories are trying to remove scrutiny from courts. Of our position as a world superpower? Our economy is decimated by brexit, international trade in and out is down, we have trade deals that WORSEN our GDP and we are a laughing stock, a tiny group of islands left to float in our own “anti-woke” seas, now swimming with happy british fish and, of course, tory approved human shit.
Voter ignorance or voter indifference?
Right wing politics, at their face, seems only to be about no compromise. We want this! We want the woke cancel culture agenda to end, we want the trans people’s rights gone, we want to continue to deny our imperialist role in slave trading, in white supremacy, in a devastatingly clear-cut class system. But that’s the lie- right wing politics is nothing BUT compromise from the voter’s level.
Voters who claim not to hate LGBT+ people somehow mysteriously fail to clarify that they are disgusted with the lack of action from Liz Truss who has been in the role for years and has just, again, rolled back the end of the consultation period for a complete block on conversion therapy in the UK- though 3 other countries have done so in the last 2 months. Voters who claim to be disgusted by racism will bend to apoplexy over the statue of a previously unknown slaver being torn down in disgust, and who borrow Johnson’s line of “context” to explain his comments about watermelon smiles or letterboxes.
Voters who say they don’t want foreigners coming here will stare on with blank eyed indifference about news headlines about atrocities the UK committed whilst holding tenderly on to the hand of the US.
Right wing votership is, in my eyes, about one of two things: the ability to wholeheartedly vote against your own self interest and protection because it will also make everyone else unhappy, OR the ability to vote for what you think is your own self interest whilst actually voting against it, under the guise that it strikes a blow against your imaginary enemy.
…but who IS your enemy?
Who is really making your daily life worse? The tired, hungry migrant in a boat out at sea who just wants to make it to shore without being tossed into the maw of the sea to lie with the bones of countless others? Or is it the politician gesticulating about the necessity of taking more money from your salary to prop up a health system they have criminally underfunded for their dozen years in power?
The ostensible links the right make are easily broken- but only if you are capable of listening to fact. Hate the hundred or so migrants who come here a day? Think of them as offsetting the death toll caused by conservative reluctance to place restrictions on the country to curtail coronavirus infection. You hate benefit fraud? Only a few dozen convictions- and who, may I ask, is in charge of the benefit system? It would be the very government you support who don’t and won’t change the system, because they know you can be angry at benefit cheats- instead of politicians who claim £50 back for a charitable donation. MP’s expenses combined would be more in a month than benefit claimants get in a year, even if they fudge the system. And yet the anger is spewed at our underprivileged fellows- because we don’t feel entitled to rail against the creators and maintainers of that flawed system.
Not all right wingers are this type. Some vote right knowing what they are voting for. Some want this sort of draconian rule by people who decry the censorship of language- you’re not even free to call people like me faggots these days- whilst supporting laws that effectively end the ability to demonstrate in public, which make voting more difficult and inaccessible to those who are already under-represented in parliament- tangible freedoms lost or pushed into the distance whilst people get angry about the non-existent thought police.
Still more are simply beneficiaries of the system. We’re taught to worship trickle down economics even as those at the top swim in oceans of wealth hoarded away from us and as our throats run parched, barely sustained from the drip drip drip of financial offcuts. Wealth disparity in the UK is at a terrifying new height- not just because of the pandemic which no one truly predicted, but because of brexit, because of a foolish lack of foresight by a government only concerned about enrichment of the already rich and by the complicity of an underclass who believes that the north star of the Union Jack is their guiding light to supremacy in the world. Just because the man who owns the company you work for is rich and the company is making world beating sales- doesn’t mean you’re prospering as you desperately try to save to pay your mortgage. And again – who maintains that system of tax cuts for your boss and tax hikes for you… but let me guess, Boris is a man of the people? You like his hair? Does he just “get” you?
It’s come to the point now where I wish right wing voters would just say the real truth, the truth we all know but never call out because “wokeness” and “censorship”, because “I’m allowed my opinion”. People vote right because they do not understand what they vote for. You might be able to install a government that will roll back protections for those nasty trans people – but they are also a government who will force you into debt, crush your pension, close down your workplace and- whilst you wait at home, desperate to make sure your vulnerable mother doesn’t lie choking in a hospital bed as a plastic clad nurse tries to offer her muffled words of comfort- they throw back bottles of champagne which cost more than your daily salary.
Right wing voters compromise on their morals to install governments who work against their own people- and are too dense to see it.
Did I make you angry?
Good.
The point of this entire blog is to make people who think in opposition to me THINK about what they believe or vote for. If you truly believe for a single moment that Boris Johnson is the best representative for you, that he understands your daily struggles from a popped tyre to redundancy, you’re a fool. We are chess pieces on a very large board to the tory government. And the time to oust these flagrant shills is so far gone it can’t even be seen by the naked eye. If you truly wish to prove me wrong, and that you’re not willing to compromise your morals then show me by not voting for the people who “make me pay less tax which is good even if I don’t agree with them on drowning migrants”.
The United Kingdom deserves a government better than we have, a government who will work for the good of us all, a government run by those who have lived our experiences, have faced our issues, who are cognisant of our frustrations. Not a nodding dog of moral vacuousness who prattles on about building back better, about hands face space, about get boosted now- the only three word slogan the UK needs is “you’re our employees”.
Daviemoo is a 34 year old independent writer, radicalised into blogging about the political state of the world by Brexit and the election of serial failures like Trump and Johnson. Please check out the rest of the blog, check out Politically Enraged, the podcast available on all streaming platforms and share with your like minded friends! Also check him out on ko-fi where you can keep him caffeinated whilst he writes.
It sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it. The idea that our nation could give in to fascism. But that’s the insidious reality. We aren’t “giving in” to it- some Britons accept it, condone it, and think it’s a good thing because fascism, the politics of discord, division and elitism reinforces the bone deep conviction that to be British is to be superior, as surely as white supremacy is the conviction that skin colour is equivalent to superiority. Do you think the citizens of Germany in the 30’s thought things would escalate to their heights? Some knew, cried out, shook their fellow citizens with the dire need for action and were ignored- are we headed down the same political path as the literal Nazis?
It’s almost comically ridiculous to think of the UK as a fascist nation. A great many things lined up politically to allow Germany to slip into such horrific politics. And it’s only yesterday I was talking about totalitarianism- I know, which is it?
But when you stop to examine the state of affairs in the UK, the desperation with which I push my anti-tory agenda becomes clear.
People will tell you that “all politicians are the same- labour are as bad as the tories”. It’s nonsense, pushed by a gleeful tory party who thank people for endorsing the quiet humdrum that’s allowing creeping fascism to take hold.
Look at today- Johnson’s party is in deep trouble. A party at number 10 in December 2020- as we all followed the rules put in place to prevent the spread of coronavirus. Horrendous behaviour from selfish and disgusting individuals.
This must be punished- but to overlook the horrendous actions of the tory party outside of the headline grabbing bluster of their disregard for life is to miss the overarching theme of a government up to their necks in corruption, desperate to hide the stench and to extend their powers to being held beyond reproach.
Is fascism the right word?
Looking at policy implementation and general political output from the conservatives over the last 11 years, a slow burn into an explosion appears to have allowed this strange slip towards the far right.
