LGBT+ Separatism; or “Why I’m Sick of Society”

By Daviemoo

This article is mainly aimed at fellow LGBT+ people- but I’d encourage you to read it if you aren’t part of our group, and rather than get offended, upset or confused about it- write to your MP and question why people in the LGBT+ are increasingly feeling this societal disconnection and how they can remedy it. As hate crime and deadly rhetoric ramps up, if your issue is to blame a symptom like LGBT+ people feeling fed up instead of the disease of virulent hate spreading through society like cancer in lymph nodes… you aren’t the ally you may think.

I came out at 15. Before I came out, I was petrified I’d be outed. I grew up knowing I was gay, or at least that I liked other men. I would have done anything not to be outed- then a friend at school I’d trusted started telling people behind my back and I thought, fuck it, people are going to find out. Why don’t I just rip off the bandaid. So I told everyone.

Turns out that was a good decision. Suddenly people couldn’t bully or offend me any more. “Ha, gayboy” was met with “yeah moron, I told you that…”. Suddenly I realised I’d been desperate for people to accept me for who I wasn’t, but I didn’t care if they didn’t accept me for who I was.
I had a renaissance with myself- finally I liked me for who I genuinely was, and I set about trying to do two things: make amends for my pre-coming out idiocy, and ensure that other people like me felt safe and happy enough to be themselves too.

When I went to college I tried and failed to set up an LGBT+ group. Only one other person came despite a multitude of people coming out to me- as bi, as trans, as curious.
That was fine; it was a strange time where society was largely okay with it- but woe betide you if you went home and told your family.
The reasoning behind working hard to set up groups, open chains of communication and be visible as an out gay teen was to spread awareness- and acceptance of- LGBT+ people as what we are: normal.
Honestly? The least exciting thing about me is that I like men with big chests and arms- the way heterosexual men treat videos of other men in the gym, I’m certainly not the only one. I just like them a bit more than you.
I realised, to my joy, that if you got offended when I mentioned my sexuality, that was very much a you problem- not to mention those who complained sometimes ended up being, to coin a modern phrase, a bit fruity.

On to uni and continually trying to join groups, meet others and spread more awareness that LGBT+ people are just people with an acronym you might not share. Things seemed to be going well. I remember the halcyon days of going quite literal years at a time without so much as a raised eyebrow over my sexuality, I remember the happy societal shift away from the phrases “sexual preference” (I don’t prefer men, I am incapable of being sexually attracted to women) or “tolerance” (I tolerate a sore neck until I can take painkillers, I prefer acceptance thanks). Things seemed to be on the up and up.

Then we come to the modern day.

I remember watching the trans panic start. Now, I already had a good friend who was trans. She came out to me on valentines day in 2013(?) with a huge garbled message, which ended with “and if you can’t accept this then I understand but I wanted you to know”. I laughed- why wouldn’t I accept my friend… I loved her, her gender was irrelevant. She told me about her feelings, her life, what was going on with her and it brought us closer together. I was just happy she was happy.
Watching people on the internet occasionally write salacious and stupid rumours around trans people was weird- picking out the story of the one transgender sex offender in a 900 mile radius was a weird argument to me considering if you took a long walk you’d walk past about 50 cisgender offenders- so I raised an eyebrow, but I figured someone had kicked a hornets nest of ignorance and they’d be distracted by sexy M&Ms or gas stoves before long (had to wait til 2023 for that).

But it didn’t die off. Instead what started as an online movement of people who say things like “biology not bigotry” yet making fun of the way people look whilst sharing photos of people with mastectomy scars, writing utter fiction to get angry about or blaming the crimes of non trans men on trans women continued to grow exponentially.
Then, inevitably, because trans people are accepted largely in the entire community- suddenly the accusations spread. Even yesterday, Bev Jackson who started the LGB alliance was begging slavishly on twitter for someone who tweeted that “the trans stuff” has made him go against gay marriage to realise that the movement she pushes every day is only meant to ruin some people’s lives, not hers.
“Groomer” is normalised parlance about anyone who is LGBT+ or supports us. In America states are legislating against trans healthcare, the parents of transgender people, drag performances and drag queens even being visible- as if men haven’t been in drag since quite literally Shakespeare’s day, as if I couldn’t go into my local city on a Friday night and find 30 cishet men in dresses as “banter” or “jokes”, as if men haven’t been pantomime dames, as if drag hasn’t been a subversive form of expression in our community for decades- And as if trans people haven’t existed in society for hundreds of years too. Suddenly this panic over our long existence has been fanned from embers to a towering inferno of societal ignorance, leaving people like me blinking in the light and heat.

Still, I hoped that there was a way to have rational discussion with people who had increasing fervour against our community.
That hope quickly died out.

I used to both want and need acceptance from the odd, flawed cishet patriarchal society in which I’ve been raised- a society I never used to question. I used to want to be able to walk down the street holding hands with another man and have nobody raise an eyebrow, talk behind their hands or call me a slur. I was praying (very atheistically) for the day that nobody gave a shit.
That hope is gone. I think people will always be bothered by my sexuality, by people’s gender expression or lack thereof. And what a sad realisation that was- that ignorance will continue and be permitted in a society too lazy to confront its shittiest members. I’ve watched- in the last month alone- people stand at microphones and state calmly that people like me should be executed, seen footage of bloody handprints left by bleeding humans mowed down by extremists walking into our spaces and snuffing us out, and I’ve heard lawmakers who don’t even understand the complications of chromosomes, gender, hormones, sex characteristics and intersex health conditions pass legislation that strips us of basic access to our rights or prevents us from pursuing our livelihoods as performers. And it’s clearly not enough for us to have the meagre spaces afforded to us by those who purchase bars and deck them out for us- we aren’t even safe in there between those who stand outside with weapons and those who walk in with them.

The difference is, I’m no longer viscerally upset by this. I don’t care any more because I don’t seek, or want, acceptance. I just need it to live in peace- and wanting and needing something is very distinct.

As these ridiculous scenarios have continued to spiral I’ve found myself more and more tired of being asked to be tolerant of narrow minded views of my community, been told we should sit and have constructive conversations with people who hold banners accusing us of paedophilia or grooming, and coming from the side who forces religion, dress code, mannerisms and more on their offspring it’s more than just a hair ironic. And I’m tired of watching a world where these ignorant, shouty fucks seem to be gaining ground- but the cherry on top is also being consistently surprised when people I think I can trust, from politicians to celebrities who take the crown of “ally” for themselves, to friends, suddenly break cover and reveal their own participation in this forest fire of ignorance.
This is why I’ve coined the phrase that inspired this article.

LGBT+ separatism

The entire idea behind LGBT+ separatism is to teach young LGBT+ people that societal acceptance is, for many of us, a need so we can live in peace- but it is not something to want beyond that. We should not want to participate in a society rooted in misogyny, built and paid for with white supremacy and which actively treats us with varying degrees of scorn, sympathy or vitriolic hatred.

LGBT+ people don’t choose our identities. When I was a child if you’d given me the ability to change my sexuality I’d have done it in a heartbeat. Now, I’ve been gay for so long and it’s so deeply wrapped around my perception of the world and how I’m treated I don’t think I’d ever change it even if it meant the difficulties that come with it being removed. But so often the argument of choice is levelled at us. People are genuinely foolish enough to believe someone wakes up one day and rashly decides they’re a different gender or that they like their same-gender friend as more than a friend. It doesn’t happen that way for the vast majority of us, and if you’re in executive control of your sexuality or gender then you’re different than I- but choice or not, it’s worthy of respect, rights and equality.

I’m aware of the dangers of this movement- becoming lax about the necessity of acceptance is a byproduct of this type of disillusionment and we can never lose sight of the idea that society does have to offer us some acceptance, simply to ensure our existences are not threatened and legislated against. The goal is not to move away from striving for that, demanding and making the case for progress in our safety- it is simply to offer an alternative to being exposed to the daily humdrum of this flawed society.

The ideal scenario would be an island populated only by LGBT+ people, where we only interact with each other. A pipe dream of course, but one I sometimes find myself imagining.

People will, of course, assume I think our community is perfect and we’d create some utopic existence. I do not. I am aware of the problems in our community, mostly perpetuated by white cis gay men like myself. It’s my sincere belief that we’d be able to confront and deal with these issues if we created this separatist society- but lets be honest, it’s a pipe dream anyway, and I as a cis het man benefit from natural high status in our community- and I fucking hate that that is the case. Our community is a microcosm of wider societal ignorance and gender, skin colour, ability etc shouldn’t (and I would hope wouldn’t) dictate societal superiority in that world.

My intermediary wish is for us to create pathways to withdraw from participation in this society as much as possible, to form our own subculture, our own ways of navigating outside the mainstream- like rocks at the bottom of a rushing river and the network between them, I want to move through life surrounded by those who also seek refuge from this ridiculous society.
Some would call this an echo chamber- name it how you will, disparage it if you must. Your participation in a society that necessitates this type of action is the reason for its existence.

How we achieve this, I wish I knew. There would be, must be, should be ways for us to create this network, methods to create rules that apply, resources we can rely on that can create a buffer between us, if we number enough, and wider society- the generation of a sub culture specifically designed, catered for and administrated by the wider LGBT+ community.
But I don’t know for sure. I just know that as society continues to demonstrate its malignant denigration of us, I continue to become more enthusiastic over finding a workable alternative for a community who has suffered endlessly under religion, under heterosexual cisgender politicians and entitled, deluded public figures who aren’t even in our community but seek to command control over what it is, who is in it and how we live.

This is a cisgender, heterosexual person commenting on an article saying specifically that more people are identifying in England and Wales as LGB+.

When it comes to the LGB alliance, the only answer those in our community stupid enough to try and seek acceptance from those who continue to hate us ever give me when I ask exactly what they have done for our community is – “They support the rights of people to be same-sex attracted”. So not stopping the government deporting LGB people (which, by the way, trans people can also be), to countries that will cut their heads off? Not lobbying the government for strengthening of equality laws to ensure that we don’t suffer discrimination like I did in the workplace? Just a movie nobody saw and making you feel like you’re justified in your bigotry? That’s not helpful. They did however publish a tweet suggesting gay marriage was pointless because “not enough” of us use it. I was unaware there was a quota for when gay marriage is a good idea, or that it was a finite resource we all needed to get for ourselves.

When it comes to the enablers of bigotry above, or the people who embody that bigotry with their stance against us, if they don’t want us in their society- fine. I get it. I don’t wan’t them in society either. Small difference being I’d like them to educate themselves into not being arseholes and some of them want me to be imprisoned just for being alive.

You see the difference? I want ignoramii to fill their empty brain cells with knowledge of why bigotry isn’t cool- bigots want us to be imprisoned or killed. There’s a difference.
I wish we were like oil and water, that I would sink past the phobic in the world and be able to move on with my day without even realising they were there.
So my question to the community is: is it possible? Is it workable? Can we do it?

There will, inevitably, be backlash to me even writing these words- people accusing me of heterophobia or cisphobia. To that I’d like you to accept one very large, long eye-rolling movement from me.
If you dislike me for my sexuality, please dont be surprised that I dislike you for your opinions. And if you are a homophobe, why the hell do you want my approval any more than I’d want yours?
Overall, the accusations of cisphobia are dumb (im cis…) and heterophobia are laughable- much like a white Brit claiming to be experiencing racism because a black person calls them cracker- feel offended by this article all you want- then turn around and walk out your front door into a society and a country that accepts you entirely, that doesn’t cause you issues based on your identity and understand that the reason your shoulders don’t sag when you leave your home is because you emerge into a society that is made for you- a luxury many of us don’t experience.

I am tired of being part of a group that is demonised for its worst members or its imagined crimes by a group who refuses to get its own house in order. I am sick to my back teeth of institutions like the Church, thick with well defended paedophiles and based on a book that condones slavery, rape and forced marriage or misogynistic nonsense being held up as a moral authority, over a community who are forced to gather in the dark spaces we’re reluctantly given. And most of all I’m tired of trying to cater to a society who believes people like us are wrong because it is too narrow to realise that an identity that isn’t a carbon copy of their own is not wrong.

Overall my aim in writing this piece is to start the process of making links with others who feel the same and beginning the process of forming the links to build a separatist network. Your gender, skin colour, age, disability does not matter in this group- it is simply about founding a community in a new sub culture that exists within the bowels of this corrupt system in which we’re trapped and offering solace in a world we are forced to participate in- but no longer wish to.

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.

Eyeshadow and gunpowder: the imaginary war on cishet society

By Daviemoo

LGBTQ+ existence has long been pitted as a culture war where the bejewelled combatants assail everyday ways of life, hurling gay grenades down the halls of institutions like American congress or men in leather pants and harnesses are kicking in the doors of middle England to convert your children.
There is no war, and it’s time to quite literally put down your guns.

I had an argument today which I’ve screencapped for your perusal.
As an Englishman I find American obsession around guns and gun laws to be absolutely gauche. But most of all, when men crow about their love of carrying guns I look at people like that with a mix of utter suspicion and- frankly- derision.

