Media – Politically Enraged

Brittania, Chained: What else must be taken from us before we rise up?

By Daviemoo

Striking and protesting are not primary actions. One does not ask to finish half an hour early then strike when told “no” any more than one immediately takes to the streets when bills begin to rocket up in price. These are desperate actions, taken as a last resort to call heed to the wider powers of the country that a problem unsolvable by workers, or the public as a whole, exists.

For too long now, the British public has been misled by the twin arms of an utterly ineffectual government and a media machine desperate to spin a gaudy narrative of lazy workers wanting more for less. Glaring headlines shared by Conservative MPs declare that Britain has become a “something for nothing” state- and yet an anonymous healthcare worker striking outside Leeds General Infirmary recently told me “some days it’s like coming in to a hospital in the trenches- I’m not striking because I enjoy it, I’m striking because- whether we’re there or not- it’s not safe for patients OR for staff”. When I spoke to a striking rail worker outside Leeds train station a few weeks ago I was told “my life is practically over. My mortgage went up, my electric and gas went up, my food bills are up, my wife is sick- Whether I strike or not I cant afford to live”.

Striking has long been a fundamental right of workers, but this right has been restricted and squeezed continuously since the dark days of the winter of discontent. In 1980 Thatcher passed anti “sympathy strikes” legislation, halting any wider spread of striking. Balloting was enforced, and the time between ballot and response was decreased from seven days to five whilst postal balloting was also introduced- not only did this involve increased cost, but it also meant determined organisation was required in order to even question adequately the workforce involved in the ballot and even these subversive moves were only the quieter actions laid by Thatcher to suppress strike action.

Unfortunately, the previous labour administration did little to remove restrictions on protest. Blair was reportedly focused more on drilling down on the economy and bringing in results, believing it was unnecessary to scrap the anti protest legislation in favour of simply working constructively to address issues which would prompt strikes.

Prime Minister Sunak’s desperation to enforce legislation around striking which guarantees a “minimum service level” is wholly ironic: minimum service levels are not being met at present, even on non-strike days. When I was thirteen I broke my wrist, and I thought the four hour wait in A&E before I was given a cast was exorbitant: now, 36 hour waits in A&E are the norm: people die waiting for ambulances to arrive or inside of them as they queue for triage outside departments crowded to bursting and understaffed.
These issues long predate the pandemic- an NHS staffing crisis has been ongoing for so long that I do not believe we’ve seen normal staffing levels since 2010 at best.

Having worked as a recruiter for the NHS directly for two years, I remember being given the amended pay scale one day and being agog: a fully trained, fully qualified consultant earned just over £100,000 at the time. People will, of course, say this is a high salary- and yet I am willing to bet that those complaining do not have to pay hundreds of pounds for indemnity insurance a year, hundreds of pounds for GMC registration, for parking, for a mortgage within an appropriate distance from the hospital in case they are summoned for an emergency. Those who quickly complain that NHS staff salaries are high too often fail to factor in the huge amount of money doctors and nurses must spend in order to simply progress in their careers.

That pay scale has barely changed since 2016 when I left the NHS’ employ and yet, due to governmental mediocrity we have seen an unprecedented rise in everything we are required to spend on: mortgage and rent have spiralled, uncontrolled bill growth continues, in Labour run councils council tax is the only means of funding as it is widely suggested that the conservatives throttle funding, so council tax bills rise and, of course, the very goods we buy- food, clothing, sanitary products- have continued to grow exponentially in prices.
The malfeasance of Truss and Kwarteng led to a fiscal black hole, into which fell the dreams of many- home ownership, reasonable rental prices and more back breaking fiscal requirements fell like lead weights on the shoulders of the British public.

How does the government respond to this shocking burden to taxpayers? By passing legislation preventing us from complaining about it.

But it is not merely workers rights being throttled by the hand of a malfeasant government- the very public’s voice is being smothered under a legislative deluge started by ex Home Secretary, Priti Patel and continued by her contemporary, Suella Braverman.

Patel passed the Police, Crime, Courts and Sentencing Bill, which was given Royal Assent on 28th April 2022. The bill focused on ensuring the police were given further powers through robust expanse of the “unacceptable protests” clause: a deeply problematic clause which was questioned by many a “lefty lawyer”- for what is an “unacceptable” protest?
The act also endowed the Home Secretary with the power to make regulations without having to defer to parliament, essentially widening the scope for prosecution, criminalisation and eschewing responsibility that usually sits in hand with the person in the Home Secretary chair.

Under the PCCSB, you could be charged as a “public nuisance” if your protests were “noisy or disruptive”- unlike those very useful quiet and non disruptive protests we hear of so often in the history books.

As the bill moved through the house of lords, huge sections were excised, deemed too extreme and draconian. Braverman, unable perhaps to create and implement her own legislation, swept the offcuts of this bill up, waited for the PCCSB to pass royal assent, took over from Patel then (ignoring the brief period where she stepped down in disgrace for leaking confidential information), used the new powers included in the primary bill to pass the offcuts unopposed under the Public Order bill.

The Public Order bill essentially criminalises the act of even attending protests- those who have attended protests within five years can be compelled legally to “check in” their nonattendance at subsequent protests and can even be legally barred from referencing or speaking about protests which others may attend on social media, thereby disrupting the possibility of encouraging active participation in protest. Braverman also has the power to give injunctions to those “likely” to protest- and yet the regular crowd of free speech advocates who go to pains to defend peoples’ rights to speak out are suspiciously quiet on this.

Garden Court North chambers had this to say on the Public Order bill:

The right to protest is at the heart of all of the hard-won rights that we enjoy in our democratic society. The Public Order Bill 2022 presents a grave threat to that right and would mark a regressive shift of power away from ordinary people and towards the State.

Not content with stripping protest rights back to the bare sinew, Sunak is now passing legislation so restrictive it even prevents “slow march” protests, where protestors walk slowly in the streets to disrupt traffic.

The overarching question which the wider public should be asking is this: would a government interested in solving problems also actively garrotte the publics’ methods of speaking out about them?

A well run country does not need to pass anti protest and anti strike legislation, because governments which drive results and correct issues are curing the diseases of which strikes and protests are a symptom. One begins to suspect that the disease from which these symptoms emanate is, in fact, a government embroiled in scandal after scandal- from Sunak’s second FPN of his public tenure to Braverman’s lazy dismissal of a holocaust survivor’s warning of her rhetoric, on to Zahawi’s tax affairs which saw him removed in shame- ironic, given Sunak’s taxation snafu over non-do status, or even to the fresh sleaze revelations of Johnson’s securing up to £800,000 loan by a friend he then appointed to a key BBC position and a distant cousin at the bank. We sometimes do not know where to turn in the U.K. because at every juncture lies further injustice, further malfeasance and stricter repercussions for not simply “making the best of a bad situation”.

The normalisation of “suffering for Britishness” is an odd phenomenon, reminiscent of the frog in the slowly heating pan. The citizens of the United Kingdom do not realise that we are, or deserve to, slowly boil in the swamp of corruption pouring steadily from Westminster, subsuming the country and winding us inextricably into the corruption the tories have solidified- and until the British and in particular the English become aware of the steady heat rising around us, we will continue to be scalded by the bad actors who stack the cabinet.

Additionally one must take into account a third arm of state machinery- the police force.
The police are an arm of control the government has been all too willing to use at their discretion, creating the bills mentioned above under Patel and Braverman to restrict our rights. The police force continues to be assailed daily by the excoriating light of truth- police are outed as rapists, racists and bigots, all leading to more state protection through watery statements from Braverman and other officials, or by promises of reform which still does not improve the ramshackle-state of either trust in the police, or the actions of them.
The police are the physical clenched fist of the state, the government it’s rotting brains, the media it’s fork tongued mouth and with these three pillars in place, we fail to be the country we can be, we fail to keep the rights we deserve and we continue to be pinned supine under the conservatives.
A government who takes these radical actions is not a government who will address the root causes- so one must then ask whether a cabinet uninterested in fixing the issues of a divided, exhausted country is a cabinet rotten to the core… and in need of replacement.

Britain: A country addicted to suffering & the antidote

By Daviemoo

British culture is built on an iron strong foundation of the glamorisation of suffering for your patriotism- and seems to intertwine those two ideas into one. From phrases like “just lie back and think of England” when you’re in a situation you’re suffering through to ridiculous notions of “blitz spirit”, we are a country in a torrid love affair with the fantasy of our own suffering somehow being noble, a country unable to break the ropes of an oppressive government because we simply cannot extricate ourselves from the idea that this is what we’re allotted: we are not meant to suffer for our nationality, and it is time for us to come to this collective conclusion, and strive for better.

Austerity was a political choice. The levers to create it were pulled at the end of the old labour government in 2009 in response to a worldwide recession, in order to try and pare back money the country was deemed not to have and to prevent us from entering the type of runaway inflation and decimation of various sectors of the UK economy that- ironically- we’re getting a hearty taste of now. The tories took emergency cost saving measures and unbolted the safety wheels, cash-grabbing money back from the British public under the guise of protection. This affected public services which have never recovered since.
Austerity has caused mass death. We can put this alongside the government’s handling of coronavirus, both the virus itself and not funding mental health resources, as another way in which they have failed many people who would otherwise be here with us.

To someone my age (I am 35), austerity and its reverberations are still felt now. I am “used”, I suppose you could say, to a country that chronically underfunds its resources.
I’ve done limited travelling, but I do remember being amazed at how clean, up to date and timely German public transport is. I went to Cologne in December 2017 to enjoy the Christmas markets with my then boyfriend. Everything was lovely: the streets clean, the trains showed up exactly when they should and even some of the architecture that reminded me of England’s brutalist office buildings thrown up in the seventies were in good repair. I found myself raising my eyebrows at the regularity, pricing and ease of the public transport systems.
I had a similar experience in Portugal with trains so cheap, regular and timely that I was amazed at how they ran. It was impressive- but public transport that shows up on time is not, actually, amazing or revolutionary. It’s what should be expected.

Yesterday my train home was delayed because flooding on the tracks meant the driver was stuck elsewhere and another had to be found.
These things happen, of course, but it’s symptomatic of the UK’s horrific infrastructure. Our public transport up north is notoriously- to coin a northern phrase I love- shite. Old trains that break down, are loud, crowded and infrequent. Between the companies who run these lines and a government who doesn’t care about the north it’s not surprising. But we’re used to it, until we see that it can be done elsewhere.
Did you know, in Japan, rail operators kept an almost defunct platform functioning for years, to get one girl to school? I wonder if the UK would do that…

As systemic problems always do, this spills beyond my idle frustrations with substandard public transport. Strikes abound in the UK now- rail, postal, university, healthcare, public servants and more are furious, and it isn’t simply that people are furious about pay- which, just so it’s clear, is a perfectly valid reason to strike on their own. People are striking because their working conditions are, and I am quoting from a doctor friend of mine, “abysmal- like working in a field hospital”.
Our public services are collapsing around us. In the middle of last year we were warned about possible energy shortages, blackouts, food shortages. And how do the establishment respond to these stories?
Firstly when I say “establishment”, I have to point out that I am now of the firm opinion that most of the UK press is an arm of it. So let’s look at the press!

How did the media pundits amongst us respond to worrying stories of blackouts? Why, well known right wing columnists eagerly inked their pens and wrote that treasured phrase from above: blitz spirit! I mean, they got through blackouts in the war, didn’t they? It built character! The minor difference being there was a war at the time.
These blackouts have yet to materialise but if they do, it’s not because the Luftwaffe are dropping shells on us- it’s because the government has never wrested energy companies under control, worked to forecast the actual infrastructure the UK needs, implemented proper taxation against the hyper rich (both individuals and companies) and put that money into the regulation, restoration, upkeep or improvement of energy infrastructure.

We were warned there could be blackouts and the press’ response was: “get candles and enjoy the quiet, peasants”.
Ironic, also, that we were forecast energy shortages- most of us are afraid to put the big light on now. Remember the stark rebukes of our fathers shouting it was “like Blackpool illuminations in here!” when the big lights were on- ironically now the country has scaled back so much on helping with the price of energy bills it wouldn’t shock me if our living room bulbs ended up a more decadent display of wealth than the whole promenade’s flashing cacophony.

How about the food shortages? Most of these warnings were two pronged- the damage done to import/export by an almost hilariously badly implemented Brexit deal means that it’s harder and more expensive to bring goods into the country and, when they are here, there aren’t enough workers to get the goods on the shelves. The escalated prices are passed, through governmental lassitude, to the customer- so you’re paying more money for less readily available goods.
The press was absolutely fervent in its desire to advertise poverty porn, running stories about the positive side to fasting (fasting is a choice, not eating because you can’t afford food is called, say it with me, starvation), or which types of food you can eat even when they’re mouldy. They were happy to platform MP’s like “30p Lee” Anderson who claims, still, that you can make meals for 30p. Lee, as an MP, earns £82,000 a year by the way. Even today Lee posted a photo on twitter of a “30p breakfast”, of two weetabix and milk.
4 pints of milk is £1.65 and a box of 48 Weetabix is £5.50- are we allowed to go to Tesco and ask if we can get our milk and weetabix in daily 30p sized assortments?
I shouldn’t say that should I, that will be Lee’s next bombshell bill in parliament… and the government are so on the nose about their distaste for the working class it’ll likely be termed the “let them eat cake” bill.

A brexiteer recently, someone who somehow STILL supports Brexit as not an abject failure, told me we need to “be more positive and make the best of it”. I’m sure she meant that to be helpful but I read it as “ignore reality and try to eke some joy out of the utter ruination of our economy based on hubris”.
If you voted for brexit, I don’t hate you. If you still support it, this far down the line, I think you’re utterly foolish and are one of the people who this piece aims to wake up.

Our suffering has been normalised- we’re told by press and by our very parliamentary representatives that it’s normal to be cold, in the dark, hungry, sick, unable to not go to work, forced to walk office corridors with people who think wearing masks is an infringement of their rights but their covid breath isn’t an infringement of yours. And we accept it.

