Tag: England

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.

How did the UK go from leaders in the world to Putin’s playthings

By Daviemoo

The Russia report, whilst still redacted and once liberally flavoured with context from political experts like Peter Oborne in his book “The Assault On Truth”, gives a damning indictment and insight into the eyes-wide-open approach of the UK government when it comes to Russian meddling in our democracy. Certain factions of the UK government- both within and outside of the tory party were hopeful of a leave result in the Brexit referendum because they felt that the European Union stymied their efforts for their legislative and political overhaul- a statement that could refer to benign protection of UK citizens over state or, as we have now, authoritarian reductions of freedom to protest, enfranchisement of citizenship and the open discussion of the reform of the human rights act. But wider fears were known for a long time about the referendum- potential political interference from those who would wish our democracy, economy and world standing harm. Having read the report, political experts speaking about the referendum and Russia’s wider role in infiltrating our politics, it paints a worrying picture of those who would cry “sovereignty” without understanding the word.

In 2017 the Parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee, a committee designed specifically to investigate probity in parliament along with MI5, MI6 and other designated security bodies, announced an investigation into the Brexit referendum- specifically around Russian interference in the leave campaign & in our democracy as a wider scope, from the suffusion of Russian money into the bedrock of our politics and the rot that dampening of fiduciary enticement would wreak on politics. We saw only last year that politicians were keen to take lobbying money and that this led to literal death during the pandemic, and so with a retrospective glance, one prepares for the worst as they load up the 55 pages the ISC produced.

Due to the enormity and importance of this report along it wasn’t completed until march 2019 and then subsequently went into its final checking stages (ensuring it was factual and redacted to protect British security). It was finally completed in October 2019 at which point the report in its entirety would have been passed to the Prime Minister for review and for publishing. The (redacted, naturally) report is now available for public perusal on the government’s website: unfortunately due to the obfuscation of large sections of information, without a wider understanding of the recent and current political spectrum it is difficult to draw a conclusion from its wording into whether Russia had specific aims in its interference, though there is no doubt that meddling has occurred, both within the leave campaign and in the wider spheres of UK politics.

Two weeks after the report was dropped on Boris Johnson’s no doubt busy desk Michael Gove appeared on the TV twice and was asked where the report was- to which he responded “it’s going through the regular processes and will be published in due course”- a lie.
Gove may be an amateur at exhibiting appropriate behaviours but he is arguably an experienced politician at senior level & would have known that the report lay on the desk of the Prime Minister. Rishi Sunak, at the time an inexperienced but liked politician within the party, appeared on TV a week later and repeated this lie- it’s unknown whether Sunak knew he was spinning a web first cast by Gove and the PM but regardless, he did.

A week after this Johnson appeared on PMQ’s and amongst several open lies, he said that the report was “subject to the usual checks” and he saw “no reason to interfere” with its publication. The report was sat on his desk.

At this time, the conservatives were sinking quite literal millions into digital advertising. An ombudsman at the time condemned around 80% of their advertisements, stating they were “outright false or demonstrably untrue” in their wording. A lot of these adverts were targeted towards swing voters to capture their interest- pulling in undecided voters with untrue statements or, to use common parlance: lies.

When questioned on the veracity of their digital advertisements, Dominic Raab stated “nobody gives a toss about the cut and thrust of online advertisement” which is a truly odd sentiment for a man from a political party investing two million pounds into adverts deemed majority misleading- clearly the tories did and do care about digital advertising and the use of digital spaces to reach people- including deploying their own bot farms to exculpate themselves from accusations of negative press coverage, as demonstrated here:

Bots tweeting disinformation about an incident where a child was filmed on the floor at Leeds General Infirmary because of the government mismanagement of the NHS

Russia had long been known by the time of the referendum to be engaging in unfriendly cyber attacks against the UK, and the UK had begun to name them as digital adversaries- prior to 2010, the ISC was asked not to do so due to the worries around diplomatic relations, but several key cyber events were linked to Russia after this- and yet, we see echoes of this in the Russia report, even redacted as it is: the report itself in clause 10 of the introduction points to the fact that any report would be seen as a diplomatic thorn in the side of Russia, because even the inference of investigation implies distrust- ironically, a distrust well founded in said report. Even with laughably heavy redaction, the lingua franca in the report is indicative of conclusive findings of Russian meddling.

It was also found though, that whilst the government knew this, no findings were given to the committee as they completed their report on Russia’s interference. This doesn’t mean no evidence was found- it means the government either didn’t investigate at all, or did and saw fit not to share their findings. Either of these outcomes is troubling and infers that the government either knew already or was suspicious that the sanctity of electoral processes had been violated.

The why

Russia’s under-arching aims seemed to be geared towards creating a climate of distrust in information surrounding events- which as we can imagine has had demonstrably disastrous influence over how the UK has handled the coronavirus pandemic.

An excerpt from the report which spoke about general aims of the interference found, around both the UK and wider

One of the most frustrating and regularly encountered sentiments around political discourse in the UK now is “they’re all the same”- because it is indicative of the UK’s failure to engage its populace and be trustworthy enough to show benefit in political engagement- the entire ethos behind this blog and my deep obsession with bringing the everyman back into political discourse in the UK.

One would assume that Russia’s overarching aim would be to weaken the UK politically, but has also cheerfully achieved the side effect of creating societal divide so deep that family members refuse to speak over it.