Fascism relies on nationalism, firstly, and the weaponization of the Union Jack as a symbol of imagined freedoms. The aggressive push- not just for Brexit, but for a total severing and complete dissolution of the relationship between the UK and the EU- the spinning of EU officials as unelected officials muddling into UK business and stirring the pot instead of conglomerate sensibility and safeguarding. The sickening stories of migrant “incursions”, open glee or indifference to refugees drowning at sea, the mentality that any and all from outside are evil and coming to steal jobs, money, women, land. The idea that there is the “right” type of British- from gender identity as one of the most hotly debated and pointless (trans people will exist regardless of their access to clothes, toilets, prisons, healthcare…) tropes. The disregarding of our true history, linked intrinsically to colonialism and the slave trade in favour of the mealy mouthed notion that we just happened to be there. The embrace of a fictional history where Britain were always the heroes instead of a nation aggressively pushing it’s agenda. Nationalism is one of the key tenets of fascism and nationalism is as deeply rooted into British culture at the moment as it has ever been.
Look also to the fact that fascism opposes liberalism – explain to me why else this constant, laughable “war on woke” is being thrust to the front of every red topped newspaper, every magazine wrapped in salaciousness, every bottom drawer chat show.
Woke is simply defined as aware of social injustices involving systemic racism, but has swollen under the half lidded stare of those fed up of hearing about how their behaviour contributes to other people’s oppression at worst, unhappiness at best. And before I was referred to as a woke liberal on the daily, I was often called a marxist- often by people who, when I requested if they could define marxism, would hurl abuse and block me or, if in person, give me the look of someone recently concussed.
The press gag
Looking at accountability for the government also, we see concerted effort to expatriate them from the regular flow of accountability – firstly, open plans to prevent the government to be reported on negatively by the media, as seen in these headlines:
Sources: The Guardian, and Press Gazette
The curtailment of freedom of the press is an irony and embellishment at best- as seen in the footage of Allegra Stratton gleefully mocking the public with journos, the Christmas party at Downing St was already known in journalistic circles, kept in the dark until a time where the headline would be most salacious. Nevertheless, the freedom of the press to report on the government honestly and allow genuine public reaction has always been both vital, and increasingly distorted in the UK. The BBC, long reported as a paragon of journalistic integrity is now seen by many as state sponsored propaganda- on both sides of the political aisle. Many say this means it’s doing it’s job well. But when one side says “this is far right propagandism” (stories of trans people as sexual deviants, migrants as criminals and more), and the other side says “it’s not far right ENOUGH”, you begin to realise this is a misnomer- and intentional. The BBC’s funding comes from the government, so any implication that bias cannot apply to the BBC is wrong- especially under a government desperate to throttle press freedoms, and who has installed ex donors to highest office at the BBC.
Again, the pushing of the fight for trans equality – ridiculously framed as a “debate” – would you call it the “black rights debate?!”- is clear evidence that this manufactured culture war is being fed to blinkered people, desperate to assign their difficult lives to a physical, to a person, to a group- and trans people fit that bill, ironically, to a T. If you weigh in to the anti trans side you are an enabler of fascism, but this time it’s a different group in the crosshairs. If you genuinely believe a small group of people who identify AS WOMEN want to take away women’s rights or stop the use of the word woman you are both stuck in an echo chamber and hopelessly misdirected to fight against women you should be calling ally.
The public’s handcuffing
But it’s not just the press whose freedom to report honestly about the actions of the government has been throttled. We as individuals are seeing our rights removed, throttled, oppressed. When we, as a large group are dissatisfied with something, one of our most basic, fundamental, vital rights is to gather in numbers and stand in solidarity- so when the police, crime, courts and sentencing bill was introduced after the BLM protests, most of us knew it for what it was: not just a lazy attempt to stop the police from being held accountable for a poor job and seeping corruption (see the murder of Sarah Everard and the met’s predictably ludicrous response). It was a co-ordinated push to prevent the British public from uniting together under issues so vital that we co-ordinated to speak out against the government. Notice the reaction to women gathered at a vigil for a fallen woman, murdered by a policeman- violence, cruelty, arrests. Notice the reaction to peaceful protests- police hitting sitting protesters with shields, batons, provoking a violent reaction to justify this legislation’s supposed urgency. And the British public endorsed it! Then suddenly up arises Insulate Britain, a group set on solidifying it’s uselessness with gestures designed to frustrate the public- not actually fix the problems it complained about- and magically this already insidious legislation is amended to prevent us from blocking roadways, ports, etc, etc with mandatory sentences and uncapped fines. Coincidence? Hardly. I don’t believe Insulate Britain are tory stooges, but I believe they were manipulated into thinking their mission would do anything but allow condoning of this disgusting government pushing restrictive policies.
Everyone else as “the other”
Even the refractive divisions amongst British politics viewed with a wider lens than tory trouble has allowed for fascism to bubble and boil under the surface- hyper right groups like the BNP, Britain First, Farage’s UKIP party- and indeed pundits like Farage, like Julia Hartley-Brewer, Katie Hopkins, Darren Grimes- all designed to package up another step, another step, another step to the right, further, further- and normalising it. Cheap slogans like “taking OUR country back”, “building back better” and every other ridiculous daubing you can think of, all designed to promote separatism and create the mythological “other” who wants to come here, steal our jobs, change our laws, kill our women folk. Take away the politely indignant bluster of these individuals and lay bear their deepest agenda- Britain First- The literal name of one of the fascist parties.
But putting Britain first isn’t a sin or a crime, it’s what should be a necessity for those of us, whether nascent Brits or not – working for the common good is not a sin or a crime, and framing it as such has created a wave of rage against… nothing. The memo that none of the angry supporters of these supposed revolutionaries gets: everyone wants to work for the common good- or do they?
Look back at these social commentariats- who among them pushed sacrifice for the common good of all Brits? Or did they all, to a man, spend the entire time telling you to be selfish? Throw off restrictions, look after your own needs, wants, requirements? That’s the true face of the nationalism they pushed, it’s not about inclusion of your own, it’s about exclusion of the other- now no longer presented as some mythical foreigner or trans woman- now the other is your fellow countryman, the sheep in the aisle with you wearing a mask.
Platformed to present outrageous- but not TOO outrageous views, always just enough to provoke reaction without backlash, we became numb to it. We allowed these shills to push the painkiller that let the government inject increasing fascism into the country.
Who is the other now? Is it the refugee clinging to a dinghy on the offchance they make it to shore, the trans woman working in the coffee shop, the fellow Brit who thinks brexit didn’t work out well? Is the other everyone? Or is it no one.
Nationality as status
Furthering nationalist agendas, let’s look at the removal of foreign people’s ability to move and settle in the UK without specific reasoning a la the visa system. This gives British nationality a “status” of attainment- an attainment that could only be revoked in the minds of foolish people who believed your deep ancestry instead of location creates nationality. We’ve all seen the radio clip of David Lammy being told he’s not a “proper” Briton because he’s not white by an ignorant caller on LBC. That’s not a rare mindset- it’s common. People who are born here but born with dark skin are seen as “tolerated” Britons- disgusting as that mindset is, it’s frighteningly prevalent. And those, like the doctors who work for the agency I work for, who attain citizenship through hard work do a damn sight more to be able to call themselves Britons than those of us who simply were born here- and yet their citizenship is seen as not real by those who think it’s a status, instead of an accident of birth or a transactional relationship. And now, to add credence to this flawed view, Patel creates legislation to strip citizenship of those she and her fellows do not agree “should be” British. Nationality is a flawed and foolish concept.