That’s the point that makes me want to tear out my own hair. So much of the British populace accepts it! And I’m not talking about the belly crawling shoe kissers who thoughtlessly worship career politicians like Boris Johnson (e’s so relatable, I could have a pint with him- me nan died in her care ‘ome cos of ‘im but ‘e did ‘is best), of course some people exist whose entire raison d’être is to gently caress the loafers of their “betters”. I don’t concern myself with that type, I can’t help them and frankly, I don’t want to after many years of trying.
I mean the people who grumble and mumble, who moan and mope- and who still accept it. The people who are truly fed up but who never speak truth to power. Those who are as fed up as they should be with the government but who do not act are entirely antithetical to improvement.
They grumbled and mumbled as the cliff edge of brexit came closer and closer, they whinged and griped as the government peeled back our protest rights not once but twice, they shook their heads and frowned as the government gripped our right to vote in it’s hand and squeezed until it stopped flailing…
The people who are completely subsumed by the 1984-esque message of “it has to be this way and we need to make the best of it” are lost, but those who know it’s unrepentant bollocks and who still don’t fight back infuriate me.

The country will continue to collapse around the ears of everyone in it and some of us are working both behind the scenes and in the open to push a critical mass of the public into calling for better.
Many of us are forming broad networks to counter the insidious message of “suffer for being British, you are British because you suffer”. And still, still sitting in their dark kitchens, fingers white with cold, a core knot of Brits who hate it but don’t stand up against it, throw their fine chains around our necks and hold us collectively in place! If everyone who was sick of this industrial fuckery took to the streets we’d petrify the government into action before they could snicker at us.

Let me be the first, the loudest to break this spell which has so thoroughly entranced so many.

You deserve better.

You, as a person, do not deserve to worry about how much it costs to put your light on. You don’t deserve to buy the cheaper cuts of meat because you can’t afford the normal ones. You do not deserve to shelve the idea of property ownership. You do not deserve to have to move to a smaller place because your landlord put your rent up and your employer’s kept your salary the same for 7 years.
You don’t deserve to drag yourself, coughing, sweating and still shivering, into work because you can’t afford a day off and your boss legally does not have to let you.
You don’t deserve to wonder if you can get away with one more slice of bread from the packet if you just scrape off the little green bits (I did it recently, it’s not pleasant).
You don’t deserve to work 8 hours a day with an hour’s commute either side, where the transport is late and costs you so much it eats over a quarter of your salary but where if you work from home pundits like Isabel Oakeshott call you entitled.
You don’t deserve a government who sees you strike from your job, not because you’re greedy but because- work or not- you can’t afford your bills, your rent, your goods any more or because the conditions you’re working in are so dire you are getting PTSD.

Britain does not have to be a country of abject misery. We’ve done this to ourselves, imbibed a past that, in large part, doesn’t exist and the parts that do don’t deserve to be wooed across our front pages because they are already romanticised by the fools typing them with no clue of the suffering they reference.
Of course they suffered during the war- it was a war. And I’m tired of hearing about how you grew up with frost on your fucking windows; because you did, doesn’t mean I should- do we, or do we not, want to improve conditions for the human race as we grow, do we or do we not want better for our children than we had?

We are a country who tells its young to go to unprepared schools to catch coronavirus whilst telling them to get better grades on harder tests to apply for jobs that need experience and a degree we’ve made more expensive- then, finally, an employers says yes and offers you a salary that means you’ll never be able to save enough to buy your own house. Asking for more means you’re greedy, so we accept the miserable salary because maybe we can cut back on our designer coffee- the coffee that used to be £2.80 that’s now £5- it’s wise for a capitalist to bump up their prices but stupid for us to buy it, so we don’t, and yet still – no savings because the rent on your run down flat went up and the bus that sometimes just doesn’t show up is more expensive… and we tell people this is normal as if it is not the definition of wrong.

We take misery from the shoulders of the older generations, reshape it into a whole new type of trauma than they suffered, and then tell kids how easy they have it.

Being endlessly condescended to by people who normalised their own misery and abuse is tiresome, so here is another key message that must be forced out into the British populace like a vaccine against this ridiculous rhetoric: what you went through was terrible, and shouldn’t have happened to you. Just because you survived it, doesn’t mean we all should have to.

We have utterly normalised suffering at every level of our society- and why? What has it brought us? What is the grand old payoff for all our noble British suffering?

Nothing positive can, or will, come from the British continuing to embrace warmly the notion that our immiseration somehow magically creates a better, stronger country. It’s for those of us with the strength and with the conviction to gear up and march amongst the throngs of those who still embody this message to disabuse them of it.
Suffering does not make you British. Britishness does not have to make you suffer. It is not just that you deserve better because everybody does, but because when you accept worse conditions for yourself this has a collective effect on everyone around you- when the strongest amongst us accepts poorer, those less strong must do the same and for much too long, the strongest amongst us have been forced to accept less.

No more.

Britain can and will be a prosperous country filled with people who are happy to be here, not because we suffer under a government unbothered about its country, but because the country will take care of us again.
We need broad change- to legislation, to our dealings in the world- but most importantly, to our own self perception. We do not deserve the continual recycling of harsh anti British rhetoric camouflaged by the act of waving a union jack or wearing a golden crown as it’s said. The establishment is arguably anti-British, calling for us to chin up and accept our difficulties- the true patriots among us are calling for a final end to the long suffering of our lives, to the reformation of a system which has seen me, at thirty five see three recessions.
Our leaders must not be weakly constructed from the same tattered cloth as those from before but be those strong and brave enough to break the rusted chains of suffering that we are forced into and chart us a new course.

Does all this seem hyperbolic? Good.
Too long in my short life have I watched people in this country languish and have the pavlovian urge to enjoy that suffering. If this writing lights even one fire in one other British person’s heart then so be it.
We deserve better. I’ll say it until I’m no longer here to- because the establishment won’t.

We deserve better.

The cruelty is the point

By Daviemoo

I’m constantly moved by those who fail to realise the ethos of the tory party: one of their many monikers is literally “the nasty party” and it’s not just because a worrying number of MPs look like the recently reanimated.

Look at the faces of the tory party: Patel, implicated in a bullying scandal so severe that the UK taxpayer fronted a settlement with an ex employee, Braverman who dreams of sending desperate refugees to Rwanda, Williamson who thinks helping someone in debt means he “owns” them, Gullis who happily screamed and jeered in parliament in support of a PM who threw back libation whilst we were legally secluded, Rob Roberts, suspended for a month for being sexually inappropriate with staff (and by all accounts trying to do so with constituents, sending out letters asking for pretty young female constituents to visit him privately) and of course the tory MP who we all know is a rapist but can’t name for fear of jeopardising his case and letting him off the hook: and of course the face of the party for nearly two disastrous years, Boris “beat up a journalist letterboxes bum boys let the bodies pile high” Johnson.
We have to get over this obsession with the idea that the tories are tough but fair- I know, I know in my heart that tory voters believe this somehow- that they think the tories are the party of “we’re doing this for your own good” but it’s not the “we’re taking the hard decisions to improve your lives in the long run”, it’s more akin to “you’re making me hit you because you won’t just lie down and take it”.

The tories have pushed through legislation after legislation to hurt the British people- not just the opposition, though the way the tories are stirring up hate against those who disagree with them is indicative of that- but the actual British people. I often have people tell me they think the voter ID bill is good, after all it’ll stop voter fraud: ah yes, just like how anti speeding laws stop speeding, how anti drug laws stop drugs and anti homeless bills make homeless people have homes!
Voter ID laws disenfranchise people: at last count, 2.5 million people will be disenfranchised from their ability to vote in the next election and 2.5 million people is more than enough to sway politics in a direction the country doesn’t want. Fortunately initiatives LIKE THIS (spread the word, share widely) help us to somewhat combat voter disenfranchisement, but we can never recapture all the voices who are silenced by insidious moves like this by the government to control the voting narrative. I’ve said before, the people most likely to be affected by voter disenfranchisement are the poor, the disabled and the young- all demographics who certainly don’t vote for tories in huge numbers: what an odd coincidence, I’m sure.

Then of course we had the police, crime, courts and sentencing bill, a bill that said “protest away! Just make sure you have the assent of the local police force”. The local police force who did stuff like this before the bill was even passed:

And a bill that said “unauthorised” protests, even one man protests, could result in imprisonment. The wooly language of the bill, no doubt in part due to its writing by Patel who was trying her best not to slip into plagiarising Mein Kampf, was so wooly that we still don’t know what an “unauthorised” protest looks like- mayhaps we’ll see a wealth of protest insurance companies pop up, ready to give you indemnity against all the eye gouges, pepper sprays and shield injuries you can muster?

But they weren’t done, were they? No, we thought Patel, the grand high bitch was bad enough but they managed to improve on that formula and go from fascist lite to fascist with Suella Braverman. Braverman has crafted a new bill which functionally criminalises you if you’ve ever gone to a protest- even a peaceful one. Braverman wants to electronically tag people who have been to protests and control their ability to even speak about protests online- that seems like pretty abrasive moves to control speech from a woman who is also encouraging the police to allow hate crimes against LGBT+ people.
Braverman is trying to imprison four people for tearing down a statue of a slaver: said slaver, were he alive today, would think nothing of seeing Braverman chained by the neck and forced to clean his floors, and she’s simply slavering at the idea of defending his honour over asking whether the British people might not want to lionise figures who killed 15,000 black people (and fyi that is just those who died during travel) by chaining them up, ripping them away from their homelands and forcing them to work for snooty Brits. Remember, the tories leaned hard for years on “the will of the people” as their catchphrase for everything and yet if you asked the British people if we wanted statues of arseholes like Colston around, I suspect the answer might be now. They say it’s part of our cultural heritage and yet they’re deathly afraid to teach us what slavers did- raping black slaves, allowing the mutilation of innocent people for our convenience: what a strange dichotomy to want these people’s faces in public to celebrate, rather than to disturb and warn us never to become so heartless again.

All of this leads us to a very simple conclusion: the tory party are total cunts. The will, of course, say that they’re doing these things for our good… what good? To stop the “just stop oil” folks? They might be delaying trucks from dispensing the goods that finally manage to run the self imposed slalom from the EU to here, but considering there’s a widespread medicine shortage that isn’t being reported on I’m about 99% convinced that four teens and three old people glued to a road in Middleton for three hours isn’t the cause. And people ask, “why don’t they do something more radical?!”.
Did you know a climate scientist self immolated (for those who don’t like fancy words, that means set fire to himself) and it was barely a blink in the eye of the public. The only time people paid attention was when a painting got some soup thrown on it for fucks sake; people are more bothered about Campbells on a wall than they are about someone literally roasting themselves to death: what a sad little life we all live together Jane.
The tories aren’t trying to stop people gluing themselves to roads or wasting a tin of Heinz cream of tomato: they’re trying to forestall the true dissent they know is coming because of years of their shit leadership. This isn’t about letting us “get on” because if it was, you’d think they would sit down with rail execs, nurses, postage staff, university staff, doctors and everyone else who is striking and actually iron out the problems. And I don’t want to “get on” with it any more! I want the problems to be fixed, not plastered over with posters akin to Enoch Powell’s rivers of blood in 240 twitter characters.

The tories are meant to be cruel- they don’t do it to help people, it isn’t tough love. It’s a distraction technique, a handful of dirt in the face of an outraged camper. They throw distractions at you to make sure you don’t focus upon the obvious: that things are bad when they are in charge.
They could easily do all the things they promise- roll back trans rights, stop people boating here, but they don’t, or they do the bare minimum and why? Because when trans people have no rights and no boats land here and your life still sucks, you just might realise that the real problem is them.

The other day I was walking along the Headrow in Leeds and outside one of the pubs I walked past a guy who said “what we need right- Australia: they have it right, shut our borders yeah”. Every part of me wanted to argue with him (Bet you were pissed off when they stopped Djokovic from coming in due to his vaccination status eh) but why bother? There are so many people convinced, utterly sure that migrants are the problem here, that those nasty foreigners darkening our doorstep are the issue.

How many foreigners voted to dump raw sewage into our rivers? How many trans people voted not to feed school kids, or make sure our pay goes up in line with inflation? How many gay people protect a man who quaffed champagne whilst our loved ones died, or back a woman whose idiotic decisions tanked the economy to unprecedented levels? How many people who arrived on boats liked the eat out to help out scheme which may have seeded coronavirus all around the country and contributed to more deaths? And how many of these people who sneak into our beloved country cost us as much as people bathed in wealth who pay less than their fair share as we get taxed more and more?

Migrants are not the cause of your shit life- your voting choices are, your desperate need to back people in charcoal suits with the right accent, the right haircut, the right demeanour because that’s what you think politics are. So many people are determined to see people like me, tattooed and pierced and extolling the virtues of maybe trying a different way after years of this one not working, as the enemy. You’re more scared of the word socialism than you are losing your houses to overinflated mortgage prices, mortgages you worked for years and sacrificed to save for if your avocado toast slander is to be believed. And you’re so angry at the benefit claimants you never once consider that there but for the grace of god goes you! I’ve claimed benefits, because I had two jobs- one working as an admin for a recruitment company, one in a bar- the recruitment company shut down (and didn’t pay me my last month’s salary by the way- I had to sue my own money out of them) and the bar decided to downsize its staff and I was new. Benefits saved me from literal starvation and I was treated like dirt because I was on them- IN THE MIDDLE OF THE 2010 RECESSION!

The tory party are still, somehow, perceived as the party of necessary evil and they aren’t.
One thing I can’t stand is the way Labour are desperately chasing the voters who love that side of the tory party. Starmer isn’t wrong that we have an over-reliance on immigration for short term staffing- but immigration itself is not a bad thing, and why it’s seen as such is beyond me. Having a country thats services- from coffee shops to the NHS – are staffed well, means we don’t have to scrape for every job going, should mean that money is flowing in a well regulated economy and therefore we can fund education better, giving better opportunities to British born people. This weirdness when it comes to migrant slander has to stop on both sides because it’s not true and it’s not sexy to blame some unnamed, faceless foreigner for our failings to prepare for anything. Operation Cygnus was ignored by successive health secretaries and would have made a huge difference during the pandemic and instead- here we are, 200,000 dead people and over 1.5 million long covid sufferers later and the most the government and the opposition can do is go “but migrants tho”.

