Category: uk politics

The Flatlined Economy & The Betrayal of Britain’s Youth

By Daviemoo

We’re trapped in a death spiral of poor economy in the UK. Inflation continues to be manipulated by the Bank of England, the Conservatives continue to waste British taxpayer money on dealing with piffling issues like illegalising the inhalation of laughing gas or million pound schemes to deport innocents- but this is only half the problem. A fiscally irresponsible government is detrimental to the foundations of a country’s wealth- but a politically ignorant nation adds to the problem, and this is the perfect storm we’re weathering across the UK. People simply do not understand how an economy functions and are fed by those who may understand but who toe the line of those in charge- and it’s time to debunk the nonsense.

Economics of a country is not like household economics. Many similar terms are used but these terms exist in their own vacuum. Talking about national debt as though it is the same as an unpaid credit card is ridiculous: National debt in normal times exists because governments sink wealth into key areas of infrastructure, investing into the nation to allow for future growth- is it better public transport to allow people to travel further and cheaper for work? Is it more robust means of education to help everyone gain higher qualifications or pursue niche roles? It doesn’t matter- the people of the UK are glibly swallowing nonsensicalities spat out by tories and their enablers when it comes to national debt. National debt is a positive, it shows governments trying to improve, rather than hoard gold like Smaug in a top-hat.

Additionally, the almost inconceivably vast number of articles written by middle class middle aged well to do pundits, slating “this generation”, talking about overpriced coffees and avocado toast… There’s a perception that the “next” generation is wasteful, that we don’t invest, that we’re irresponsible and we’d rather buy frivolous nonsense than get a mortgage.

You just know I could pull out any number of graphs that show how house pricing hasn’t kept up with property prices, that people live in houses bought in 1987, my year of birth which have quadrupled or more in price. Yes, salaries were lower- but parity was closer than anything we’ve ever experienced in our adolescence. The never ending cycle of blaming us for not being able to buy property is so tedious I could cry whenever I read it, wanting to shake some sense into those who wrote it. People used to be able to have a house and a car on a single wage- now I work two jobs and still cant afford a mortgage, because my rent goes up annually, council tax does, electricity is 5 times the price of the EU’s wholesaling- But this leads on to another demonstration of the easy ignorance displayed by so many of the “we had it hard in our day too!” Crowd.

“The average house in the UK currently costs almost nine times the UK’s average earnings, based on data as at 30 November 2022. The last time house prices were this expensive relative to average earnings was in the year 1876, nearly 150 years ago.”

Research on the terrifying truth of house price and salary disconnection

You want people to stop spending frivolously, as if that £3 every Tuesday and Thursday on a medium coffee from Costa is what’s holding us back from mortgages- what do you see these frivolous purchases as? Let’s say everyone, every single adolescent wholesale stopped buying our coffees or our Tesco meal deals. How would that affect the economy?
People all too easily forget that economy runs on interaction. No it’s not, of course, at the same scale as a house purchase- the mere act of inquiring about a mortgage creates more wealth in the economy. But economies function on many levels, and I doubt all of us no longer making purchases with what we earn would positively affect the economy!

The issue that so many of these article spitting vipers and their faithful adherents miss, is that we are a generation who grew up on lies and fairytales. We were told the UK was a huge successful country, all whilst being told it wasn’t actually ours as anything but symbols and iconography.
You come from the greatest country in the world – but unless it’s shaking a St. George’s Cross in the face of someone who just lost to our football team, what does that mean for us? Since 2009 we’ve been under austerity, austerity 2.0, austerity 3, revenge of the austerity. Then they offered the masses another trove of lies wrapped up in a cheap hope costume: brexit. “Do you want things to stay like this, or do you want change? Do you want to try and go back to the halcyon days of being a superpower or do you want to be like… this” they said after beginning the Y incision into public services and investment. Hardly a mystery as to why everything went the way it did.

But what was our reward? Are we a world renowned superpower again?
Here’s some things which have happened since that vote.

*A prime minister caught lying to the public, throwing parties and shirking his vital duties during a deadly pandemic which took 250,000 of our fellows away
*An economic pummelling with our exports up but the economy flatlining because the real terms cost of export has become prohibitive for businesses
*A government paralysed by the venom of scandal: Lies, blackmail, sexual assault, infighting and more
*Brexit decimating the British economy even worse than coronavirus- which also hit the economy
*Another prime minister who only knows how to write 80087355 on a calculator and who blew a £1`00,000,000,000 hole in the economy through fiscal ignorance
*A Health Secretary who hired his friend with public money then proceeded to damply grope her on camera when his role was to prevent us from being killed
*An education secretary who was so stupid that he was knighted for keeping his mouth shut about the first prime minister’s dodgy behaviour
*PPE VIP Lanes ruled illegal and dealt with illegally
*The vital app that would keep us all safe during the pandemic being handed over to a woman whose nickname was Dido “Dataloss” Harding, who could not be removed because her husband is the person who you report nepotism in governmental appointments to!
*The app losing thousands of peoples data as predicted
*A scandal about lobbying where a government minister was paid vast sums on his already huge salary to promote a company not fit to handle contracts, which ended up worsening the pandemic
*An “eat out to help out” scheme that spread the virus made by our current prime minister who was too distracted hiding he and his wife’s immigration status so they could save on taxation on their £731 million fortune

This isn’t even an exhaustive list- it just rolled off the tongue.
The problem isn’t young people buying Starbucks, the problem is complete fiscal idiocy from the top down and the seeding of ignorant ideas about frittering money on takeaways instead of an economy in free-fall, ridiculous ignorance of monetary crises and ignorant decisions and inaction leading to the irreconcilable divorce of the “next generation’s” normal life with the idea of being able to save enough money to be able to live well.

As the cost of living continues, as the government continues to slurp lazily at the toes of the tycoons who own big business across the UK- and now further afield as many have fled the disastrous consequences of a brexit they pushed for- we will continue to be tarred with the brush of lazy and feckless, when the simple truth is half of the blame lies with a government wholly incapable of doing the job they slithered into on untruths, and a nation of those who raped our generation’s wealth and laugh at us from behind their Scrooge McDuck bank vault doors, telling us to buy cheaper coffee and we’ll have a nice 2 up 2 down in six months.