I find this type of delusional thinking objectively fascinating. The lack of nuance never fails to amaze me: if I walked into a kitchen and saw a man brandishing a knife I wouldn’t bat an eye- contextually it’s normal even if a knife is a deadly weapon- but if I saw a man brandishing a knife walking down the street I’d be pretty within my rights to think “well… that’s not good”.
Same with a gun. In the right context, guns don’t scare me: I’ve been on shooting ranges and guns in that context are normal- I’ve also walked past the mint in Leeds where money is created, and had police with P90s stand looking at me warily. It’s intimidating, and it’s done for one of two reasons: to avert danger, or to threaten it.

Men with guns aren’t out stretching their firearm’s legs, there is a reason behind why they carry weaponry and walking out of my favourite gay bar after a show to find a line of men dressed up like marines rejects fingering the trigger of an AK47 is, understandably, nerve wracking- and yet honestly mystifying.

To act like fear is not the motivator for carrying guns- why else has anyone ever carried a weapon in history- either to do harm, or protect themselves from it- so which scenario do these anti drag folks envision- protecting themselves from drag queens or wreak harm on them. Ironic too, for people used to carry sidearms back in Shakespeare’s day… when this newfangled “men in dresses” thing started, because there were no women in Shakespeare’s plays, only men in drag.


Perhaps I’m wrong, perhaps it’s rage. Either way it’s misplaced. If it’s rage, be reminded that drag queens aren’t trying to convert your children: it’s impossible to do that and a huge swath of the LGBT+ will tell you so. If it was possible to convert, how many of us would have chosen the path of least resistance in our youth to avoid this ridiculous argument we’re forced into. If conversion was possible, conversion therapy would work: it doesn’t, it leaves most of its victims psychologically scarred enough that they don’t act on their urges, but it doesn’t remove them. I’d also hasten to point out that the existence of conversion therapy speaks to who is trying to “groom” whom into being like the other.

If it’s fear that necessitates dragging firearms around, which I suspect, I fail to see what’s so scary about a man in a dress and fake nails, other than the possibility of a catty comment or being accidentally blinded by flying sequins. But can we be surprised that so many are radicalised into thinking LGBT+ people are creating a WAR on normativity? Look at the messages pumped out by conservative media outlets.

Each of these things has been described by Fox News as having a “WAR” against it

If there was a war; we wouldn’t stand a chance.
3.5% of Americans identify as gay or lesbian. 0.3% identify as transgender. If 3.8% of the population waged war it’s not exactly going to go well- is it.
But conservative types are desperate to push this narrative that anyone outside of their normative model is assailing it, coming for your way of life, trying to FORCE you to be like them.

Making small concessions towards a tiny fragment of the population isn’t war. Not asking people personal questions that you don’t want the answer to any more than we want to give it is not war. If you ask if I have a wife and I say no, and you tell me I should be married at my age and I just smile and say nothing you’re being intrusive- why not leave it instead of prying further then being offended when I tell you I’m gay? It’s like purchasing a rod, waiting for it to arrive, taking it out of the box then handing it to someone and asking them to hit you with it.

It may come as a shock: I don’t want there to be more gay people in the world: I want the people who are to be able to come out and be happy if they so wish, I want the people who are trans to get their healthcare and get on with their lives, and especially, I want people so brainwashed by the endless shouts of WAR, WAR, WAR against them to let go of the rhetoric and realise they’re not being threatened by gay people- but by their perception of us: you’re fighting ghosts.
Yes, you might get fired if you call me a slur. I might get fired if I call someone a slur… it’s not a right I have that you don’t, simply that there are no slurs to describe you and even if there were I wouldn’t use them- but of course, normative culture has a morose obsession with trying to make normal words slurs.
TikTokers like Nicholasvanj call heterosexual people “upsetterosexuals” or “straggots” and then face deluges of “HETEROPHOBIA” in their comments. People constantly decry the use of the word cis when it’s literally a descriptor like “tall”, “athletic” or “interesting”. If you don’t want to be called cis I won’t call you cis- but I’m sure going to be confused about how you’ll wring insult out of a factual descriptive word with no negative connotations, and I’ll make extra sure that you don’t use any offensive lingo either- you’d be fascinated by how many people offended by a biological descriptor like cis throw around anti trans or homophobic words with what they believe is impunity.

The saddest part is that most virulently anti LGBT+ people seem miserable, obsessed with something that isn’t their concern. I cannot imagine spending my life wrapped so intimately around something I find disgusting. But they cannot simply disengage because there almost seems to be a need to create a dark shibboleth of the community, to make us the enemy that worsens their lives, poisons their water and steals their precious children into depravity. I don’t just want them to stop because they endanger my life with their increasingly provocative rhetoric: I want them to stop because I don’t like seeing miserable people yelling about my private life 24/7 and I think they must have better things to do with their time: Imagine how much happier you’d be if you stopped worrying about imaginary genitals or whether I’m a top or a bottom. So much free time to knit, to go to the gym, read, drink beer, I don’t care- just stop obsessing over people who, frankly, want nothing to do with you.

Heteronormative men in particular are desperate for there to be some sort of attack against them- constantly pushing the rhetoric that they are having their way of life dismantled, their freedoms taken away, their free speech censored. Unfortunately this is what parity looks like: when you finally get held to the same standards as others it’s not because we’re taking your rights away, it’s that we’re applying societal norms to you that your predecessors did not face.
Let’s imagine there is this fabled war though, and when they win, when they finally take over… then what?
I don’t understand the world that the men who espouse such toxic nonsense actually want, and frankly I don’t think they do either. If you rid the world of the LGBT+ and the feminists and the feminine men, how long do you think it would be until the less masculine men were up next, charged with feminising the real alphas… and which group would you be in? If every man suddenly became a super masculine paragon of manliness it would be a flash before they turned against themselves- they have to have an enemy to survive, because the whole ethos of the “alpha” male is victimhood garbed as strength, and if nobody is there to pick on them.. what then? It’s an ideology that folds in on itself like poorly done origami the moment it’s subjected to critical scrutiny, and one too many men fall into to expunge blame for their own failings when they are often the arbiters of their own misery against each other.

The fallacious thinking of the meninist crowd is made complex by people debating the grossly vapid talking points of empty fools like Andrew Tate, who likes to spend his time failing to antagonise 19 year old women on the internet or by lionising the actions of those cosplaying Navy SEALs outside drag bars when it’s really very simple: Men have spent years being lied to by media, shown movies where masculinity is control, manliness is anger, where if you just keep pestering, eventually she’ll say yes- from James Bond movies to every other action movie dross, negative masculinity is at the forefront of most of our historical media. Men grow up being told if you’re rude and dismissive to women they’ll do what you want because all women secretly want bad men- but wait, no, feminism is ruining it, making women think they have equal status? You have to put effort into dating? To men who think like this, I have to ask: do you even like women? I saw an interview with a meninist recently who argued his girlfriend should not be allowed to go on holiday without him because other men looking at her is disrespectful to him.
Security with a partner comes from trust, and if you cannot trust you are deeply damaged. Forcing someone into fidelity by simply refusing to allow them to go anywhere and do anything is not a paragon of masculinity, it exemplifies true fragility- and if you disagree, reverse the roles and ask yourself how you would feel about a woman averse to allowing her partner to go on holiday without her…? Control freak? Crazy?… Insecure.
It’s no different in the inverse.
A partner is just that: someone on equal standing who supports you as you support them, and if you’re too weak and fragile to be in a relationship with an equal I want to heartily assure you- it’s not women who have the problem in that scenario. Strength seeks strength, so if you hope to find a weak willed woman who will do what you say it’s because of your own inherent weakness, not because of your strength.

Further, LGBT+ people aren’t coming for your way of life. Many LGBT+ people call for integration into cishet society and whilst I understand it, the older I get the more I want some form of base separatism. I want to be left alone to live my gay life in a gay subculture that barely bumps against straight culture. I don’t want to have to mask my irritation at insensitive questions about my sex life, or feign patience when I listen to someone say “I’m fine with it, I just wish they’d leave kids out of it” when I have always known I was gay and was suicidal as a child and into my mid teens because nobody could or would help me understand it, and despite this endless patient explanation still being told “but some people might take advantage”- again, creating imaginary “what if” scenarios proves to me only that you’re more interested in living in an imaginary world than the physical one.
If you want to have a realistic conversation about indoctrination lets talk about forcing children to say the pledge of alliegance, or splashing water on their forehead so they don’t go to purgatory forever or relentlessly pestering your young children about if they have a girlfriend or a boyfriend… or is is that there’s good and bad types of grooming and indoctrination?

Society is crowded with bigots riled up by media pundits whose mission is to make you think everyone who isn’t a carbon copy of you- skin colour, political affiliation, sexual proclivities- is coming to destroy your life. Ironic, then, that they so readily destroy lives that they see as apart from their own.
If your existence is maintained via the dismantlement of other peoples’ normal, perhaps your normal is the aberration.

When it comes to masculinity, the very idea of feeling so threatened by a drag artist that you hover outside their work with a loaded gun is not masculine: The essence of masculinity is security, displayed by being so unbothered by gun toting yahoos that you cooly stroll into work unbothered by the threat of their presence.
If you want to shame people for dressing up to be that which they are not, might I suggest you take off your store bought army garb, holster your unused firearm and realise you’re just as much- if not more than- a cosplayer as those you hope vainly to threaten.

Political lying is Normalised worldwide- it is a travesty

By Daviemoo

From the top job to opposition parties, from the ineffectual reporting of “untruths” and “unlawful actions” by the government in a media who, wholesale, sanitise the actions of the inept in power, the United Kingdom suffers from an insidious sickness: political lies. Here, today, a stark reminder that this should not be normal: that we deserve better from politicians, from our media- and from each other.

Rwanda, ‘The migrant problem’ and fundamental falsehoods

Rishi Sunak’s government is currently trying to re-sanitise itself- not quite a return to the norm; for example, the “party of law and order” is pushing, through sub-standard MP’s like Jonathan Gullis or public liabilities like Suella Braverman, to break human rights laws, and the “party of fiscal responsibility” keeps haemorrhaging leaks about misappropriation and misspending from PPE to fraud write-offs to wasted money on a brexit festival: it’s more of a re-branding. The twin forks of lawfulness and lawlessness, fiscal idiocy and fiscal responsibility show a party divided. And even when you legalise disgusting plans like “the Rwanda plan” otherwise known as government sanctioned human trafficking, its legality takes nothing from its repugnance.
Using the perceived face of the public, MP’s like Gullis push the angry, nonsensical and demonstrably false opinions of a British public that simply does not exist: a majority of the British public, contrary to the home secretary’s claims of yesterday, support refugee protections along with broad reforms in the UK’s operation, including opening further migrant processing centres in the UK. Remember also that at last count around 77% of claims were upheld, meaning deporting to Africa will cost much more as those who are approved are eventually settled regardless.

The furthering of this agenda is more unneeded proof of a government in tailspin: a plan grandiose enough to snare headlines and useless enough that the perceived “problem” with migrancy will continue: for those in doubt of this, let us take a moment to ask whether a roulette spin of possible deportation will deter people so desperate to try that they will climb into a half deflated, crowded boat and sail across a choppy sea, running the risk of an incident much like the one which occurred last week leading to death.

The government is lying about this plan. It will not deter migrants. It will not increase safety. It will not prevent people trafficking, and is, in fact, the legalisation of trafficking persons by a government more wrapped around ideological opposition to refugees than invested in border management. And this is by design: the more the government and media demonise migrants, the more the unthinking masses attribute their issues to these migrants rather than a government who has held power for twelve years, has had an overwhelming majority for three.
If the government truly wished to do so, it could prevent migrancy in almost totality: it does not, because migrants are a useful scapegoat: but how many migrants have voted for your taxes to go up and prevented runaway inflation?
And one must stop for a moment to marvel at the not funny but incredulous laughter inspiring parity and parody of a government who declares its most diverse cabinet in history, whilst preventing families like their own from settling peacefully here.

The government continues to spin the pop-culture issues like mass migration, the culture wars (from trying to strip royal titles from those they perceive as inferior despite this flying in the face of “chosen by God” to blaming the actions of sick, perverted men on transgender women and more) because they must, to maintain power, divert blame.

Braverman, when questioned on the fiscal irresponsibility of her Rwanda deportation scheme along with its general success prospects, accused her opponent, an SNP politician, of becoming “ideological”- an irony. Founded evidence shows that the UK has failed to create safe routes for refugees in key areas across the world- and this was shown in a stark and gut-churning select committee in which Braverman, who has aspired to the Home Secretary role for many months, who left in disgrace after leaking privileged information, who was mysteriously reappointed by Sunak despite this- could not provide a single safe and legal route for a high risk refugee. An ideology is a system of beliefs to which you cling even in the face of evidence that it is incorrect- and Braverman clings to the belief that refugees, not tory ineptitude, are the net cause of UK issues. But this is not unique: other areas of the UK in crisis are easily shown to have been failed continually by the tories in the last years and yet the issues in these areas are continually attributed elsewhere.

One must ask at what point the Conservatives do plan to take account for their leadership.

Failing the NHS-a capitalist choice

The NHS is always going to lose money. It’s clear that you must face that fact: healthcare is not, at its core, a money spinner despite the clear necessity of its’ duties. It is not a luxury, but a fundamental right- and in the UK it is currently neither.