We don’t need political parties in charge that cater to the wet dreams of racists, or to the entitled views of people who think benefits exist to do anything other than support people in unfortunate situations: and of course there will be those happy to subsist rather than exist- but blaming them for the system misses the entire point that the system exists with those loopholes built in.

I don’t want the nasty party in charge. They’ve had very nearly thirteen years now and what have we seen? Societal divide and decline, increased poverty rates, food bank usage shot up by 14% in a YEAR, shortened lifespan and lower quality of life, less rights.
We need alternatives, and as my good friend Dr Maria Norris said, we need to rely on hope, not fear. Fearing migrants isn’t solving a problem, it’s assigning it to something. And no migrant ever voted to restrict your freedom.

Embracing the different is what strengthens us – the way iron itself is more fragile than steel, drawing in disparate elements creates strength and this too is true of society. I don’t care about where you were put on this earth by your mother, whether you’re gay, if you want to transition to another gender: I care about your values and your willingness to leave the world better than you came into it. This isn’t a shallow fight for who can hoard the most resources to their chest, it’s not a game of who can get the most stuff- we all end up hollow corpses or piles of dust, but what’s important is making sure we leave the world better than we found it, that we eliminate the struggles we faced for the next group of people for whom fate aligns to put them here. And to do that, it’s true folly to look at this country as ending where the seas begin and to think that simply being born here means you’re better than those who weren’t. From the devices you type your angry messages on to the surgeons who remove your tumour, nationality is not relevant as much as intent and prowess: and that doesn’t come stamped on your rear like three lions or a white and red cross.

If you want to improve your country, start at its power center, start with the government and work outwards and perhaps, when you get to the borders, you will realise that the invasion was always coming from within.

Is it ‘cancellation’ not to laugh at something you don’t find funny?

By Daviemoo

I cannot understand how people genuinely delude themselves into believing cancel culture is real. Even saying it makes me roll my eyes.
Even in the very genuine cases of a raft of public outcry we see a temporary flame and then the natural fizzle which, short term, affects people- but never teaches them a lesson and then burns away to allow them to carry on being just as much of an anal fistula as they were before.
Look at some examples from pop culture: Chris Brown almost murdered his then girlfriend and after a couple of years he’s throwing out music, with stars like Lizzo (why Lizzo- how is CHRIS BROWN one of your favourite people…) still singing his praises, Piers Morgan’s cel-shaded pork face gurns from every bus that goes past despite his association with phone-hacking scandals and even today I had a short lived internet beef with John Cleese who swears blind he’d be cancelled by the BBC in a matter of days with his new diatribe, which he’s taking to… GB news! The BBC on which he appeared to swear that the BBC would cancel him. Yes, Cleese somehow managed to tell a BBC presenter on a BBC radio show that the BBC would never allow him to put his show on the BBC that he was on, because he would be cancelled-and not simply because it’s likely just not that funny.

In a way I feel sorry for the people who think they’re victims of cancel culture, or that people are sat at home waiting for them to cross some invisible line, at which point the hoards of social justice will descend to silence them! It must be weird, to think the problem is with a society that’s just too soft to cope with what you have to say, that people are oversensitive and weak and can’t handle your wit and risible pastiching of society. These are the thoughts of people in that group. Lawrence Fox spends his life wanking out what he thinks, no doubt, are provocative statements on twitter. The fact is, people like Fox just want to upset people because he likes to think he’s making other people a tenth as miserable as he is, when honestly I have no urge to correct or dispel any of the utter horse cum he regularly explodes onto social media: it’s the faint embarrassment of noticing your grandad quietly pissing himself in the corner I feel when I see another desperate attempt to get under our skin.

Perhaps it’d be a kindness to sit these people collectively down and explain that they’re pining for days long gone: we don’t laugh much at jokes about disabled people because we’ve seen disabled people speak about why it pisses them off. We don’t guffaw openly about homophobic or racist jokes because we understand how much splash damage they can do- are we soft, or just more empathetic- or, lets be honest, are we just bored of the same jokes that were told 30 years ago still being wheeled out today with a wink wink nudge nudge?

I don’t agree with what everyone keeps saying, necessarily. I do love comedy that walks close to an edge. But the art is in walking up to that line and staying on the side of it, not blundering over it, then getting angry when people don’t like what you say: you’re not cancelled and silenced if people tell you your comedy is shit, you’re just not funny…
I myself was a total edgelord at university- because I was immature, not because those things were actually funny. I’ve grown up, and so to those who still find jokes about people who exist around them and who aren’t as able to mount a defence all I can say is, I dunno, grow up? Or at the very least accept that you can find it funny if you do, but not everyone else has to agree?

The irony is, I have no real interest in policing what people do and don’t find funny: I wouldn’t have given a single fuck about where Cleese practices his showmanship even if it is on the ever sinking barge of GBEEBIES- it’s the simple temerity of whingeing about being denied a platform on the BBC, on the BBC. If you find anti trans or racist or homophobic jokes funny, all I have for you is a dismissive half frown: it’s not for me to tell you you’re right or wrong, but if you stand in the street screaming “I AM BEING SILENCED FOR MY VIEWS”, I don’t see how it’s a terrible transgression to ask you to shut the fuck up. And at what point do we turn to the infamous example of GB news letting one of their reporters go because he knelt on air whilst talking about BLM… So much for free speech.

The broader ridiculousness is that there is ALWAYS a line of speech people will stop at. It might not be saying something bigoted, but there is always a point where someone will say “yes we shouldn’t allow that”, but at least people like me are forthright about where our line is, unlike the crowd on the “other” side who pretend there is no line, that any speech is fair game and then- just like today- spend hours collectively writing column after column decrying, for example, Nicola Sturgeon for stating she doesn’t like tories. Do you want free speech or do you want people to only speak when they say what you agree with you? Because that’s how these things come across. You can’t tell people they’re too soft for not liking what you say then spend three solid days clutching your nanny’s pearls over the first minister of Scotland answering a question frankly. And the biggest, pant splitting, testicular torsion inducing irony of it is that this comes from the crowd who have spent years calling us snowflakes, remoaners, weak, fragile, nancies and this of course is when they’re not just flat calling us slurs like the guy who was referring to people like me as “benders” on twitter last night. God forbid we bite back at them rather than huddling on a street corner for them to spit on unimpeded, how dare we give as good as we get!
Of course, you’ll then meet that hilarious subset of “being nasty to nasty people doesn’t get you anywhere” types: you sure are right “Dan27834928” that being a dick to someone who was a dick to you doesn’t fix the problem, but there’s only so many times I can “live, laugh, love” homophobic slurs away before I simply want to tell these people exactly how much I’d like to flip them inside out rectum first…

It’s so consternating that we have these same folks fulsomely screaming the same lines about political correctness, the dreaded “w” word, how everyone is too sensitive these days when the fact is it isn’t even about sensitivity, it’s about emotional intelligence. It’s not up to everyone else to just let you blunder around being stupid because you think you have the right, and we could do that but there will come a day where someone won’t simply just disagree with you but will give you a cheerful lamping and you’ll get even more upset then, I’ve no doubt.

I genuinely want to see these people in a world without this fabled cancel culture, otherwise known as being told they’re not funny/ wrong. In a world without it, people like Cleese wouldn’t be chewed out by netizens over his ill thought out move to a channel he recently called KGB news and whose ethical model he questioned.

Folk like this would have nothing to do if nobody is offended because cancel culture doesn’t exist: why would anyone go to see the show of a provocative comedian if nothing is provocative? What’s funny when nothing is off the table, nothing is too far and nothing is risqué? And even if that wasn’t the case, what excuse would they find for the increasingly empty seats every show as they stride across the stage, screaming racial epithets to the fewer and fewer people who equate offence level with brilliance like Kanye fans cheering on his increasingly petulant stunts.

Culture has changed, and it hasn’t changed entirely- plenty of people still find comedians like Cleese funny, plenty still watch ridiculous “news” channels like GB news- but it’s not enough. The people staffing these channels have a desperate need to prove that their views are the most popular: but why? I wear my remainership on my sleeve because even if it wasn’t the most popular choice I stand by it, and I’m fairly certain actual fact has lionised that opinion.
I wear my sexuality openly, not because I’m forcing it down your throat but because it’s a part of who I am and has made me the way I am and I’m not ashamed of it, even though you’re more likely now than in the past decade to get hate crimed. I don’t need to be on the winning and popular side, because I believe in what I say without the need of a mob behind me agreeing from behind anonymous profiles- and it seems to me that those on the other side fight endlessly for validation because there’s a gnawing sense of fear at the bottom of that well- that if they’re not popular, if people don’t secretly agree with them… maybe they’re wrong.

The finest hilarity with the type of person who associates themselves with these views is to point out that their divisive nonsense would be useless in a world without the thing they so hate. What would they spend days and hours booing about if they did exist in their anti politically-correct utopia? I invite you, and them, to imagine exactly how shite a world without the sort of thing they speak out against would be. Guarantee they’d be pinning for their precious cancel culture inside of a week.

I guess all I have to say is, I’m not even trying to be cruel with this piece, I just don’t understand how people can bitch about cancel culture and political correctness gone mad when, without it, they would be nothing.
The contrarians at GBEEBIES make their existence central to going “against the grain” because they genuinely believe their views are the right ones. I’m not the one to tell them whether that’s true or not, but I won’t lose sleep over whether I am because I don’t need the glib, seal clapping validation of a bunch of people who wait for me to tell them what they think- right or wrong, I’d rather just let people live their lives as they see fit without complaining about it, then railing against the resultant tide of people disagreeing with me as ‘cancel culture’ and not the missteps of someone with their finger far off the pulse of modern culture and discourse. Rather than be cruel, I just want to exhort people to think simplistically- is there any chance at all that the problem doesn’t lie with us, the people who don’t find you funny, entertaining or whatever, and it’s actually with you- the people who do nothing but denigrate us for not falling in line with you… food for thought.

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.

“Finally, a Conservative government” – they’ve been in power for NEARLY THIRTEEN YEARS

By Daviemoo

I’ve no doubt that I’m biased, I see things through my own lens and what I believe is not always necessarily correct, but the open flippancy the tories continue to display to the British public at large is a point of utter rage inspiration at this point: Kwarteng, fresh off of making a total arse of himself at a funeral, has now decided to create a budget that’s tantamount to whipping out a bruised red areola and shoving it into the mouth of the already milk sozzled rich, once again and always at the expense of the poor in the UK. When will tory loving lunatics learn that when they say things like “you won’t like this budget if you care more about the poor”, they don’t mean some theoretical string vest wearing cousin of Hyacinth Bucket, they mean YOU!

Truss recently… Can I really call it “hit out at” when she is the physical doppelgänger of Pinocchio in a wig… “futilely flailed at” the idea that we’re putting future generations into debt to slightly ease the energy crisis now. Ironically this performance was even more milquetoast than tory fans had predicted: Like eager football fans, “they’re keeping it close to their chest, they’ll pop out with a plan last second and do something spectacular, it’s coming! Any second now!” they cheered- only to be met with the ooooOOOOOOOAAAAAaaaaaah of a ball sailing nowhere near an open goal.
Ursula Von De Leyen, every brexit hard man’s secret wank fetish had recently declared that repeated windfall taxes and harsh scrutiny of energy companies was one of the key ways to help the average person through the crisis facing most countries. Germany is forcing returned ownership of an energy company to the state to ensure that pricing does not spiral. Spain, France, all of these countries working hard to ensure the prosperity of their citizens as economic conditions decline.

The tories have created a budget that gently trouser-strokes the swollen gland of the rich with the callused fingers of the poor, once again leaving us to foot a bill so astronomical that it would even make Jeff Bezos’ brows crease should it land on his door. Wealthy people are set to make a fortune just from not paying the taxes they’re due, and of course poor people are set to pay equal to or more than what the rich will pay; because it’s fair to have someone earning £17.25 an hour pay the same tax percentile as someone who has a flat screen tv screwed into the ceiling over their fucking bath tub isn’t it.

And all the while the seething rage that we all once felt towards the tories is slowly being reflected backwards now, because we always knew these petulant, coke fuelled shysters were, as Angela Rayner said, scum: But honestly British public WAKE THE FUCK UP, give your head a shake and get the placards out! Enough with the vague promises of shouties and frowns via the Enough is Enough campaign, enough is bloody enough but I don’t need endless rallies, I need tory ministers to be PETRIFIED to leave their houses for fear of being dogged every step by people asking them why they should pay for the tories’ bakers dozen and then some years of idiocy.

I’m tired, reader. I’m tired of every day switching on the tv or opening social media to another frosty faced tory minister grim-facedly defending another sex scandal (lest we forget the “anonymous” rapist that’s still working happily in the government or Pinchy Pincher the literal pervert), another misstep in policy and every single time, enabled by media commentators who don’t even look shocked any more when politicians say bollocks like “the cost of living crisis is less significant than the death of a 96 year old” (cheers Lindsey). I’m tired of listening to people saying they love the tory party because they’ll sort out this WOKE NONSENSE- they’ve been running the show for 12.8 years now and their greatest joy is that you’re more arsed about pronouns and who shits where than their reverse-Robin-Hood cuntery.

But most of all, I’m tired of living in a country where the citizens will grumble, and shuffle, foot stamp and huff and keep taking the hits. Our government should be petrified of us. Our government should be treating us like a dog, teeth bared, tail wagging, straining at the lead to get to them. They work for us- but they don’t fear us. The nation is supernanny and the tories are a bratty little toddler, completely unaware of the power dynamic that could, that should sweep over them as we tell them to fuck off to the naughty step for breaking the economy.

What’s wrong with us?

So many times I’ve had the usual union jack masturbatorial idiots tell me their grandfather didn’t die for me to kiss another man. Well, too bad but your grandfathers sure as shit didn’t die so everyones businesses could fold and we can’t afford to put the big fucking light on either.
The UK was supposedly a proud nation of people who would never take anything lying down once, and yet here we are, supine underneath a government giving us a caustic golden shower. The UK badly needs a wakeup call- the tories aren’t going to change, aren’t going to get better- they’re the perpetually pissed-up spouse ready to come home and slur out some blame for why they’re so depressed and much like anyone in that situation it’s time to pack their shit and kick them the fuck out.