The nationality and borders bill further separates those from abroad from us- another nationalist pandering legislation.
An attack on legal protections
Legislation tabled by the tories recently has been so fascistic as to create terror in the eyes of those who understand the implications.
If the government creates legislation which contravenes human rights, judges can rule against it, forcing the legislation to be reviewed until it does not do so. But not only do we have a Justice Minister in Raab who wants to repeal the human rights act and “create their own”, we have a government actively pushing legislation which would allow them to overturn, overlook or outright ignore the rulings of judges in cases of judicial malfeasance. Any rulings would therefore become advisory and would allow the culpability of the government for transgressions against law, land and the public to continue unabated.
This is quite literally one of the steps that the Nazis took before the beginning of World War 2- the unbinding of judiciary scrutiny from government action.
This unshackling of the government is a terrifying move to allow a government we cannot trust to access their full potential in authoritarianism. They must be stopped from instituting this bill.
Brexit’s “benefits” only benefit the far right
The rise of nationalism came when the EU was cast in the light of legislative oppressors, meddlers and more towards the UK, infringers of a sovereignty we already had.
The severing of oversight from a larger body who could sanction or impose legislative challenges of members is, was and would always be the goal for a government aware that they could seize and maintain power so long as they stirred the issues aforementioned. The cataclysm of brexit came in legislation – with the damnation of the NI protocol as a hinderance and the reason brexit has caused issues, and with the in your face horrors of very real goods, medicine and food shortages. But the true damage was the breaking of long placed bonds on a corrupt government now free to ramp up their power- at the expense of a populace battered by fighting for union and fighting against a virus. Our resilience has been worn out, fighting figmentary culture wars and this exhaustion has allowed this horrific situation to sweep forth.
Equally brexit benefited the rich- and we all know which side of the bench the rich usually sit. Relocation of businesses and evasion of scrutiny of taxation and ill gotten gains is a core tenet of this current tory government. Let those subject to the law be damned in the face of those above it- the law of the EU, the law of the land, and the laws of the time.
The overt denial of systemic racism from a report claiming contributions from experts who didn’t even know they were being consulted and the almost immediate drafting and imlementation of legislation criminalising aiding “immigrants”- note, not refugees, plus the regularly falsely pushed line – pushed in fact, on the 6th December by Scott Benton on the news, that you can be an “illegal” immigrant (again- refugee) has allowed the British public’s most dense subset to imbibe an automatically negative perception of anyone who challenges their rigorously structured fiction of “the unwashed dangerous foreigner”.
The strangulation of the unheard voter
I’ve written a piece on my blog before about voter disenfranchisement- I urge you to read this piece, as the dangers of creating difficulty in votership are impossible to understate. Mandating voter ID will, intrinsically, affect the voting eligibility of the poorest in society. Passing legislation to remove ID documents from voters is a terrifying step towards fascistic restrictions on votership- if the cornerstone of democracy is the allowance to partake, then any efforts to restrict access to this even under the guise of “preventing fraud” is the dismantling of a democratic right. And please remember the 2019 election resulted in less than 50 accusations of voter fraud and six proven cases- out of tens of millions of voters.
Ultimately, I am terrified that we are past the threshold, through the looking glass. We have borne so much under a party so clearly bent on self preservation that they have resorted to actual fascist implementation of policy.
The question now is two fold and simply: What next? And what else?
Ever since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, something politely termed as debate has raged between a deeply factional society. Bodily autonomy and freedom are two terms thrown around often by people who simply don’t understand the concepts they’re discussing. And whilst we’re told as we grow that we sometimes simply need to learn to disagree civilly with people whose views differ from our own- what do we do when those views carry potentially deadly consequences? Is someone’s skewed view of liberty worth dying for?
What is freedom to you?
It’s a question I’ve asked myself hundreds of times throughout this pandemic. The answer is more closely tied to the repercussions of Brexit, oddly. Freedom to me was the right to rights themselves. Losing the right to free movement sickened me, as someone who always loved, and wanted to move to, the continent but was prevented through fear of distance between myself and my family. The right to rights is a strange sentence, but being bound or restricted But as the coronavirus spread around the world and I saw the death toll mount, I- and many others- knew that our freedom was imperilled.
As the pandemic has raged on burning away people’s lives, making people long term sick, tanking economies, worsening wealth disparity many people have woken up to injustices- but in very different ways. Some of us fight with desperation to remove a government intent on enacting damaging laws, from the throttling of our democratic right to protest, to curtailment of our ability to aid those in distress who are not UK citizens, to removing “dissidents'” citizenship, to the enfranchisement of voting by implicitly attaching a cost to votership.
Some rage against a system they see as horrifically authoritarian for enacting emergency powers to restrict movement and interaction amongst people- enacted to control the spread of the coronavirus but to some, the reasoning of “a virus with a 97% survival rate” is a flimsy one.
This is where so many of us fundamentally differ. In 2020 the human population estimate is 7.753 billion.
If 3% of these people died, this would be a death count of 232,590,000.
Two hundred and thirty three million lives. This of course only factoring in the deaths from coronavirus. All too easily, the deaths from delayed medical treatment, from delayed ambulances, from exhausted physicians are written off.
One of the main kickbacks from my speaking in support of coronavirus restrictions is “what about deaths from the vaccine”.
This is understandable- but does not account for the fact that any deaths are sad, especially unnecessary ones like coronavirus deaths- or deaths from the vaccine, regardless of how low the risk. We should count these deaths as deaths due to the pandemic- because no coronavirus vaccine would be needed without the pandemic. Equally, look at the escalated rate of suicide due to isolation. This pandemic has a huge death toll, that extends it’s sinister reach far beyond the death brought by being infected and every single one of these deaths is a loss, a travesty and should not have happened. The way deaths have been manipulated for a political agenda is disgraceful. Ultimately and objectively, mass death is not a political decision- and the philosophical arguments can be bandied back and forth, but ultimately behind politics and philosophy are humans laid suffering from something that went from being an unprecedented worldwide event, to preventable for the most part, if people curtailed their contact.
The emergence of coronavirus allowed an unprecedented glimpse into the mindset of so many around us, people who openly distain others’ as long as they don’t feel controlled, coerced, don’t feel spoken down to, don’t feel like they have to make changes to accommodate others- forgetting of course that if others didn’t do it, they would also be at risk.
After two years, it’s openly a hostile move to walk into a shop- a place you have to go to buy food- without wearing a mask. Some see it as a laughable move which won’t prevent anything, some see it as a symbol of oppression and control from the state, others simply do not care and still more are a mix. There’s also a small subset of people who just like to annoy other people.
Those opposed to mask wearing, to social distancing, to lockdowns or any other measures declare that it’s their right to DO WHAT THEY WANT. They state that they shouldn’t be controlled, coerced, forced to do things they don’t want to do. But I have to wonder how often they follow that thought pattern to it’s apex of “for the common good”. Nobody that I know wants to wear masks, wants to get vaccines, wants to spend weeks alone. It was, I believe, seen by some as a civic duty or, more simply, the right thing to do. Was it? I believe so. Some are diametrically opposed.