The government’s determination to try to wring profit from the NHS is disturbing. There are pragmatic models of healthcare governance which show that fiscal competition can sometimes be a driver of increased health outcomes- but studies like this fail in totality to account for the humanity – and, worryingly, human cost of life or quality of life- behind these studies.
Outsourcing of healthcare may, as Wes Streeting, labour health secretary, says, help the NHS to function if done on a limited and short term basis- but Streeting’s determined positioning of those ideologically opposed to healthcare privatisation as “the real conservatives” misses out on the fundamental reasons behind why the NHS is lauded as a brilliant institution. Healthcare is not and should not be a for profit model, and ensuring that any costed privatised health brought in has no say in the NHS and simply provides the service at minimal taxpayer cost, should be seen as a sign of the utter dereliction the tories have run the service to.

Whilst tory ineptitude may force us, through lack of options, to outsource- one has to ask whether you can call for wholesale reforms whilst also giving temporary control of NHS services to the highest bidder: to fix problems, one needs a holistic approach; outsourcing services is a blocker on long term observance of those services and their issues, which will prevent resolution.
Worse still, those in direct power are determined to stand in the way of NHS improvement: diverting blame, obfuscating stories about medical staff leaving due to exhaustion and a basic reluctance to fairly compensate highly trained workers in literally lifesaving roles have led us to a crucial moment: the UK’s public must decide whether they stand with workers who somehow dragged us to this stage during the pandemic even with its existing systemic issues, or to capitulate to the double headed hydra of governmental malice and a media whose toe-point-switching of support and demonisation of NHS staff can only be described with a term I normally loathe: gaslighting.

The government has even openly resorted to employing bots on social media to spam disinformation:

Governmental think tanks align around certain core ideas and use social media to openly lie to the public’s face whilst wearing the mask of “one of us”. Where exactly are the people who see these tweets and believe them and are then shown evidence of their falsehood? You would think that being lied to on an industrial scale- as we were by Matt Hancock when a child was treated for illness on the floor of my local hospital which I used to work at, would rankle: but instead the public greedily devours the government line even when it’s proven to be from a poisoned pen: why?

Even here though, lying about the causation of issues does not reach the depths to which the conservatives are sinking when it comes to political lying and it’s enabling.
Jacob Rees-Mogg has now been brought so low as to actively lie to his own supporters about the government’s disastrous attempt to wrench us from the European Union, enabled of course by those denizens of internet nonsense who cannot bring themselves to accept their government of choice’s ineptitude. Rees-Mogg was recently seen on Question Time, belaying the worries of a wine import expert, a lifelong conservative voter, of some 30 years and confirming that the man’s founded experiences and factual stories of increased difficulty negatively impacting his business: even going so far as to openly disregard the man’s qualms. He also confirmed that the NHS was given it’s £350 million a week post brexit and yet no figures attesting to this can be found: one suspects that if £19.2 billion had suddenly been injected into the NHS, we would not be quibbling over a pay rise for nursing staff.

Brexit, of course, is the shibboleth for success for both sides of the government as they try to style themselves as moderates: from the conservatives shouting louder and louder that brexit is a success as the UK slides further and further down and to the right of the Overton window and the fiscal charts of success to the leader of the opposition promising that we will “make a success” of brexit, one has to wonder why everyone fails to mention the terms and conditions attached- with fair winds, good economy, no wars, no governmental malfeasance, it would take about 35 to 40 years for the UK to re-establish itself as a world leading economy outside the EU. I will be 70 to 75 when this happens, and I don’t believe the children in my family, some literally toddlers, should have to wait until they are my age or older just to see some parity with pre-brexit economics.

The mainstreaming of governmental lies, despite popular recitation by those like Peter Osborne in his book, “The Assault on Truth”, far predates this conservative iteration: from the Falklands debacle and pitting the government against the miners to the long established roots of the word “tory” (allegedly coming from an old Irish word meaning “thief”), governmental policy has been long shaped by those willing to lie to and mislead the public. It is tacitly accepted by populations globally that we are lied to on an industrial scale by the government and that they are aided and abetted by media like Sky, like supposedly independent channels like GB News (whose shady donor links should make anyone scorn the word independent)- even by the BBC who are constantly lamented by the right as too left wing and too right wing by the left- the fact is, I do not want the BBC to be “more left wing”, I want it to be more honest. Can the right say the same?

Political lying is as in-your-face-obvious as the chaos that suffuses this current government. Division in the tories is sown openly across the pages of the newspapers, divided now themselves amongst what to report to prevent open rebellion by a beleaguered nation.
To begin to restore political trust, one must begin with political honesty- for one does not trust that which is not honest. So if we hope to regain control of the runaway train of British political discourse and progress someone must wrest the wheel from those who would seek to plow us through more obfuscation.

In the far flung recesses of my mind I long for a government who aligns with me on issues like the mass taxation of the hyper rich, the reformation of the NHS in a “post” pandemic Britain, the forging of strong links to our neighbours, the protection of immigrants- on prevention of landlords abusing the populace and assisting the young in being able to afford property, in modernising education and in standing up to the megaphone dullardry of bigotry who complains about cancellation from multiple mainstream media; but for the moment I look at the status quo, at a nation devouring its own tail just to avoid hunger pangs and I’m willing to settle for a government who just doesn’t lie to me every day, a government who doesn’t throw ideological shrapnel into the face of the population- and most of all, a government committed to bettering the lives of the citizens of the UK.
Once upon a time I’ve never lived, governments supposedly did what was right for their people: currently we subsist under a government determined to recycle money amongst themselves, demonise the innocent, divide the nation and scatter our resources amongst themselves as they angrily ask you why you should have to share with strangers.

Until we begin to steadfastly call out mass political lies, like Mark Francois blithely giving out vaccine misinformation in parliament, to our own allies continuing to push the Big Lie of Brexit (as my good friend Aid Thompsin now calls it), the normalisation of lies will continue- and until people realise that politicians, our representatives, lying to us is not “for our own good” but “at our own detriment”, the United Kingdom will continue to be run like a racket by those whose only success is to pillage the nation whilst blaming the innocent for their bulging pockets.

Do not get burnt out: or, the story of how a Nazi isn’t going to break me.

By Daviemoo

It’s so easy to slip into apathy- to close your eyes to the endless iterations of madness our world is suffering from. Climate deniers, anti vaccine bobble heads and corrupt politician after corrupt politician. But sinking into denial is less sinking into a warm bath than sitting in a slowly heating pan of water: by the time you realise you’re cooked, it’s too late.

I don’t know where to find the strength some days. It can be anything that sets me to the edge- another story about working class money thrown directly into the maw of another dodgy millionaire like Michelle Mone, Baroness of Bras. It can be being made aware that, as many homes across the UK daren’t turn on their heating for fear their bills will spiral into financial ruin, MPs can now claim Christmas parties (as well as utility bills) on their expenses. Or it could be another right wing demagogue, screaming about being silenced from between the pages of another national newspaper. It weighs on you.

The biggest frustration with this never ending slew of salacious stories is the fact that you always know there’s more we don’t know. I, for one, am regularly told stories by insiders who work in and near the government that I can’t verify but absolutely believe, stories about terrifyingly senior politicians running out of brothels high on PCP, MPs running a racket of continual suing of their detractors so they can make hundreds of thousands of pounds whilst posting on social media about defending free speech, or about extremely high up political figures throwing their partner down the stairs and using a gagging order to silence her. To know that even the ugly underbelly of our society that is being waved before our eyes is still concealing the rot beneath- that this “exposition” still somehow is condoned by politicians, controlled by them. It can be utterly overwhelming to know we’re in the mire- but never know just how in the mire we are.

Recently I found myself needing to stop, to close my ears and eyes to it, just for five minutes- and why?
I did charity work for Dignity in Dying, whose ethos is to push for assisted dying laws for terminally ill people. And that experience opened my eyes to just how broken our society is.

Firstly- the homophobia: with the rise of hate crimes in the UK I expected that a camp man wearing a pink hoodie may, perhaps, face some indignities. I wasn’t wrong. I was called a “comforter of Lot” by a cantankerous old man, along with being called a murderer- for wanting to help those already dying die without the agonising days long deaths I myself have witnessed from family members.
I told the man if he didn’t agree with the mission of DiD to go away and he came back three times to heap more abuse on us, some of it homophobic, some of it at me. I hope that man never finds himself in the position I have witnessed several family members, and that if he does it gives him the grace to understand the mission: but I also do not brook homophobia. There is no excuse. To have people publicly assail you for your sexuality which you aren’t even referencing is rage inducing.
But I wish that was the worst incident of that day.

As I stood there with my associate we’d occasionally ask people if they wished to join the campaign in asking for a debate in parliament. Some would say yes, most would ignore, and some would be outright rude. That’s charity work!
One man in particular stumbled up to me and asked me what I was doing. I explained and he responded with “do you know what the worst thing that ever happened was”. I already had a pang of worry for where this would go. I took a breath through my nose and said “go on…” in a guarded tone.

“Hitler losing World War Two” he said.
I stared. He weaved to the side a bit.
“…Are you actually fucking delusional,” I responded but he was ready to cut me off.
“No, no, think about it… what he done to the jews was bad and that, but imagine how much better things would be if he’d won though” he said.
“I’m going to need you to fuck off before I leather you with a sign” I replied.
“Mate, think about it!” he said, shocked at my reaction and insistent on labouring his, and I use this word loosely, point. He waved his finger in my face, frustrated that I hadn’t blithely accepted his loving critique of his, apparently, führer.
“I have thought about it. It’s why I think you’re fucking daft you nazi dick head now fucking walk away”.
“You got to listen to people mate” he chuntered, already turning to walk off. Ah yes, the appeal to the illusion of free speech. Should have seen that one coming.

He stumbled off, muttering the whole way. I turned to a couple next to me and said “did… I just get confronted by a Nazi in the street”.
They just nodded, looking half amused and half scared.
My heart pounded- a nazi sympathiser just appeared from nowhere to have a chat…?
Not my first dealing with fascists, not even my first time this year- I attended a counterprotest in summer because The Patriotic Alternative (a fascist organisation) protested drag queen story time at Leeds Library. Nothing like spending 5 hours in the sun being called a pervert by the sort of men who look like they desperately want to hold Andrew Tate’s genitals whilst he urinates. Those child protectors, by the way, set off the fire alarms in the building which traumatised many of the children present.
But this was different. This wasn’t facing a crowd of baying morons behind police barriers.

It was that moment that made me start to question just how ridiculous everything has gotten in the UK in a way that nothing else has: from a government hammering us economically with a vanity project called “sovereignty” to Johnson threatening to do nothing about a viral outbreak that’s now claimed over 200,000 of our countryfolk, and from snooty politicians laughing openly at our compliance with lifesaving rules as they brought suitcases of wine into the very heart of British democracy to damaging legislation like the Police Crime courts and Sentencing bill and its steaming offcuts served back to parliament- the Public Order bill, the Voter ID bill that disenfranchises millions… all of these things were terrible, galvanised me against a political machine that was armed with weapons that I could slip between.

But to look around me at my fellow working class and see people espouse Nazi talking points as naturally as referencing football or the weather? How had we fallen so far that the Luftwaffe wandered the streets with us, casually referencing eugenics and making Adolf Hitler out to be a bastion of democracy at best and a cheeky little chap at worst?

I grew up reading endless books about world wars, forced to at first by a grandfather who wanted me to understand the crimes humans commit when we forget our duty to each other. Men who espouse nazism do not get a pass- they learn and atone or they are cast out. Or so I believed. And yet, our society is so fractured and the lie of “free speech above all” so endlessly refrained, that people will repeat pro Nazi rhetoric and have the temerity to be shocked when you threaten to batter them with a sign.

The UK is so much more broken than we knew. Our homes freeze (I am shivering as I write this, afraid to turn on the heating for the cost will ruin me) and our government give themselves “Christmas party expenses” along with writing off an estimated two million pounds of collective energy bills- and all the while those of us who should be organising in the streets, calling for elections OR ELSE… are wrestling with how to reconcile standing up for a proletariat with whom nazism is becoming normalised. Even prominent artists are comfortable warmly enthusing about their love of the SS.

Before Sunak mystically slipped into office, placed there by the failure of other inept politicians, he threatened to refer those who spoke poorly of Britain to the PREVENT deradicalisation programme. Sign me up Mr Sunak, because I am disgusted with modern Britain.
Nurses hold picket lines outside hospitals, not because they selfishly want more money but because your predecessor hiked up their mortgages by an average of 40%. University staff, constantly demonised as “forcing a progressive agenda” (otherwise known as tolerance and education) on students ask for more, scant years after the Tories blew the lid off university price caps. People call radio stations to leave their living will and testament, terrified that they will quite literally freeze to death in their own homes. The UK taxpayer is asked to foot the bill for Boris Johnson’s defence in the case of whether he misled the house- AKA us. Imagine someone murdering your wife then asking you if you can bung them a few grand so the courts don’t wipe out that million they earned touring the US reciting speeches they didn’t even write?

The UK- the world itself, is broken. Right wing demagogues clutch power with both hands, insisting as they siphon money into their back pocket, that it’s the others, the lefties, the snowflakes that are the problem. Nobody ever points out the fact that things have demonstrably gotten worse over the 12 years the tories have been in charge and yet they blame migrants and trans people, women, people of colour, nurses, doctors, our work ethic… as the people with the reins, you can only rely on your libertarian sense of every person for themselves for so long before you should cast your eagle eye on yourselves, the people holding the reins as they zip through your fingers.