Stand up for yourselves, Britons!

“God (that you don’t believe in) save the King (that you don’t support) in helping the Government (that 56% of you didn’t vote for)”

By Daviemoo

Truss has had months to prepare for recession, the energy crisis, the cost of living crisis and any other issues headed our way. But empty pageantry, infighting and a desperation to squeeze her neck into the leash of “the donors” has led us to where we always knew we would be- rule by a party who looks after the rich on the credit card of the poor. The hypocrisy is layered deep in the UK status quo: but what is true patriotism if not the antithesis of what we are fed by media and deranged thoughtless reactionaries, and how do we seize this true patriotism, pass it through the bars of our prison and lead ourselves through revolution into the UK we need- not the UK we have?

Governmental ineptitude at your expense

Liz Truss has never met a moral she can’t ignore. From a republican to speaking at the Queen’s funeral, Lib Dem to leader of the Conservative party and from staunch remainer to helming a country so battered by the trifecta of Brexit, Covid and lacklustre leadership we’re slipping past some eurozone countries in regards to quality of living. Truss has already demonstrated clearly to us that she intends to do nothing to assist in the living conditions of the downtrodden but will pull out all the stops to bolster the supports holding we, the underclass, under our supposed betters.

Unfortunately for Ms. Truss, that nebulous descriptor, “poor” continues to expand, as more British households slip into poorness, poverty and desperation due to the economic malfunctions of a government long off the rails. Truss has created an energy plan that pushes the crisis further down the ways, all (naturally) to the expense of the British tax payer. Her economic taxation will save the poorest households less than one pound a month, whilst benefitting the already wealthy: but did we honestly expect some subversion of the Truss we’ve always seen when she has so readily shown us who she is and how she acts so many times before?
She describes herself as a “no nonsense northern straight talker”. One suspects that a no nonsense straight talker would have told the companies that have turned unfathomable profit into CEO salary instead of investment into green energy, onshore wind farms, more efficient forms of energy capture- that these failures couldn’t stand, and would have begun implementing hefty reforms on the businesses operating here.
Truss eats out of the hands of these companies not just because she used to be in the upper echelon of Shell, but because these companies throw money at her party in return for their servile response to this energy crisis. It’s like asking your boss to tell the CEO to close their office door when they’re insulting the HR team: it won’t happen.

One must remember that the conservatives who have been in power for almost 13 years have faced a steady stream of reminders from a nonpartisan group of government ministers since 2012 that an energy crisis was looming because the UK had no onshore infrastructure which needed to be addressed: was it? Absolutely not- the flat ignoring of this long-looming crisis has meant that energy infrastructure actually plateaued, with only minor changes made, surface changes which impacted nothing. Additionally, the installation of Truss who is apparently moved to the approximation of teary eyes by seeing solar panels has meant that any government schemes to incentivise businesses to pursue green energy infrastructure are dead in the water- water that is now being filled with sewage, because of course it is.

Broader than this though, the cost of living crisis hangs over us like the clouds we Brits are so used to. And what are the government doing to ensure that we don’t drown in debt just so we can purchase butter for our crumpets? Why, making sure that bankers’ earning potential is uncapped of course!

If the almost immediate move to deregulate bankers bonuses did not plainly show where this government’s interests lie, what does? I, and I’m sure most people reading this, don’t care about bankers bonuses in any way more than wondering why they can have unlimited earning potential when we have empirical evidence of how badly that works for the economy: I give it less than a decade until a harangued and as yet faceless PM (it won’t be Truss) pops up on tv to tell us that we’re not only giving energy companies our money to float their businesses but we’re going to do the merry go round of paying bankers another set of bailouts.

But isn’t this all just the milieu of Britishness now? It feels like we’re a nation of the abused, sat stirring a cup of tea quietly, terrified that we might accidentally tap the side of the cup with the spoon and bring down on us the ire of our betters, be they crown wearing, crown serving or supposedly the businesses that work for us. It won’t be long until the UK’s energy companies take the line of South Africa’s main energy supplier, “load shedding” IE shutting down the national grid for hours at a time whilst admonishing us silly, selfish proles for daring to use the energy that we literally pay for.

And as if having a government of openly hostile, privately-but-not-well-educated bad faithers strutting the halls of our parliament wasn’t bad enough, watching the collective St Vitas’ Dance madness unfold around the death of Queen Elizabeth has been absolutely flabbergasting. However you feel about the royals, and you have a right to feel however you want, the reaction from the British working class has been galling to the point of making me wonder if I should simply delete my social media, the blog, the podcast and just give it up as a bad job. From people wearing cardigans daubed with union jacks saying that “proper British” people accept “the way of things” to watching working class people confirm that yes people SHOULD be arrested and in fact should go to PRISON for being critical of the monarchy, I’ve sworn at my various screens more times in the last month than in the last 6 combined, and that’s quite a feat considering Johnson was still our PM a few months ago.

British people are suffering from a collective Stockholm syndrome. Ruled over by hopelessly distant elites who use their paid shills to tell us over and over that we want it to be like this: innumerable people fit into the openly visible underclass of the UK. We’ll soon have no working time directive to protect us from unreasonable demands from our workplaces, implanted no less by a government who partied during the biggest health crisis the UK has seen in over 100 years, had 3.5 months in meltdown, came back for a week, took 10 days off for the death of the monarch, will go back for 2 days, then will be off until OCTOBER- but don’t forget, little workers, you’re amongst the laziest people Dominic Raab AND our new PM Liz Truss has ever seen. Truss made this comparison against China, and the reason we may be lazier than Chinese workers is probably because in China an errant word against the government can have you arrested. Just a thought.
Moving to the royals: the mere acceptance of a monarchy is to accept that there are greater and lesser humans. To believe that a god chose and beatified a human to raise a lineage of those with inconceivable wealth and power to rule over a land, free of election, free of discussion. The UK collectively allows itself to be held prisoner- and why? Because of the most infuriating adage in the British language: “we’ve always done it that way”. Tradition does not obfuscate the need to question whether, at the start of a cost of living crisis announcement, we watched our now king sit atop a golden throne next to a stolen jewel worth millions in a palace worth hundreds of millions as he told us we were in for a difficult time. If people feel so collectively strongly about the monarchy, put it to a vote! Why are you afraid of reaffirming the nation wants a monarch? And why, in particular, are you afraid of people like me? It’s not like I’ve made a habit of being on the winning side is it? I backed Corbyn, I voted against Brexit, I called for an election when Johnson was finally put to the governmental sword… I’m sure we’d vote overwhelmingly to keep the monarchy but at least we were asked.

Apparently patriotic behaviour is accepting the collective delusion of a nation filled with people who, a year ago, swore that wearing a mask for 37 seconds to buy a 20 pack of Marlboro lights was the equivalent of the subversion of bodily autonomy suddenly deciding that it’s ok to tase people who aren’t openly weeping about the death of a total stranger.

But what IS patriotism?

Patriotism is, shockingly, not the concept that we must unblinkingly accept the foetid corruption of a government determined to undermine those who disagree with it, by stripping back the right to protest. Patriotism isn’t being forced by violence and with threats of police retribution to suddenly give fealty to a man who was hated for his mistreatment of his wife when I was ten years old. Patriotism is not waving union jacks in the streets of a country failing it’s citizens so badly that we went from 35 Trussell Trust food banks in 2010 to having 11,650 by 2020. Patriotism is not the calm and certain acceptance that people awaiting cancer treatment were at risk of, and in fact suffering from, the loss of their booked appointment because of a funeral, a funeral which you were compelled like worker ants to imbibe by the removal of any other avenue instead: shops shut, gyms shut, libraries, museums shut… you will mourn: or else.

Layer upon layer of injustice is spread like a permafrost across the UK: a government who continually prioritises the rich few over the poor many, and then with no hint of irony talks about not pandering to minorities… A media who blithely behaves to the antithesis of how media should act, ratifying the lies and missteps of the government, the police, the royals – its own self…

The UK has fallen so far from where I hoped it would be. And yet I, we, fight on. We endure the insults, the degradation, the threats and the infighting, we read and write about how things can be, could be, should be, will be better for people who go out of their way to insult and malign us. We steel ourselves for abuse every time we press “send” on a message- but why? Because despite it all the gossamer thin but steel strong strands of hope run through us: hope that we can reach someone out there who feels similarly and make them keep fighting. Hope that we can reaffirm those beaten down by these injustices that things can and will be better. Hope that those disaffected by the nonsense and noise will rise up with us and fight to improve the status quo.
That- this- these actions, this is patriotism. It’s not the gormless acceptance of a country and state that have failed us for so long in so many ways, it’s the razor sharp and endless conviction that we can, that we will win and that in this victory we will seek a better country and a better future for ourselves and even for those who may not deserve it after aligning themselves with the forces who worked to derail this change.

I know- not think, I know that we can make a difference. That we can change the direction we’re headed. But all hands on deck, people. Things aren’t working, things aren’t improving because not enough of us are willing to throw our weight into it. The tories call us lazy, but laziness is letting the country sink. So gird your loins, wrap your hands in the work ahead and repeat this phrase that I have imbibed on my heart

We Deserve Better.

Twitter: enabling bigotry and attacking minorities in the palm of your hand

By Daviemoo

I’ve just been permanently banned from twitter for quote tweeting a Christian using a disgusting meme and suggesting ironically that perhaps a religion of love and peace wouldn’t actually celebrate the eternal torment of atheists; this is a couple of weeks after being suspended for the temerity of sarcastically asking sky news whether I should just die because of the cost of living crisis. Twitter’s moderators casually allow racism, transphobia, homophobia on the daily, but come down hard on minorities speaking their mind: because it’s outrage that drives their algorithm, and there’s nowhere to hide in safety on a website who feeds hate for money.

Would you like to see my recent transgressions that saw me face a one week ban, and now a permanent one?
Here you are:

My first apparent transgression, where sky news were stating that people under £45,000 would struggle throughout the energy crisis and I replied thusly

I used the word die. I didn’t say “you should die”, I didn’t say “I hope someone dies”, in fact I was saying “shall I just die” but because of these pesky things- “” and this one – ? – Twitter decided I was threatening Sky News.
I sent it for review because of course they’d understand it was a mistake. They can read nuance right?
Nope! Twitter’s crack team of moderators decided me insinuating I’d die because of the cost of living crisis was egregious enough to send me to the naughty step for a week! Bad moo! How dare you hint that the cost of living was so severe you might die!

So off I went. Then I took more time away because I’m 34 and twitter is a seething shithole of angry idiots some days. But, like a nicotine addiction with characters I went back and- before I had time to readjust my fringe- boom. I’m permabanned. Why, you ask?

A christian insinuating that atheists will burn forever in hell and me sarcastically pointing out how loving their religion is

So there’s my crimes people- I used the word die sarcastically and I made fun of a christian who was taking pleasure in the idea of atheists suffering for eternity.

Twitter is a shithole of an app. Every day I go on there and see endless examples of small minded bigots from JK Rowling to Helen Joyce, from small minded peons like Lord Moylan to unrepentant idiots like Nadine Dorries tweeting bollocks with impunity: Dorries even tweeted a doctored image of Rishi Sunak attempting to murder Boris Johnson. I watch US congressmen and women write about how the trans menace is going to destroy Bible Belt America, all the while practically deepthroating their AK47s on main.

Does Rowling and her neverending tirade of bollocks ever meet punishment by twitter? Does Joyce sharing the juvenile conspiracy theories she scribed in her book “trans”, in which she met, talked to, interviewed, no trans people? Do our MPs or leaders face repercussions despite the fact that they’re meant to be the best of us? No. But heaven forfend a left winger speak out of turn to people insinuating they’ll be charcoal briquettes in hell forever because we don’t share their cartoon colouring book beliefs.

So much for this lovely free speech I’ve heard so much about eh. Fuck twitter and the little minions so desperate to control the speech of those they spend half their time shouting about free speech at.

Welcome to Britain: watch out, we’ve gone quite mad

By Daviemoo

After two arrests due to “anti-monarchist sentiment” and further police violence & the blithe ignorance of it I think it’s safe to say that Britain has gone utterly insane, contracted a state of collective madness akin to St Vitas’ Dance with genuflection.
The acts of arresting people for the crime of not giving unabashed fealty to the crown and to the veritable stranger beneath it are heinous enough- but both were justified in the worst possible way – and fits neatly into the exact reason some of us have been shouting from the rooftops for over 2 years, showing a stomach churning continuation of the ever-steady march towards state oversight that simply should not be there.

“Be respectful” has been daubed indelibly across my eyelids now. When I get into bed at night and close my eyes it lights up like a neon sign, burnt as it is into my vision. It’s hardly an alien sentiment: someone has just died, a person has lost their loved ones, so of course be sensitive at this time. However, we must drop the pretence that this death is similar to our own losses: losing your mother, your grandmother, is a horrific loss which swallows your entire world: but it does not swallow the entire world the way the loss of a 92 year old monarch who has long headed a country known for its violent imperialist past does. Nor (I would hope) does it stir up such polarising emotions in differing crowds who all want to be heard. The queen’s death is sad in the way that any inevitable death of a person is sad: a person who existed now does not. But sentiment runs high on both sides of the wall: those who do not support the monarchy and those who are actively opposed to it are unable at present to voice their frustrations without fear of very real repudiation.

We are told to be respectful by not mentioning the transgressions of the crown historically and more recently against other nations, other peoples – or even our own laws, as though it is not recent history that the queen intervened personally to ensure her wealth was hidden from public scrutiny, that shadowy work was done to obscure just how true the “the royals pay for themselves in tourism” line is, that Charles is legally exempt from inheritance tax laws because “they” (whoever this oft referred to “they” is) would not wish to diminish the wealth of the crown. We are asked to keep our sentiments to ourselves. I understand. I don’t mind on a personal level: nothing will change whether I verbalise my distaste for the idea that some are just born more special, more important than me or not- people will support that system no matter the eloquence of the argument, and of course people will be offended by it because it questions beliefs they’ve ingested at every casual glance at a “HMQ” postbox since they were born.