When it comes to politics and more, it’s inevitable that disagreement will pop up. But the sheer volume of working class people cheerfully arguing that the economy can’t be allowed to fail if it means keeping people alive is terrifying – it’s the height of “it won’t happen to me”.
And of course it’s right and normal for humans to disagree on matters- but matters of mass death? It’s a strange world we’re forced to live in where people believe that their own, their loved ones- and strangers, who they don’t know- will die and that’s a worthwhile sacrifice.
It’s completely understandable that people are sick of living the lives we’ve had to under coronavirus- but it’s so often missed that people’s lives will continue this way until the virus has become endemic (we all knew from the start we’d never eradicate it). It’s the very people up in arms about masks and health measures who necessitate it’s continuance.
I read the story of an oncology doctor on Friday, who had to cancel a cancer patient’s operation because the bed they would have taken was now filled with an anti vax covid patient.
The covid patient would likely be moved to a ventilator soon, but the loss of that precious window for the cancer patient likely meant that they too would die. The cancer would grow, it would metastasise and just like that, another two people who didn’t have to die, but died, because of this virus- and because of the choices of an anti vaccine enthusiast.
Your choice to kill?
You see, there was a tipping point in the pandemic where your choices were miasmic and didn’t have the sway to hugely impact on the outcome. We were uninformed, we were all waiting for more research, more information. And now here we are- where your personal choices, from declining to wear a mask to refusing vaccines- are in a very real way, wreaking real life consequences upon people.
I’ve always levelled a deep and profound blame at a government simply unable to act decisively. Wishy washy guidance, hand wringing over following their own rules, duplicity- but now the onus truly has shifted to a split with those who wilfully will not comply building off the ignorance of the Conservatives.
It’s confusing that people are being given the choice to risk others’ health, all under this strange umbrella of bodily autonomy. Many of the people who support forced birth have appropriated their hated moniker, “my body, my choice”, for their crusade for the freedom they find difficulty in defining.
The co-opting of pregnant people’s rights
A pregnant person can, and should, be able to choose what happens with a pregnancy for many reasons, from whether they wished to get pregnant in the first place, financial and emotional readiness, health, safety and more. This isn’t a debate. A pregnancy can’t go on without a body to co-opt, but a body can go on without a pregnancy. Human beings are not incubators and pregnancy can have horrific consequences- from thinned bones, post partum depression and psychosis, scarring, bleeds… death. Every pregnancy constitutes a risk towards the pregnant person’s health. Their body will be, no matter how smooth a pregnancy goes, permanently changed simply by going through it.
And when it comes to being forced to take vaccines, this argument is, while controversial, more understandable. But that’s the essence of “my body, my choice”. You choose not to take a vaccine and you take on the risk to deal with consequences- societal (being excluded from mass events etc) or personal (dying or becoming disabled from long COVID). And of course, anti vaxxers will point at the death rate of vaccines- but again, this is bodily autonomy in action. Choosing to take the vaccine is you choosing to take that risk- negligible, but existing risk. Every person who died from the vaccine to my knowledge took that needle because they chose to, and accepted the risk.
The gleeful appropriation of “my body, my choice” is a misnomer. Pregnancy doesn’t spread via the air. Pregnancy only puts risk on the body of the person carrying it. You won’t spread mass pregnancy simply by being in a room while pregnant.
Outside of a pandemic the choice to make is whether to take a vaccine. Whether to take that risk, on the off-chance you come across the disease in question. During a pandemic, the choice is NOT to take the vaccine when there is a silent timer counting down to your exposure- and whilst it’s seen as bodily autonomy to make that choice, it’s not bodily autonomy- it’s bodily tyranny, because your mere presence in a room- especially if you’ve been wandering around with no mask, no social distancing, no vaccine- creates a risk, removing everyone around you’s bodily autonomy, their choice NOT to be sick. So now the question is- does one person’s bodily autonomy supersede that of the rights of everyone they could come into contact with?
People believe the merits of the anti vax movement- but isn’t it strange how the movement went from telling us that vaccines cause autism (neurodiversity by the way is a normal condition and function, though there are naturally extreme cases) to being silent, when 5 billion doses of vaccines were deployed over months. Suddenly the threat is “oh within two years you’ll be sorry”… about what?
Once some credible evidence comes to light we can discuss the nuance of whether vaccination vs non vaccination is worthwhile. Otherwise we continue to debate the efficacy of medicine that works vs rolling a lottery of disability, sickness and death.
Do I have to die for you to change your attitude?
Lets say coronavirus didn’t kill anyone but makes them sick like I was. Desperately poorly for weeks, exhausted, dizzy, sick, unable to eat, unable to sleep, in pain, headaches and more. I lost weight, I was light sensitive, my body ached. I still have a cough in December and I stopped actively suffering in mid October…
Is it worth running the risk of spreading that en masse? Even without death, mass sickness and disruption to peoples’ lives is a huge ask of everyone you may walk past in a day.
Society has not changed, no matter how much we can state it has. Change would be adaptation to the crisis at hand. What has changed are the circumstances in which people can easily advertise to you whether they care about those around them or think their own welfare comes first. No longer can we believe the myth that humans would try to collectively come together to protect each other- because all too many of us have joined the war on coronavirus on the wrong side.
The societal shift
One can’t necessarily pinpoint why society is how it is, and it appears that it’s a mistake to imply that we haven’t, at our core, always had this type of person in our society who will refer to those who make sacrifices for the collective “sheep”. But sheep do what they do out of fear, and out of instinct. I’m not overly scared of coronavirus, of isolation, of masks and vaccines- I’m scared of human beings who would rather lash out in violence than give simple proof that their claims of government takeovers, of poisoned vaccines, of masks causing health issues.
Until we can move past this virus as a collective, this battle will continue and the victims will continue to mount until common sense can stretch to both sides of the aisle. There will always be exceptions to those who can follow restrictions. But there will also always be those who spurn them. And the question continues to gather urgency – how long can society countenance the outliers when their actions, or lack thereof, endanger us all?
I refuse to use the word “leading”- the UK through the coronavirus crisis was always going to be impossible for Johnson. We have neither been led, nor are we through it -specifically because of this selfish, cretinous fool’s attitude. Bare below the elbows. Tie tucked. But desperate to show his sweaty, selfish face off for photo ops in a building filled to the brim with people sick and dying because of his, and his worm eaten cabinet’s selfish decision to protect the economy over human life.
The clear desperation of Johnson to make good of his mess in regards to the corruption scandals “rocking” Westminster (I air quoted rocking because- let’s be honest, who didn’t know that Westminster was rotten to the core under the tories) has now led him to the latest in a series of selfish blunders- wandering the halls of a hospital unmasked, his libertarian, or possibly libation addled mind aflap with nonsense.