It, I admit, broke me to realise that so many fools walk amongst us- not just people stupid enough to espouse genocide rhetoric, but people stupid enough to think “we’ve always done it this way” and “things keep getting worse” are not mutually exclusive… if we’ve always done it this way and things keep getting worse, maybe we should stop doing it this way??!

But it was an important moment for me. I realised that thronging those idiots who back tories or rhetoric more extreme are people just unaware, and among those, people who are aware and want the change too.
So I refuse to let the continual beatings keep me down.

I finally admitted to myself that this might not be a winning game. Maybe the world is doomed to repeat the same fascistic cruelties it allowed before. Maybe the gun toting anti gender thickheads will win. I can’t control them and you can’t educate someone too radicalised to recognise sense. But it doesn’t mean it’s not worth fighting.
Some of us are fighting for voter reform and for access and education in politics. Others of us are preparing for the longer haul, for the pushback against authoritarian demagogues which we see rearing up, faster and faster every day like Jörmungandr on the horizon, ready to spew the poison of rhetoric amongst a beleaguered public.

All I know, and what keeps me going, is that even if I fail, at least I tried. Even if the world keeps getting worse the collective push to improve it cannot stop. If we surrender, if we give an inch, they will take a mile. The world may well continue to sink into the depths of corruption: but as long as we push for better there is a chance for it.

There is no surrender when fighting for a better world. One nazi, ten, hundreds, thousands… a cabinet full of fascists; it doesn’t matter. We must stake our claim. And I’d rather lose to fascists fighting them than let them stand tall in the crowd, peppering every disgusting sentence with their right to “free speech” on my streets.

Make no mistake, reader. The UK’s government is increasingly fascist- pushing extremist rhetoric for so long now that it is completely normal to read actual extremism in comment sections of otherwise droll social media posts. They may not be reading from the same speeches in Triumph of the Will, they aren’t espousing the exact same rhetoric that came before. But they are pushing the type of language, using the type of dogwhistles that forments danger for us all. Johnson, less than two years ago called us a “country united in blood and soil”, a direct far right dog whistle. And it was heard.

Ask yourself deeply, how much lower we must sink before you and yours will act. How debased will you allow this government to make us before you cry out “no” and stand against them.
It is not a case of “if” but a choice of “when”. Join those of us already standing and fight back and lets beat the darkness back to where it belongs where we can- and expose the rest of it to the light of truth and remove it from our path.

Stop Normalising Suffering!

By Daviemoo

Britain freezes. Snow is everywhere and temperatures have collectively plummeted across the nation. This is particularly worrisome for poorer people and older people, and especially for poor old people. But for every person speaking up about the conditions we’re being made to survive by governmental malfeasance and the never ending greed of the aggressively capitalist society we’re ever so proud of, there is another person lined up to extoll the virtues of their “living through” the same or worse. Here’s why I’m done with listening to that rhetoric.

Yesterday, a caller on LBC rang in to explain, frankly, that he was worried he would die in the cold. He didn’t have enough money or resources to stay warm and was on the verge of tears that he explained that he didn’t think he would make it through winter. LBC’s twitter account posed the clip of the man explaining his dire situation with Ben Kentish and was, with the predictability of blinking, met with tweets like this:

It’s almost become a fetish for people who somehow stumbled through their appalling childhoods to weaponise them against others. Why shouldn’t we all wake up to frost on our bedroom windows? Why can’t we all cope with an empty stomach for two days at a time? And why don’t we all restrict the only time we feel warmth is from our father’s palm as it slaps us across the face?
Apart from the no doubt shocking fact that a lot of us don’t want to wake up in freezing cold bedrooms left unheated because we can hear the whirring of the energy meter in the cupboard nearby, and other than silly little things like the factual observation that it’s a basic human right to live in comfort and safety, I have a confession.
One of the biggest reasons I don’t want another generation of people to grow up in these miserable conditions (apart, obviously, from the above) is simply that I refuse to foster a world where this ridiculous idolisation of your own victimhood is used as a stick to beat others with. I don’t want another generation of emotionally ruined people rewriting history to pretend they weren’t suffering and making do, to foist their nonsense on future children.

So you survived waking up to ice on your windows: do you want applause? And do you actually want a return to that for people? It’s so ironic, as it’s often statements like these made by people from behind double glazing in long paid off houses worth £100,000 more than they it was bought for- I bet you’d be unwilling to replace your loc-tite windows with plastic sheeting, so ask yourself why you’d foist that living on others if you’re unwilling to endure it yourself. Additionally, it’s always interesting to bring up the disproportionate rates of serious illness and infant mortality rates back in the “frost on yer windows” days to people.

Using your own suffering as a stick to beat people is ridiculous and is indicative of unhealed trauma. I don’t want people to freeze in their houses now any more than I wanted you to then. I want people to be warm now as much as I want you to get therapy for your trauma, a trauma that you’re desperate to foist on others.

When people bully others, it’s usually because their lives are miserable in some way- from a child tripping others in a playground to a cruel co-worker going home to their abusive spouse, misery begets misery and it’s all too clear to see that those who will espouse how they, through luck, survived adverse childhoods, seem to want others to suffer as they did. Nobody should suffer from fuel poverty, food poverty or ANY poverty these days, any more than anyone should have survived cruel winters through luck then.

Additionally, what’s the point of inventing technology to keep people thriving if we reserve it? Why invent double glazing and central heating, inventions that have saved untold numbers of human life, if we don’t use it or if we attach price tags that quite literally freeze people out? Humanity must adapt and progress to thrive, and refusing technology that ensures people do not fall ill, become disabled or die is a vile and massively normalised aspect of modern society, that allows a distorted society- one we’re currently living through.

The mass normalisation of living through adverse conditions, where “survival” is the end goal was made clear through the pandemic. So what if you spent 2 weeks sick with a virus, now your lung capacity is ruined, you get out of breath just sitting still and you have arrhythmia- you survived didn’t you? You should be grateful! Societal madness writ large.

Survival being a goal is a failure of any society that pushes it- every society should be encouraging you to achieve, and providing the framework for, thriving.

Anything less is humanity failing to reach its potential and in a country like the UK where this has been baked into legislation like austerity, it is state sponsored failure of its citizens.

There is an almost straight split of people who hold values about austerity being positive, “pulling yourself up by your bootstraps” and those who actively wish to either have people “suffer” their way out of adverse situations or suffer through them as they did.
To those who push the lie that one must suffer to build character, ask yourself why you fail to relate to other humans, why you wish for them to push through negative situations they should not have to “just because you did” and wonder to yourself whether, perhaps, the sentence “and I turned out just fine” might be the biggest lie you ever told.

The Great Normalisation of Stupidity

By Daviemoo

You’ve heard it, I’ve heard it, we’ve all heard it: I’m not even just talking about Kanye West’s latest deluge of verbal offal to human heart gristle Alex Jones. Stupidity is everywhere, and it’s getting worse. As humanity continues to wend its way through the universe on the only planet we have, I shouldn’t be shocked that the lowest, dumbest conspiracy theory nonsense is being banded about by idiots- and yet I am considering the only planet we have will be a flaming ball of iron and there’ll still be some crispy climate change denier gasping out “M-my…op…opinion” before bursting into flame. So my question is, and I’m not even being rhetorical- why are people so okay with mainstreaming stupidity under the guise of “opinions”?

I’ve seen so many people trot out the usual, tired lines about the Kanye West debacle this week. “It’s freedom of speech, everyone is allowed an opinion”. And for the longest time I was stymied about how to put my feelings into words against this sentiment. Our language is limited in this area: because, yes, if you want to go with the most base, un-nuanced version, the things Kanye West has said are opinions. But please tell me how we’re so low as a society that “I think pineapple is the best fruit” can be categorised in the same hall of descriptor as antisemitic conspiracy theories and full throated support for one of the most despicable figures in all of human history. And what’s happening to internet searches of his name in the wake of Kanye West’s latest episode of “when dickheads have money” you ask?

Internet search aggregators showing that West's idiocy increased name searches for Hitler by 6 times the amount.


Tell me this, defenders of FrEe SpEeCh: why is it that so many of you will throw yourselves out of your chairs to defend Kanye West’s rotted opinions like he’s paid you to, but you’re suddenly of the opinion that free speech ends there: that nobody has the right to reply, debunk, discuss or point out that if someone’s opinion comes with a body count perhaps it’s more important to protect human life and liberty than someone’s right to talk shit? If you care so much about free speech you’d listen to peoples responses, but it seems people just want to shut down any replies under the guise of protecting the original speech… I don’t understand how the free speech protection coalition never seems to understand that this leads to circular discussion: one side yelling at another, the other responding, the original one yelling again… we need to come to resolution, and resolution happens when we debunk falsitudes- and we only debunk falsitudes if we’re allowed to cut the original lie off from being repeated or it spreads.

Hate speech is like a virus: it has a patient zero, and it spreads virulently- the vaccine is widely available: education. people seem to misconstrue being corrected on a stupid opinion as some sort of invasion of bodily autonomy, but being corrected on wrong information isn’t a “winners and losers” game, it’s collectively good for society if you stop espousing nonsense… and if nothing else it stops you looking like an absolute arse.
As we’ve seen, there has been a precipitous rise in violence worldwide, but in the UK in particular the continuously contentious anti trans row has meant a 56% increase on the already not insignificant hate crimes faced by trans people and even the home office, run by cartoon transphobic villain Suella Braverman has admitted that “transgender issues have been heavily discussed on social media over the last year, which may have led to an increase in related hate crimes”.
Meanwhile in America, the vile meninists who blame women for issues caused by their own reluctance to accept their distinct mediocrity, and therefore unattractiveness as a partner, have been working in lockstep with regressive right wing policy makers which has culminated in attempts to entirely strip abortion rights from the US- and if you think this row is staying abroad, the one thing Jacob Rees-Mogg has learnt to do between sucking cold teabags, is import culture wars: regardless of Brexit. He was heard describing the right to abortion in the case of rape as a “cult of death” recently- Rees-Mogg by the way, earns some of his inconceivably vast fortune via a company which… manufactures abortion pills. Nothing like clinging to those morals unless there’s some paper with the royals on it, is there?

We’ve had this nonsense running faster and faster for years, and I want people to remember- anti vaccine demonstrators were SURE 10 years ago that vaccines cause autism and now billions of covid vaccines have been given out and autism cases are…’nt, suddenly it’s something else: heart problems or dizziness or a sudden dislike of cheese… Sudden Adult Death Syndrome has existed for years, and is now converted into a shibboleth for the anti vaccine mess to explain that uncle Brian died and we don’t know why. Now anti vax groups are blaming SAD cases on vaccines without evidence. And we let them! Media outlets who could disseminate easy, factual truth like “every vaccine has adverse side effects but that is hugely smaller than the millions of covid deaths”- but do they? Unfortunately, factual truth doesn’t really seem to move the news cycle, but giving an incel 10 minutes to rail against women sure brings in the viewers, doesn’t it: heedless of the damage it does. You don’t NEED to present a man who hates women to argue against his viewpoints because all he cares about is saying his nonsense.

Reason doesn’t work on unreasonable people, so don’t GIVE the unreasonable people the airwaves!

We have to refine the discourse around what constitutes opinions, because the phraseology is hopelessly limited- but further to this, we have to discuss why, WHY as a supposedly intelligent species, we’re happy to push stupid, incorrect information, dressed up in a cheap wig and fake moustache with “my opinion” scrawled on it.
If my opinion was that people called Ben were all evil, I’m fairly certain there’d be dissent, that I’d be told I was wrong, weird, stupid, making it up, purposely being dense- is that not totally normal, expected even? Or should I be allowed to walk around spouting anti Ben rhetoric…?
When an opinion causes harm to the innocent, when an opinion is patently false-when an opinion comes with a body count, maybe your right to hold it isn’t as inalienable as others’ right to safety.


Because here is the other problem, the awkward point that nobody discusses in these swirling debates of never-ending ignorance: opinions don’t just float in a void. Starting with an inert opinion, if it’s my opinion that tacos are the best food on earth you can bet I’m going to eat tacos at some point… make sense?
Opinions lead to action, especially when those opinions are contentious. When you constantly demonise and fear monger over a minority, you have no right to cling to the defence of its inertia as an opinion when others who share that opinion take it as permission to use that “opinion” as justification for murder. It does happen: the US right wing media and right wing nee’rdowells like Tucker Carlson, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert who is in charge of the district in which a mass shooting of the gay people she’s condemned and called “supremacists”- and even disgraced and disgraceful ex president Donald Trump continue to fearmonger that the LGBT+ community are somehow “grooming” children by existing.
Pushing the idea that a whole community are paedophiles looking to hurt children will inevitably lead to radicalised people with these apparently oh so protected opinions swirling in their heads, walking blithely into an LGBT+ space- one of those places we make so we’re not ‘shoving it down your throat’- and mowing us down with guns. You can’t spread rhetoric like that, knowing you’re stoking this type of hatred, then shirk any and all responsibility for it.