One day soon this generation will begin to expire, and a generation of those trapped in dire straits will begin to wrap their hands around the controls of an economy in free-fall. One only hopes that they are not exhausted by the long fight to get there, and can wrest this wreckage into some form of control. In the mean time, before you offer solicitation on what we can give up to achieve the heady dream of property ownership, ask yourself how you got there, and wonder why you aren’t extending the hand of help to those who so sorely need it.

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.

“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!

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.

“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.

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.

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.

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.

Daviemoo is on hiatus: or, why the left in the UK doesn’t deserve to win right now.

By Daviemoo – who is posting this and running far away from social media for the foreseeable.

My last post was my hundredth, though it’s not the hundredth article I’ve written for politically enraged- I cleared out 23 drafts the other day. Thank you to everyone who reads what I write and enjoys what I do but I have to be honest, of late everything has become somewhat exhausting– and not because of the always growing wankery of tories and their voters, of the arm waving gammonry of the politically dumb- because leftists in the UK are, as a whole- acting like fucking dickheads.

I wasn’t aware of the shitstorm ignited by commentary on a video which emerged recently until last night, and truth be told I was not sober when I was made aware. I read with abject horror some of the comments I, and my friends, had received for calling out what I pretty confidently would call racist dog whistling.

I have to be honest, in the way that my latest podcast episode is quite honest; I have no idea what people actually want any more, and as I grew from “back labour no matter what” to “we can critique labour healthily and listen to those with opposing views but I can’t see an alternative that works in this broken system”, my surety in what I was saying diminished.
I look at that as a gift.
I don’t want to parade the digital halls of social media, telling everyone what I say is definitely right, throwing out deliberately divisive tweets and confidently telling you any alternative to what I say is wrong because I don’t know. I don’t have the self confidence, nor the confidence in any political figure or leader, to state that we’re doing the right thing, on the right track, and that you should lean over and copy my answers on the test of “how to move forward”.

Equally I’m disillusioned with any faction I once called mine. The more center-left labour seem, no offence to those who keep staunchly backing it, to be willing to compromise on stuff that I’m not; but also lack the nuance to understand that just because I’m critical of labour’s brexit stance or Wes Streeting’s weird “they’re both bad” stance on transphobia in labour for example, doesn’t mean I’m trying to subvert support for labour. Dealing with problems is how you deal with them, and making compromises for them or flatly ignoring them doesn’t. Labour has some issues it needs to deal with by talking about them out loud, and by allowing voices who want to bolster the movement but don’t understand the direction to speak up, labour could allay these fears, embolden its supporters and move ever onward to a progressive alliance- not with other parties, with it’s broad-base supporters itself.
On the “far left” which is a term that makes me wince a bit because it’s so often used to describe the “has socialist in bio but acts like a 4chan edge lord” type, I’ve been absolutely stunned to see misogyny, bullying campaigns, I’ve had direct homophobic nonsense and people like the ragged trousered philanderer blithely being disgustingly transphobic guff – behaviour I genuinely thought was beneath people I once respected and now can’t stand to know I associated with.

I made fairly definitive critique of a man who used the argument “ethnic minorities and upper working class people want to destroy labour with liberal politics” (its Neo-liberals you’re referring to I assume) and spent 4 hours reading comment after comment of people deciding I was trying to sabotage labour, sabotage EiE, sabotage socialism itself, and not merely pointing out that if socialism means small-state bollocks where you point the finger at “ethnic minorities” and fellow members of the working class as the enemy instead of trying to make a cohesive movement with those very people, I don’t align with those views. It’s not exactly guy Fawkes-ing the EiE HQ is it, saying “wow this is really disgusting sentiment” and yet I had supposedly left wing people saying shit like “Tommy Robinson isn’t a bad guy now, he realises it’s the state, not muslims who are the enemy”. This the same Robinson who, literally 5 days ago was demonising Pakistani men? Or saying that I must be tory if I don’t imbibe the sentiments that foreign working class people are trying to sabotage the… what, “native” working class? Sure, Jan.

Dempsey’s views on calling Tommy Robinson supporters “the scum of the earth” make me laugh. Because Robinson supporters are the scum of the earth- not indelibly, forever scum- racism is a choice, bigotry is a sword you can put down at any time. Robinson supporters don’t care about unionisation, or workers rights, or emboldening the working class- they care about ‘the nasty foreign people coming here to steal are jobs’ and whatever other half baked cuntery they pull out of their racism-frazzled brains. There is no excuse for what he said- none. Pushing divisive rhetoric about factions of the working class, levelling blame at ethnic minorities? No way would I ever align with those views, and offering forgiveness to Robinson supporters until they showed actual contrition for falling for the racist dog shit that gave him the money to put a swastika on his neck? No thanks. You don’t fix racism by not being racist, you fix it by being anti-racist- and you dont fix capitalism or FPTP by espousing more politely worded, general racism.

The fact is, there is no perch on which I’m comfortable on “the left” after all of this, after being squeezed between the pro and anti starmer people to bursting point, and I’m certainly not a centrist but I don’t necessarily hate those who are (there’s a difference, to me, between ‘this policy isn’t pragmatic enough to work’ and ‘oh sure they want gay marriage illegalised but look at that tax plan!’- that’s not centrist pragmatism, it’s selfishness which is a byproduct and ethos of the right)- and I cant stand the right. It’s to the point where if you still back right wing parties now, now that the masks are off, you’re either so deeply radical I can’t help you or you’re so twisted you don’t need guidance, you need an assessment.

I call myself a progressive now for lack of any better option. Because the factionalised shitgibbonry of the left as a whole is pathetic, puerile, childish and yet it’s also deeply dangerous. I’m sick of big leftist figures acting like paragons of goodness whilst setting their followers on other left wingers, unleashing tidal waves of vitriolic bullying and acting like making other leftists come away from social media is some sort of victory for your movement instead of proof that you don’t give a shit about politics- if your entire goal is just to push your own agenda so hard it steamrolls other people, that’s not ok.
I’m sick of seeing people demonise those they share particulates of political leaning with rather than taking aim at the actual enemy. Half of you are overthinking it- it’s not some secret complex game of guess the secret baddie, like ‘Guess Who’ with rosettes- you’re either for voting against the tories or you’re not. I say it a million times a day, the system is broken so if you’re not happy with this iteration of labour, what’s the plan? Oh some long winded spiel about reforming the system by not partaking in it- apparently it’s actually a huge part of disinformation farms to push the idea that not voting is some wise political choice- not voting just means you need to shut the fuck up about any and all repercussions because you literally cut out your own tongue when asked for your opinion. Miss me with that “I’m so big brained I don’t participate but I feel entitled to moan” shit. And even better, nobody who insults Labour seems to have an actual plan- even big leftist figures whose bank is aflow with the money they earn by bashing labour come down on “well im still voting for them but I’ve been consciously telling people not to for months”. Mmmm, I also like hypocrisy. Again, the lack of nuance. You could constructively criticise and platform those who do the same, but I guess acting like rabid dogs with 200 characters or 2.20 seconds to bark is easier. The option I often have wafted at me is “i’m just going to vote for this other political party that won’t win, but at least my hands are clean (and the tories will still win but that’s not MY fault, right)”. Every person who suffers under tories doesn’t really give a shit about your clean hands but whatever helps you sleep at night I guess.