But there it lies, bare to see: those who cry that people should be allowed to offend (the tory government is full of these people, you will notice) have crafted, carefully, legislation that endorses the right to offend – but only if you offend who they want you to.

Where are the “free speech” loving Brits now that two people have been arrested under one of the worst scrivances from Priti Patel’s poisoned pen: the Police, Crime, Courts and Sentencing bill? If you want to defend free speech, this golden essence of it that you have supposedly so deeply imbibed, surely you must be agog at the idea that one man was arrested for questioning who elected the new king and a woman who was arrested for holding a sign, something which we quite literally decried Russia for when brave dissidents were arrested for holding anti imperialist signs – or just blank or random ones – on Russian state TV?
It is, as I’ve always said, not about “free speech”. Nobody wants “free speech” if it doesn’t agree with them, and the right are just as censorious as the left. We should- we must- drop this pretence first of all, if we are to move this ridiculous debate forwards. Be honest! I don’t care if you’re anti “free speech”, I just beg of thee to utilise your free speech to verbalise what it is that you want to censor.

But the broader issue is, Britain has been forced, prodded, cajoled into a maddening period of enforced grieving to which very few of us may actually subscribe.
This is not to lessen the very real pain of those who may feel sad, upset, angry at the loss of a figurehead they relate to: I have been upset and grieved for people I didn’t personally know when they died, be it music legends like the late great Amy Winehouse, historic figures who passed before I was even born but whose efforts allow me as a gay man to enjoy the freedoms I do now: and harsh repudiations won’t stop someone from mourning anyway. I don’t understand what those who so hate the monarchy expect to achieve. People either already know of the crimes of the crown and the British state and flatly don’t care, or they don’t know and won’t suddenly change their minds because you expose it to them in this state of heightened emotional turmoil.
However, when the literal law is turned on us to hem us in to this collective outpouring of feeling and forces us to only verbalise sentiments in line with public acceptance, this is too far.

Prohibiting people, on pain of arrest, from expressing their distaste whether long- held or personally directed at King Charles (even typing that made me curl my lip up) is a completely inappropriate use of power. Precisely what verbalising anti monarchic sentiment does to “threaten or endanger” anyone at the proclamation did, one cannot guess. And not asking for but telling a country we must show loyalty to a man who has had a peripheral presence on our lives, known mainly for a bottomlessly classy ex-spouse, for large fingers and a propensity for sexting his wife feels like true authoritarian nonsense writ large for all to see. But it appears that we collectively got the wrong glasses out… very few are reacting with the apoplexy I expected at this brazen display of monarchic countenance.

Most of us were born under the rule of Queen Elizabeth and knew nothing else: she was just there, on our stamps, on our money, sometimes on our TV. She partook in silly sketches, she set a supposed example (most of us didn’t need) during coronavirus- but one suspects it was easy to stay at home when your home is larger than my entire apartment complex, easy to isolate when you had staff on hand who were prevented from mixing with their own families to continue waiting on you. We didn’t question or begrudge it because it was part of the daily milieu that made up our lives. It just was, an incontrovertible fact.
Suddenly we are not asked, but told- take that energy, that passive flow of acceptance and direct it at this stranger: and best yet, do not question, simply do. There is no room for you mongrels, you lessers, you peons to object to this change- this is your new figurehead and you will like it or you will face consequence! How dare we not meekly nod along with the idea that fealty is not earned but taken!

This, though, is part of an even larger trend of even more blatant deepening of the authoritarian wave which has been sweeping the UK more and more openly for years. Many of us have been up in arms since its announcement about the disgrace of a technically minority government authoring voter disenfranchisement, eschewing public scrutiny on covid law breaking and PPE contract violation to the tune of millions of pounds of public money disappearing into the bank accounts of the already reach, the meek passing of the police, crime, courts and sentencing bill -for months and years we’ve attended protests, signed petitions, written to our MPs, formed pressure groups and spoken to glossy eyed family members because we didn’t think but knew bone deep that it would spell nothing but horror for our expression as free countryfolk. Are we wrong?

Chris Kaba was recently shot to death by police, and conflicting reports are awash: he was/was not armed was/was not in or out of a car, was/was not running from police. One suspects it’s simply a matter of time until this new, draconian, arms-of-cthulhu bill is invoked to somehow justify the death of a man who should not have been shot. And adding insult to quite literal murder, sky news falsely reported that the march for justice for Kaba was actually a march in memory of the queen’s death. Kaba’s murder by police is the latest link in an ever growing chain of police malfeasance and one of the many reasons a host of people ever growing spoke out against the utter foolishness of enshrining more vague powers to the police and paring back public assembly rights. The PCCS bill was always tacit revenge for the temerity to gather in objection to racist murder, and it wasn’t (as so many will try to sell) imported from America; Renni Eddo-Lodge spoke eloquently about the Brixton riots in her book “why I’m no longer talking to white people about race”, so if those among us want to deny that the UK has a racism problem it doesn’t just show a gilded perception of the nation itself but a fundamental ignorance, an unwillingness to engage with critical literature and therefore a justification for us to disengage entirely with the conversation.

When I say that the country has gone mad, I wish it was simply the state I was referring to – Liz Truss is off on a jolly jaunt around the country to try and ingratiate herself with a public exhausted by a chain-link of horrifying public issues, along with the new King (lest he forget that she once spoke passionately about being a republican herself) amid the deepening cost of living crisis.
But it has long been obvious to those of us with any semblance of public awareness that “the state” in in “a state”: it is in crisis, helmed for two years by a sentient balloon animal filled with the air of lies and before that by a woman whose most salacious deed was, by her own admission, running through a wheat field and not the disgusting mismanagement of mass deportations under her gaffe-rich time in Patel’s role as home sec. But it is not just the state. Many people I had admired for their forthright, punctilious commentary on the monarchy have simply folded, given in and begun to tow the line: “be respectful”:

Bear with me whilst I pull up memes you shared all of 9 weeks ago where you made fun of the concept of hereditary monarchy which you’re suddenly reporting people on twitter for sharing, like an overzealous school prefect.
Is it fear of the draconian crackdown on the true essence of free speech- speech used to criticise power and the state, or is it simply that it was popular to insult the monarchy until it wasn’t? I’d say have the courage of your convictions but that could be more literal than we want to admit before long, apparently.

Those of us who so often have callous insults jabbed at us with the immediate defence of “but free speech though” are rankled and full of rancour at this dislocation of sanity: amazing how in the UK, the nation of free speech lovers, it’s fine to aim jibes at minorities you hate who have less societal protection and power than you, but heaven forfend you criticise the rich, the entitled, the born-into-more privilege-than-you-could-ever-fathom crowd: lord knows I’m sure Charles is feverishly scrolling twitter and reading every critical tweet, gnashing his teeth as he did at the aide who wasn’t quick enough to move his pen-box.

The UK has begun to suffer a collective delirium, a mass case of the vapours and I’m sure I’m not alone in saying that right at this moment I feel surrounded by those who feel as I do: like I woke up in another dimension the other day, everyone around me alien but unaware of my covert status: mayhaps we’re the mad ones! Slap on a tiara and just mourn for the sake of peace… but I can honestly say I don’t think we are the mad ones. It’s honesty.

I’m more than happy to let people get on with the business of publicly grieving a figure they may have liked for whatever reasons they chose to do so, but I won’t be compelled to partake in it because “it’s the British thing to do”- everything I do is “the British thing to do”, because I’m British whether you like it or not. I won’t offer feelings I don’t feel… unless the state care to compensate me as an actor (my rates are steep but fair), nor will I try to silence those who raise fair objection over the monarchy, the crown, the state- because people are allowed to feel and say as they do, and the least harmed by criticism are those who have power encapsulated into their very being, like hereditary heads of state: the crown still costs more than I will ever earn, regardless of how I feel about the person wearing it. So allow us the freedom, at least, to feel how we feel: and if that freedom is truly lost as these arrests and the behaviour of the police continues to indicate, let us drop the pretence that we live in any sort of democracy or free country and at last vindicate those of us who have expressed our fear of that loss at long last.

The Stupidification of Brits

By Daviemoo

As the Conservatives push hard to renationalise imperial measures, something we’ve always had on our food packaging my entire life as an ostensible “brexit benefit” that doesn’t directly revolve around-but will likely contribute to – a poorer economy, one must wonder how it is not obvious that the party is trying to contribute to an overall shift away from the rest of the world: Little Britain will be unable to sell goods to a market that doesn’t understand the measures, or that has to do extra work to do so. But this isn’t the only way the tories are working to Break down Brits…

Imperial Measurements- an exercise in futility- Boris Johnson

Imperial units seem like some kitschy reach back into the not so distant past- some little move towards showing the world we don’t need them because we have our own way of weighing corn and meat… not one person who isn’t desperate to return to the smoky pubs and “it’s ‘ow we’ve always done it” rhetoric of the past is particularly interested in starting to use imperial measurements again, because it is of no benefit to anyone who doesn’t regularly start sentences with “back in my day…”

Imperial measurements will make it more difficult to:
-Sell to other countries
-Cook
-Purchase necessary products and ingredients

It was also never “banned” by the EU, but to fit their standardisation model it was vital that we all used the same measurements- products in the UK have always been allowed to display imperial, just not as prominently as the other units.

So why would we do it? Because as always it pleases that tiny base who will thoughtlessly back the tories specifically because of nonsensical moves like this. Looking at the outlook of those who approve of this, they don’t care about the realistic damage and annoyance this move will cause now- but you can guarantee that they will be the loudest to decry it as soon as they experience issues resulting from it.
As we fall into measuring things here, we will lose step with the rest of the world- the pointlessness of making our coexistence harder rankles, but also fits perfectly well with the desired outcome of those in charge of implementing brexit: what seemed like a silly little brag fits in with the theme of isolationism behind brexit. Measures, money… what next?

The curtailing of university entry- Nadhim Zahawi

Recently it was announced that if you do not score certain fundamental grades, student loans will not be on offer, effectively curtailing university for those who fail to achieve in the earlier exams. This is a disaster both in terms of the hangover from coronavirus which adversely affected hundreds of thousands of peoples’ education, but is also- and there is no sensitive way to write this- a stupid idea.
I’ve written extensively about the myriad different learning styles for human beings, whether that’s an ability to absorb through physical action, reading, listening, watching demos and more- denying someone access to higher education simply because they cannot conform to the archaic system of listen, repeat in a slightly different way on a written exam is a disastrous response to the educational future of the UK. People can excel at university when given access to the right learning resources, teachers and allowed to study a passion subject instead the usual proscriptions of subjects given at a young age- and even if someone goes on to work in a completely different field, the ability to obtain a degree, masters or PHD is a vital skill that should be exercised for those who can – and want to.

Zahawi’s zest for preventing students who don’t excel at exams from reaching new chances of education is a transparent attempt to gatekeep knowledge from those who need it most desperately- and he should be looked upon with shame for this transparently reductive action.

Additionally, the spectre of “left wing censorship” and deeply worrying authoritarian moves to combat this nebulous nonsense has always been touted over university: searching student forums shows right wing students asking whether they will fit in- rather than simply acknowledging that their views, as all views are, will be questioned, it’s an immediate self censorship and a lack of understanding that an exposure to a wide range of people around you is likely to change your narrow views to wider ones: university isn’t a factory for spitting out left wing Leninists, they are buildings filled with knowledge, and intersected by tens of thousands of people you may not have met and learnt from before: you are not being converted, you’re learning other people’s lifestyles and exposure to this is the antithesis of reductive rhetoric.

Other tory ministers state that children should be asked to sing unsettlin g nationalistic anthems in schools– we truly are allowing steps towards childhood indoctrination to nationalism.

Throttling the media- Nadine Dorries

Despite 96% of respondents saying they wanted channel 4’s funding model to remain the same and a wealth of evidence presented that C4 is doing well in it’s monetary goals, Dorries has stated that the government will take steps towards its’ privatisation. Dorries has repeatedly demonstrated that she doesn’t know or understand- nor despite time and prompts, care to learn, how channels in the UK are funded (she has also wrongly stated information about the BBC, ITV and channel 4’s several messups). Dorries has stated channel 4 hasn’t “helped its case” against privatisation when “one of its lead presenters is shouting fuck the tories at a concert”. That would be a sentence in and of itself enough to sink any other culture ministers as blatantly taking revenge on a channel for a presenter not slavishly worshipping the government but Dorries is too busy making raps on tiktok to feel the shame she would if she viewed herself as a huge majority of the UK view her.

But the media also does the tories job for them- all of the big newspapers lean right, from the Daily Mail and its endless campaign to blame “lefty do gooder lawyers” for everything, the Express and its attempts to copy headlines that sound similar to those written in North Korea about their own “dear leader”. Other papers are too busy trying to scratch at culture war to make sales by punching down on minorities or both sides-ing debates which are patently pointless or a nonissue. Those media that do speak truth to power are often small or sat on, or- as we saw recently with Cummings’ admissions about the Johnson administration “throwing bungs” to right wing media whilst ignoring left wing or smaller media outlets, underfunded into oblivion.

Social media has seen an uptick in the amount of people desperate to speak truth to power there- its how I have come to what little prominence I have because the only place you can speak about the disgusting state of the country with little intervention (though lots of hate mail, the odd death threat and a sprinkle of doxxing) is social media.

The only way through this mire is a multi pronged attack. Social media is hugely influential when it comes to allowing the voices of ordinary people to be uplifted above the proscripted dross of the mainstream media- a phrase I hate but will indulge in here, but large scale organisation and a flat refusal to allow the government to pass damaging legislation must also start to take place. Fighting back against tory policy must take place both in cyberspace and in the real world – lobbying the government is ineffective right now, but we cannot stop and must in fact increase our efforts to battle them in the real world including against the frightening anti protest legislation they have inducted.

They will not stop us. We are many- and there are more of us than we think. Though decades of tory policy have enforced a miasma of glibly disenfranchised brits, people can be reached with the right message -we must find this message and galvanise those who would not normally move to counter this fight. We must- for without the voices of the discontented rising in concert, the zombie moans of a nation whose freedom is dead will only grow to silence us all.