This is the other contentious point: people want their access to what they think is “free speech” (it is here that I tiredly remind you that free speech is your protection from speaking out against THE GOVERNMENT without repercussions), and yet they want absolutely none of the responsibility that comes with it.
When you say things, people listen. When people listen, they decide how they will act based on that information. When they act on that information, their actions are of course their own, but if your wilful spread of harmful rhetoric led them to that action- the inescapable false conclusion that jewish people are bad, that black women should accept racist lines of questioning, that LGBT+ people are dangerous, that abortions which save lives all over the world are not healthcare- then you should, you must accept your role in spreading it.

I always, at this point in this discussion I’ve had hundreds of times, have people approach me to say- usually in some lofty tone as if they’re about to teach me something I haven’t thought about before, “erm, you are aware that discussing this stuff is how we know that it’s bad and that discussing it is important”. To you I say simply- why do I need to enter into a long “both sides” discussion about war crimes to know war crimes are bad? Why do I need to listen to straight men talk about how people like me make them uncomfortable and thats why I don’t deserve to live, and have to defend my right to walk the earth or not be imprisoned for the crime of “you can’t stop yourself thinking about me having sex”- this has happened twice this week…
Is there proof you can give me now that my mere existence as a gay man, that my community existing, makes the world worse? Because if there isn’t, please let me know why you think I should debate this pretty obvious thing with you. And why do you also discount my expert opinion as someone who is literally IN THIS COMMUNITY, LIVING THIS LIFE?

RichardLongur6 on twitter explaining that because gay and trans people make him feel personally uncomfortable we should all be imprisoned.


Not everything needs to be discourse needs to be blown up to size 100,000 and written in the sky by planes to remind people that just because YOU want to discuss gay people as if we’re a theoretic that doesn’t exist to do anything but annoy you by showing diversity on TV, doesn’t mean I do.

It’s not just that we’re collectively accepting that stupidity is the price of “opinions” and “free speech” when we don’t have to- it’s not, because the least we can do is call it out and ostracise those who promote and cling to disgusting ideologies; it’s that we’re also allowing people to do this, then act confused when the trail- from corpse to gun, gun to wielder, wielder to manifesto, and manifesto to interview after interview about the dangers that random minorities pose, leads right back to them.
You do not have the right to wield a hateful opinion without also wielding the responsibility of it: if what you say leads to harm and death, perhaps you shouldn’t have said it in the first place, perhaps it IS our place, societally, to delineate that its actually NOT OK to praise one of the most notorious warmongering evil humans in history, mayhaps decisions about healthcare should be decided on by the people who need to access that healthcare with minimal interference from outsiders, however well intentioned?

Let’s be frank. Society is failing at the moment. We’re letting people like Elon Musk, billionaire right wing jerk merchant, pretend twitter is a “marketplace of ideas”. I’ve said it before but a microblogging site is not the place for intelligent conversation. The reason that anti trans and pro trans people clash is that clear ideas like “women regardless of gender should feel safe” are being pared down to the bone and tiny flecks of rhetoric are spit back at “opposing sides” when both sides are pushing the same fucking obvious idea- that women should feel safe. But trying to inject nuance into a platform that runs off controversy and is character limited and run by a ham sandwich with a face is never going to work. And there are some ideas that we don’t need to discuss. What is there about Hitler, drug fuelled hate wielding maniac, mass killer, pure evil, that committed horrifying crimes we should all hope never to see again, that you could possibly ever love if you’re a decent person?

People also fall to “mental health” to defend indefensible remarks, and it’s possible to accept that someone is mentally unwell and still not let those remarks fly. Britney Spears shaved her head and ended up in such a restrictive conservatorship that she’s spoken about being mentally broken by it- odd how she wasn’t touted as a champion of free speech then, isn’t it. Mental health contributes to- and yet does not excuse- antisemitism or hideous rhetoric like that of people like Lily Cade who called for “parents of trans children to be lynched”. Mental health is vital and those who suffer should be treated for it- but it doesn’t give you carte blanche to do everything but grow a curly villain moustache and start saying evil things casually.

The time is passed now where we can simply sit back and allow the “marketplace of ideas” that is society to be polluted by such “if you don’t agree with this you need to wonder why you don’t fit into society” issues- but at the very least, if we must continue to sink into the dystopic horror of discussing these topics, it’s at the very least fair that the people pushing these ideas start accepting the responsibility, start acknowledging the blood that stains their hands and start to grasp the concept that “free speech” covers our right to call them evil just as thoroughly as it covers their right to be evil.
Overall, the question we need to ask is as simple as this: why are people so desperate cling on to, to defend, to discuss “opinions” that are so clearly wrong and why can’t they approach unpicking these “opinions” and asking themselves if they’re wrong with the same zeal they have for clinging, white knuckled, to rhetoric that gets people killed.

Talking about LGBT+ people isn’t ruining your children- you are

By Daviemoo

Day after day, I see more brain dead ramblings from people who think that there is no way to explain gay people existing to children without bringing out a blow up phallus. Lets go through the arguments and make, and I use this word loosely, “sense” of them because – as a gay man- I have had enough.

It will traumatise them

It absolutely flabbergasts me that people think they can bring children up in religious doctrine and that’s normal, but telling them about LGBT+ people is the final straw.
So your kid can believe an all powerful being is looking after uncle Jerry after he plowed his car into a tree on his way home from a bar, that god sits there peering off a cloud watching people exist and that if that child does something wrong god will let them be tortured for all of eternity in fire- but telling them two men who were holding hands in the street are gay is what’s going to mess them up? The cognitive dissonance astounds me daily. LGBT+ people do exist, and acknowledging this simple fact prepares your child for a life of very occasionally encountering LGBT+ people in their daily/weekly life: we’ll be their doctors, hairdressers, accountants, baristas… You don’t have to teach them to like it, but “I can’t teach my child facts because it’s counter to my beliefs” is really fucking funny to hear people say unironically.

They’re too young to understand

If they’re old enough to see two teenagers necking on in a bus stop, they’re old enough to understand that sometimes that might be a boy and a girl, a girl and a girl, a boy and a boy, two non binary people or any combination of these things. You don’t have to break out the action man and barbie figures and start smashing them together like you’re trying to reconstruct the large hadron collider experiments for children to grasp that sometimes people of different genders like each other.

“It’s grooming”

The amount of people who don’t think adult men tickling little girls or asking children if they’ve got partners jokingly or encouraging boys to bully girls to express their feelings are all normal behaviours, and yet think acknowledging LGBT+ people’s existences is grooming is increasing, and increasingly confusing. Grooming is normalising sexual behaviour with people who aren’t legally, mentally and physically prepared for it and should be protected from it at all costs. It’s a pretty fucking dark accusation. It’s also bullshit. If you’re ok with showing them sleeping beauty where a guy KISSES AN UNCONSCIOUS WOMAN, maybe ask yourself about your priorities VERY closely because “gay people sometimes exist” and “look, maybe some day a man will kiss YOU when you’re asleep” are actually not the same message. If you don’t get upset with half naked people writhing provocatively on a Jean Paul-Gaultier perfume advert, you can also not get upset about gay existence, because one is sexual and I would posit close to grooming and one isn’t- and it’s not the ones you think.

It might make them think they are

So? So what? Are you that afraid your child might not be the carbon copy of you that you were desperate to create when you mounted your wife like a drunk raccoon, and you think that means your existence was meaningless? If your child briefly wonders if they might be gay or trans just because they see a gay or trans person so what! If they’re not- they won’t pursue it, and if they are maybe immediately rejecting them based on that isn’t because you “failed”, but because you’re a bad parent…

It makes me uncomfortable

“I can’t cope with the literal fact that other types of humans exist” is not a compelling argument for not educating your children. It makes me uncomfortable to hear people talk about my sex life on tv, it makes me uncomfortable that people wear crocs in public and yknow what I do? Move on.

I think it’s an adult topic

Exactly how do you see this conversation going? “sometimes men like women, sometimes men like men” is quite a simple sentence. If you’re the ones who have to go into excruciating detail about where genitals go, what genitals are and who does what with them, its because you suffer from a terminal lack of nuance- that’s not LGBT+ peoples’ fault. If you don’t want to talk to your kids about it, don’t. But they will learn elsewhere, sooner or later, and leaving that to the world then getting mad about it is a pretty stupid look. And again, you can acknowledge LGBT+ people without having an adult conversation with your kids- it’s like, super simple.

I think it’s wrong

Ok? All the more reason for you to educate your children I guess but sure, hide us from them, lets see how that goes when little Timmy discovers he likes little Ben as more than a friend and has nobody he can confide in because his parents suck.

I have to wonder what people who endlessly moan about the LGBT+ and our existence think we feel when we look at them. Listening to people who waste their lives complaining about us gives me frustration but mostly makes me nonplussed. If you want to spend your entire life angry that other people exist, I can’t stop you. But I do wonder how much happier these people would be if they’d stop imagining my sex life.
We’re constantly told we “force it on people” because we wear flags to denote our existence- the same way you guys wear union jacks… its our identity and we like to share that… I’ll stop wearing mine if you drop yours?
We’re always accused of being everywhere- that is LITERALLY life now. Your hairdresser? Lesbian. The guy at the bank who approved your loan? Trans. The person who checked you in at the airport three weeks ago? Bisexual. Your admission that you can’t cope with the fact that other people exist is not a good look, and yet people continue to open throatedly confess that they dislike literal fact.

I wouldn’t even mind people constantly being arseholes about me and mine if we didn’t literally pay for society to cater to these losers. Ah you feel free speech is threatened because I exist? What do you propose you do about it? You want me to be prevented from talking about myself and my life? Uh, so you’re not really a free speech advocate then I guess. Cut my taxes to the bone, because if I’m not treated as a full member of society I shouldn’t be paying for it.

Honestly, society continues to confound me: people think that now is the peak of human civilisation and we can’t even go two weeks without threatening to drop bombs on each other. We have much growing to do, and we aren’t going to be able to do that until we stop causing division over nonsense. People continue to conflate my community with paedophilia to the detriment of actual victims of paedophilia, regardless of the sexual orientation or gender of the criminal involved. If you think our existence is the end of society, you may want to reflect on the simple fact that we’ve existed as long as you have and society still keeps on going, and perhaps it’s your wilful entitlement as “the right type of person” that’s causing division and societal friction and not the people who exist amongst you and just want to be able to kiss their partner without a bunch of yeehaws crying about it.

If you’re incapable of having a talk with your child about sexuality or gender without making it weird, if you can’t even bring yourself to acknowledge us to your child, it’s not because we’re awful evil people- it’s because you’re a bad parent, failing to prepare their child for a world in which we exist just as surely as they do and a world in which, regardless of your sentiments towards our community we deserve to exist unmolested.

We are witnessing the biggest scam in history.

By Daviemoo

The British government, hand in hand with the monarchy, has cracked the spine of fairytale books and told us time and again over the years, but never more so than recently, their favourite myth: that we should, must…will suffer together collectively for the “greater good”: austerity, pandemic, the cost of living crisis- it’s no wonder that people’s empathy has all but burned to ash in the constant pushing of the fallacious narrative that one must suffer for their fellow man: especially when the curtain obscuring the truth is gossamer thin and cobweb light: let us lift it now and talk about the great wealth heist.

The Crown Jewels of the British monarch are worth between £1 billion and £4.9 billion pounds. As his mother ailed, Charles, this year, sat solemnly on a golden throne, next to a crown made of gold and diamonds to address the British public and to say gravely that, together, my friends, we face difficult times ahead. On that, my unelected king, we agree for certain: difficult times have been here for many years for some of us but clearly there are no plans to abate this.
One imagines the heating bill for what is now Charles’ estate is astronomical in this climate: he’s very lucky that he’s one of the breakaways who does not pay his own energy bills. Or rent. Or, anything really.
I do.
You do.
Your family and friends here do. We pay for everything, from the ill gotten diamond that adorns the crown to the golden chair Charles sat upon to tell us how hard things would be, that austerity and cost of living was coming and to prepare to cut a new notch and again tighten our collective belts.

The Royals sit hand in hand with the British government, overseeing affairs of state. Now, earlier this year MPs voted on a pay rise, bringing them to £82,000 a year (their subsidised food and paid for expenses notwithstanding)- this is more than twice my own salary, almost three times: and of course people will hear this with jealousy. Yes, I would love to earn that much money, mostly because I’d have something of a shot at getting a mortgage before I’m 45. But the point is, the threshold for being in the top 5% of earners in the whole UK is £85,000. So when the government, too, tells us to prepare for austerity- Truss in her flash in the pan told us that, what she planned, she “wouldn’t call austerity”, but a rose by any other name, eh, Liz? Now Sunak prepares to draw us into another collective five to ten (or more) years of harsh cuts, rollbacks, spending halts and more, one has to remember that these people, those shot callers, the people making these “hard decisions” that we all have to live with- won’t suffer. Like fibreglass is insulation in a cold home, money is an insulation against austerity: if you already have it, you can afford not to suffer- after all, it’s literally called a cost of living crisis: the cost attached to how much you need to spend, just to live. Dystopian.