I genuinely hope we get PR in the near future- not just because I have grandiose hopes for a more democratic spread for voters to choose from, but because I’m sick of being hemmed in to a wing of politics that’s become even more toxic than the forced birth loving, force my religion on you-ing, worship the rich-ing tosspots on the other side. Having to share politics with people who act more despicably than right wingers is pretty grim- and because the system is fucked up, there is no alternative.

I’m taking time away from it all, to sort through my feelings on it. The fact is, I see little point in talking about politics right now, because there’s no view you can have on leftist politics that isn’t polarising. The left is radicalised against itself and it’s pathetic. We don’t deserve power any more than the scum in power right now do. It’s an embarrassment of a movement- half of it more bothered with deifying the dusty words of old white men who engaged in theoretic thinking, whose lives didn’t even slightly reflect our way of living than actually looking at the system we’re in and asking how the fuck we make these hazy dreams come true without employing the same scary ass totalitarian governments who push for socialist structure, the other half desperate to compromise on some of their own long held beliefs because they think winning can come at a stupendous cost and that giving up on long held core beliefs of their movement is acceptable. Ah yes, we win everyone! Brexit’s never being reversed, it’s ok to be transphobic and the laws that stop us protesting, force us to abide by ridiculous voter disenfranchisement and keep us locked in a broken system of capitalist dogma even as we cant afford electric or water are still all things, but we win!

Frankly everyone, go for it. Tear yourselves apart, tear each other down, demonise each other- I’ve pushed for unity on the left ever since I saw a bigger picture lurking in the background. But what’s the point. I don’t want to align myself with any of you right now because all of you are behaving shamefully. So do what feels right to you, be tribal, be vile to each other- It’s nice to see under the mask and understand the dangers of political polarisation laid bare and to understand this ever growing “if you’re not in, you’re out” mean girls politic in the UK.

I’m taking some time away from all of this because my head is abuzz with realisations. when I come back I hope some semblance of maturity magically manifests itself into the forebrains of leftists in the UK because right now- you’re all acting like idiots, and as loath as I am to level the accusation of enabling the tories I am – the whole lot of you attacking each other instead of talking constructively are doing exactly that.

Peace out, enjoy your fighting folks, I’m going to work, gym, read some political theory and come back ready to focus on the actual enemies rather than my bedfellows.

The Homeless Generation- how the governments of the last 50 years have betrayed the generations to come

By Daviemoo

I used to have a savings account choc full of money with an ex. When we split up I was so desperate to escape him I didn’t even fight over the money in that account. I will never regret it- he was, and I don’t use this term lightly, evil.
Successful, single at 34, I’ve watched property prices explode out of reach again and again as my savings went from just enough to never enough. My hands are caked with the soil that covers my hopes of affording property, perhaps until I marry another man or my media career somehow ignites and I can supplement my income.
But why?
Is it my desperate need for chai latte, my selfish need to live in a nice flat or my lazy refusal to take on a third/fourth job that means I can’t own property… or are we just being screwed by people who don’t live the life of the average Brit, but know how to convince the average Brit that their strife is their own fault, or the fault of some illusory shibboleth?

I woke up to a text this week. It was just a link to an app that helps you save money for a mortgage- it’s name was so ridiculous I’d never have considered using it anyway- but the message rankled me nonetheless. It felt like the sender was implying that my lack of home-ownership was due to my laziness, lack of effort or some other jibe. I thanked them and closed the conversation- I couldn’t be bothered to be drawn into another defensive delineation: “I saved money in my old job because my salary was good. I saved money again recently because I have not only two jobs but I freelance as a journalist”.
There’s many things you can say about people like me when we tell you we don’t own property. Idealistic? Sure. Scatterbrained? Absolutely. Lazy? I wish.

There seems to be an enduring belief by the British public at large that owning property is a salve for all of the monetary issues we face. I refuse to buy into the endless recitation of the “avocado toast and latte” nonsense: even if I bought one coffee a day at £3, that’s £90 a month: that, hardly a mortgage does make. We foster a culture of “pay into the economy to make it strong”- so deeply pushed during the pandemic that the eat out to help out scheme may have contributed to thousands of avoidable coronavirus deaths- ironically, despite that, our economy is still on ventilation and atonal breathing. But think how contradictory those messages are: “don’t spend, save for a mortgage- but also go out and spend for the precious economy” and yet those messages coexist in some sort of peaceful harmony in the heads of many people, the irony somehow missed.

The problem isn’t saving up or lack thereof (I did, though not so right now), our problem isn’t our proclivity for purchasing hot drinks- the problem is that we exist in a system that has continually failed to provide for the next generation, whilst shoring up the assets of those who built and maintained it.

Studies show that in London in particular, by 2030- 7.5 years away- the average property price in London will reach a million pounds- someone who bought a London property for the average, £130,000, in 2000 will have seen an increase in their property price of £870,000…
London is, however, its own mini entity within the UK and its property prices are an aberration – but the phenomenon around the property price increases is not.

This graph stops in 2020- but the pandemic saw the disparity increase even more

In the 70s, the average house price was approximately four times the average yearly salary. Now in most areas, the average house price is nearing eight times that. Bear in mind that is the AVERAGE. The average salary in the UK? 31,000. Guess what I, with my 2 jobs and freelancing earn? And another cherry on the cake: because I can’t use my rental receipts as proof I pay nearly £900 a month and because my rent, council tax, electricity etc have all gone up in price, not only have my savings stagnated, they have started a slow decline- and I can’t prove legally that I can pay a mortgage of £650 a month…

My rent, when I moved into the flat I live in was £850- I’d previously been living in a very very small, moth infested flat which only cost me £550 a month: bear in mind though that when my dad saw how small my old flat was, where I lived for a year during the worst of covid- he actually got upset for me.