The shift in political discourse was disquieting- suddenly you couldn’t believe what was said because it wasn’t true, or an expert said it and we don’t trust political experts. Even trusted UK assets like Christopher Steele had spoken, though in limited terms, about Brexit and Russia’s wider impact on geopolitical Democratic purity:

“There was some evidence that Russia had funnelled money into the Brexit campaign… it was like a virus that had moved westwards, started off in places like Ukraine and Georgia and so on, had come into Eastern Europe, then Western Europe, and then obviously had made the leap across The Atlantic, to the US in 2016”

Christopher Steele, in an interview with Sky News about Russia’s troubling influence on global democracy and alleged links to Election interference

One could generously supply a list below of general discussions occurring in the public sphere which could ostensibly be linked to Russian ideals flooding the UK beyond the referendum which became a daily wedge issue- the push against “woke” culture is an obvious topic. Any move away from the important implementation of diversity inclusion highlighted in “anti woke” discourse would arguably worsen societal existence for groups already enmired in ensuring their rights, freedoms and protection are not eroded from beneath them- but as the side chases away the sand below our feet, “anti woke” rhetoric has pervaded our society. I hasten those involved in the obsession with ‘the war on woke’ to question what a society without “woke” culture would be like.

Similar with the anti-trans debate. One needs only look at how Putin’s Russia treats minorities to see that Russian society is the ideal- a strange coincidence? I think not.

One of the most troubling parts of the report focuses on who actually implements real checks and security on our democratic processes- from MI5 to Nadine Dorries’ remit of the media office, nobody seemed to want to claim ownership of the safeguarding of democracy. The report suggested that perhaps MI5 should do so- and yet no information could be found online as to whether this was implemented. This, then, indicates that regardless of outcome the government is not interested in preventing further attacks.

From leaders to deceivers

The UK seems to have almost wilfully lost its place in the world as a leader in diplomatic relations. There will of course be some amongst us who laughably argue that we never had a prime place but even as a harsh critic of the Tory Party I would argue that we were always regularly involved in sweeping political events in tandem with the US and EU and even seen as distinct from the EU as our own political force majeure.

Our report makes mention of the sanctions, expulsions and harsh rebukes of Russia that came from the Litvenenko assassination and the poisonings of the Skripals- an event which harmed several British citizens. No longer do we see the UK leading the way on Russian sanctions in the face of the war in Ukraine- arguably the UK has fallen behind of other leaders like the US and the EU who have worked extremely quickly to sanction Kremlin-linked individuals, but to implement harsh domestic and foreign policy on Putin linked allies. The UK’s government is more keen on defending its lacklustre approach to doing so than it is on actually putting action to word- as seen with silly infographics about sanctions for individuals or tweets with demonstrably false statistics from Michael Fabricant.

This alone would be indicative of the UK government’s fall from grace due to brexit and the gleeful instalment of Boris Johnson at its head. But the falsitudes of UK discourse are now so thick and fast that, quite apart from seeing our diminished standing as a loss, it’s being hailed as a win and reframed as good leadership. A Swedish politician on Question Time only last night corrected Nadhim Zahawi on the idea that Russia would see the UK as “leading” when clearly the EU has worked in perfect concert to help refugees and to punish the Putin regime.

Looking at the installation of by-design corrupt political figures like Priti Patel (let’s not forget that Patel was found to have been undertaking unapproved meetings with officials abroad which is close to subterfuge) in key roles like the Home Secretary, in which she has protected a terrible police commissioner, ended free movement, pushed for the removal of arguably human rights like protest, the confusion grows as to why our political prowess has decayed.

Putin’s meddling is not wholly responsible for the decline of UK political discourse but it is a figment, or a fragment of it. The regular lacing of mistruths was always part of politics- from the Lib Dems throwing students under the bus to Blair misleading the public on weapons of mass destruction to enable war. But the appointment of the Johnson cabal to public office was the attempt to checkmate British democracy- as Johnson seeks to remove scrutiny from public justice, as he hides more reports into his deceitful behaviour during covid, as courts find his government guilty of preferential treatment for PPE one must ask…

Can we turn around or is it too late?

The UK has failed everyone: it failed its own populace by allowing its brexit referendum to be hijacked by those who sought to weaken us and as a rejoinder to this, made the populace believe its own severance from the EU was a benefit- whilst it decimated the economy and livelihoods of farmers, fishers, and businesses who imported to the entirety of the Central European bloc.

It failed every single person who died here from Coronavirus- and thought that is arguable, lest we forget that the tories- in the face of science- argued for herd immunity in the pandemic’s initial stages and has continued to throw off restrictions in spite of the science and is still doing so today (cases are again rising and the government does not speak out).

Its failed America, by working fully and openly collaboratively with a man like Donald Trump – another Russia linked pawn who was installed by luck after losing the popular vote, and a man who tried actively to dismantle America’s already tenuous democracy.

Its failed the EU, our neighbours and a bloc we were part of, had huge influence in and worked collaboratively with to the enrichment of our society and our culture- now our relationship lies in ruins because of the pomposity of a PM who blundered us into a disastrous deal and failed to even negotiate as a politician would.

And its failing the people of Ukraine- obfuscating routes to entry, releasing open misinformation through the home secretary’s twitter, lying openly about how refugees can obtain visas- and keeping a visa system which could easily be superseded by a digital entry system akin to the one developed for pre-settled and settled residents from the EU.