Neutering the ministerial code was not a shot across the bow- it was a declaration of war

By Daviemoo

In 1992, the ministerial code was formally introduced for the purposes of balancing the highest level of government against the accountability and standards expected of those capable of doing the job. Every company, organisation and group has its code of conduct, and if you are unable to meet these high standards you’re likely to lose your seat at the table.
Under a leader too weak, corrupt and lazy to hold his ministers- and himself- to the quality we should expect the UK is set to sink beneath what the government can muster themselves to do: not what they must do for the good of us all.

In every iteration of the ministerial code, themes have run concurrent: honesty and integrity. Transparency has always been absent- but when you imagine the weight of some of the information that passes through the office of the prime minister that suddenly seems acceptable. We don’t ask for every last nuance of political upheaval to be hauled before the masses and nor should we: but politicians have slowly become masters of extrapolating not telling the truth with lying and with building a bonfire of integrity, edging closer and closer to the fuse, all the while assuring us that we could expect the required & requested levels of the opposite from them.

The fact that it took until 1992 to introduce a code of conduct amongst politicians should have been the first alarm that something was not all well in British democratic discourse, and even having a code or a constitution doesn’t prevent political meddling: looking briefly to the shores of America we see the desperate thrashing of the left against the ever increasing radical right- no constitution prevented an attempted Coup in January 2021. These tenets are as tall as the clouds; but as wide as a strand of hair- though you can’t directly progress forward, it’s easy to step around should you be motivated to do so, and one could not ever accuse Johnson and his cohort of lacking motivation to circumvent vital scrutiny- we’ve read alarming tales of their fervour for being able to overturn judicial decisions, we saw them drop the reformations asked for out of the paterson scandal, they stripped back our right to voice displeasure through protest, they tell us to hold them to account at the voting booth whilst making that more difficult, they allegedly pay “bungs” to newspapers to report, or not report, what they need in the press.
Looking at this behaviour the idea that democracy and justice were a bulwark of protection becomes as fantasist as it is: all we have ever had to hold our upper echelon to account is the promise that they would adhere to this code and anything beyond that is illusory- so – every last one of us must stop expecting this low standard. If we cannot expect honesty of them we must demand it.

Johnson’s desperation to obscure his actions from vital scrutiny point to the idea that he must alter the very fundamentals of what scrutiny he is allowed to endure is a tacit admission that he cannot rise to the heights a prime minister must reach- instead he seeks to lower the bar so he can clear it and with that action he does not even ask the people our thoughts, he tells us that he knows best and we must sit back and watch- with the air of the misogynist husband who tells his angry wife to calm down, Johnson has put his finger to the lip of the nation in our fury, in our confusion and in our resistance, and shushed us: are we truly the nation who would take this slight?

The exsanguination of truthfulness

Honesty is a necessary part of the office of the prime minister, and something we could argue that many prime ministers long before the era of the Johnsonites has failed us on. Blair blustered us into Iraq, Cameron ran a referendum on EU membership to stop some of his MPs defecting to UKIP, selling it as a decision the people deserved to make when it was merely his attempt to wrench power back. May, a staunch remainer, flailed against the EU fruitlessly for months because she believed it was wrong to do what she was hired to do and she was deposed for it, all the while slated in the media as the lacklustre PM who was letting us all down even as she kept on top of other domestic affairs outside of Brexit: ultimately, her lack of fervour for the destruction of our relationship with the rest of the EU was her pyre – all of these events were a precursor to the level of dishonesty we now take as tacit from the office of the prime minister.
There is a method of torture known as death by 1000 cuts which is exactly what it reads as- a slow death, a shallow slash at a time. The person cannot escape and slowly, slowly, their blood drains until their body can be sustained no more. We were slowly bleeding from 900 wounds before Johnson’s government’s premiership- then he emerged and delivered the last 100 blows in quick succession.
If the lifeblood of a truly free country is truth, only an infusion could save us now- but the ambulance is in a nine hour queue to a hospital fit to burst with backlogged patients: will we survive this haemorrhage? Just like any wound, the longer we bleed, the less that is likely.

Dishonesty has, as we well know, dogged Johnson’s career as he has tumbled from vexatious attempts at literacy to being the laughing stock of a Brussels politician and somehow found the tenacity to scramble his way, always on the backs of those more talented and clever, to the office of the prime minister of the United Kingdom. So lacking in talent is Johnson that he may be the prime minister who initiated the deconstruction of the United Kingdom. Soon he will be the man who rules over a country who despises him, not the leader who unites several nations- all because he lacks the modesty to follow the true will of the people. It is easier for Johnson to feed the press machine that brought him to prominence and that he uses as a shaking podium, asking them to constantly press forward the storyline that everyone loves his caddish brand of politics and then to simply place his fingers in his ears and scream a bastardised version of the national anthem- as always backed up by his baying choir, the front bench MPs. Even as a huge proportion of the nation quakes in unleashed rage against the entirety of the administration, they continue to tell us collectively that we must move on from their betrayal: that is precisely what we must never do, for they will never dictate to us where we stand, why we kneel- or why we fight.

Integrity- democracy- illusory

One may have always disliked the politics of the conservatives. That is, of course, understandable- their politics was, and is not, for many. But one could never accuse them of the unparalleled heights of hypocrisy plain to see now. Years ago, an illicit affair would be enough to dismantle a politicians career and paint the entire party with the deep stain of shame- but politics has been gamified by a media that must exist by pushing salaciousness as our bread and butter.
The public love scandal- and politicians have been all too eager to give in, to align with a media who publicises every tawdry detail and as we have watched, agog, politicians have gone from the best amongst us, the smartest and most moral amongst us to affair having, children starving, fat shaming, law breakers- even now, the reports of the Sue Gray report contain a barely concealed glee that politicians drank, fought and had sex behind the black door of number 10 which Starmer recently rightly called a representation of our democracy. Integrity was not just respected, expected- it was required.
Thatcher never recovered from the lies she told as PM, nor did Blair- and rightly so. Their legacy is written against the lies they told- but Johnson? His legacy IS the lies he has told, for it is all he has done- from the moment he was placed in office he has plied the public with so much dishonesty, rhetoric, obfuscation and technicality that we can no longer discern- or rather, we don’t know where to focus on to find the truth for everywhere you turn is a lie.

The issue with fighting this level of political dishonesty is simple to explain, and can be applied to everything from brexit to election promises to the daily besmirching of the people’s office.
The truth is a stubborn thing, as unchangeable as bedrock because it is, and it exists only as itself- it cannot change; you can put a coat of paint on the truth but it will always still be the truth.
A lie can be anything you want: if you can lie with an air of plausibility you can sell almost anything- let us take brexit as an example- take a peoples who have suffered under austerity for several years and use media to repeatedly push the idea that you are poor, your mortgage is expensive, your roads bad quality, your food expensive because of your EU membership (see the stupidity of straight bananas) and suddenly you have people desperate for a brexit that doesn’t benefit them- but of course, many will see through this, so then you bring in the rear guard on a different line of attack- anyone who still wants to stay in the EU is a traitor, doesn’t believe in the UK. Not only do you forment the blaming of the EU for people’s poorer lives but the very idea of questioning that makes you a traitor. Add to this a deepening sense of the nationalism that tells you two contradictions: Britain first, British people are better and Britain is the best it can get- and people who want better for Britain through any means other than waving its flag and declaring its wonders are traitors.

The problem we face is thus: all we ever had to fight back against governmental malice was the hope that they were the best of us: now we know better than ever that this is not the case- but what will we do about it? Starmer continues to try to assail Johnson using the rules he has already gleefully destroyed, so how could this ever work? We must change tactic- but here, my thoughts run out of steam. I am simply not smart enough to articulate the next move, and I don’t know it. Starmer’s advisors are old guard labour members, active since the 70s, 80s, 90s and they too cling to the idea that the archaic modus operandi can hold Johnson et al to scrutiny. They will fail -so we must shift attack. But how? What do we do? Let us not forget that shame, contrition and genuine remorse were the weapons we wielded in the past against governmental malfeasance. This government does not, can not- will not, feel the sting of these weapons. So what weapons will penetrate their hide: how do we re-arm ourselves and win the battle they have dragged us into?

Currently, a worrying proportion of the American further and far right are floating the idea that they will provoke a civil war against the left- and as they are the side who wholeheartedly back a lack of gun control, they truly believe it is a war they will win.
Guns are weapons- and so is knowledge, and both can be wielded to wreak havoc, but only one can truly be wielded for good. So how do we harness the capability of knowledge, weaponise it to turn the tide of this war we find ourselves in?
Only those in charge may tell- but tell they must, and soon or dire consequence will befall us- not may, but will. Knowledge cannot deflect gunfire, so we must start our deployment now, and fight back against the ignorance that will lead to it: not just in the US, but in the UK- in all the countries who claim democracy, yet only hold their leaders to the standards they can be bothered to uphold. The deepening storyline that the left want to take away freedoms even as the right does so, that the left want to force you into a body you don’t want as the right force you to carry pregnancies you don’t want, that the left want to censor speech as the right ban books about LGBT+ people or flatly refuse to report on governmental failure, that the left want to come after your children as prominent right wing politicians both here and in the US are jailed or investigated for child sex offences- somehow we must break through this cloud of hypocritical disinformation and expose the depths of right wing political corrosion to people willing to prop up governments who hurt them all to fight back against an enemy who doesn’t exist- of course, amongst right wing supporters are those who know the truth and don’t care, or know the truth but want it to be this way, but amongst them are those whose eyes can be opened to the simple fact that this polemical politics poisons them against those who want honestly what is best for all of us.

If we can reach those on the right who have been consumed by this saturation of us vs them narrative, I have hope that the real enemies of truth, those who must rely on diversion over talent will become clear to them, and we can add them to our side.

At least once a week, I write that we deserve better in the UK: we deserve better from all of our governments- but we don’t just deserve better, we need better and without it we face a dark and uncertain future, where the meeting of the lowest standards is not only acceptable- it is applauded. This is Johnson’s legacy- the 8 feet under lowering of societal standards, integrity, honesty, freedom, and on the tombstone shall be carved “here lies the UK- we could have done better- but we didn’t”.

(You can’t) Read all About it- The UK’s Press is Bought and Paid for by a Corrupt Government

By Daviemoo

When news of partygate began to ripple through the UK’s media, broken by the enterprising journalism of Pippa Crerar, the immediate thought was – what else have they done? It had taken a year for partygate to come crashing down around the conservatives & it fell amongst the raft of other scandals that have dogged Downing Street during Johnson’s short but damaging tenure from PPE VIP lanes to the Paterson scandal.
But yesterday’s casual announcement by Johnson’s former aide, Dominic Cummings that the press was quite literally bought and paid for by Johnson and then lent credence by Peter Jukes of Byline Times who shared the article by Brian Cathcart, should have blown the doors off parliament: are the press taking backhanders in the form of covid relief on the proviso that they would write only the stories the government allowed? Or are the government wilfully underfunding those who do not favour them in coverage?
The UK’s press is as complicit in the mire in which we find ourselves as the callous men and women running parliament like a circus- But how does one hold the press at large to account for something the press at large won’t report?

During an age of endless news streams where we are bombarded with news updates from apps, social media, popups, papers and 24 hour channels, it made sense that companies so large would require funding – Johnson’s government insisted on plying the larger, established news corporations with funding they scarcely needed in favour of eschewing the smaller ones who would fall to rack and ruin.
One only needs to look at the Murdoch empire to see a network suffused in cash from the top to the bottom, but the government happily threw them “bungs” as Cummings described it.

One can intimate it is because of the political leanings of said corporations: nobody can deny that the press in the UK, so often referred to as a shark tank is more akin to a bowl of goldfish where the Johnson cabal is involved. Whether this is correct and the government gave funding to press it felt would favour them is a matter for debate- but hardly a debate that would challenge ones faculties, as Johnson is an ex-journo and knows how the system before him works: don’t bite the hand that feeds you- but if you are bitten, the government realised, better a domesticated pet than a scratch from a sharks tooth.

Other smaller news corps were forced with difficult funding decisions to keep reporting and suffered as a result:

Seats on the subsidy life-raft are reserved for the News Media Association (NMA), the corporate press club in which most members have turnovers exceeding £100 million. The rest are being told to swim for it or sink.
This approach privileges the corrupt past over the innovative future; it helps the lumbering legacy brands while allowing the COVID-19-induced crises of circulation and advertising to sweep away smaller outfits that are far more innovative and free-thinking.
The winners here are the sun, the Mail, the times, the Telegraph, the Mirror, the Express, the Guardian- and the big asset-strippers that have so devastated the regional press: Reach, Newsquest and JPMedia
https://bylinetimes.com/2020/05/13/strangling-democracy-millions-paid-to-corporate-press-at-the-expense-of-journalism/

The battle for a fair press has been fairly openly debated in recent years: nobody but the most strident amongst us can deny the open favouritism displayed by the press towards a right leaning government: but it has become confusing to see the press become tantamount to a lapdog under this government. Barely any news coverage that Johnson’s win as prime minister was celebrated by an immediate vacation- at a time when he should have thrown himself into the driver’s seat to wrest the nosedive towards a no-deal brexit, he vanished to the beaches of another country… one you would soon need to take the longer queue to visit or return from. But a holiday upon a victory is hardly an act to win condemnation- his actions since, though, are.

The press were all too happy to tread the waters of government briefing over the advice of scientific bodies: Independent SAGE spoke out against the argument for herd immunity posited by an as then uninformed Sir Patrick Vallance who assumed that coronavirus could not readily reinfect people: once the death rate for coronavirus became clear in the UK population, Vallance along with a beleaguered press frantically walked back their message about herd immunity in favour of protective measures- again ignoring scientific advice from a number of bodies regarding masked transmission rates, including studies which had been long used to justify the common sense of wearing masks during operations.
Large scale media programmes were deployed to combat misinformation, even as misinformation was propagated by the government– Johnson’s long segueing speeches were often met with utter bemusement by the public but vital information was simply suppressed: it was widely assumed the rule of six had been developed by calculations of infectivity vs person to person contact but again Cummings blithely revealed that Sunak and Johnson had thought of it off the top of their heads: and the press repeated the line with the confidence of ignorance.