Moving here was costly but was a reward for getting through a year of total isolation due to covid, in a hot, tiny flat crawling (sometimes literally) with insects that I couldn’t find the source of. I had to move somewhere else and at the time I was doing a job that paid enough.
Why not move somewhere nice, I thought- I could always make more money… my mental health had been crushed by living in that dank little flat. So here I am, and for 12 months I dutifully paid my rent on time every month with no complaints: I chose to move here, I can hardly quibble about the rent price, and because I can be quite frugal often I managed to keep making savings. Can you see the storm clouds yet?

A mere nine days after the papers began to speak in earnest about the cost of living crisis, I went downstairs to get my mail to find a letter from my landlord.
The letter thanked me for living here but said that now the pandemic was over, so was the rent freeze- they planned to increase my rent by £24.

I emailed my landlord, pointing out how hilarious it was that they chose the beginning of a cost of living crisis to increase rent and asked whether they felt any remorse: they said that they had to “cover their own costs”. Two days later I went on a trip to London to the Byline festival and as I left my flat to get the train down, I found a fully dressed man unconscious in the corridor, sleeping outside one of my hall mates doors- I took a photo, sent it to the landlord and asked them if the rent increase was to pay for rehab.

But lets do some maths: there are approximately 110 flats in my building, the adjacent and opposite ones and the square next door- all owned by the same company. so that’s 880 flats, and I assume the smaller flats rent went up by less and the larger flats went up by more- but for simplicity, lets say that we all had our rent increased by £24:
24x 880= £21,120

My landlord, with the printing of 880 letter, increased their profits- just from increasing the rent- by over £21,000

At the same time as my rent increased, we started seeing the huge bump in energy prices. My energy has also gone up by £41 a month. My council tax is up £20. My food bills have escalated insanely because goods simply cost more to buy now. Everything is more expensive.

Now let’s talk about salary stagnation!
Everywhere you look at the moment, everyone from rail workers of all job delineations to doctors are planning strikes because their salaries don’t cover their cost of living. Are these strikes annoying when you depend on the services provided? Absolutely! Which is why you should be backing those workers all the more: their labour allows you to live your life smoothly, and their labour isn’t paying them enough to live.
Mick Lynch has been a steadfast storyteller, the de-mythologist of the idea of the lazy strikers, and has explained over and over to somehow continually glib listeners that companies are maximising profits which only hit the pockets of a select few shareholders and CEOs whilst the company does not reinvest that money back into itself to the benefit of its users or the staff who run the businesses.
Wage stagnation is at it’s worst level in, drumroll please- TWO HUNDRED YEARS in the UK.

My favourite response to my talking about this is “why don’t you just move somewhere smaller?”
I looked at a flat further out of town which was smaller and cost £660 a month last Monday.
It was on the market for 4 hours and 30 minutes before it was taken by someone else.

When I asked to view one of the studio flats in my block, the man literally laughed and said “I’d just take it mate, property’s going quick right now”- they wanted me to move into a smaller flat that I’d never seen. Welcome to renting in 2022!

The sad fact is that now, thanks to real terms pay cuts, pay stagnation, inflation, deregulation in the housing & property sector and the increase in goods prices due both to Brexit and covid sprinkled liberally with the awful governance from the unfathomably wealthy ex chancellor & final contender for grand high prick, Rishi Sunak, over ten percent of UK citizens survive on £18,000 a year or less which puts them at or under the poverty line.

Property ownership isn’t a distant dream- it doesn’t even register as thought when you can’t pay your rent and bills with your salary.

Tom Tugendhat, recently eliminated contender in the soulless despot of the year competition, stated that we needed to create more houses. To Mr Tugendhat, to Ms Truss, to Mr Sunak and indeed to those steady of ear in the other political parties, I’d like to introduce them to the idea that the issue isn’t simply creating more property- it’s the affordability of it.
I’d be happy to forego six months of hot drink purchases if it meant the end of my ever spiralling financial woes- but when those woes are caused by the increasingly flailing decisions of a ridiculous government, when your lack of property ownership as you march ever closer to 40 without home ownership is caused because property prices diverge ever further from salary, it’s nice to see those responsible not only helm solutions to the problems, but place the blame on their own shoulders and not yours.

The overarching point is that property ownership has been made almost impossible by the continually more vapid and short termist decisions of successive UK governments who have not only decimated the economy by making unfortunate decisions, but allowed landlords to lean heavier on the ‘lord’ part of their title whilst providing less and less of the land.
The master stroke as always is for the government to continue to point the finger at everyone but itself- it’s definitely the foreign gay trans people making property prices explode of course, not the people who have been in charge for hundreds of years- and if we only work harder, if we only forgo any pleasure besides the consumption of endless ramen packs in a dark, cold flat wearing threadbare clothes we’ve owned for 7 years, perhaps we can afford a matchbox for one in the next 5 years.

We would all, I’m sure, be happy to invest in the economy by purchasing a house, furniture and more- but until everything else stops paring back our finances and gnawing at the bones beneath we will be stuck in a cycle of saving, then checking the market only to see that extra £2.5k that we saved didn’t keep up with the rise in property prices- back to the drawing board again eh.

We’ll have to forego the precious dream of owning our own pied à terre, at least until politicians in the UK can grapple with keeping down the price of a pomme de terre.


Boris Johnson is a symptom- British politics is the disease

By Daviemoo

The guillotine falls- the sharp ring sound of blade on flesh rings out followed by the heavy thud of head into basket. But the body keeps writhing.
Johnson’s milkwater speech & his removal as the leader of the conservatives is not even a step forwards for those of us with a keen interest in reconciling decency and politics- for Johnson is the head of the hydra, and now head is being severed from body, new problems begin to form at the stump.

Johnson was a problem for conservatives as much as he was for those of us suffering under his leadership: at most recent poll, sixty nine percent of the polled public wanted Johnson out. It’s understandable- he has mainstreamed political mistruths with the same unrepentant showmanship as his counter in the US, Donald Trump and has contributed to the “footballification” of politics. Many of us began to find politics interesting as it began to directly affect us and a core of this currently deeply engaged group will flit back to political indifference once the times stabilise. But for some of us who have the pleasure of meeting our forerunners, activists who warned of all this to no avail, the times are no less frightening now the sword of Damocles hurtles towards Johnson’s crown than before. We must not stop fighting.