To prove you’re worthy of trust as a prime minister, you would expect to go further, work harder, and set the examples. How many holidays has Johnson had since he took highest office? How many U turns? How many scandals, salacious headlines, protests and more has he inspired amongst the tired, beleaguered and furious populace of the United Kingdom. He has been so inept as to make the United Kingdom an ironic moniker, as Ireland and Scotland seem set to take steps to sever their connection to the rest, if only to escape feifdom rule by a man pathologically incapable of enshrining responsibility in his role.
It is only a matter of time until Boris Johnson steps down, or is removed. And he will be remembered forever as a blight on the face of political discourse and honesty in the united kingdom.
Let’s go back, shall we, to Johnson’s election win. Most prime ministers would roll up their sleeves as he so selflessly has in the picture above, and set to preparing the country for it’s exit from the European Union- they would be stepping into briefings on the economy, political division, racial disparity, wealth inequality – Boris Johnson went on holiday to “celebrate his win”- he’s also been on holiday three more times in the last year, mid brexit shortage, covid crisis, increasing bills, increasing NI and more.
The win was a shock for those of us who were left of the center- not just because Johnson seemed inept, but because it came a matter of weeks after police were called to his flat due to a domestic disturbance- the media covered this, but strangely it was seen as verboten to ask whether the man who would take highest office should have his personal life dissected- after all, Johnson’s past exposure to the press hardly painted the image of a salubrious, caring man. Fired twice for lying, exposed for doxxing a journalist so a friend could attack him for writing factual unkindnesses, had an affair when his wife had cancer and lying about it.
Once in the position he had so coveted, Johnson took little time to start appeasing those who put him there- his and Priti Patel’s comments on “do gooder lefty lawyers” preceded a huge spike in violence against said group- and yet an apology wasn’t even entertained. Finally, the right leaners had an unrepentant man in charge.
He didn’t have long to entertain his success at the polls. As coronavirus began to spiral in the news cycles, dogging our footsteps like the virus itself would mere weeks later, Johnson tried to appear unflappable on TV, boasting about shaking hands with covid patients- shortly before almost dying of the virus himself. The government’s reluctance to pre-emptively close the economy was responsible for the precipitous rise in cases- facilitated as well by their early determination to seek herd immunity. As soon as the mass deaths began to show, Johnson performed the first of his many U turns- but that meant little to those who now lay cold in the ground due to his lassitude.
Once the PPE chain corruption was established, it was only a short matter of time until an inquiry into who in the government knew about, and took advantage from, this practice of taking public money to produce sub standard PPE that would demonstrably cause deaths, or simply be a waste of vital public money.
Let’s also not forget the government’s determination to appoint Dido “data loss” Harding to the top job at Serco test and trace- slapping an NHS logo on an app doesn’t make it an NHS project, just means it is shielded from scrutiny in a way it should not as a business swallowing vast sums of public cash. Harding was a terrible choice, proven when her poorly run unit lost thousands of cases because they used spreadsheeting software that’s out of date compared to the software I use at work- but complaining about government corruption would do you little good- Harding’s husband heads up the anti corruption unit- and she is also good friends with Johnson.
Next to come was the discovery that Johnson had dismissed founded- proven- claims that Priti Patel was a bully who had demeaned and undermined her staff to the point that the public had to foot the bill for a payout for a staff member. Johnson’s sticky prints were all over this and the person responsible for the investigation was so incensed, he quit- but as his other job was to report on certain activities of Johnson this meant, somewhat dubiously, that months later Johnson would come under fire for being unable to prove who had paid the exorbitant bill for his number 11, Downing Street flat revamp. Was it the public? Who knew- until at the last moment a scrambling response from the government showed that Johnson had reimbursed a tory donor who footed the bill. Strange that a man who thinks nothing of money couldn’t have footed the bill himself.
We are, though, nowhere near the end of the strange tale of Johnson, part time prime minister and job share with the grim reaper and the snake who lied to Eve in the garden of eden.
Desperate to boost an economy that had already begun to flail under the pandemic’s necessary restrictions and the unprecedented disaster that was the brexit fallout, Johnson worked out a plan with the Chancellor of the Exchequer – Eat out to Help Out- that only took weeks to cause cases to explode in an utterly predictable way. But as long as the economy was rising, Johnson and his cadre closed their eyes to the rising covid numbers.
Suddenly, Johnson’s old ally Dominic Cummings filled the press with excuplatory headlines, trying to out the government as the nest of fools it was. Quotes Johnson had made were everywhere as he talked about letting our corpses pile high in the streets instead of locking down. And still the public forgave.
Next came his defence of Matt Hancock’s ineptitude. “He’s doing a fine job” said Johnson dismissively – continuing to defend this viewpoint even as Hancock was outed as a clueless, corrupt and inept health secretary- and even into the proof that Hancock was having an affair with an aide paid by public funds, more bothered about filling his hands with her pant suit than working on plans to save the lives of his fellow countrymen. Johnson rolled his eyes, probably thrilled that he wasn’t the only person incapable of fidelity – but as the public’s ire rose, suddenly Hancock announced he was leaving the role of health secretary and immediately Johnson claimed he had fired him. Demonstrably a lie- and shortly after this, Dawn Butler MP would call out Johnson’s lies in Parliament, something heretofore unprecedented.
Johnson’s government’s venom truly started to seep into the nation at the point where he decided to scorn providing school meals to school children.
Many ardent tories jumped out of the woodwork to repeat the same recycled media lines of “oh so they can afford cigarettes and iPhones but not to feed their kids!” And while none of us denied that there are some who will abuse benefits or mistreat their children, to tar everyone with that brush, and to deny children free food that would ease the burden on their parents and fill their stomachs was a truly monstrous move on behalf of the government.
This though, highlights a wider problem of the poison of the Johnson prime ministership. The emboldening of tory MP’s to self radicalise, to talk absolute tosh, to purposely be offensive or to do outrageous things. Ben Bradley accused his constituents of “selling free school meal tickets to pay in brothels”. Dominic Raab has accused the British populace of being amongst the most lazy – despite his insistence on not leaving his holiday resort as Afghanistan’s last defences against the Taliban crumbled. Priti Patel, already let off for bullying, her literal subterfuge against the nation forgotten, has now written legislation that has killed refugees in the sea- it has already happened, but you may not have read about it in our biased media. But don’t forget, this legislation is also widely hailed as illegal by other countries and has soured relations between England and Britain even more.
John Redwood, once hailed as an intellectual, regularly spends most of his time positing wild nonsense theories of how to improve relations between the UK and other places. Michael Gove, exposed for being biased against the north then made director of schemes to improve infrastructure in the north… the ineptitude, purposeful prodding and open idiocy of this cabinet is plain to see for those who look.
When his appointee to succeed the inept Hancock, Sajid Javid, immediately caught covid then threw off all restrictions, most of those who have railed and raged at Johnson’s inability to do a good job waited with bated breath, assuming that SOMETHING would stop the foolishness of our “freedom day”. Over 6000 people have died, needlessly, since freedom day because our government is derangedly driven to placate a small but loud minority of idiots- and a worse pandemic has spread in the UK- lack of consequence culture. But looking at the contents herein, can you be surprised.
The next hand clutching slip-up of Johnson’s was his deep desperation to facilitate a trade deal with India to make up for the yawning maw that is the post brexit trade deficit. His insistence on throwing off travel safety made it perfectly convenient for the delta variant to pervade the whole country, swaths of infections following his foolish decision to kiss up to the Indian politicians he hoped could enrich our trade. There was money to be made- money that came again at the expense of the vast majority of Brits.