But partygate is the best example of the cancerous spread of nepotistic favouritism from politics to press.
Several members of the press knew of the “briefing” Allegra Stratton hosted. They knew already of stories of a Downing Street party- the evidence was already free to them. Colleagues who had also been journalists alongside her bantered gently with Stratton who chuckled off an accusation of attendance before wondering- to the press, those waiting to receive information, whether cheese and wine was against the rules: it was.
There was the bomb, ready to go off- but it sank below the tides of worsening infections, death rates, lockdowns. Why?
The fact that our highest officials were freely breaking the laws which had been devised and enacted in the very seat of democracy was a scandal that should have immediately rocked the country. Some will of course say that perhaps the press held back for fear that news of Johnson, Sunak and other staffers breaking the rules would push tired members of the public to do the same, worsening the state of affairs: but it is not for the press to decide these things. The press is meant to be the guardian of the publics collective knowledge around governmental actions and their failure to aid us here cannot be venerated- and only has a limited number of explanations: either the press were desperate to curry favour with Downing Street for access to other stories, they did not care about reporting the truth… or, worst of all- they had been disincentivised from telling the truth via coronavirus levies. If this were proved, the twin pillars of government and press would be met with the distrust it seems they are steadily earning.

I argued recently on a Byline Radio twitter spaces that the BBC is a lame duck when it comes to holding the government to account. Happy to smear Jeremy Corbyn with offensive superimpositions of him in the background of debates on potential incumbent prime ministers or to openly disparage him whilst offering favourable coverage of Johnson was proof enough- but the recent debate around scrapping the license fee headed up by Nadine Dorries who doesn’t understand the funding model for channel 4 who she has helmed the privatisation of. The host stated (incorrectly) that the government DOESN’T fund the BBC- all they do is set the cost and decide whether it should be scrapped. Just like a boss setting salary and deciding whether to keep someone employed.

The BBC is now rumoured to be staffed heavily by conservative leaning members in its upper echelon which has led to a soft touch approach towards any coverage of the government, and therefore cannot be used to scrutinise the government – all because the government controls its funding model and because the BBC is infiltrated by those who all but suppress negative coverage.

It is at this juncture that people will leap on partygate as proof that the press ARE scrutinising the conservatives, forgetting of course the amount of op-eds from right wing pundits stating that the conservatives’ willingness to break the laws they enshrined for protection concluded that there was no way we should ever have been in lockdown- rather than after twelve years of failing governance, perhaps the conservatives simply have become a party in freefall, the front bench crammed with sycophants loyal only to Johnson and the power he brings.

But again, don’t take my word for it: Let us cast our eyes over to the daily mail: the paper that pressured Durham police to reopen an investigation- not into Cummings himself and his ambulatory misdeeds during lockdown one, but into the leader of the opposition, Sir Kier Starmer.
During the initial findings of Johnson and Sunak’s lawbreaking the paper angrily shouted at the public- “Don’t they know there’s a war on?”- arguing that Johnson should be allowed to stay in post and (to coin Johnson’s favourite empty phrase) “get on with the job”.

Then, when the public continued to rail against the man who ensured we stayed home to keep our loved ones safe as his staffers dragged suitcases of wine into his home, they pivoted to attacking Durham Police and Sir Kier for what they called a refusal to investigate and hypocrisy.
This was farcical enough, but when the investigation was reopened, the newspaper began to smear Starmer, intimating that he is a liar, only for him to do exactly what they had asked and confirm that if he was indeed found guilty of breaking the guidance (bearing in mind there was no lockdown at the time), he would step down. Not satisfied, the paper, after eight days of headlines intimating the Durham police were lackadaisical, then accused Starmer of “pressuring the police”… then as a final, laughter inducing crescendo removed any and all references from this trail of events when they realised that doing so would pile pressure on Johnson to follow suit in the footsteps of his opposite numbers actions.

If ever was a tale so filled with the blatancy of media supplication to a government, this would surely be it: from “get over it” to “but HE did it” to “He’s doing what we are” to complete ignorance in the space of 3 weeks.

If it is true that Boris Johnson’s government has been lavishing money on the press, threatening them with privatisation a la Dorries and channel four and more then the government tips over into ticking another tenet of potentially fully fascistic behaviour, by preventing its own scrutiny by what should be a press willing to speak out against their transgressions and the British public are being gulled again into backing a man who is as uninterested as improving the standards of living in the country as he is being honest at the despatch box. The press thrive off controversy and here it is in spades in the form of a corrupt, criminal government headed up by a man who cannot find it within him to be honest to his spouses, much less to a country of those who require his fellows’ help to thrive post pandemic.

If Johnson cannot be held to account by his peers for breaking his own laws, by the opposition who cannot force contrition on a man incapable of feeling it, he cannot be held to account by a press too willing to bay his messages under threats or cash injections it is for us- the public, to become the collective fire in the dark of an abyssal government. If they won’t speak truth to power- we must, or all is lost.

If the government IS actively meddling in freedom of the press with cash and threats… we must expose this rot, root it out and start to regrow.

We don’t need a referendum on net zero- we need sensible public discourse for once

By Daviemoo

As the UK is preparing to sanction Russia for it’s abominable actions in Ukraine, Nigel Farage, eternal hypocrite, is pushing for a referendum against net zero. But I won’t let the mistakes of the Brexit referendum repeat- so lets look at what net zero is, why we need it, and also ask ourselves why we need the opinions of a paid rank hypocrite?

What is “Net Zero?”

A country working towards net zero, is working to reduce it’s emissions of carbon dioxide by changing it’s operating procedures; it doesn’t mean not producing carbon dioxide, it means that we produce little enough CO2 that it’s production is cancelled out as it approaches the atmosphere. More info can be found here.

Working towards net zero will affect everyone from the poorest to the richest, and means ploughing money into infrastructure to prevent the wild usage of personal automobiles which aren’t electric, it means fining companies who do not meet their emissions targets (remember that 90 companies are responsible for almost two third s of global emissions and then ask yourself who would wish to prevent overhaul in their operations… then follow that money trail back to campaigners like Farage et al).

Why would you be against net zero?

Those who are against this approach usually cite cost to business and infrastructure disruption as their main causes of doubt, plus the simple doubt in global warning: a well documented scientific phenomenon. Loathed politician Michael Gove underscored a very disturbing and important social phenomenon when he said he was “sick of listening to the experts”.

Many others who are against working towards net zero are also those who benefit from the status quo- and at the moment one of those most prominent is all-in-name-but dictator, Vladimir Putin: who, let’s not forget, invested heavily in pushing the UK to vote itself out of the EU.

Underpinning the Brexit referendum and the dire warnings therein, and the dire warnings about net zero that not striving to minimise CO2 fumes will lead to serious consequences for the human race, is the feeling that people just don’t want to entertain reality any more: the idea that we’ll have to change the way we operate to ensure future generations are safe, happy and… well, alive, is simply too much for those who would rather cry glory to an empire that ceased to exist before our grandparents even let out their first cries.

Farage is a master at championing these causes of unreality, from taking back a democracy which was only lost in the fermenting of the Brexit referendum and it’s saturation with Russian disinformation, to asking weekly for seven years for a tough, no nonsense Australia style immigration system only to go red in his already pre-puce face when Australia dared to… use it’s immigration system to say no to a rich man who thought he was exempt from public health rules. He’s always backed the wrong horse, but like other political figures seen as foolish he’s managed to fail upwards- he succeeded in brexit, he succeeded in getting the Conservatives elected by strategically standing MPs down, he’ll likely succeed on a referendum for net zero- but it’s not because the man is an intellectual savant- it’s because he’s backed by those who decide what should be shown and written in our media. We’re saturated with sycophants like him, desperate to peddle the idea that we should be at liberty to do whatever we want forever, heedless of the cost to the next generation.

Nigel Farage is the antithesis of the young, and the scion of older people who made the world what it is and want to ensure it remains so for those working against the rising tide of ignorance- and the literal rising tide.

What does net zero encompass?

Using renewable energy as the core of our energy infrastructure is vital: it’s also easy to do. Some countries are able to subsist on renewable energy in huge masses for prolonged periods of time so this is not exactly out of the norm, yet we’re told it is… that it will cause us untold frustration, that people will lose their jobs: it doesn’t have to be so, because part of the push to net zero is to change people’s jobs to fit into that process.

It also involves the push to ensure businesses are working ethically and cleanly – a lot of businesses are beginning to enshrine green practices in their daily routine but not enough, and certainly not the main contributors.

Net Zero, green new deals… all of these things are nothing to be scared of but for a significant portion of the usual band of reactionary subjects, it appears to be their bogeyman: more scared of wind turbines and solar panels than melting ice caps and burning planets.

It does mean changes to basic infrastructure including travel and transport, including taxing big business, including dismantling our long standing reliance on gas and oil- for the good of the world and those who live on it. Isn’t it strange then, that those who stand against it were also the ones who couldn’t stop complaining about wearing masks during a pandemic? Almost as though other people’s suffering is acceptable if it means they do not have to think… but I digress.

Why a referendum?

Easy: playing on the entitlement of the uneducated.

Don’t take that as an insult. I’m uneducated too: I’m starting a new job involving compliance for medical workers soon, and that’s been my career for ten years. But what do I know, or you know, or what does John at the end of the road who runs a cafe, know about net zero and how it should be achieved?
Every political party had a pledge to meet net zero in their manifesto in 2019; the conservatives included, and though they’ve broken a number of pledges as is their wont, they’re still ostensibly working towards net zero. The reason every party had it as a promise? Because it’s important and it’s inevitable. Once the sea goes up, it doesn’t go back down and every party knows they have to work to mitigate what we’ve already done to the earth. But look at the last referendum as an example of manipulation master classery- allowing anti science thumb suckers like Farage, Hartley-Brewer, Lawrence Fox to comment on something (else) that they are hopelessly ignorant about as if they speak from authority or knowledge is laughable.

Appealing to the angry masses about an issue that only benefits them positively by spinning it as anything else is manipulation, and these spindly sycophants work in concert to do just that, spinning webs of deceit around the public and obfuscating truth with outrage. Unfortunately a complicit media platforms them and barely gives a whisper to actually informed human beings, scientists, those who study the effects of global warming because unfortunately the grim reality of a planet burning in it’s own gases isn’t as entertaining as watching a glassy eyed pundit gripe about having to have another recycling bin outside their 11 room house, one they likely won’t even notice because it’s not them doing the cooking, cleaning or throwing away.

Just look, for a moment, dear reader- critically- at this situation. Pundits will angrily write words about how they don’t want net zero: they do not want to change the way the world works to make it habitable to humans 300 years down the line. What selfishness it is to live in these people’s skins and expect everyone else to kowtow to what you want when what you want is to worsen the lives of future generations.

Ultimately, the only people who win if we keep backing the long hacked out path of fossil fuels are the rich business owners who profit from wrecking our world, oil oligarchs, billionaires like Putin, rich men like Farage who are paid to tell you to vote against your own interests and their lackeys like Isabel Oakeshott. Those who lose? Everyone else. Everyone whose homes will be wiped out by encroaching sea levels, those who cannot drink their own tap water because of fracking, and those future generations living on an inhospitable planet, all again for the sovereignty of “doing what we want for a change” hollered by people who have never, once in their lives, done something they don’t want to do out of sheer childish stubbornness.

Backing net zero is common sense, it’s an investment in the future of the world and it’s also, quite rightly, a spit in the face of the useless pundits whose pockets are fit to burst with dirty money from those who would see us live on a dying planet as long as they get to buy their newest beach house on the burning coast.

The urgent need for accessibility in political discourse- and the case for change

By Daviemoo

The politics of England in particular are facing fracture at an alarming rate. As Scotland gears up for another indyref, as Wales looks at shearing away and as Ireland could reunite to solve Brexit quandries, we must ask ourselves how we break down the multiple walls that brick away political knowledge from tens of millions of people- and make them see that votes without knowledge lead to corruption, failure- and fascism.

I was arguing with a commenter on my tiktok yesterday. I’d made a video stating -factually- that labour is the most credible opposition to the tories at present. The commenter replied incredulously, “Starmer? Credible?” and then gave me some very irate examples of the things that Starmer does that she doesn’t like. I, agreeing with what she was saying but also having the gift of realism, replied with “okay, what would you do then…”

She then went on to rant about how my politics are the problem and that neoliberalism doesn’t work- and both of these points annoyed me- my politics have a central, white hot core which is simply “make people’s lives better”. Please, regale me with how that’s a problematic chain of thought. But the main bugbear I had is that the exact issue I’ve found as I’ve forayed further and further into discourse around politics, society, media and the surrounding issues is that people talk in academic or overly complex terms which immediately put off or cut out the common person from the conversation. I know what neoliberalism is, what nationalism is, because I’ve spent a lot of time specifically researching them. I talk about them constantly because they’re important. But I also try my best to explain to those who may have interest, but have never heard the terms before, exactly what they mean.
In this aspect, I feel like all too many people are keen to have discussions that are important, and by their very nature – exclude people.

This extends beyond simple politics into abstract politics. I keep mentioning the word fascism in my blog posts because I am petrified of our approach towards it- but all the scholars into neofascism are discussing this problem with each other at the most academic level using complex parlance, who then hand it to experts in political theory who discuss it to a lesser extent with fellow experts, then a few keen parties pick it up- and it doesn’t reach the people who most need to hear it as they’re at risk of the radicalisation we fear. People most at risk of radicalisation, of falling victim to disinformation and of voting for parties who will hurt instead of help them are almost always cut from the conversation through various different ways, which i’ll explore below.

The limitations of our current education style

I’ve talked a lot recently about how the archaic system of education still deployed to this day does not help a vast proportion of the population. Education as it stands is designed to churn out people who can either do physical, menial or office jobs with the fewer amongst us going on to do other roles.

Many people would be capable of doing these other, “more important” jobs or reaching a further potential which allowed them to achieve more of their goals, or just live a better, more fulfilling life- but they are barred by the ancient style of education still used to this day, you can and will never progress.

Education styles have been widely talked about over the last 25 years- another of my posts on this blog is directly about this topic.

Additionally, a firmer understanding of topics is then off limits based on the progression to further education- which is now extremely expensive. Which brings us to the next issue.