One can only infer that the citizens of the UK are being failed systemically by our state- headed up by a government entrenched in ineptitude and scandal one switches from “unfortunate circumstance” to concern about whether this was the grand plan all along.

Through the looking glass of the proletariat to the state’s sweeping machinations one can only assume that the Kremlin’s secretive pushing against our society via subterfuge have led us into a deep and dark pit, dug by the feverish arms of the Tory Party and so many disaffected voters. The question is- do we now start the climb out, or keep digging deeper?

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.

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

By Daviemoo

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

What is “Net Zero?”

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

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

Why would you be against net zero?

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

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

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

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

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

What does net zero encompass?

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

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

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

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

Why a referendum?

Easy: playing on the entitlement of the uneducated.

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

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

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

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

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

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 mythology of “Britishness”

By Daviemoo

What does it mean to be British? I mean really, what does it MEAN? Is it about being born here? And if it is, why are people like this so desperate to spew their ignorance in full view? Britishness is a concept, created by human minds and is therefore as mutable to the next person as the one before- though some may share commonalities on what it is, where it comes from ultimately Britishness is decided by the individual until we set down a true consensus of what Britishness is.

Racist folk love to deny people their own nationality based on their heritage. But how far back do we go? We were all African once, all descended from black people originally, all descended from people who travelled to Britain from other nations. Our white skin comes from a genetic mutation because we didn’t require as much melanin on a rainy, cold island that gets dark at 3.30pm in winter. But skin colour is not, and never will be a blocker for Britishness despite the ignorance of the racists. In fact, many caucasian people who live in the UK are decidedly not “British” by their standards, because they come from Europe, from America, from other overtly white or majority white countries. If whiteness is the deciding factor as it is for the racist caller to David Lammy above- what’s to say the Europeans aren’t as British as the rest of us people of pallor?

Nothing.

OK, cry the frustrated nationalists, it’s not JUST about skin colour: so what else? You have to be BORN here! You have to have been birthed in Britain to instantly absorb some of the magical British essence at the moment of your first cry, yes! That’s it… but wait… Boris Johnson, prime minister, was born… in America. So our head of state, our top leader, the man elected(ish) to highest office was devoid of that mystical British air we all have. Maybe that explains why he does such a shocking job but, still… it doesn’t solve the conundrum of why or how Johnson is a Brit.

Well, naturalisation of course! You can naturalise and then that’s it, that’s how you do it. You come here and you work hard and then there you have it, British you are forever and ever with the passport and the strange fetish for tea the rest of us encapsulate in our being… right?

Well… not according to Home Secretary Priti Patel.

The draconian new law (no not that one… the other one… yes) the Nationality and Borders bill has essentially enfranchised citizenship into a privilege one can be deprived of at the whim of a government who has yet to truly clarify on what grounds they can rescind something that’s been earned by one of their citizens.

So we can earn it, but it can be taken away. It’s not something we’re born with because it can be earned. And we don’t have to earn it because someone born overseas has earned it heavily enough to be our highest elected official… So what is it?

The “other” problem with Britishness… The British

Lately a huge hidden group in the population have revealed themselves, casting off the masks of fellow ordinarians to suddenly stand amongst us. They call us sheep and themselves lions- but sheep and lions don’t share fields.

Wolves though… wolves can share fields with sheep. Wolves also attack and kill sheep.

I’m quite happy to be labeled a sheep to be honest, when it comes to following what I saw as entirely necessary restrictions to prevent deaths from a dangerous disease, or because I wanted to remain in the EU flock. Other people’s opinions of my moral or political choices don’t affect me much because I always think about what I’m doing, why I’m doing it and how it benefits me and others, or whether it would harm people to do what I do. Call me a sheep or a shill, I’ve already run the paradigms in my head and I’m comfortable with who I am and how I operate.

Lately, I’m surprised people are interested in claiming British nationality. Our passport has slid down the chart of most powerful passports to hold, our economy has been shaken to it’s core and shrunk like a primark jumper in the wash, our world standing is that of a country desperate to encapsulate a greatness we’ve rarely displayed outside of brutal imperialism, and our hostile environment means that all of the above, no matter how disproved, means people still may not consider you really really British, even though they don’t know what that is.

So we know what it isn’t- what is it?

I don’t know.

I don’t think anyone does. But I know what Britishness seems to be right now, and what it could be. Britishness is currently the desperation to cling to Blitz spirit, a time where people followed safety restrictions like wearing masks, whilst not actually doing what that entailed. Britishness is claiming that being British is the greatest honour in the world whilst also not caring one jot about your fellow country people- whether that’s refusing to follow safety mandates or letting the government push ever more people into poverty. It’s declaring that we’re the greatest nation in the world as Scotland gear up for another independence referendum, Wales look to do the same and Ireland look to unify to escape the noxious madness of the English.

So then, what could it be?

We could admit our sins, we could work together to heal the rifts of Brexit (whether that encompasses staying out of the EU or an eventual attempt to rejoin when this madness burns out), we could work together to actually build the nation in the mind’s eye of the people so proud of the mirage they see when they look for the green and sunlit uplands.

Ironically, losing EU status made me feel less British. Harking back to the start of this piece, I said that Britishness means different things for different people. For me, Britishness was always about multiculturalism and about sharing our country with those who wanted to come here and enrich us- be it culturally, with their work specialty whatever that may be or, hell, with their presence itself.