And when Peter Bottomley MP said that new MPs find it “desperately difficult” to cope in their £81k salary with huge expenses, subsidised meals and more, at the exact same moment that the government removed the £20 uplift from universal credit, how much clearer could it have been that our duly elected did not, even in a blindingly fundamental way, understand the travails of the working class, either in, or not in the covid era? And again, during this latest scandal with Owen Paterson thrown under the bus and forced to step down he decried the salary scheme for MPs... why a man so out of touch with his constituents retains power so easily is beyond me.
This latest controversy has prompted a splashback that nobody could have predicted- Johnson’s determination to defend a colleague who provably took money to lobby for a company who has caused a surge in infections (strangely just before he faces an investigation by the committee) saw headlines from usually slavish newspapers critiquing his and his government’s foolish actions. Open evidence of corruption – “vote this way or your constituency will be defunded” has finally seen people shake off the pall of indifference we’ve been pushing back against for months.
But Johnson’s controversies predate his role as PM and continually during his tenure he has refused to apologise for contentious remarks he’s made in articles, from calling muslim women letterboxes, calling gay men tank topped bum boys and in his book, using the phrase “he was stupid because he was a c**n”, and far more. Johnson always falls back on context- always missing the point that the context makes the comments worse. He sticks to these views because this is how he sees anyone not of “his level”.
Johnson has, somehow, clung to the strange moniker of a man of the people, “just like us”- but how many people do you know that describes their £250k salary as “chicken feed”? Daffy Johnson is an affectation that too many British people are happy to swallow in their ignorance- ruled by elites, the UK’s government is as far from “people of the people” as you can get- and in fact, to quote a disgusting and inflammatory headline from the time where the path of Brexit was open to decision, at the moment this government walks ever closer to the deserved moniker of “enemies of the people“. A friend of mine has created a podcast about extremism based specifically on that headline that painted judges as traitors for questioning the legitimacy of the brexit vote, in case the severity of it is lost on you- and all the while, headlines just like that were thrust to the fore by a media determined to placate a rapidly right-sliding government.
And yet no matter how much evidence is thrust into the light by enterprising journalists, researchers and, of course, the “woke do gooder lefty lawyers” who work for places like the goodlaw project, Johnson’s strange and fraudulent presence as a man of the people just wont die- even with the death of 160,000 of his fellow countrymen Johnson has clung to popularity.
And today, 08/11/21, we see Johnson parade down a hospital corridor, bare below the elbow, tie tucked in, maskless and oozing ignorance. The face of our country, red cheeked and belligerent, determined to strengthen the foolish confidence of his populist base.
Many of us are awake to the injustices and corruptions of this government. When will the rest of us awaken from this spell, and finally step forward to remove power from a man desperate to obtain it, but fundamentally incapable of wielding it for good?
Every day the numbers of infected people hits over 35,000, which is a precipitous and terrifying number of people who cannot work, who may get sick, who may spread the coronavirus and who may get very sick and possibly die. The leaders of our country, from the prime minister who wanted bodies to pile high in their thousands over closing the economy for safety, to the old health secretary who had an affair with his assistant who he hired using public money, to the new health secretary who threw off all restrictions to please the tories’ populist and pugilist base, have failed us- why aren’t we calling this out?
England is a confusing place to live these days. I find myself looking around at the maskless masses and wondering what part of their nature allows them to think that running the risk, not only of their own health, but those around them- is acceptable. I’ve spoken to people I have to be around with this mentality and the shrugging indifference is maddening.
The reason I find this so very confusing is that, in a country so tightly wrapped up in nationalism, one would assume that your fellow countrymen would be high currency to you- and yet the inverse seems to be true. The callous disregard for our fellow countrymen and women seems to be at odds with a country so dedicated to pushing the narrative of “we’re the best”.
One could reasonably assume that the endless scribes thrown out by the media, which serve to manufacture culture wars that aren’t worth the time and attention (see people constantly using the word “woke” as a pejorative) of anyone with a reasonable mindset. As someone who is assigned this moniker at least once a week to my indifference, I’m amused as to why people would think “ugh, you care about people’s feelings and safety” is an insult- but perhaps this is another symptom of the sickness other than covid that is creeping amongst our numbers. Many people are suffering from a terminal case of indifference to anyone that is not “of their number”.
I’d go so far as to state that the UK is suffering from tribalism, but the tribes are hilariously misdrawn. The poor defend the rich who make their lives harder with longer working hours, less stable contracts, poorer pay, more tax, unsafe working conditions. One minority turns it’s ire on another as if this will give them exemption from the same hatred pouring from the masses. And all the while, white people will proclaim that they too can be victims of racism without ever seeing the power dynamics at play.
This applies too to the problem that made me write this article.
100 people on a dinghy, desperate to reach British shores because they speak English, because their family live here- simply because they WANT to come here- are described in term of vermin – incursion, flood, TOO MANY! But the lack of restrictions on coronavirus facilitate the choking death of 150 people daily who supposedly share this great nation, and they’re consigned to the “inevitable deaths” pile.
Looking at it from that angle makes my blood truly run cold. “They had pre-existing conditions- we need to get on with our lives” are the usual defensive lines. It makes me feel sick to think that so many people can’t and won’t even go to the insignificant step of putting on a mask in restaurants, stores etc to prevent the possible deaths of those around them. I won’t even attempt to debunk the crackpots who believe a strip of cotton with ear loops is equivalent to oppression because their cosseted existences cannot be punctured with the simplicity of explanation that a face mask is not the same as jewish or POC or LGBT+ oppression, and rising to their ridiculous polemics is pointless- it’s the net result they want, so I frankly choose a mix of scorn and indifference.
The “other” arguments
Another talking point that both exhausts and amuses me in equal measure is “we don’t count deaths by cancer or flu every day”.
We actually do count flu deaths in the UK- just not on a daily counter. It’s not something we need to do because it’s not happening to the extent coronavirus deaths are presently. If flu became the perfect mix of horribly infectious, easy to pass on, hard to kill and deadly- I can guarantee you the daily figures would indeed become widely available- but the abject slap in the face that is conflating cancer with coronavirus cannot be stated as stupid often enough for me. You cannot- in any real way- compare something that essentially spontaneously occurs in people, which needs long term medical intervention, is 100% fatal without intervention and is not infectious with a virus: to put it simply – I’ve never caught cancer by sharing the gym with someone with cancer. Also as someone who has lost multiple family members to it I find people’s eagerness to throw out nonsense comparisons deeply offensive.
It’s the same with heart attacks, or anything else. Even comparison with flu doesn’t work- yes flu is infectious, it is a virus, but it has a lower death rate than coronavirus- why is this still information that needs to be repeated very nearly two years into a pandemic?
In my eyes, at this point- every death in the UK is squarely at the feet and the fault of an indifferent conservative government, enabled cheerfully by it’s supporters and emboldened by anybody who does not speak out on the hypocrisy of it. And being told to focus on yourself, having the false narrative of personal responsibility thrown out is the biggest insult- how can I focus on my own personal responsibility? If I need to get on a train to visit my family and I wear a mask but every single other person does not, I focused on my personal responsibility and nobody else did- their decision affects me and nullifies my efforts. A society should be encouraged to come together for its’ own good and for its’ own betterment- but in England it’s every man woman and child for themselves.