Rachel Johnson, sister of the disgraced ex PM did a radio show a few months ago, waxing painful on what luxuries she’d have to cut back on due to the cost of living crisis in some unfathomably painful attempt to appear as a woman of the people. Johnson is also a regular advocate for returning to the office rather than working from home: she described civil servants as “riding pelotons” instead of getting on with the job, as her brother (at the time still our prime minister) said working at home was “distracting” and taking about how you would just eat cheese: remember, by the way, that the prime minister lived in a flat above his workplace at the time and suddenly you realise just how horrifyingly prescient his statement, for once, was. Bear also in mind that Rachel Johnson’s opinions on anything are unfetterably only interesting because she’s related to the sex addled scandal ridden man who spent his entire tenure as prime minister, lying to the public- brexit would be simple and boost the economy, we would ignore the coronavirus and get on with it, we all had to stay separate for each other, he didn’t know Chris Pincher was a pervert… One has to wonder whether Rachel holds her brother’s dual ability to be as unfailingly, unpleasantly delusional and yet be paid as handsomely as he back when he was a journo, once describing his exorbitant second salary at a newspaper -£250,000, as “chickenfeed”. Ones sympathy for Rachel’s brave cost of living sacrifices is as limited as her ability to see under her no doubt constantly carefully maintained fringe.

Day upon day, the UK public are fed messages that are so 20 karat dystopic in nature, the cut so diamond sharp and crystal clear, that I find myself in an almost constant state of flabbergast: we, the little people, the poor, the beleaguered, must go to the office, and earn our meagre salary (but don’t worry, you’re paying less tax under the anti tax tories who raised them 15 times), putting that money aside- not for frivolity but just to afford our variable mortgages, to keep the lights on and to quietly drive to the local food bank, primark sunglasses shoved up our noses so the neighbours don’t realise it’s us because god forbid people realise for a second how dire our own and each others situations have become-because we’re all in it together, aren’t we?

Rishi Sunak, the new prime minister, is married to one of the richest people in the UK. During his tenure as Chancellor of the Exchequer he broke lockdown rules when he wasn’t extremely busy making sure he and his wife took full advantage of the broken tax rules to pay less than their due to the country he serves- but when he was working on the pandemic, he was a crucible for the situation we’re now in. Some will cry that he had to pull out all the stops: furlough cost money don’t you know. These armchair economists, friendly to Sunak, usually only know the value of a pound contrasted against a Freddo and have a purposeful lack of understanding when it comes to countrywide economy.
Yes, Sunak had to pull out all the stops for furlough or the hospitals would have been flooded with sick workers, death on even more of an industrial scale- because people could not afford to go to work and die, nor could they afford to sit at home for free. Naively, these same chocolate penny economists will tell you that furlough came at a cost to us: not to the landlords though. Those of us lucky enough to own property and to be paid for it- furlough covered them, because where did that money people earned for “sitting at home doing nowt” go… banks, or landlords, and energy companies. And harking back to the ineffably babbling point- missing waffling vicissitudes of Rachel Johnson, it’s funny how many rich folk wanted us back in the office- not, I believe, to ensure that hard work continued (after all, according to Truss, and Raab and Johnson, the British proletariat are lazy, idlers, prone to drink and violence over a hard days graft) but because rich people own property.
When you own eight office buildings, and none of those offices need you any more because SURPRISE, home working does work, your valuable property that accrues you money for just sitting there is suddenly useless.

During Truss’ tenure, if you didn’t blink and miss it, you may remember that she came up with what she termed as an “aggressive growth plan” to shore up the economy. Do you know the real reason that stupid, ill thought out plan didn’t work? Do you know why you should block and ignore any single person, pundit, newsreader, broadcaster or family member who for one second believed in the mythical magic wand waving of trickle down economics?
Because we’ve just lived through proof it doesn’t work.

Pandemics throughout history had been assumed by economists and historians to be a crucial crux of wealth redistribution: the rich suddenly having the onus thrust upon them to pay for the poor when the world came to a crashing halt and could not function as normal.
But this only demonstrably happened once- it was an aberration, during the Black Death, and other subsequent pandemics didn’t offer this proof. But they should be. Because wealth is accrued via the poor doing the jobs the rich pay us tiny slivers of their wealth to do, and when that stops, the rich should stop getting richer… shouldn’t they? That is when trickle down should manifest, as the rich haemorrhage money because the poor are verboten from working for them. But that didn’t happen.

Wealth accrual is not, or should not be, another form of immunisation against the pandemic: the poorer suffered from more adverse conditions than anyone during the pandemic. CEOs sat in their spare room ordering the office to continue under covid guidance, royalty broadcast remotely from chintz desks worth more than my flat’s monthly rent and bills. And so richness became an immunisation against covid too- because as with abstinence, it’s the best preventative. If you have a huge estate and you’re never exposed to another person, you won’t get sick.

The rich are in charge, the rich are in power- and so of course, they sit on their golden thrones or behind their vivid red placards, quoting three word slogans and telling us that we’re in it together. Because even in the most horrific conditions, they do not pay their fair share- and during the coronavirus pandemic, this was exemplified. The rich collectively gained a huge sum of money that the poor- us- lost. That money was not economy money, like the money that is created when people apply for mortgages or create a new business to meet demand: it was a simple transfer of wealth, from the collective poor to the privileged few. Investors in vaccines and masks, in ventilation tech or in industrial sign printing or whosoever else was “savvy” enough to spend a small sliver of their money to make huge gains right back.
So there you have it: trickle down economics doesn’t work- because during the pandemic and beyond the rich have accrued collective money at a rate never seen before in history and… it hasn’t trickled down. We’re still in a cost of living crisis, still in an energy crisis, still being told by those who benefited from existing wealth and wealth disparity that we’re all in the same boat. The difference is the boat has ten chairs, all occupied by unfathomably rich people, and the rest of us are dangling over the edge desperately paddling with both hands towards a shore we’ll never reach because the rich do not want us to.

Austerity is a choice. It is a choice, to force the poor to pay more tax proportionally. To offer temporary, sticking plaster aid to people to pay their bills, a choice to cut money to already skeletal public services when the answer is there: it’s plain to see energy companies and the rich collectively need to pay windfall taxes. Do you know what a windfall is? It is when money unexpectedly comes to you all at once. So we’ll implement half hearted windfall taxes against some energy companies sometimes as an emergency.

What about the billionaire CEOs who invested money into PPE schemes and got returns numbered in the millions, each pound or dollar measured in the flickering beep of a heart monitor attached to a COVID patient? That wasn’t smart investment, it was betting on death, insider trading on mortality. And those people get to… what, keep that money? Sit back and enjoy the spoils they, if you can lower yourself to using this word, “earned” by transferring wealth to already rich companies?

In accounts around the world, wealth sits- be it the collective wealth of companies or the accrued riches of some illusory businessman. That money could be put to use- it could pave our roads, fix our schools, hire our doctors, it could be leveraged back to its company to cheapen our bills, it could be used to democratise property ownership and prevent predatory landlordism.
Instead this money, this accrued wealth of those who could provide solutions to the problems humans face every day, goes towards vanity projects like buying social media, goes to space flights or it’s offshored where it is secreted away from the economy it came from: smaller sums go towards golden wallpaper or towards paying security to sit in one of six estates owned by a man whose claim to fame is his mother’s title, and her father’s title after that. This wealth exists to create a them and an us, and during this time, as temperatures plunge, as mortgages spiral, as windows stay dark and old people ride buses just to stay warm, we still live in a world of fools who think the them, the millionaires and billionaires, will keep feeding us the crumbs from their cakes if we just keep paddling that boat for them.

National debt is a myth. Money can just be printed. Its value is imaginary and human life is worth inconceivably more. And between a monarch under a gold and diamond hat, clutching a sceptre, and the richest PM in history whose wealth is still being accrued from a business operating out of Russia, being told we’re all in it together is not just a bitter pill to swallow: it’s a placebo.

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 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.

Living as a minority is fucking exhausting these days.

By Daviemoo

The never ending discourse that minorities are subjected to about their identity is absolutely exhausting.
When I was in my mid teens, the amount of discourse around gayness was tailing off after many, many years of our time in the societal panic spotlight. I’ve mentioned before that we almost seemed to experience something of a renaissance in white gay culture, a time where nobody cared or thought about us and it felt very liberating to just be able to get on with life without any of the inane rambling.
Now, we seem to be back in the spotlight along with other minorities and the endless pathologisation is exhausting, and I would love for those outside of our experience to imagine how mind numbing it is to be subjected to this over and over.

There’s this thing that happens when you exist as a minority where you feel the need to speak out about something, and are instantly shushed. We all know what I’m about to say- from “why does everything need to be about race” to “you don’t have to talk about being gay constantly” or the monosyllabic ranting around gender, for every time you open your mouth to speak somewhere an ignorant person is desperate to tell you to close it. This is, though, especially ironic when the person or people telling you to quieten down have profiles or existences dedicated to the ongoing denigration of people just like you- from racists who would be out of work without the existence of people of colour to people like Maya Forstater who seems to do nothing but go from anti LGBT+ event to anti LGBT+ event. We can’t turn off whatever it is that makes you dislike us, and bigots can- could- should deal with their bigotry, but I have so often seen people of that creed reject founded evidence of their wrongness in favour of believing incorrect beliefs. In fact, if we’re mentioning Forstater let’s talk about the idea that Gender Critical beliefs are a protected characteristic because even if you present gender critical people with empirical evidence they are incorrect they will still hold the belief in the face of it being wrong. There is an ever growing tranche of evidence linking far right activism including anti vaccination and white supremacist rallies to gender critical activism and we can see why: Look at how the anti vaccine movement has stopped talking about autism in the face of billions and billions of COVID Vaccinations yielding not one additional case of autism- it’s the same conspiracy-esque nonsense as trans people secretly being funded by George Soros to “trans” peoples kids.
How is one meant to argue the case with people to whom fact means nothing. Judith Butler has often spoken out about those who will try to “silence” dissenting minorities, as if stopping adults from talking about their gender or sexuality would stop children from experiencing their own awakenings; trans people existed before 1990, as did gay people and quietening those voices does nothing to stop that. Let us not forget Butler’s Guardian article in early 2022, which featured a prediction of far right allyship with Gender Critical movements. Though this section of the article was removed, the truth of its words rang out and were ratified only last month when Butler’s prediction came true.

For most of us, identity is incidental. If we lived in a normal world, my being gay wouldn’t have been a big deal so I probably wouldn’t think about it much. But we don’t live in a normal world. We live in a world where stranger A’s being transgender offends stranger B so much that stranger B literally lobbies against stranger A being able to exist in society: we live in a world where a gay person existing on TV is so offensive to some non gay people that they will boycott shows just to avoid looking at someone who isn’t even doing anything adult- just existing as a gay person.

Now, the irony here is that it’s quite often the people complaining about these things who talk about how people like me are soft, sensitive snowflakes because we don’t like having our identity questioned and pathologised- but I hardly think it’s the people who don’t like spurious accusations of mental illness and perversion levelled act them that are the weak ones, over people who physically cannot tolerate seeing affection expressed between two consenting adults. But it’s an irony that is so often passed over, because acknowledgement of this presents a threat to the heteronormative status quo: if you question why straight men are so sensitive they can’t even see two men kiss, they will likely lose their temper, or immediately spit out nonsense in retaliation.

My personal favourite overused archetype at the moment is the “I’m not *insert flavour of bigotry here* BUT”.
“I’m not homophobic BUT I don’t support gay people’s right to get married”.
So you don’t think it’s homophobic to allow me to have equal rights to you? “You do, you could marry a woman”. Yes I could- do you condone me marrying a woman knowing I have no intention to follow what the normative model of that is…? Also under equal marriage, you have the right to marry another man- ah, you don’t want to because that doesn’t interest you. Interesting…
The most fascinating part of the “I’m not X bigotry BUT” types is almost a tacit acknowledgement that it’s wrong to be bigoted so they try to distance themselves from it whilst also rationalising a viewpoint that proves they are.
I’d posit that it’s possible to hold one, maybe even two ‘mildly’ bigoted opinions about a minority without being wholly a bigot, but it’s best to just unpick those opinions because having bigoted opinions does not help you in any way.
But the way in which bigoted people will try to remove themselves from the idea of being a bigot whilst perpetuating its existence is almost comical.

This seems to happen a lot with anti trans people. “I’m not transphobic” is said so often to me that I could genuinely use it as white noise, second only to “but what did she SAY that’s transphobic”. It’s a bad faith argument. When you’re told by multiple members of a minority that something is bigoted, why fight that? It isn’t affecting your free speech, you can still say it, but you will also be judged for it. If you’re being told that what you say is offensive you have options:
-Accept that what you have said is bigoted, apologise, acknowledging this is wrong and try to do your own work to unpick the thought patterns that led to this thought’s formation
-Accept that what you have said is bigoted but refuse to do the work, believing that it is your right to hold this view even if it is considered “wrong” societally
-Deny that what you have said is bigoted and explain it further, possibly alleviating the problem or making it worse dependant on your defence
-Deny that what you have said is bigoted and refuse to engage on the topic further

It is this key confusion I wish I could unpick. People seem to want to live in a world where they can both say the bigoted opinion AND escape culpability for having it.

A narrow minded opinion is not just a handcuff, it’s a ball and chain: if you want to have the opinion, you must be shackled to it’s consequences: any attempt to hold a bigoted opinion without ownership of it’s negative connotations is proof you are aware that the opinion is incorrect and is not defensible.