I’m not naive, and I know that not everyone that comes here is going to be some wonderful European draped in their country’s culture, eager to make things better- but I’m also not stupid enough to think that every British person is a paragon of virtue, eager to help their fellow countrymen when the chips are down- the callous disregard of the vulnerable at this stage of the pandemic (it’s not over just because the figures stop, it’s just invisible and unmeasured) shows me that Brits are all too eager to ignore their country-fellows if it gets difficult for them. Some of the worst people I’ve ever met have been natal British people – if that’s even a phrase, as it made my stomach roil to type it. And some of the best have been African, From other European countries, American.

Let me guess: Why don’t you just leave?

Lately I feel like all I do is talk about how sick of Britain I am. It’s not because I don’t care and it’s not because I’m not patriotic. It’s because I refuse to cling to the idealised version of the UK so many people do. I see things for how they are, and I know that we can do so much better but we cannot do that whilst we recline on a bed of Johnsonite lies- we cannot do it whilst we mourn for a prime minister we’ll never have- and we can’t do it whilst we disenfranchise Britishness from people who work harder to claim it than some that live their whole lives with their silly blue passport as a de facto right.

Here’s the irony. There are huge, gaping problems with Britain, wounds in our side and whether you want to acknowledge them or not they are there, haemorrhaging. Some are keen to ignore these wounds and others, like myself and my fellow activists, call them out, are trying to stem the flow of lifeblood, are shouting to medics. I don’t want to abandon the UK to die of it’s wounds. I want to make it better here. I want to make British people happier, healthier, safer, smarter, richer and more prosperous.
Someone the other day said I “need to think about what those who disagree with me think”. I don’t disagree. But in 5 years I’ve never once met a brexiteer who didn’t approach any questions about Brexit with a sneering attitude of hiding some grand secret we remainers aren’t party to which all boils down to “The EU did some bad things” (you can’t get the DJ to change the music by screaming outside the entrance to a club). And ultimately if your goals aren’t aligned with mine – as in finding practical steps to make British lives better, we just don’t have a lot to talk about. And, even further, if your goals of making British lives better are simply to flag wave with no substance, to talk about the great and green country before you when the green isn’t grass but the toxic fumes of corruption then you’re not my country fellow, you’re as close to an enemy as one can be without actively bearing down on me with a pistol in hand.

I know England in particular can do better, but not until we give up the foolish lie of perfection in a country that’s ailing, failing and sailing head first into multiple disasters. We can build something great- once we condemn the creaking structure of Johnson’s levelling up in a country he’s simply levelled.

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

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

By Daviemoo

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

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

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

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

The limitations of our current education style

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

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

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

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

The paywall of higher education

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

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

The daily disinformation of the media

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

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

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

The final, and biggest problem, though…

Apathy, apathy and more apathy

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

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

Politics is for everyone

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

What is it that empowers the right? Political ineptitude, selfishness or a willingness to compromise on morals?

By Daviemoo

Forgive me for the rambling -As I write this on my lunch break at work I’ve posted a video I recorded this morning about some of the sacrifices I made during lockdown which have yet again been made fruitless by the incompetence of a government unable to follow their own rules. It’s past time that this blustering, self aggrandising mobster government be sent to the gulags of history and judged as a failure- not just because they are criminally inept at the job, but because they are criminal full stop.

A very American problem

The right have many a method to stay in power. In America, Donald Trump never won a popular vote- but won his first term as president due to an antiquated votership system, the Electoral college -and may have won again were it not for the valiant efforts of supremely invested politicians like Stacey Abrams who worked tirelessly against gerrymandering and voter disenfranchisement. Abrams should go down in history as one of the truest patriots America has ever seen, and her heroism is unsung because America still fights in it’s hear for freedom from a dictatorial cancer – not “conservatives” or “republicanism” but the monster these two types of right wing populist politics have created- the GQP, a bent and blunted force for uneducated Americans to rally around, blaming the blacks and the fags and the jews for their woes- and not long standing contempt for working class Americans, not a broken health system which will bankrupt you for the sin of developing cancer, a deeply propagandist education system more interested in teaching the masculine values of waving a flag and a laughably flawed justice system which allows the gunning down of an innocent sleeping paramedic or protester with automatic weaponry.

Where is England’s Stacey Abrams?

The toxicity of tory

In the UK, the voting system in combination with the differences in voter demographic, mixed with a terminal indifference to politics for younger people have led to the continuation of the tory government. Right wing parties dropped out of the running in areas where tories could gain seats to prop up Johnson, and though over 50% of the UK voted for left wing parties we have in place a tory government with an almost unprecedented control of the house of commons. There is the first piece of evidence to my claim – instant switching of alliegance to tory just to win, even if you didn’t believe in their aims- you just wanted that 52 to 48 result respected. But do you know what else we have after twelve years of tory rule? Under the conservative government, poverty has risen, income inequality has skyrocketed- quite literally as Richard Branson achieved his wet dream of space flight as the rest of us wrote costing sheets to make sure we can afford rent and bills. Anti LGBT+ hate crime has escalated over 300% in 4 years.

The concerns of women about corruption in the police force, both from female officers and hapless women harassed in the street were met with ridiculous sneering contempt – flag down a bus, they were told by flippant Met Officers who backed and still back the tory government- why? Because they are given unique power to attack thsoe who stand against them. Meanwhile the met completely fails to investigate repeated, open, obvious breaches of the covid laws and restrictions which have seen over 5000 Londoners in court paying fines- and, I hasten to add, rightly so. To break lockdown is to thwart attempts to control and curtail a dangerous pathogen. So why are the tories uniquely protected against prosecution, as Cressida Dick wags a bony finger at journalists to dissuade further questions that may bring out more queries?