I suppose I’m searching for answers here from those who so devoutly believe it. Why is 50 migrants a plague, but 150 deaths – from a plague – is fine if it means you get to drink a pint without wearing a mask?
From lockdowns, Brexit, tax hikes, energy crises and so on, left wing folk are used to regularly facing denigration and abuse by right wing figures and voters. Constantly denigrated and lazily insulted with buzzwords like SJW or woke, we put forward policies that help huge chunks of the population and reverse the damage caused by extremist right wing political parties- but when do we face the simple fact that the right cannot clean up their own messes, and need to start facing accountability for their own shortcomings?
If i had a pound for every time I’d been called some sort of invective by a right wing person- either face to face or online – I’d have enough to make decent inroads into any national debt. Sheep, remoaner, beard (that’s TERF specific)- the list goes on and is extensive. It always makes me laugh – it comes with a grain of frustration – sorry for wearing a mask so you don’t get COVID off me, apologies for thinking we’re stronger in the EU than out of it, please don’t hate me for thinking trans women don’t deserve a relentless hate campaign. It was even worse during the BLM protests- the amount of my fellow milk white people saying ACTUALLY YOU’RE RACIST because I went to BLM protests and spent a good 8 months reading accounts from people of colour to understand their perspectives in a way my ignorant little self hadn’t done before.
One thing that some of the more vocal racists who constantly denigrated me for weeks kept saying was something to the effect of “why should I feel bad for something I didn’t do”. An understandable perspective- wrong though. When it’s highlighted to you that people of colour suffer under a system you’re part of and you don’t work to change it you do contribute to it.
So let’s take that logic and apply it to a few situations which need to be spoken about.
The pandemic
Millions of the us faced the same situation- loneliness and isolation, and took it on the chin because we knew it was the right thing to do. I’d lost my mother two days before the first lockdown in the UK and spent months completely alone, avoiding any contact with any people near me. We all spent time completely away from others, because it was necessary. It wasn’t fun, it wasn’t nice. It was what we needed to do for the good of other people.
Mask mandates came in and even though we didn’t and don’t enjoy wearing them, we did it and do it because science quite simply shows you that if you are carrying an illness that’s expelled via airway, a mask will help. We accepted the things we had to do based on scientific evidence, which is why when the vaccines were rolled out, even if we knew there might be a risk – a tiny risk- that we could suffer health issues, we realised that the only way to seek normality was to take that tiny risk and have the vaccine. The more vaccinated and the less adverse reactions, the more secure I felt. Then came the “WAIT 2 YEARS TIL YOU’RE ALL DEAD!” – Literally every reputable scientist actually laughed at this claim. But all the time we were being vaccinated we had to walk against the tide of the griping fools who said it was an infringement on their liberties. That wearing masks was akin to a muzzle, that we were sheep.
Abuse for doing what we felt was personally and societally, the right thing to do.
Then came the football rioting. Those of us who actually cared about others sat at home watching scenes akin to the London riots- fighting in the streets, flares shoved up sweaty men’s arses, groups of ruffians breaking into a football stadium- and who was castigated? Oh the “reactionary left” who were enraged by the flouting of rules meant to keep us all safe- and yes, the football did in fact cause a massive surge in cases as predicted- but let’s all focus on how the left were angry about this and frustrated by the deluge of racism. Parliament convened to discuss it, only for the right of the room, the ones who are flippant about or endorse this abuse (see the recent report that states that those who suffer racist abuse are a necessary sacrifice in the pursuit of the rule of law…) to police the tone of women of colour who spoke up.
Then came the anti lockdown riots- just in time for lockdown to have ended the week before. These brave soldiers, out in public en masse in defiance of a lockdown that didn’t exist, potentially causing another mass infection to cause exactly what they were protesting about in the first place. If you don’t want lockdowns, don’t do what makes them necessary!
Further to that, those of us who were exhausted with it all and resolved to just get on with it were again insulted for still wearing masks, for being cautious- it seems like as we are trying to move on we’re still castigated- so who is really the one causing issues? The ones who are back at work in a mask or the ones gathered, sweaty faced and shouting, in the streets of London?
The anti everything crowd are the ones prolonging this heinous situation and those of us who have done the right thing and continue to do so face the abuse, but dare we speak up against those who won’t only to hear the tired epithets of “MY BODY MY CHOICE” (if your body can become the disseminator of a dangerous virus it’s NOT actually) or “SHEEP” or whatever else, suddenly we’re the ones causing the issue – I quite flippantly told someone a fortnight ago that I truly hope they don’t experience illness or death or lose someone they love for their decision which prompted them to tell me they were going to “find me and fucking kill me”. Hmm. I’ve spent 19 months sacrificing for your safety so frankly if you do face consequences for your selfishness, keep an eye out for me waving to you cheerfully.
Brexit
Project fear, as it turns out, is actually “project we didn’t predict it would be quite this bad but here we are”.
I can understand people who were swept up in the hype sold by the media and the leave campaign – I didn’t agree with it but I understood the allure for those who felt Britain was chained down by the EU, rather than facing facts that industrial Britain, built on the pain of the enslaved or the proletariat, had had it’s day and we were becoming a mediocre power simply because that’s how the world progresses. As time went on and more and more experts- political, economic, societal, scientific, came out as against it we became more aware that brexit could have potentially disastrous implications for our standing as a nation and for our (ever important…) Economy.
Cue the people desperate for independence from the EU insulting us, calling us doomsayers, being anything from sarcastic to openly violent towards us. The amount of doors slammed in my face, threats of physical violence or insults for simply saying I think we would have been better in the EU is bordering on parody levels of ridiculous.
What it is that brexiteers feel like the EU took from us or held us back from, I don’t know but if the covert changes to legislation that protects workers in this country wasn’t enough evidence that we were making a mistake, if the brutal murder of my local MP by a far right brexiteer radical wasn’t enough, and if the current food shortages, the constant UK EU headbutting wasn’t enough, if the increasing bills wasn’t enough, if the vaccine disruption and accusations of selfishness, the lack of action on ventilation, the blatant disregard of foreign scientists, the lack of HGV Drivers and people to cover certain job roles- if all of this wasn’t enough, I have to wonder what would be the thing that makes brexiteers realise that we DID MAKE A MISTAKE.
I tried to find a tweet I saw last week to place here which was to the effect of “why don’t remainers understand that we don’t care if people lose their jobs, industries fold, if the country goes into recession as long as we get our brexit!”
To people who think like that I ask- what the fuck did you gain then? You’re tanking people’s lives and economy in the name of a sovereignty we always had! You talk about how the EU restricted this and that and now we’re free- we still need to trade with the EU, so all you’ve done is remove any say as a conglomerate piece of the union that we had. The freedom you gained is from the EU’s perspective as a united group of countries who have far more influence than we do- and talking about the queen, trade deals that don’t rival the flow of EU goods, or how we are a nation built of strong stuff doesn’t change the fact that people here are in a worse position because of a vote you made based off of what have been demonstrably proven to be lies.