The paywall of higher education

Locking away knowledge behind further knowledge is unfortunately a by-product of human intellect- you have to develop layers of understanding. So if we solved the first problem by enacting change in the educational sphere and more people were able to digest and learn from differing styles of education, we next have the problem to solve of the simple cost of deepening knowledge- university was expensive when I went. The fees then rose precipitously a few years after I graduated, and I was disgusted to watch the country entomb knowledge behind tens of thousands of pounds of debt. Some people simply do not have the capitol behind them to study because money is a blocker.

Whilst we live in a deeply capitalist society we can always expect that further education will come at a premium, simply to price people out who will then be trapped in the layer of workforce who don’t need a degree or more to progress. But this is a gatekeeping of knowledge so fundamental that it not only prevents people from accessing this knowledge. The other problem is that, as I stated, a lot of the political or socio-ecological knowledge is kept behind this paywall because it also alters those (if they are lucky enough to get there), who get there to be distant from their roots, and therefore make them less likely to be the people so sorely in need of the knowledge, as an irony. Furthering yourself in education often uplifts you automatically from your starting point, but the whole notion I’m driving at is that those AT the starting point are the ones who need the knowledge without the alteration.

The daily disinformation of the media

I’m confident that any person who reads the daily mail, the independent etc automatically thinks they are “politically engaged”. But it’s all too quickly forgotten that UK news sources in particular are written with a deeply political slant in mind, and almost all of the big selling newspapers lean right to varying degrees. With this in mind, those papers even by simply omitting the factual problems of a government like the one so installed now, are keeping people ignorant of key, vital knowledge.

One must truly search to find real political commentary and discourse, and as someone whose entire life has now begun to revolve around untangling the media’s insidious reporting of the Johnson administration, it takes real effort, nuance, camaraderie and time to decode the true meanings of the stories so published, and to find information that the media is all too keen to alter or cover up to protect a government who continues to lean on their necks (lest we forget that Johnson is looking at further curtailing press freedoms by banning stories which “embarrass MPs”.

We’re also bloated to bursting with insipid media which is created for vapid enjoyment and contains absolutely no intellectual merit at all- this goes beyond social media which can be carefully crafted into a tool of mass information dissemination or the antidote to right wing disinformation, but onto lengthy runs of shows with no actual lesson behind them being put at the forefront of viewing rather than those which would allow people to understand the society we’re in.

The final, and biggest problem, though…

Apathy, apathy and more apathy

Actual statistics I was shown recently show that a dramatic proportion of tory voters from 2019 have slipped into political apathy, uncaring of events because they simply do not believe that they can have a tangible effect on it.

The uncaring nature of so many citizens of the UK has lent strength to a party who know that many people will roll their eyes and say “they’re all the same”. When it comes to a reluctance to approach politics radically, any party who wants to win will toe the line of compliance simply to ensure that the fear of radical change will not obscure their potentially excellent political machinations. But this insistence of continuing to apply “the usual business” rules to politics lends itself poorly to an excitement in upholding honesty in politics to those who feel disillusioned- for if the system is broken, continuing to work within those bounds will not excite people for change- and will also allow those who think all politicians are corrupt, to believe that indulgence in that system is complicity.

Politics is for everyone

Ultimately, every single person in the UK is absolutely entitled to be involved in political discourse- as political commentator Supertanskiii said on the podcast recently, “politics is everywhere, it’s there when you go to the shop to buy a pint of milk”. It’s fine to have distaste for the system in which we are enmired- but the only way to clean up that system is engagement, from the widest spread of people in this country. And to do so, to borrow a thought from Orwell’s 1984- the proles must realise that the power is entirely ours, and our lack of assent, our denial of compliance, can and will make this government crumble before us.

Either the bill dies, or democracy does

By Daviemoo

KILL THE BILL – that is all

As I write this, I’m all of 2 minutes through my front door after attending the kill the bill protest.

I’m already under the covers- everything is cold, the flat is cold, I’m cold. The only warmth is the fire in my belly from the huge display of solidarity I just witnessed. People of all ages, classes, ethnicities, genders, sexualities stood on the main street in Leeds (and are doing so around the country in other cities) marching. Not just for ourselves, but for everyone.

One could argue that the roots of patriotism are nourished by the pitter patter rain drops of the individual turning to the storm of people coming together in making our voices heard, and in protesting against our country moving in a direction we do not like. Some would disagree. Those who do have likely never had to protest against a single thing, either happy to let others do it for them or that forefront demographic who will never need to protest against censure because the world is their platform.

The Police, Crime, Courts and Sentencing bill is another bill which carries fascist tropes, designed to instil dogged obedience in the nation by removing or curtailing one of our fundamental rights- not, of course, outright criminalising protest but forcing bureaucracy and redundancy into it- those roots we just spoke of, throttled of nourishment by strangulation. Imagine the irony of having to apply to the police to protest against… the police? Imagine being arrested and charged for being a nuisance. Imagine facing years in prison because you blocked a road, shouted too loudly… This legislation is hand stitched by the fascist fingers of Priti Patel to sow discord amongst those who desperately need to protest to be heard and those whose cosseted lives make protest only something to watch, glossy eyed, on the TV.

The biggest irony known at present is that those who have spent two years of pandemia decrying their right to free speech, free faces, free bodies, are nowhere to be seen as our actual rights to live in democracy are threatened.

Standing surrounded by those who also feel the threat of this bill I encountered well spoken older people, students, foreign nationals, trans women, gay men, people of colour – all angry that their ability to speak out critically against a literally criminally inept government seeks to rip away our right to be heard in their flawed system.

I was also surrounded by those who I too often disparage as privileged- the everyman. Many of those at today’s protest were furious at the prospect of more rights being curtailed under the- not so much iron, but) wooden hand of Boris Johnson’s conservatives.
He’s taken so much from us in his short tenure with his attack ready home secretary ready to whip out more dangerous legislation.

Ask yourself, regardless of your political alignment, why you would ever happily sign rights that you’re entitled to away.

…and it’s not the first time

It’s mere weeks since the nationality and borders bill slugged through parliament. This bill has disenfranchised a disturbingly enormous proportion of the British populace. Some would say it’s divine right to be born and be a citizen of a realm- but others put in work to become, to naturalise, and to assimilate- and those people who have done so have had an abject lesson presented to them: that the tories will remove that from you at their whim. Even today I read a tweet from a man who has served the UK in his position as a soldier for 22 years- who faces deportation in 28 days.

Now we stand in the face of another bill, draconian in nature but more frankly just wrong.

The tories will continue to take, take, take from us- because we let them.

Stand up and kill the bill together. Or the only thing that dies is democracy.

The Party is Over: The Tory Party, That is.

By Daviemoo

The British public faces a stark choice: to continue to enable and embolden a wholesale corrupt political party, or to shake up a system that has failed us repeatedly over the last decade. As pressure mounts on Johnson to resign and a report by one of his employees is awaited, the question has shifted from “will Johnson step down” to “will the British public continue to be a doormat for the Etonian elite”?

Prime Minister Boris Johnson stands accused of lassitude, corruption and collusion in not only partaking in parties when the nation was on strict lockdown, but in engendering an attitude of utter Devil-May-Care wankery in the walls of our most respected institution of Great British Governance. True to form, Nadine Dorries took a running leap at a Sky News microphone to defend professional alcoholic and philanderer Boris Johnson this week ahead of yet more party allegations. She told us that we should accept the disgraced Prime Minister’s “fulsome apology”. Here, incidentally, is the dictionary definition of “fulsome”:

Nadine Dorries reportedly once stood near a dictionary

Unsurprisingly it was a matter of 37 minutes between me watching this interview with Dorries and with the breaking news of two more unsanctioned Downing Street carnivales. Angela Eagle, in PMQ’s on Wednesday, asked whether it might be appropriate to investigate the days parties DIDN’T happen in downing street as the number of known illegal or at least horribly ill advised gatherings numbers thirteen- as much as Eagle meant this as a joke, it may actually be taken as a collaborative suggestion for expedience from the opposition to assist Johnson’s employee, Sue Grey, in her report on what appears to have been a two year long Oktoberfest in the walls of Downing Street.

Like Michael Gove, perhaps we should all be drawing a line somewhere- and like Gove perhaps it’s related to the Westminster toilets- his location of choice, and the current location of the Tory party’s moral standing.

The incarnated marionette that is Jacob Rees-Mogg lost no time in disparaging fellow tory party members to curry favour with everyone’s favourite scruffy haired scrounger-in-chief, insulting Douglas Ross, one of over 30 Scottish tories, whose tartan pattern is simply the sad face emoji. Weak and ineffectual Ross may be, but for once he is genuinely interested in the good of country, party and nation by calling for the resignation of Crime Sinister Johnson for his piss-taking parties.

And back to Dorries, she defended the most tepid tweet of prime ministerial defence from chancellor and all around rich boy Rishi Sunak, saying he was absent in defending the prime minister because he was in Dorset and “there’s no wifi in Dorset”. Dorries apparently mistakes Dorset for a concrete and steel box sunk forty feet beneath the earth – or perhaps this is a tacit confession that Sunak is an anti vaxxer and therefore doesn’t have access to the magic 5G properties of a nice dose of moderna.

And then we look to Michael Fabricant- at least, in his capacity as MP and not in his second job as wig stand for H&M’s mannequins, desperate to split hairs – theoretical ones, much like his own head hair- over whether the laws were indeed broken. The fact that the court of public opinion doesn’t even need consultation because the prime minister himself has said it was a party and he did attend – and yet we’re being asked to both congratulate him on the bodies piled high and simultaneously to forget it all and move on. We’re being pulled in more directions than Michael’s hairpiece.

Rees-Mogg was quick to claim that perhaps the laws were too strict, and should never have been enacted- and between this and the claim by the Metropolitan Police that retrospective crimes wouldn’t be investigated, unless we happen to recruit for minority report style policing my future defence for any crime committed will be “it’s all in the past now, the law is too strict, move on- in fact, congratulate me on doing such a good job”. Let’s see how that works shall we?

Approximately 17,000 people have faced criminal sanction for breaking lockdown rules- and those claiming that they should be refunded miss the point that a refund acknowledges Johnson should also be let off- in my eyes, if you broke lockdown rules you- and he- are subject to punishment on behalf of those of us who did our damndest not to spread the virus.

Another person who bent the knee without a moment of question was Priti “torpedoes away” Patel- taking a brief moment away from writing authoritarian legislation whilst gently caressing her well worn copy of Mien Kampf, she put a message into the tory whatsapp group (imagine how dry that group must be… PORK MARKETS!) to let them know she stands with Johnson. Patel, known for having the moral fibre of a rusk- condemns misogyny but works for a man who talked about grabbing women’s arses, who is disgusted by racism but denies it’s systemic presence in the system she maintains, who thinks the death penalty is a good idea even if people are innocent of their crimes, who stands for protecting British citizens* (*unless you’re gay or of colour or disabled or naturalised as a citizen or a woman or old or poor…) and the age old Great British values of racism and inappropriate smirks.

But let’s not forget who is also culpable here- a reticent, sneaky and subverted media whose job is to inform the British public of newsworthy events and give us, uncritically, a picture of our world, our country and our politics, sat on reports of these parties even as their own colleagues attended! The media is as culpable as the tory party for attending these events and for burying them in the sand- and once we sweep out the self serving tory party we should be casting a critical eye over journalistic moxxie in the UK and asking why they felt it appropriate to obfuscate these vital stories.

Casting a broader eye away from the media and to the rest of the tory party, and widening the lens beyond partying we can see that this isn’t just a Boris Johnson and his criminal ineptitude problem- the tory party as a whole is institutionally corrupt, debased to a level akin to violence.

PPE VIP lanes now ruled illegal, the restoration of Patel after proven allegations tantamount to espionage only for her to bully staff out of a job, Theresa May’s hostile environment and Windrush reaction and that of her Grenfell response, Owen Paterson’s indignance at being found to be a scumbag and his insistence on blaming the public for being angry that he lobbied for a terrible company to give us terrible service, track and trace to the tune of 37 billion, delivered late and carried in the data-sieve hands of Dido “GDPR” Harding, a Brexit which has caused food, energy, petrol and more issues, Eat out to help out (“out” being COVID-19), Matt Hancock too busy having an awkward teenage looking fumble to be health secretary during a health crisis, Javid throwing off all restrictions as if being an open economy makes up for tens of thousands of preventable deaths, Dominic Raab trying desperately to google what time the sea opens as “Afghanistan Minister- Missed call” flashes up on his phone for the 7th time that day, Dominic Cummings tootling about the country with a car full of pathogen and who thought that driving a one ton machine powered by dinosaur explosions was a good way to make sure his eyes were in working order. These parties are the latest episode in a cascade of cacophony that is only outstripped by the thud thud thud DJing of the music in the basement of our most prized political institutions. Corruption is the surface level scummery of the tory party, and the only conserving that the Conservatives have done is to Conserve their own hides; the only person to lose their job so far in the allegations- provable ones- of illicit parties is a person who wasn’t even AT the parties but joked about them, as callous and cavalier as any attendee.

Johnson’s cabinet is being chewed up by the woodworm of corruption, but to try to assure the public that throwing him out will deal with this rot is to lie as surely as Johnson at the despatch box. If a cabinet is rotten you don’t replace the struts- you throw it out wholesale and get a new one with the hope this one does not succumb as did the last.

The British public only has one choice- not to “keep calm and carry on”. We have to evict this disgraceful and corrupt party from office.

Ultimately there is only one party that deeply concerns me overall- the tory party. And much like the ribald bashes thrown in Downing Street over the two aching years of pandemia endured, apparently solely, by the common man- the party is truly over.

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Stand up for yourselves, Britons!

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Governmental ineptitude at your expense

But what IS patriotism?

We Deserve Better.

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Imperial Measurements- an exercise in futility- Boris Johnson

The curtailing of university entry- Nadhim Zahawi

Throttling the media- Nadine Dorries

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What is “Net Zero?”

Why would you be against net zero?

What does net zero encompass?

Why a referendum?

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The limitations of our current education style

The paywall of higher education

The daily disinformation of the media

Apathy, apathy and more apathy

Politics is for everyone

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…and it’s not the first time

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