Some amongst our number fear Johnson will not leave. He has levers at his disposal to consolidate his power even with minority support from ministers and the public, levers which would deeply damage British democracy if pulled- yet the grubby hands of our erstwhile PM rest upon them regardless. Johnson has demonstrated time and again that he does not care about the damage his presence and continued displays of political substandard parlance has done so to assume he has a level, a point at which shame would kick in is incredible. PMQs threatens to be even worse- what does the man who has lost it all have to lose? Will he make more accusations of Labour’s leader that led to him being harangued by crowds of far right extremists? Could he lean harder on the war in Ukraine to clutch power? He could well be in backroom discussion with loyalists planning the UK’s no doubt quintessentially more ridiculous January 6th. Let us not forget the levels of unabashed stupidity Johnson has sunk to before- from doxxing a fellow journalist to having an affair, being sacked for lying, homophobic and racist statements he still refuses to walk back on, Johnson’s political legacy will have been to inject his own poisonous disregard for honesty, decency… humanity, into mainstream British politics.

But even if, somehow, against all odds he is ousted, he goes gently into that good night, his party will continue to rage against the dying of the light. The tory party was gutted by Johnson’s appointment as those tories who don’t openly distain human beings were shuttled out, and loyalist parodies were parachuted in. From those foolish enough to punt for the leadership role to back benchers, the party is a shambles and has been for longer than Johnson’s woeful tenure.

Sunak has released a video desperately appealing to the farcical notion that he’s a man of the people: Sunak was chancellor of the exchequer and he doesn’t even know how to pay for goods with a contactless card.
Braverman was unfailingly loyal to Johnson, blithely defending his lawbreaking over the NI protocol and partygate- she is unashamedly “anti woke” and though I dont feel its appropriate that I as a white man go into the particulars of why this may be, several friends of mine who have Bravermans in their family have given me an understanding as to why she so reviles the notions enshrined in the right’s imaginary bogeyman: the woke.
Liz Truss has been such a terrible equalities minister it is rumoured she is referred to as the inequalities minister in the corridors of westminster- the only reason Truss wasn’t papped at the parties in Downing Street is that she has been too busy running from photoshoot to photoshoot, desperately plying a very bored public with images of her pretending to be Margaret Thatcher 2.0
Steve Baker speaks for himself- unfortunately everything he says is unrepentant nonsense, usually a bastardised bible quote.

As to the “more decent” tories, I’ve heard many people quietly applaud Penny Mordaunt for standing with LGBT+ people: just like every right winger, suddenly people like Mordaunt realise the virtues of my hated word, “tolerance” when related to an LGBT+ person. Mordaunt’s brother, a gay man has rightly criticised the conservatives for being unabashedly anti LGBTQ+.
Tom Tugendhat- everybody’s favourite placeholder tory, a man who still voted cheerfully for all the hideous things the tories have wrought upon us, a man who continued to sit behind Johnson no matter what he did. “Maybe he wanted to temper Johnson” many people say- and to that I simply reply “temperance does not arise from complicity”.

The long and the short of what I’m saying is frankly, this: there are no decent tories, no Conservative party to salvage. When they sold the British public out by allowing a suffusion of far right entrants through the brexit party and the other violent nationalist parties, they invited venom into their veins. That toxin has crept into every artery, suffused the entire party and now their corruption is laid bare for those with willing eyes to see. The party who at least had plausible deniability is gone and in its place is a grouping of extremists who have the taste of power in their mouths along with the astringent bite of rot.

The public desperately needs change and a functional government. When a battery dies you don’t just flip the battery around and put it back in- you put a new battery in place. So why must we accept more sub-standard words from insincere political shysters who will only propagate the problems they have so far failed to fix?

The way forward is clear but forked: do we go the route other nations appear to be embracing with full scale revolt? As I write this, Sri Lanka’s president has been chased out of the presidential palace… violence is not an answer but in times of great economic strife it becomes a brutal means to an end. We should strive to avoid it- but it should also be something the government actively works to calm, and with MPs like Andrea Jenkyns flipping off crowds and known liars like Sunak and Truss attempting to wrest control of the party it does not appear they are doing so.

The common sensical path is a coalition of leftist parties, deep discussions on the factions of the left to create a plan of how to move forward through tactical voting, installation of the government we want, pressure for what we need like voter reforms, PR, the removal of the tories destructive writs and more open dialogue in the UK on what type of policies we both want and need.

Clear before us lies political upheaval- the question is, will it arrive by fracture or by coalition?
Whichever way lies the path forward one thing is clear- the tories have inflicted much misery upon us, and we must at all costs prevent them from doing so again. Johnson is a fan of quoting Shakespeare so let us remember: there are daggers in men’s smiles- and only by raising shields against those weapons will we see a new Britain we can at last be proud of.

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 unsettling 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.

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.

Really? During a cost of living crisis and the most corrupt prime minister in history you want to talk about GENITALS?

By Daviemoo

The law states that a transgender person- regardless of gender reassignment surgery- is their stated gender. So yes, by law a woman can have a penis. Whether you personally think a woman can have a penis or not is a personal decision, and doesn’t- and shouldn’t- change the law. But if you don’t have more important things to focus on than someone else’s genitalia then you live in unimaginable privilege and it’s time someone told you that.

As a young boy I was given a never ending list of things that made a man a man. If I’d imbibed them all I suppose I’d consider myself not a man now- or I’d have tried to become the woman bedding wood chopping dilettante that is constantly touted as what a “real man” is. Ultimately, whilst society can have a broad consensus on what constitutes a man or a woman it’s really down to every single individuals’ personal feeling, an answer that will of course frustrate any transphobic or regressive folk who read this- but think about it.
You know you’re a woman, yes? What makes you a woman? Is it just a lack of a penis or is it a multitude of things? And if someone else gave you a list of what they think a woman is that conflicts with yours does that make you less of a woman or is it irrelevant?
There is your answer to this entire protracted exhausting debate around gender. To themselves and in the eyes of the law a trans person is their stated gender and you can’t and won’t change that any more than the fact they are that gender to themselves alters your gender. NOW CAN WE MOVE ON?

Every day the media assails us with endless rhetoric around whether women can have penises, why do we need to call it chest feeding, what about bathrooms and shelters and on and on- as if suddenly 70% of children instead of around 0.7% identified as trans, as though trans people are positively sweeping the globe! It’s the new catchy phenomenon- that affects less than 1% of people.