The relentless discourse around identity is part, I am almost sure, of human nature. It is human to examine, deconstruct and question identity- from the first moment one human saw another human. walking around in clothes, or choose to farm instead of hunt all the way to now, variation has been part of human existence and many of us spend immense amounts of time unpicking the human experience through the lenses of others: the idea that identity is a binary is laughably reductive in the face of all of human history. From body types, skin colour, gender to the more ephemeral concept of music taste, artistic level, hobbies and interests and so on, humanity is vast and varied: to deny this and to shrink identity to “right” or “wrong” based on its marriage to your own identity is bizarre. The problem is, culture is linked to the popular. White, blonde, fairly affluent right wing people seem to be the largest demographic (this is false, there are more varied and liberal people in western societies) based on social media and media presented to us by states and national interests. The reason that the more varied side fails often to stake its’ representation properly is that, within that vast and varied group there is still a reductive argument about identity that persists, alongside the idea that there is or are a way or ways in which to exist which is “correct”: this is false.

Every person has a mode of existence that suits them. Unfortunately, some people’s mode of existence intersects negatively with others. People who kill, people who hurt others, bigots etc- these people negatively impact on other people’s mode of existence. This is not acceptable, and whilst neither a wholly “live and let live” mindset is fully helpful, it is more conducive to a prosperous society than enforced rules of living that do not fit a certain proportion of people.

There is no “correct way” to exist, because each person is so fundamentally different from the last, though often having overlaps that to apply a unifying theory to existence is wholly pointless.

Looking at gender: many societies have followed similar but not wholly same methods of gender expression for many years. That doesn’t mean those methods are correct as much as that, at the time, they were considered appropriate: from Geishas in Japan as an expression of femininity to Boudica, stripped bare for statues- these are expressions of gender just as surely as petticoats, little black dresses and more. Society changes in huge, varied ways which lead to a retrospective interest in their originations: Think of it in terms of medicine. The reason that so many anti vaxxers exist is that many see medicine as it exists now as the “peak” of modernity: medicine can’t get any better, so any “new” medicine, like vaccines etc are not acceptable or safe: this is based on the idea that medicine doesn’t grow and change. Vaccines have been performed en masse since the late 1800s and whilst they, like every single medical procedure from dentistry to appendectomies have resulted in deaths, the numbers are small. Every time you have a medical procedure you should be aware of the potential for harm: vaccines are no exception.
I have no doubt that in 200 years, if humans don’t wipe themselves out, the way in which we treat cancers etc now will be viewed as just as brutal and unsafe as we view war wound amputations from the 1800s. This is the same for understandings of and ways to go about expressing gender, including the medical side- but one can also look at anything and see societal understanding adapt and grow through time. It genuinely functions the same: Archaic expressions of gender are seen as quaint, and our reductive understanding of gender and its expression now will, again, be seen as primitive if humanity continues to flourish.

But in examining these modes of existence we zoom so far out as to miss the micro-strands of daily existence and humanity woven between these existences, so to zoom back in and to get back to the original point, being under that constant level of scrutiny is wholly exhausting.

One reason I feel this could be the case is that those who live under “social norms” or who feel the need (like transphobic trans people) to reaffirm social norms even in the face of their own existence, feel their existence is threatened when someone exists outside of their reconciliation of their own identity.
In particular, gay men who rail against any man who does not conform to their idea of masculine seem often to be filled with a certain type of discomfort that, because a feminine man exists he will also be tarred with femininity. This leads into a broader discussion of what exactly is wrong with femininity or conversely why a “masculine” woman is problematic, but it’s original concept is that to be a man who does not conform to what another man’s expectation is cannot be a man. Norms are simply the base understanding we originate from, but do not have to be the finality of our understanding of how people can be, exist and function. I have been told innumerable times in my life that I’m not a “real man” because of my sexuality, but if homosexual acts remove me from my sex then sex is surely not innate and immutable- and yet many homophobic gender critical people can hold these two opposing beliefs in their heads at the same time.
I do have to wonder on a personal level if there is a connection between why a lot of gay men are more effeminate- is it biological, societal: who knows. But the question is, why does it matter. Behaviour is just behaviour, and why do normative people feel threatened by those who do not conform? Perhaps there’s a biological imperative on why certain sexes act certain ways, and a further conflation of why homosexual people act differently than this- but in a society that isn’t based on survival due to very base acts, actions and modes of existence it doesn’t matter.

I used to believe that humans would naturally become more understanding, kinder, better as we grew. But I grew up in the early 90s and we didn’t have the internet or smart phones. Now we do, we can reach out and speak to people of every walk of life- and that seems to have come with endless discourse from normative people on why anything outside of their experience makes them uncomfortable. One has to wonder whether this massive amount of discussion is simply a Richter shake of society as we strain to accommodate those who were quiet before: but the main issue we face is that society will not continue to improve until we stop recycling the same faces, the same voices: White cis women endlessly recycling the same 5000 words about their discomfort with trans women, middle aged men speaking out about foreign people in their countries, old people talking about the problems with the young… Until we change the well worn narrative it is only these recidivist attitudes that will continue to seem “normal” and whilst I personally do not want to appeal to “normal” because I am not by my nature, I would very much like for “normal” people to stop discussing people who are not they as a pastime.

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.

Give us democracy- or prepare for consequences

By Daviemoo

“Give me liberty, or give me death” is a well known quote attributed to Patrick Henry, reconstructed from memories of a speech he gave to the Second Virginia Convention. Even without context this is a bold assumption, but it speaks to the idea of liberty- freedom- as a fundamental right and a fundamental need, so basic as to warrant death without it.
Where, I have to wonder, as we watch events in the UK unfold, does democracy twine together with freedom, and how are we to access it against the headwind of an openly corrupt and incapable political party in the Conservatives: is democracy something we would die for? And if so, what is the mechanism that would trip to force that stand-up fight to access it?

Britain is a mess.
I’m not just talking about the obvious: the crises, the cost of living, the ever spiralling quality of life. I’m talking about the populace too, an embittered people- and rightly so. As an Englishman I’m painfully aware of the optics of being English, when it is amongst us that lie the biggest proponents of this failing government.
Many English folk cannot accept that the tory party are fundamentally antithetical to the UK’s growth, its needs and seem desperate to cling to an ideology that the party shucked in favour of extremism long ago. This has manifested several times in several ways: when the right wing press urged Nigel Farage’s brexit party to stand down over 200 MPs to strategically prevent vote splitting it was a grim portent of what was to come. Farage did this with theatrical aplomb, allowing those voters to assimilate into the tory party, and the tory party wanted this to happen, because having- and as we see demonstrated now- maintaining power- is the only success the tory party has had. Even their fabled exit from the EU has demonstrably worsened living conditions for anyone in the UK under an exorbitant living threshold, but under the thrall of press who pour poison upon its own readers, many of them still hail it as a win.

The reason Britain is a mess is in huge part this desperate Stockholm syndrome under which much of the population lives: the desperate willing to accept anyone provided their tie is the right colour is a disease that spans both wings of the bird we’re all hurtling towards the ground on. But the right’s need to cling to the tory party as its framework shatters and it becomes nonfunctional is bizarre on a scale I never expected to see.

Again and again since 2010 the party has demonstrated its inability to put the genuine needs of the British public first. They worsened austerity, causing a rumoured 330,000 deaths- more than coronavirus, but coronavirus threatens now to overtake that as cases skyrocket again and the tories do nothing. Cameron tried to heal the division in the party, arrogant as he was that he could make the case for remain: he failed, and left before he could sweep up the shards of his own mess. Teresa May- a remainer- took over to helm the party. She tried, three whole times, to convince people to back her deal. Her deal was bad not because she was a remainer but because the EU held, holds, will always hold- all the cards. When you’re the partner threatening to leave, you don’t get to demand what goes with you.
And so May fell, victim to the shadowy ERG if rumour is to be believed, and in her place rose Boris Johnson.
I’ve written extensively about Boris Johnson- the man sacked for lying three times now. The man who thinks 250,000 per article is “chicken feed”. The man who was raising glasses of whisky whilst one of my old clients choked slowly to death in an ICU bed. And the man who not only willingly hired a pervert into his inner circle, but joked about it- “Pincher by name, Pincher by nature” it was said. Johnson has clearly never been touched against his will, or he’d never sink to such humour. And we all know the other stories, the racism in his columns, the lies about the EU, cheating on his cancer stricken wife. So when Johnson was forcefully removed from the party by a rebellion the likes of which we’ve never seen in the UK, one was to believe that perhaps the party was trying to shrug off the cloud of ill-intent that had surrounded it and distance itself from him.

Along came Liz Truss after an excruciating leadership battle in which it seemed every member was trying to outcunt each other- Mordaunt throwing her only redeeming quality of supposedly being LGBT+ inclusive, Sunak and his promise to defund ailing areas, every day brought with it more reasons to despise those in power more as they revealed just how much lower they could sink.
I suspect that most of us knew that Truss wouldn’t last, not even a glass cannon and more of a lead balloon. But one suspected that after all of this- after originating a prime minister whose hubris initiated a chain of events that has wrecked the economy, after ineffectual leaders, protracted leadership campaigns in the face of encroaching terror, broken promises and a leader who was more concerned with drinking than protecting British citizens, I believe we all suspected that the Tories zeal for power might run out. In the face of the simple fact that being lord of an island whose economy is in minus figures, where everyone has a dangerous virus and where division runs so deeply that the entire island wants its own independence referendum from itself, I was sure that perhaps at last the conservatives might at last, for lack of options moreso than anything, bow to common sense and call a general election: but no.

Now talk is loud of a return of Johnson, all forgiven by those who were never angry at him anyway. The British populace’s obsession with this pathetic weaselly man defies all laws of logic. He’s condemned the working class and his premiership was naught but disaster, and not even of the coronavirus variety. He ignored the EU’s olive branch for ventilators, meaning British Citizens who could have been intubated and given a chance to live died instead.

Democracy is something to die for- but I suspect many of us never expected to have to make that choice and walked the streets and paths of the UK blithely unaware that we’ve never been in proximity of democracy. Our voting system is broken, our parliament bloated with those whose understanding of the lives of the 99% couldn’t even be described as ‘passing’ and our country is built on the house of cards lie that it must be someone like Boris Johnson who masquerades as intelligent in the face of his stupidity that must lead us.

So if we cannot have democracy, will not be given a vote, then I truly hope for Boris Johnson’s triumphant return to the premiership: and let me be the first to say that in the inevitable days to weeks until another scandal breaks, until it is revealed that Johnson did wilfully mislead parliament, until another indiscretion comes out, I hope you enjoy the reinstallation of his glib face. Because the tsunami of vengeance against tories and their enablers is building. It has been growing in strength by degrees for years and now it threatens to overwhelm the nation. Before long, the people will have their say, with or without an election and I wonder exactly what will be left of the Conservative party when the wave breaks upon the shores of number 10 and parliament.

If you so wish to maintain this system then may you lie upon its altar and prepare yourself – for you may well be the sacrifice it needs. But if we have the chance of better, of true reflective politics, politics that helps British people to live better lives, more honest lives, why continue to battle against it? The reason, I fear, is that the tories are too selfish to relinquish power even in the gasping death of their own party and of our democracy.

What we need is a drive to expel the bad actors in UK politics and to instil a fear of the populace in our MPs – not a fear of violence but a fear of the utter and total rejection of this failing system, a complete redundancy of their presence as useless to our ends. I suspect this drive will come in time, but every day the tories stamp harder on the accelerator towards its conclusion.

And so I welcome the return of Boris Johnson to finally begin the rictus dance of the party that started to die long before his bumbling years in charge, and may the decomposing meat of the long dead conservatives be the compost from which better politics arises at last. And if not Johnson, if another soulless hollow eyed tory, we need only move the expectation back- for every single member of that disgraceful party is a cancer upon the brain of British freedom- the only question is the level of malignancy.

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.

A NEW THREAT TO HUMAN RIGHTS? Must be a Tuesday in Toryland

By Daviemoo

Protest is a fundamental right- Whether it’s to stand up against corn-drunk overlords in the feudal days, to gather a party and march on the palace in the days of absolute monarchy or to kneel in Millennium Square in Leeds in solidarity with the people of colour whose lives have been stunted by racism and racists, protest is in our blood, our bones, our DNA.
We use protest from the macro to the grandiose, every time we tell a boss they can’t treat the office poorly, every time we tell a stranger to stop behaving inappropriately- but it’s most contentious use is to speak out against those who wield power against us. Holding power and wielding power irresponsibly are not bedfellows, but in this dark and twisted timeline, somehow these two disparates have been conflated: a government who uses its power against you is not normal. A government should be in thrall to it’s people. The tories are not, Least of all Suella Braverman whose new bill poses the most open assault on British freedom in recent years. George Monbiot has done a masterful thread on Twitter, explaining the thorny new bill proposed by Suella Braverman.

PMQ’s today was, as always, an exercise in futility. From the opposition benches came questions of hole-filled economic policy, accusations of not being up to the job, frank concerns raised about people who will die in freezing rooms or alone with mental turmoil this winter- and from the tory benches, foolish rambling nonsense about rugby teams and “will the right honourable lady agree with me that…” which benefits nobody.
Tory, labour, SNP, Greens… it doesn’t matter the alignment of the person on those benches- to constituents facing the very real possibility of poverty these ridiculous questions do not matter. It is long since PMQs was of any real use to the people of this country. Now elected to stand before the dispatch box is the shambling corpse of a party once elected as fiscally competent until this prime minister hollowed out the British economy, or thought of as the party of law and order until the last prime minister broke fundamentally vital safety laws in office.