And who suffers for this? Is it the people who voted out? No. We all do- and as a staunch remainer I don’t want anyone to suffer, but we all suffer because of the decision of just over half of us. So we work to continue on, to make the best of the situation as leavers demand- and yet we can’t point out our frustrations or we’re remoaning…
Let me ask you again as I have in another post- who is the patriot- the one who wants their country to face up to it’s mistakes, issues and shortcomings and overcoming them to lead us to a better future, or the one who thinks draping a union jack over the cracks in our culture and economy fixes the problem. And of course, we all suffer together but those “remoaning” are just voicing their issues with the shitty economic position we’ve been put in through the ignorance of those in charge and the spurious claims of a campaign run by a man who has money to spare and access to a European passport should he wish. I know leavers don’t like to be told this but you were led down the garden path by a group of people who can escape any suffering through wealth and they’ll leave you to misery without batting an eye. But enjoy your tarnished sovereignty.
Tory voters
If one more person tells me “BUT IF LABOUR WAS IN”…
Every time someone has said this to me, it’s been about things that are literally happening now.
Empty shelves? Corbyn would have made us have empty shelves
Energy crisis? Corbyn would have priced us out of the energy market
Authoritarianism? The tories took your right to protest and put it in the bin
Terrible handling of covid and the NHS backlog?
Pick your poison. If your response to being told the conservatives are doing a bad job is to say “it could be worse” you’re not focusing on the fact that it could be better. It could be much better, if you’d stop accepting the bare minimum from your leaders- it seems like because Johnson’s marketed himself as an affable fop people will accept that he’s a fucking terrible politician who is as laughable as Trump. But if you speak out against the conservatives you’re in for “at least it’s not socialist Corbyn/ Labour is a terrible party” and on and on and on in a never ending cycle- and not just from the right.
Focusing on the nebulous situations in your head rather than dealing with the realities we’re suffering under is a special talent of all of the above.
I think every person on both sides of the above feels they are the victim- but only one side actually caused these negative situations to come about, and so maybe we are all, or none of us are, victims- but I certainly know who the perpetrators are.
The reason all of this is so frustrating is that I had a video go viral on TikTok recently where I had 30, 40 people telling me over and over that I should go out and DO- stop moaning and SORT SOMETHING, offer SOLUTIONS.
Did I get us into this mess? I campaigned for labour, I campaigned against brexit, I isolated, wore masks, social distanced, washed my hands, vaccinated… and all the while I was called a socialist (as if that’s a dirty word…), I was called remoaner, sheep, test subject. I do what’s right even in the face of all of this, as do so many others- and of course, when the chips are down its US who need to rise up, take back power, fix it, find solutions. Do you understand how exhausting it is to have to carry this huge facet of society along all whilst it’s railing against you and kicking and screaming against progress? I understand why people get so jaded with political activism because it is exhausting to try and simply get people to see your perspective whilst being constantly insulted, threatened and more, and then be told that WE need to do more, we need to undo it all, fix it all.
It’s well past time that the brexiteering anti mask anti vax tory voting weak brained amongst us realise that they have caused untold misery, frustration, pain – death- and face the fact that they are on the wrong side. They can enjoy the victories they amass in the fact of common sense, knowing that it’s at the expense of a worn out group of people who want what’s best for us all as we spiral more. Or they can take the wheel they’ve repeatedly snatched at and try to guide us out of the repeated and worsening messes of their creation.
Are you tired? Tired of being told to be vaccinated? Tired of being told to social distance? To wear masks? To wash your hands? Are you tired of the tyranny of a government commanding you to follow orders like a sheep? How tired do you think we are of dragging you all along with us and suffering at your hands?
MY BODY MY CHOICE. It was, I’m sure, perceived as a master stroke when whichever cosseted little snowflake decided to appropriate the abortion rights moniker in the war against sense that is the anti vaccinations/ anti lockdowns/ anti masks movements.
However, I’ve never caught a virulent case of pregnancy via a handshake or sharing a supermarket aisle with someone.
Your body is your body – but your choice to walk around as a disseminator of a virus that has killed 4.5 Million people is not your own to make- except under a government that is either wilfully negligent or terrifyingly inept.
To imply that you are able to walk around with impunity is already false- were you found to be carrying a dangerous disease communicable by breathing or touch, you would, against your will, be forced to quarantine for the good of everyone around you. Were you walking around emitting radiation you would be caught, cornered and isolated. This is not new, it is not news, and it is certainly not controversial. You are not being shot, beaten, broken for the crime of existence- you are being prevented from spreading disease. If you can’t make a distinction between a desperate attempt to prevent societal damage and death, and TYRRANY – the issue doesn’t lie with your fellow countrymen or, loath as I am to defend them- the government.
The irony is that we currently have a government in place who are supremely unconcerned with infections en masse so my defence is- like any tory lines about “protection” – fictional.
Equally I see many people desperate to make a false equivalence between coronavirus and HIV.
HIV is bloodborne and can only be passed in certain circumstances I very rarely find myself in with strangers- that’s the difference with covid, and if you can’t make that distinction without an internet stranger pointing it out, I urge you to keep your mouth closed out of fear that you will suffer mortal embarrassment.
To be regularly called hysterical by people who reach histrionics when asked to wear a mask, to stand a slight distance apart or who regularly storm the wrong places to protest a vaccine is exhausting.
To see the dregs of our society – dregs, dear reader that I’m not afraid to call them any more- holding back our progress in defeating this virus that’s stolen a year and a half of our lives makes my stomach fill with hot rage. Here we sit, handcuffed to awkwardly squirming anti-everythingers who just want to “get on with their lives” as they refuse to follow even the smallest inconvenience to it, prolonging the issue.
How long are we as a society going to forment these weaklings? Do we really have to speak to people like they are children to explain why this is necessary? And if that is the case, why is it we who must suffer as they rage and flail against the symptoms they cause?
Frankly, the last 18 months has fundamentally changed how I feel about my fellow humans. Seeing the endless nonsense recycled, only to be called to heel by the reason of experts- to see it recycled again in a clown-filled repetition of garbage garbage garbage assailing the truth – has made me embittered towards my fellow people- and yet still I do what we’ve been told will help without question. But why? Why should I continue to do what experts recommend when so many others wont? If they wish to be so cavalier with my life, why shouldn’t I be with theirs? The answer, I fear, is that it is fundamentally who we all are as people- surrounded by those who are “reasonably sure” they are right and their surety may kill me, as we try to protect them and may be giving our lives or health for it.
As the government who are supposed to oversee the welfare of the country continues to tacitly accept this disgraceful lack of safety from a legal and societal standpoint, I find myself more amazed than ever that we continue to assent to their twisted rule. Under the thumb of Johnson, who is hoping to eliminate the job of vaccines minister because he wishes to “move on” from COVID, this dangerous situation will grow, spread and entrench into the very stones of our buildings until our half-safe way of life becomes normal… even as the rest of the world returns to normal, away from the gaslighting the UK faces on the daily.
I don’t see wearing a mask, getting vaccinated or any other measures taken as cowardly- I see an inability to change your own behaviour as the world dictates as weakness.
And many more of our fellow man are shamefully weak than we knew.
Politically Enraged 