We have politicians who try to hold the government to account – Zarah Sultana is prodigious and fearless, Dawn Butler passionate and eloquent, Rosina Allin-Khan a front line worker who still finds time to visit parliament and beg the government to explain it’s lacklustre efforts. As an aside each one of these women of colour have been met with belligerent repudiation, told to “mind their tone”- a sentiment oft- weaponised against people of colour and especially women of colour who do not play to the demure-seeking demands of bigots.

The crux of this post is to make people realise that right wing people will do what others simply won’t because of decency. Be it solemnising a company then, before the company is even formed lobbying it to parliament to supply PPE (as a tory lord did), creating a VIP supply lane, using problematic language to slap down women of colour, or- as today’s news displays, showing pathological indifference to the suffering of people trying their best to curtail a pandemic’s deadly spread.

This pattern of thinking leads to a question I’m often asked- do you think all tories, all brexit voters, all right wingers are racist, homophobic, bigoted etc?
Not necessarily no- but they do what I won’t. They compromise on these issues. “Oh I don’t hate foreigners at all, i just *insert reasons for voting here*”. It seems to me that if I didn’t hate foreigners I wouldn’t vote for something that gave the strong and close to undeniably did in fact do that. And always with these voters they’re allowed plausible deniability. Brexit was for taking back control -of what? Our borders? We had more control in the EU. Of our legal decisions? The tories are trying to remove scrutiny from courts. Of our position as a world superpower? Our economy is decimated by brexit, international trade in and out is down, we have trade deals that WORSEN our GDP and we are a laughing stock, a tiny group of islands left to float in our own “anti-woke” seas, now swimming with happy british fish and, of course, tory approved human shit.

Voter ignorance or voter indifference?

Right wing politics, at their face, seems only to be about no compromise. We want this! We want the woke cancel culture agenda to end, we want the trans people’s rights gone, we want to continue to deny our imperialist role in slave trading, in white supremacy, in a devastatingly clear-cut class system. But that’s the lie- right wing politics is nothing BUT compromise from the voter’s level.

Voters who claim not to hate LGBT+ people somehow mysteriously fail to clarify that they are disgusted with the lack of action from Liz Truss who has been in the role for years and has just, again, rolled back the end of the consultation period for a complete block on conversion therapy in the UK- though 3 other countries have done so in the last 2 months. Voters who claim to be disgusted by racism will bend to apoplexy over the statue of a previously unknown slaver being torn down in disgust, and who borrow Johnson’s line of “context” to explain his comments about watermelon smiles or letterboxes.

Voters who say they don’t want foreigners coming here will stare on with blank eyed indifference about news headlines about atrocities the UK committed whilst holding tenderly on to the hand of the US.

Right wing votership is, in my eyes, about one of two things: the ability to wholeheartedly vote against your own self interest and protection because it will also make everyone else unhappy, OR the ability to vote for what you think is your own self interest whilst actually voting against it, under the guise that it strikes a blow against your imaginary enemy.

…but who IS your enemy?

Who is really making your daily life worse? The tired, hungry migrant in a boat out at sea who just wants to make it to shore without being tossed into the maw of the sea to lie with the bones of countless others? Or is it the politician gesticulating about the necessity of taking more money from your salary to prop up a health system they have criminally underfunded for their dozen years in power?

The ostensible links the right make are easily broken- but only if you are capable of listening to fact. Hate the hundred or so migrants who come here a day? Think of them as offsetting the death toll caused by conservative reluctance to place restrictions on the country to curtail coronavirus infection. You hate benefit fraud? Only a few dozen convictions- and who, may I ask, is in charge of the benefit system? It would be the very government you support who don’t and won’t change the system, because they know you can be angry at benefit cheats- instead of politicians who claim £50 back for a charitable donation. MP’s expenses combined would be more in a month than benefit claimants get in a year, even if they fudge the system. And yet the anger is spewed at our underprivileged fellows- because we don’t feel entitled to rail against the creators and maintainers of that flawed system.

Not all right wingers are this type. Some vote right knowing what they are voting for. Some want this sort of draconian rule by people who decry the censorship of language- you’re not even free to call people like me faggots these days- whilst supporting laws that effectively end the ability to demonstrate in public, which make voting more difficult and inaccessible to those who are already under-represented in parliament- tangible freedoms lost or pushed into the distance whilst people get angry about the non-existent thought police.

Still more are simply beneficiaries of the system. We’re taught to worship trickle down economics even as those at the top swim in oceans of wealth hoarded away from us and as our throats run parched, barely sustained from the drip drip drip of financial offcuts. Wealth disparity in the UK is at a terrifying new height- not just because of the pandemic which no one truly predicted, but because of brexit, because of a foolish lack of foresight by a government only concerned about enrichment of the already rich and by the complicity of an underclass who believes that the north star of the Union Jack is their guiding light to supremacy in the world. Just because the man who owns the company you work for is rich and the company is making world beating sales- doesn’t mean you’re prospering as you desperately try to save to pay your mortgage. And again – who maintains that system of tax cuts for your boss and tax hikes for you… but let me guess, Boris is a man of the people? You like his hair? Does he just “get” you?