But one point not raised was the new legislation dragged from the dungeons by Suella Braverman.
Braverman’s public order bill is an authoritarian monstrosity, forcing those who have attended protests- even peaceful, planned protests- to submit to government tagging, monitoring and threatening custodial sentences for anyone who encourages others to protest online. Draconian is not the word- Suellenian is, because Suella Braverman is a step past draconian.
Under this bill any protest activity is essentially treated as extremism, including retrospectively. Protest in the last five years did you? Did you attend BLM protests? Pro EU marches? Strike action? Or on the converse side… anti lockdown marches… then you can be forced to wear an electronic tag like a shoplifting teen, forced to register your whereabouts and you are forbidden on penalty of prison from using the internet to speak about protesting. I abhorred the anti lockdown protesters, because I knew that they would spread the virus that took me to the floor, and make the entire ordeal of lockdowns and restrictions last longer- but they still had the right to do it as surely as I did over BLM or trans lives.
This bill takes a paring knife to the few dried strips of flesh left on the bone of English protest rights (it does, happily, not extend to devolved nations), meaning that English people would be fundamentally unable to speak out against this government- and why would this be? This is, after all, the government who has, since 2016, parroted the will of the people at every turn. If the will of the people was of concern to the conservatives, they would surely be happy about any way in which they can hear it? And of course, a government doing a successful job wouldn’t need to legislate against people speaking out against it. Imagine being so bad at governance that, instead of doing the things people want and need you to do, you just legally stop them from complaining.

But this isn’t the only gaping irony exposed by this new behemoth-bill.
it’s less than three weeks since Truss stood at the tory party conference, gesticulating into the glossy eyed audience as she exclaimed at her excitement over wanting to be “a small governance” government, who doesn’t care “what you do in your personal life”- one does not have to care if one legally restricts you from doing what you want. And foolishly, Truss supporters (however few) gulp down this nonsense as fact. This government cares deeply what you do in your personal life, if that in any way diverges from their bold vision of autonomous workers free of the thorny legislation that means you get time off, holidays, sick pay and protection from bosses who will force you to work without adequate protections, legislative or physical.
Truss promised bold restoration of tory party values- a simple task, as the tory party has no values left, all consigned to the pyre of anti EU gesticulation and empty flag waving. Today at PMQs she declared she is “a fighter, not a quitter” which ironically is the main problem people have with her- we want you to quit, just call an election first and consign your twelve years of mayhem to the dustbin heap on which it belongs. It won’t be long before anti protest legislation pales into irrelevance because so many people are sick of Truss, sick of Tories, that there aren’t enough police in the entire UK to prevent the uprising on the horizon. Like the star tattoos of the early 00s, I imagine in five years time we’ll all be comparing our DBS checks to show which version of ridiculous protest law we were slapped with, and anyone without a disclosure will be deemed quaint or disparaged as an enabler of these eternal shysters.

When thousands of people took to the streets of London, Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool to protest against the police crime courts and sentencing bill the government studiously ignored it: I myself was at one protest in Leeds, flanked by police officers. “Do you actually want this” I asked of one, who simply stared ahead, ignoring me. “Do you want people to not even be able to stand here and say how they feel”. Nothing.
Now that bill is passed into law- protesting is functionally illegal without assent from the local police force. Think about that, in conjunction with the recently released report on the institutional failures of the Met to tackle its long raised issues with homo and transphobia, misogyny, violence in the ranks, the officers who protect each other from domestic abuse claims… We need to gain consent from those to whom consent means nothing in both bedroom and street, to protest against them. Protesters are being imprisoned for tearing down likenesses of our racist ancestors who used humans as cargos, because Braverman, who uses phrases like “tofu eating wokerati”, is fighting an ideological war of one.

Braverman is a step down from the bottom-basement step of Priti Patel. Her utter obsession with forcing conformance on Brits is madness. She claims to stand for free speech but is compelling people not to respect gender identity, she decries political correctness whilst demanding people speak the way she wants. She is not the last bastion of free speech, she is a desperate attempt to utterly destroy it. If you don’t speak like Braverman wants she hopes to criminalise you, and if you act in a way she disagrees with she will craft legislation so harsh that countries like China and Russia seem moderate in comparison.
Braverman is the burning ember of what is left from the tories desperate hoovering up of the cigarette ends of UKIP and other extremist parties, a useful puppet too stupid to understand contrition or politeness: her main issue with the phrase “politically correct” is that she’s never been correct once in her life, fondled by Johnson into the job of attorney general despite her lack of qualifications and legal nous. Lawyers and human rights experts alike went from rolling their eyes at her endless open mouthed nonsensical rambles like her anaemic defence of Johnson on question time to being slack jawed themselves at her appointment to Home Secretary. She is spectacularly hypocritical, a woman who shakes her fist at everything EU whilst benefitting from the Erasmus program she supported the scrapping of and someone who desperately refrains back to the idea that her way of living is freedom whilst she legislatively obliterates any other ways to be.

This law is the latest attempt from the tories to curtail any anger at their behaviour and it’s another inch on the rope around their necks: legislate away, Suella- when the dam breaks and the tsunami of frustration boils over, no amount of yellowed legal paper containing your photocopied signature will protect you from the reality of our displeasure with tory malfeasance.
But fight we must, against this. Braverman is convinced, in the face of an overwhelming amount of evidence, that she is correct. The British public must speak up and speak out against her, until her meek bleating is lost in the concerted cacophony of British people telling her in no uncertain terms that we have had enough of her, and of her party.

Until this time though, when finally we Brits come together as we must and take to the streets, I ask the readers of this blog to reach out to your MPs. Teenagers gluing themselves to roads or walls in protest of climate issues is less of a threat to our way of life than ever more condescending bills being thrust before the eyes of the unelected lords- I urge you to tell your MPs that you will in no way foster this bill being taken through to royal assent. And if your MP is a Labour MP I urge you to gain confirmation that labour will commit to reversing this, and all other degenerate protest laws the tories have put in place since their mind bending decision to back the dead end of brexit.

The UK is waking up to the tories and we will take back our country from this vile government. The only legislation I want to see is legislation that protects the people, by ensuring that this criminal cabal will never see power again.

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.

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

By Daviemoo

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Daviemoo is a 34 year old independent writer, radicalised into blogging about the political state of the world by Brexit and the election of serial failures like Trump and Johnson. Please check out the rest of the blog, check out Politically Enraged, the podcast available on all streaming platforms and share with your like minded friends! Also check him out on ko-fi where you can keep him caffeinated whilst he writes.

Get Off Your Knees

By Daviemoo

Today’s interview between unelected cockroach Liz Truss and worlds most servile client journalist Laura Kuenssberg was the inexorable tearing point. The blithe dismissal of a key question about who actually voted for any of this broke something within me that has been fraying for many years. Now we must ask ourselves, as citizens of the UK, whether we are prepared to continue to lie on the floor as they waterboard us with gasoline, all the while impetuously telling us it is for our own good.
The time to stand against this government is at hand, and to the folk of the UK at large, I ask- if not now, why?

“How many people voted for your plan” Kuenssberg asked, in a rare show of something approaching criticism of the people who have allowed her unfettered access because of her creeping protection of them. A trademarked pause, a dismissive smirk and an offhand “what do you mean by that”, replied Truss.
In that response, I heard the tangible *RRRRIP* of the last of my patience. The phrase “the straw that broke the camel’s back” was never more relevant than today. It was an innocuous response at best but summed up everything that has led to this moment: a direct question, an exhortation to explain who it is that actually wants this- and Truss can’t answer honestly. Even the gaggle of conservative voters who voted Truss in did not choose this haemmorrhagic attack on the UK’s long troubled economy, and any of them with sense and without bank accounts stacked high with money would not have done so. Truss’ determination to leave a lasting impact on the UK left her with a Putin-esque wish to wreak destruction upon us, and Britain’s glib concurrence with anti-democracy has handed her the remit to do so: our silence, our long compliance with a government we hate- that is the mandate Truss and her useless cabinet cling to. And so, in that moment where Truss tipped her hand that she believes she does not need a remit to have savaged our futures, I lost my temper in a way I have not done in the years preceding.

I’ve said this so many times that it tastes dry on the tongue: in my youth I was raised by a grandfather with a history of national service, a man who believed to his core that the UK was sacrosanct, that it’s citizens would take no nonsense, worked hard, deserved the best.
The UK is not beyond scrutiny. Yes, there are benefit scroungers who sit at home all day watching tv and smoking cigarettes.
I don’t care- at least, I don’t care about those people as much as I do about people who get away with ruining the UK’s economy with the smirking assent of the government. People coming away with £17k of benefits a year aren’t as much of a problem to me as the people defrauding us of millions of pounds of taxation, not the least because the benefit people put that money back into the system when they buy whatever they buy with it, but the millionaires use shady bank accounts and purposely badly written legislation to keep their money away from public investment.

And every stupid tory voter loves the idea of not paying more tax- as if tax goes directly into the back pocket of some illusory immigrant rather than into the roads, the schools, the hospitals we all use. As if paying high tax isn’t one of the most brazen solutions to fix a country in decline- to fix infrastrucure. Of course paying more tax under the tories is a bad idea, because they’d privatise their bowel movements if they could. They funnel tax money into their friends and families limited companies, to the detriment of the public, all the while using the willing press to jab jewelled accusatory fingers at imaginary enemies. It’s not years of open idiocy that has resulted in the public decline of the country: it’s trans people! Or foreigners! No, it’s those bloody politically correct teachers, those lefty institutions.
Need I remind you people the tories have been in power with various majorities for THIRTEEN YEARS.
If the tories actually thought foreigners, or trans people, or benefit scroungers were the problem- they could fix it in a matter of weeks to months. They don’t fix these problems because if they did act against those minorities, it would show how little threat they pose- and because these minorities serve as scapegoats for people desperate to hate anyone but the arbiters of their misery! When’s the last time a trans woman from Iraq raised your taxes and spent that extra money on “Selfish.LTD” who made 30000 pieces of defective PPE? Is it more than, or equal to, never?

The UK’s population has lain prostrate for years under a government without a real terms majority, without a competent modus operandi, without a plan as they did nothing to aid us. They have stood above us, implementing austerity measures, holding transparently manipulated referenda based on lies, blaming us for our own quality of life declining- and at all times they have held the reins. The conservatives transparently fail to hold themselves accountable for their myriad failures, constantly dodging and diving- but the advent of the post- Cameron politics pre-to-post brexit also added in a Trumpian insistence on doubling down on nonsense unashamedly, an art that Boris Johnson refined and Liz Truss in her short tenure has perfected.
We cannot hold to scrutiny people who are pathologically unable to feel shame: and the time to try has passed.

Not Liz Truss, nor any tory, are the people to guide us through encroaching brexit fallout (it’s still not done by the way), through economic and domestic crises, health crises, through the no doubt impending world war. We need decisive ,competent and bold leadership who does not maintain the well worn lines of the status quo- because the status quo has not worked for one day of my life- the tangible decline of the last 13 years is proof ignored by millions of people numbed to the slow decimation of our country: people ignore the cracks just barely hidden by union jacks plastered on every surface.

When it comes to the semi-immediate future, I expect a labour government to take root. But labour must be bolder than it is. It must root out its own problems, the problems which are wielded against it. Labour at its heart is meant to be the broad church of the left: and it must not fall into support of extremists who believe in “kind” authoritarianism rather than the blatant sort of the tories. Democracy must be held sacrosanct. It must start to deal with the nagging issues it has continued to shush its critics over, from allowing shills like Rosie Duffield to ascend to, and keep, power to ousting those who say disgraceful nonsense like Rupa Huq. But most of all, Labour must promise to steer the country in a different direction to the tories. We deserve better. Labour must offer better.

Any incremental change is crumbs- and perhaps, in the face of history, it is time to let us eat cake.

We will not escape the coming civil upheaval without casualties, and that thought itself is enough to instil a fear of it into a great many of us: lest we forget those who have already been let down to die by this government: the people who lost their lives due to austerity, who froze in their homes even before the energy crisis, those whose benefits were frozen under the now head of the NHS Therese Coffey, our brothers and sisters who died alone because of a flippancy over the severity of covid. We aren’t headed towards a clash where some of us will die- we have been lined up against a wall for years as the tories took potshots at us from afar. But now the blindfolds are falling away. There is no alternative for us but to rise up together, as one, and declare ‘no more’.

Scotland will have its independence referendum. Deservedly so. Wales will leave, Ireland will reunify. The tories have besmirched the union to the point of farcicality. But more than tearing the union asunder, they have made us suffer together, huddled in the wreckage of their maledictions. Together the UK must impart a fear of the masses into politicians that will persist long after the death of the unions. Together the people of each country must stand arm to arm, shoulder to shoulder against this government and against any other that comes to power after. For too long we have been silent when we should have been screaming, and now we’ve started may the echoes of our rage ring in the ears of every political party from now to eternity. And down the line may we each remember that we failed, time after time after time, to hold these villains to account, and may we say “never again can we let this come to pass”.

We have the chance now to live on our feet instead of at the feet of the Conservatives. Let us take it.

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.