Ah but then of course comes the argument- should 99% of people be made uncomfortable by this less than 1% of people? No… but they aren’t. Transphobia is not the popular theory we’re constantly told it is by right wing knee jerk reactionaries like the person who prompted this article today, the ever ineffable Nick Ferrari. Most people don’t feel uncomfortable around trans people because most people realise that a trans person is a person trying to live their lives in a world that seems to be doing its utmost to hinder that. Would I expect women to be comfortable with the pontificating, red faced pillock that is Ferrari tumbling into their gym changing room and haranguing them about their dress size? No. But Ferrari isn’t identifying as a woman, because he isn’t one. There’s a gulf between a trans woman and a cis man and the constant ignoring of this fact is what drives most of us who are not trans but are fucking sick of the endless recycling of the anti trans talking points are fed up of.

How often do you see strangers’ genitals? Me, usually about 50 minutes after I’ve hopped on Grindr, and other than that never.

I avoid looking at people at the gym because I’m not a creep- and if you, like utterly obsessive people like Staniland, spend your time talking about furtively staring at the dangly parts of strangers in the hopes of justifying your moral outrage, you may come to realise that you are the spooky one, not the person just trying to use the facilities.

Ultimately, I feel I need to say this very clearly for transphobic people- and I’m sorry to my trans mates, I don’t mean this to sound as insensitive as it will but- the correct answer to “can a woman have a penis” is I DON’T CARE. I don’t care what’s in your pants, what you were born with or as, I don’t care. I care about you on an individual level and the only time your genitals factor in is if I want us to see each other naked or if you plan to weaponise them against me.
The stats clearly speak to the fact that trans people are not a danger, not simply because they barely exist in the first place but also because trans transgressions (say that five times fast…) barely exist as well!
Websites developed by TERFS would have you believe that around every 3rd turn in a city a trans person is waiting to assail you with what they conceal beneath their clothes- it’s confected outrage and the fact that so many people endlessly fall for it is so consternating. Maya Forstater claims to care for women and yet has declared previously she doesn’t believe in period poverty and only referenced the overturning of abortion legislation in the days after it was leaked to say WOMEN, NOT PEOPLE. Truly, picking at language is the real indicator that you’re a champion of women.

With all of the things going wrong in the UK right now- coronavirus killing approximately 83,000 of us a year, a government making their own corruption legally unassailable, the breakup of the union, the worsening war in Ukraine and our ever increasing march towards direct involvement- focusing on whether a person has an inny or an outy in their private personal area is the height of pathetic. If you feel like trans people are encroaching on your freedom you may want to double check you can still vote after the restrictions on ID came in. If you feel that trans people are taking your rights away I hope you dont want to protest about it because you literally can’t do that any more without risking legal repercussions. And if you feel trans people are dictating laws and sensibilities to you, you may want to know that the government is enforcing laws that means the far right are able to visit and speak at universities and cannot be turned away.
All of the posture, bluster and noise around trans rights has done absolutely nothing but allow actual fascistic rhetoric to embed itself and breed in the fabric of the UK- and that’s why when people tell you you’re supporting fascists and authoritarians, they’re right.

If people keep their genitals to themselves what they have shouldn’t concern you, and if you don’t believe trans people are who they say they are you have the legally protected right to think so- but you also can’t go around blustering at people about it because it’s rude- so you have what you want, you can air your views, you already have access to single sex spaces -but if it’s now gotten to the point that you’re dissecting, in depth, what genitals people have and don’t have you truly have walked off the reservation. I urge you to get some perspective and focus on actual tangible issues instead of the concealing of genitalia.

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.

(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.

Until Johnson is gone the UK has no hope of democracy

As Boris Johnson’s fist tightens around the throat of democracy, one has to ask: will he jump or be pushed, and will we be gathered around the coffin of our long standing governance before long… or can we resuscitate the UK’s political sphere into something recognisable when he goes?

Many scholars who study authoritarian regimes have spoken out about commonalities between the conservative government and more radical and open authoritarian governments across the world: one of the keenest scholars of authoritarian legislature is known as OpenBookshelf on several social media platforms, and I recently invited her to speak with me about authoritarianism. 

The meat of our conversation focused around the subversion of any attempt at democratic discourse under the Johnson regime- from the effective illegalisation of protest to seeking to overrule judicial decisions, effectively giving the government unilateral powers of censure: these are tools of truly toothless governments seeking to solidify support under the silence of the oppressed. 

Johnson’s cabal embodies the antithesis of “the other”: rich (but not all rich), white (but not all white), brash (but not all brash). It is a cabinet that personifies the worst aspects of the British public and seems to work to the destruction of the offices they helm, all the way from a home secretary whose parents naturalised and who harbours what seems to be a sociopathic distaste for people who come from overseas (all legally, as there is no illegal way to seek refuge…), a simpering culture minister who did not know that the de facto video hosting site for everything from politics to cookery to DIY, YouTube, was being “used by young people to learn things”– a chancellor of the exchequer who has been overseeing the rules that allowed his wife to pay less tax than she was due to pay in the UK and refuses to clarify whether he too is a benefactor. 

But the rot which corrodes the front of the house extends further, sinuous tendrils working its way through tories who accuse their constituents of “selling school meal vouchers to brothels and crack dens” or who blithely accuse doctors, nurses and teachers of flouting lockdown rules like Johnson so confidently has done. 

The problem with this cultish populist government, if you’d like to pick one specific problem, is that this acidification of the pillars of democracy will lead to a fatal erosion: and what will be left when the corinthian columns of freedom no longer exist?

Well, to fret over that, one has to believe they do still exist and I, for one, do not.

In a democracy, a government who obtained 44% of the vote overall would not be in power with a huge majority: the tories spent more time splitting the left vote with endless smears of a fairly decent politician in Corbyn, promising empty shelves (as they delivered not once but twice during the pandemic) and escalated bills and taxes (as they have now provided so expertly). But Corbyn’s labour had it’s own myriad problems from upheld claims of anti jewish sentiment to internal saboteurs, and the left vote was split so widely that we have this watered down opposition bench and a furious SNP desperate to extricate itself from English politics and be done with Westminster once and for all- however you may feel about indyref one or two, it would be churlish to deny that Scotland has founded grievances especially after watching the tories openly jeering Ian Blackford during today’s debate about Johnson’s wilful lies at the despatch box: any pretence that Scottish politics is respected in parliament is belied by their actions. 

Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.…’

Winston Churchill, speaking about democracy and it’s flaws

Democracy may not be perfect- America’s downfall to and through Trumpism and the UK’s similar crash and burn into Johnsonism has demonstrated this. And yet Democracy means something tangible to all and sundry who rest under it: it is infinitely preferable to the invisible shackles of other rules where the will of the people is so thoroughly ignored or discounted.

In a democracy, a failing and floundering party in charge would not be propped up by press punditry, where regulars who knew of Johnson’s failure to uphold the standards of the PM would have reported without delay, or going further back would simply have been honest about his unsuitability for the job. Instead he was painted as the roguish journo turned political pundit who would magically MUGA- Make Us Great Again.

In a democracy, a party who repeatedly broke manifesto pledges is… well, par for the course, unfortunately- everybody knows that manifesto pledges are subject to change dependant on the conditions of the world but the conservatives are diligent at one thing only: disregarding manifesto promises under the guise of covid, brexit and war. Many conservative voters have been programmed to believe that the war in Ukraine is responsible for escalated energy prices and tax hikes: but both were decided long before Putin’s fist came down upon the border of Ukraine and this can be seen on this very blog- I spoke months ago about the proposed NI hike and my disgust at a government wilfully raking money away from the British proletariat. The broken promises aren’t the main issue so much as the lies around their reasoning: a desperation for cash, the wilful dismissal of concerns around energy storage and long term green infrastructure and terrible health secretaries forcing restrictive contracts on doctors, or more bothered about kissing colleagues than running an effective health service have led to an NHS strapped for cash and bent backwards over the knee as covid continues to kill over 500 people a day. 

In a democracy, then, we would see feasible solutions to a government who has proven itself unable to front its duties: but we don’t. We see a desperate cadre of MPs more concerned about their pay packets than the corruption seething at its core. Johnson was not the architect of the erasure of democracy- it far precedes him- but he is the accelerant, the petrol upon the slow burning flame that has now turned into an explosion through our oft highly regarded political spectrum and this is glaringly obvious to those who dare to stare into the flash point.

Under the last labour government the education secretary resigned because exam targets were not hit, despite the protestations of the prime minister of the time. That is honour, and duty and overall the brave ownership of a job not so well done. In place of that long respected system of accountability we now see cronyism at it’s finest as Johnsonite stooges circle the bullet-riddled wagons to protect a man who has completely derailed transparency in politics.

Johnson’s ascent to power was solidified between (as Supertanskiii has spoken extensively about) client journalism a la Laura Kuenssberg, an ever increasing tory bias at the BBC and a desperation to empower a right wing leader with supposed Charisma: whatever you think of Johnson, somehow he manages to capture the credulity of smarter people. He has been described as roguish and comedic, hosted TV shows and written entertaining articles utterly bereft of fact. Add to that the indulgent upbringing of a boy who is quoted as saying he wished to one day be king of the world and powerful friends like Evgenny Lebvedev assuring him that he would rise to the top job if he backed brexit and you see that Johnson has both clawed for the job and been pushed uphill by those with agendas he could fulfil: now at last that Brexit has decimated the economy but deepened the pockets of the already wealthy, perhaps his ‘good friends’ are done with him at last- will the PM so known for leaving the wreckage of marriages, friendships and reputations in his wake hear the crash when his marionette strings fall loose at last and he falls to earth from his ascension? 


Until Boris Johnson is ousted from his lofty perch and finally feels the sting of repercussions for his scorn towards the office and the British public we will only see this merry go round of fervent front benchers and unashamed back benchers forced before us to defend, deny and distract us at the valuable expense of our dignity and the last shreds of their respectability. The conservative government has long commanded my grudging respect as a party that will ruthlessly do what it takes to uphold it’s own values. Now it does not even have that. I am not their target audience, not their voter base- but their expert job in alienating their voters to enshrine a man who has destroyed their credibility has been something to behold, and until they decisively show Johnson the door for his misdeeds, his shadow will be cast long and wide over the always detestable but once, at least, respectable- Tory Party, henceforth known as the party of illicit parties.  

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.

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.

Coronavirus, Brexit and the things we’re not talking about

By Daviemoo

The UK gleefully poked holes in our economy on what outwardly appears to be a vanity project- but Brexit has been linked to dark money, media control and more. Credible sources link the leave campaign to dirty money, to abject lies and to the smoky backrooms of extremist campaigns or even to Rupert Murdoch bouncing the PM’s child on his knee as he told him of his dream of media supremacy. What appears to simply be a national embarrassment is actually many issues twined together around the central core of political apathy cultured by years of terminally inept governance. From the head of a party now steeped in the deepest corruption accusations in modern British politics to the salacious headlines of a press desperate to flog it’s latest issue, we’re bombarded by the temerity of the conservatives’ political corruption. But what of the things we need to talk about- but are avoiding, ignoring… or are kept ignorant of?

The stats were never promising, but the UK economy is, in some ways, decimated. As a remainer it’s not funny or nice to be proven right but it was never in doubt to me. I, and anyone else who worked to campaign hard for a vote to stay in the European Union, knew it would come. Of course, those who pushed hard for Brexit still stand by their ideologue (Brexit truly has become an ideology, I’m only stunned at this point that they have not designed a flag, so steeped in mythology and iconography are the hands of the shady right who pushed for this result). They are welcome to. Anyone with common sense feels the decline. And those who sneered at 11pm on the night we left the EU talking about how “see, the world didn’t end” have no idea how ironic their statements would become with the swiftly encroaching Coronavirus pandemic.

As stated here in Bloomberg, the effects of economic downturn were (ironically) masked by Johnson’s exceptionally poor Brexit deal- this was though the PM who championed the idea of a no deal Brexit which functionally is this very deal, with more scattered lines on expensive paper. This tarted up confetti has Johnson’s grubby fingerprints on every page- and much like one of his fumbled love interests, it’s a job left undone to everyone elses’ detriment. I, and others who are intrigued by the trajectory of the Brexit process, are firmly of the belief that Prime Minster Johnson still believed that remain was the right option but knew that defecting to leave would seal his fate as the maverick who “got it done”. So desperate as he is for the top job but so resistant to responsibility, this explosive recipe has caused each household in the UK the same silent and aching damage as any natural disaster could have.