It’s come to the point now where I wish right wing voters would just say the real truth, the truth we all know but never call out because “wokeness” and “censorship”, because “I’m allowed my opinion”. People vote right because they do not understand what they vote for.
You might be able to install a government that will roll back protections for those nasty trans people – but they are also a government who will force you into debt, crush your pension, close down your workplace and- whilst you wait at home, desperate to make sure your vulnerable mother doesn’t lie choking in a hospital bed as a plastic clad nurse tries to offer her muffled words of comfort- they throw back bottles of champagne which cost more than your daily salary.

Right wing voters compromise on their morals to install governments who work against their own people- and are too dense to see it.

Did I make you angry?

Good.

The point of this entire blog is to make people who think in opposition to me THINK about what they believe or vote for. If you truly believe for a single moment that Boris Johnson is the best representative for you, that he understands your daily struggles from a popped tyre to redundancy, you’re a fool. We are chess pieces on a very large board to the tory government. And the time to oust these flagrant shills is so far gone it can’t even be seen by the naked eye. If you truly wish to prove me wrong, and that you’re not willing to compromise your morals then show me by not voting for the people who “make me pay less tax which is good even if I don’t agree with them on drowning migrants”.


The United Kingdom deserves a government better than we have, a government who will work for the good of us all, a government run by those who have lived our experiences, have faced our issues, who are cognisant of our frustrations. Not a nodding dog of moral vacuousness who prattles on about building back better, about hands face space, about get boosted now- the only three word slogan the UK needs is “you’re our employees”.

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

Education is designed to fail some of us-but denying knowledge to those who don’t excel in an archaic system is a failing of society we must fix

By Daviemoo

A famous quote (wrongly) attributed to Albert Einstein is “everyone is a genius. But if you judge a fish based on it’s ability to climb a tree, it will live it’s whole life believing it is stupid”. Whilst the origins of this quote are wrong, it’s sentiment is not- and to move forward as a society- and as a world. If we want the world to do, and be, better we must stop holding knowledge behind complicated wording and the paywall of profiteering.

I bought a book the other day. It is brilliant- “How to Stop Fascism” by Paul Mason. It’s edifying to read a book that confirms the crawling in my guts is justified, that my worries about society and the world at large are not unfounded and that people are putting pen to paper every day to fight back against the creeping ideologies of fascism, authoritarianism and hatred that wrap our societies in their gnarled fingers and squeeze decency out.

But the very act of buying that book, of having the time off to go to waterstones itself, then to be able to spend £20 without a second thought (though my inner child gasped at it), and then have the luxury of sitting in a coffee shop to read it, brought to me the irony of how our society is structured.

Those who need to read the message within this book, or within “Why I’m not talking to white people about race any more” by Renni Eddo-Lodge, or “The Assault on Truth” by Peter Oborne, the ones who would likely be more keenly affected by the knowledge within, may not have access to the funds, or time, or – through no fault of their own- the inability to grasp the themes, are often frozen out of the discussion.

This sounds so ridiculously entitled and tone deaf and I understand that- I know my privilege. I’m a white man, I’m a cis man, I’m a Brit who was reasonably favoured in school because I like to learn, and luckily learn the way the British education system teaches. I’m not trying to hold myself above others- but society does that for me and I think that’s disgusting, and it’s that which we need to discuss.

One of the best things I’ve read in my life is in the pages of “How To Stop Fascism: “all over the world the main driver of far-right extremism is the fear that people who are not supposed to be free might achieve freedom, and that in the process they might redefine what freedom means”. Look to this as the link- fascism is borne out of the fear of freedom, but it’s also fostered when people aren’t free to question these ideologies- not because of the dictator’s hand at their throat, but because they were never given the knowledge to fight back in the first place.

Those who are born into, and raised in a working class home, who are never taught in a way that allows them to imbibe knowledge, who are never told they are worthy of that- are kept out of the conversation, despite being a broad and diverse group of people who should have access to the knowledge around it- look at this (old but still poignant article about the rates of working class people who reach university) and when I speak about “the discussion” I am of course referencing the ever encroaching authoritarian and fascist tropes of our modern government.

This isn’t hyperbole- laws like the Police, Crime, Courts and Sentencing bill are authoritarian. Changing parliamentary procedure to allow a crony of the PM’s? Authoritarian. The Nationality and Borders Bill quite literally contains fascist tropes, as does the insistence of the PM that he would like Parliament to be able to overrule judiciary decisions- yes, this is fascism ladies and gentlemen. Fascism is not the sounds of boots on tarmac and orderly marches of subjugated people- that’s the most in your face, terrifying and immediate part of it. But it begins on paper, in legislation, and in the hearts and minds of voters who do not understand the depths of evil they are countenancing.

The latter leads to the former- and it will. And the way we fight against that is, of course, to address it- but not between scrivening academics giving theory and politics a ribald bashing in a page 14 spread. It’s exposing it in a clear, concise way, to those who don’t realise it’s there.

It’s too generous to say no working class people would embrace fascism. Some already have- through ignorance or, well, the fact that shitty people do exist. But to fight back against something as insidious as fascism, people must be made aware it’s there, and must be given the tools to understand it’s horrors. Those who have been abandoned by an education system that doesn’t foster alternative styles of learning are very unlikely to have picked up books on political or social theory and therefore learned about the horrors of a fascist society.

That isn’t their fault- it’s society. We continue to foster an education system that does not factor in alternative ways to teach or learn, from sensory and tactile to physically viewing and seeing things- from one on one teaching to open discourse in classrooms, peer to peer discussions… education is woeful in the UK, at serving the people it must.

This is not the fault of teachers but continuous lack of action by a government desperate to pinch every penny. Why spend money on sensory classrooms or trips or displays, when you can put in the same money and produce just enough people who can go on to university, and enough to go and fulfil menial jobs, usually unaware that they have potential to do whatever they want if they were taught in the right way.

There are a lot of scholarly articles around how to teach which vary based on subject- from anatomy to language, I’ve just read some articles and books and all of them focused on one key tenet- that the archaic system of standing before a classroom and talking without engagement does not work. Look too, to university where lectures can often be interrupted or punctuated with student to teacher discourse.

Let’s also look at the subjects we’re taught. I’ve been an atheist since I was 13, but had to learn PSRE until I was 16. And of course learning about theological ideas and the ideology around religion is, broadly, helpful in terms of understanding society- but I was never taught a class on politics or political discourse and I didn’t have courses in critical thinking until I was at college. In terms of the modern day I’m distraught I never entered into academia to study the intersection between politics and media- I studied media- because I didn’t think I was intelligent enough to understand politics. And yet here I am, after 6 years of holding my nose and quietly grumbling about politics, talking about it all day every day- internet videos, tweets, long whatsapp discussions, phone calls, and this very blog- founded on the lucky premise that what I do understand, I understand well. That knowledge, that surety, must be passed on en masse to the general public through simple, easy to grasp education around politics and wider discourse around the application of our own politics to the modern day.

If, for example, more people were educated on crime statistics in relation to refugees we would easier be able to move the discourse forward- instead of “more refugees equals more crime” we could skip the intro dialogue that, actually, the vast proportion of refugees do not commit crime, and the increase in crimes has on occasion been proven to be because native citizens have committed crimes against refugees- sometimes refugee on refugee crime, sometimes people committing crime against refugees- these things add to crime statistics. And yes, of course, more people in a country mean more people to perpetrate crime AND more people to have crime perpetrated against them. Man has, since the first time we stepped out of a cave and seen our neighbour doing the same, wished to enact violence on each other.

Think in depth about the isolation, stigmatisation and poverty that migrants face here and ask yourself whether you would be driven to steal to survive if you needed extra food because £40 a week didn’t fill your children’s stomachs. Ask yourself whether you would fight someone who called you a slur in the street after you lost your friend in a desperate journey to flee your home country and came to a place where people designate you scum just for the colour of your skin, your religion.

The overarching point of this is that education fails fundamentally to impart the gift of critical thinking and key aspects of knowledge on people who then go on to vote, unknowingly against issues they speak out against- from LGBT+ issues to the migrant “incursion” we aren’t suffering in the UK, ask yourself why people vote for harsh immigration policy then cheer Blair’s Iraq war as necessary -when that war itself destabilised the countries these migrants now leave to survive.

Also ask yourself why education never focuses on simple humanity- imparting on children at an impressionable age how important it is to imagine being in someone else’s skin, someone who is not like you, and imagine their journeys and struggles- from melanin to sexual preference and the intersections therein, from gender to sex, from ability or cognition, family situation and more. Education seems to be built to fill people’s heads with enough knowledge to contribute to the workforce and pay tax and not much else. It’s only by luck or perseverance that some come out of education desperate to continue their learning, to question society and political direction. And thank goodness for the outliers- but we need to create more.

The way we do this is not to gatekeep important information about political alignment, to obfuscate knowledge behind theory which is never explained, to sneer at those who don’t understand but who want to. We have to make knowledge accessible to the masses- lest the masses continue to vote unthinkingly for those who will chain them down whilst claiming the chains come from migrants, gays, socialists… and they will believe it.

How we go about changing the educational sphere in society I do not know. Speak more plainly, more openly is a start. But until a grassroots movement to overhaul education affects change, I fear that the roots of fascism will dig deep into a society blissfully unaware of it’s hulking weight bearing down on us.

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.

Tune out the voices of those who don’t live your life, but presume to tell you how to live it.

By Daviemoo

Rachel Johnson has caught my ire three times recently. Sister of the disgraced prime minister of the UK, privileged by birth and by station, given platforms from which to speak- Ms. Johnson wades into subjects affecting a populace she isn’t even close to, speaking with an air of expertise and confidence so iron solid you’d believe she is a boffin in every subject- but entitlement and experience are two different things. It’s time we tune out those who don’t live our lives and listen to each other.

What was it that made me focus this article mostly on Rachel Johnson? Was it the article she wrote in the spectator expressing sympathy for Ghislaine Maxwell, exhorting the public to feel bad for her too- yes, the poor disgraced daughter of well to do family who chose- not resorted to – child trafficking for paedophiles rich and powerful. So no, it is not “easy to feel sympathy for her”, but perhaps if Oxford elitism comes with a side of sympathy for paedophiles the urgency of doing away with it should be hastened.

Was it when she, with clear entitlement and absolutely no expertise, talked on LBC, one of the biggest radio stations in the UK, that it’s a GOOD thing that we’re facing mass infection with COVID-19. Johnson no doubt has a huge house, can work remotely if she chooses, could not work for the entire duration of the pandemic and still have money left to pay bills- so why on earth should we take advice on how to feel about facing a potentially serious pathogen from someone who can easily elect to avoid it should she wish to do so?