With rocketing food prices, a continuing cavity in the UK workforce, discontent from Scotland, Wales and literal rioting in Ireland with nothing said of increasing prices due to a woeful lack of foresight on energy supply and implementation, there should be piles of evidence stacked to the tip of the three peaks on why our break away from the union was a mistake. And yet our media, a compliant and suppurating pet of the government was loathe to finally address these issues- it took three days of twelve mile queues due to new implementation of post brexit checks and paperwork and the government wilfully switching off road traffic cameras for the press to pick up on the happenings at Dover. Human cig packet and part time goose step trainer Nigel Farage was literally AT dover, scowling with frustration at Dinghies full of the refugees our armies machinations displaced, and so keen he was to tut and pontificate to his camera crew he must have missed the tailbacks that his raison d’etre was causing literally over the hill.

But even amongst government coverups, corruption and lies there is a more insidious truth that I have yet to see dragged out before us all.

The government’s handling of the Coronavirus pandemic could, in less serious circumstances, be called laughable. But with 150k and counting of our country men, women and children dead I can’t seem to muster anything but frustration.

Why has the government’s handling of this pandemic been so woeful? The explanation, I fear, may be more horrifying than people wish to admit to.

One may, at this point, wonder whether Johnson wants the pandemic to continue to obfuscate the heart deep gashes of our EU exit- and to continue to fill the already bursting pockets of his donors…

Where it began to where we are

Photo by freestocks.org on Pexels.com

When David Cameron put match to tinder by announcing his intent to hold a referendum, wheels began to turn amongst the rich and powerful to ensure a lack of European oversight on tax evasion, and about overhauling worker rights to the detriment of the workers themselves. Even at the inception of the idea those who counted themselves economically savvy knew that the likelihood of prosperity for the UK was a remote dream, only possible if we had an exceptionally dedicated, powerful and talented team who would have worked nonstop from 2016 to 2020 to push through deals and use world standing to ensure that the UK would be able to change gear into a self sufficient entity.
What actually happened, as we see, was the implementation of a narrowly requested brexit which wasn’t understood, wanted or seen as anything other than a shiny trophy to place on a shelf: “We stuck our fingers up at the EU and all we got was this lousy brexit”.

The hissing fuse leading to an the unsatisfying pop of the legal severing of EU relations was always due to let down brexiteers, hence the fanfare at 11pm on that strange night- but the explosion came mere months later. Coronavirus hit our shores. Faux laid back updates from our government pitched the idea of simply letting the virus sweep the nation, infecting hundreds of thousands of hapless citizens. At the time, it seemed like a callous and ill-informed idea: We knew very little of the virus, it’s death rate, severity- even the symptoms so widely known now weren’t in common parlance.

It was at this point that suspicions should have been raised- capitalist we are, and aggressively pro economy the conservatives may be but the simple fact is dead people can’t buy and sell goods… and this wasn’t the simple suggestion of allowing a cold to infect us- this virus was provably dangerous, there was no cure, no treatment, only survival or death.

As time rolled on, the government threw back the restrictions with a glee that outmatched the dire situation. Scientists- along with literally any person with common sense- spoke out against the government’s plans to entrench a temporary “eat out to help out” scheme, a scheme which demonstrably boosted our wounded economy by balancing it on the hospital beds of swathes of newly infected and dying patients- estimations from the University of Warwick demonstrate that 7 to 17% of new infections may have stemmed from eat out to help out.

Again, the curtain dropped, and again too late. Johnson was developing a reputation for lassitude and lack of action: but was it lassitude, or did he know that every lockdown would lead to further evidence that under the surface of the coronavirus pandemic, brexit rot was writhing it’s way through the economy already shrunk by his deal?

Rinse and repeat through another lockdown and reopening, through Matt Hancock’s well publicised clinch with a colleague- Johnson all the while celebrating the UK’s independence.

Photo by FRANK MERIu00d1O on Pexels.com

One of the prime minister’s favourite lines to visit is that the UK’s vaccine rollout would have been slower and less successful had we been in the EMA (European Medicines Agency) – this is, I’m sure you will be shocked to discover, a complete fabrication because the EU medicines agency was only advisory and the UK’s scheme could and would have rolled out as the NHS dictated based on the prescient scheme they were already developing. So the EU wouldn’t have helped the vaccine rollout but it would not have hurt it as Johnson so likes to claim at the despatch box: a provable lie that is still yet to fell the beast.

A picture began to emerge as we saw shortages directly related to the reality of Brexit – from workers to goods: Blame the pandemic. Johnson crouched behind the wall of mistruths he’d built, heaping blame on the pandemic, on the pingdemic, on the woke lefty remainers- refusing to capitulate to the ever increasing doldrum gong that the problems stemmed in no small part from his deal, from our departure from the trade union and free movement which had allowed our market and our businesses to work before.

This of course is nothing to say of the decimation of farmers and fishers- coronavirus restricted independent farmers ability to sell simply because they could not see their clients or prospect to new ones – but out at sea, invisible borders had shot from the sea floor into the skies, raining fish passports down upon UK waters and cutting us off from prime areas and the market which had bought from us previously. Even when fishermen COULD sell to the EU, new non-common market regulations meant that new higher standards must be met and to sell, new red tape had appeared. The evanescence of the dream of brexit appeared before it’s keenest voters who were left out in the indifferent moors they’d tended before, or the turbulent UK only waters.

And even amongst all of this, still hailed as a WIN for the UK brexit has been behind the government’s deranged fervour for throwing off restrictions at every turn. “Vaccines are our only way out” Johnson shouts, lips spittled with excitement as scientists behind him place their heads in their hands.

Vaccines will not save us, and now rejoining the EU is a distant dream – our commonality with our EU brethren has faded as the UK slowed, stopped, and reversed course, all on the desperate dream of an independence we never truly lost. And above it all, growing in the hundreds every day- a death rate which is the new currency of an economy decimated by surety in a nation split in two by a yes or no question. So as restrictions are set to vanish again so we can bolster a broken market, remember that every pound spent came at the cost of a loved one’s last, lonely breaths on a ventilator, all orchestrated by Alexander Boris De Pfeffel Johnson, the prime minister who chose nationalism over national safety- who chose lack of scrutiny over lack of security. Johnson is desperate to see his legacy sealed as PM, and sealed it is- as the PM who condoned our deaths for cash.

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.