Or was it when she continued to blithely defend her brother, the PM? I would not trust myself to be non partisan were one of my sisters prime minister- so why on earth is the prime minister’s sister being given a platform to defend the brother who heads up the most openly corrupt cabinet we’ve ever seen – from PPE scandals, flat money mismanagement and a woeful response to covid which has rolled on for two years now- I do not want to hear the opinion of someone so biased.

But let’s expand this net further: Maajid Nawaz, another LBC presenter, is presenting essentially anti vaccine and anti lockdown conspiracies to a wide, complicit audience. When it comes to sharing viewpoints we need a grain of common sense and as someone who hates the tories with a passion, you’d have to be somewhat extreme to make me defend them- but the tories aren’t causing situations to enact lockdowns, they are just inept.

Julia Hartley-Brewer isn’t talented enough to work on LBC in my opinion, mostly because she spends any time she does get angrily chortling to herself about everyone else in the world- she hails herself a feminist and a TERF even, and yet spends a disturbing amount of time attacking women on the internet- Julia Grace Patterson runs a nonprofit to protect the NHS, and Brewer in her usual ignorance accused her of profiteering- now she’s being sued. She openly stated that a glamour model shouldn’t be surprised she is sent unwanted dick pictures by random men, because of the pictures she posts- so women should, according to this feminist woman, cover themselves up or expect dick pictures? That, my dear readers, is creeping blithely over the borders of rape apologism.

And an MP, Stella Creasey, was talking about how there is a rule in parliament preventing her from bringing her child- Hartley-Brewer spent days relentlessly attacking Creasey for daring to do both career and child rearing.
Feminism… I think not.

If you stop, and look at the lives these pundits- Nigel Farage, Katie Hopkins et al, live, you start to wonder why we ever decided to listen to them. Farage is inconceivably wealthy, Hopkins openly doesn’t believe half of the nonsense she comes out with and has trampled over the line of controversy because it makes her money. We allow punditry and paegantry to speak loud over those of us who are familial, those of us who live each other’s lives and have each others’ experiences.

The true issue underpinned here, is that those of us who could reach each other with true opinions, who understand each other’s lives never get the chance- because those platforms are taken up by these rich pundits who have not a clue what it’s like to live each other’s lives. Platforming the common person is overlooked- but why? Do we love the controversy shoved in our faces by these eternally offended pundits? Or are we just never aware of another option, of the possibility of platforming those of us who understand each other and could actually offer reasons we’d understand for their stances? I can’t relate to the sister of the PM who met an heir’s future paedophile enabler daughter at oxford…

When you look outside of the paradigm that we’re in- being asked to come at societal issues from the angle of rich, entitled and privileged folk instead of thinking about each other’s commonalities, you start to realise why society is quite so twisted- where are the opinions of our fellow working class folk? Nowhere but the carefully selected editorial letters the newspapers or magazines may choose to print.

It’s far past time that access was granted to normal folk, actually able to relate to others, to share our experiences of life rather than having our notions and feelings dictated to us, often by those who can elect to avoid those issues.

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 prime minister involved in the worst sleaze investigation ever seen, PPE money mishandling, circumvention of the law around gatherings- wearing police issued clothing. Are we approaching dictatorship?

By Daviemoo

“Dictatorship” when applied to the United Kingdom sounds ridiculous- the idea we could fall so far is laughable. But looking at the definition as above- are we in one and unaware?

Lets look.

Dictatorship as defined here

A single person with absolute power over the state.

Johnson holds an 80 seat majority in the UK and could pass any drafted legislation even if every other party- who more people voted for- opposed it.

A press which has been called, multiple times, the most biased in Europe, has long enabled right wing leadership, lionising it’s figures as they act in the interest of the rich who run it and punishing it’s members individually, as though they do not act in concert- all the while casting aspersions on the opposition, to the eager ears of a populace who will call the only people placed to depose this ruling party weak, fractured, complacent.

Johnson’s celebrity placed him in good stead at first- known as a supposedly affable and comical bumbling character, Johnson’s public persona has long hidden a disturbing set of behaviours now written off by the public in the same way disgusting behaviours always have been… “it’s just Boris, that”.

From restrictions on the fundamental democratic right of protest, disenfranchisement of voting, misuse of billions of pounds of public money on PPE procurement with friends instead of existing contractors, a piss poor brexit deal leading to shortages on the shelves of a nation unbound from COVID protections, from the allowance of a colleague to return to role after holding unauthorised meetings with a foreign power and for proven bullying- from flat donations scurrilously hidden away from the public eye, from flouting his own rules constantly then flat denial in the press in the face of literal photographs to the contrary. Now we see assaults on the direct structures of democracy itself as Raab, one of his pets and “deputy PM” is instructed to review, change and scrap the human rights act, mere weeks after the announcement that Westminster’s MP’s are embroiled in lobbying which was so blatant as to be offensive simply to read- and in some cases lead demonstrably to deaths as companies unequipped to handle vital public testing simply failed to do so. There is so much more asides that could fit into this paragraph but- we know.

The point of this diatribe is as simple as this- Johnson should have been clapped in irons for myriad issues throughout his tenure so far- and other than lambasting by a hampered opposition and awkward headlines he has faced nothing. As the decisions he and his cadre make, democracy is being ground down to a scintilla of what it should be. If that is not absolute power- what is?

Johnson could be- should be- held to account by his peers and the opposition, but a swollen party means they are aware that, should they fail to back him, they lose their grip. And so to power they cling, under this unfit man. Is this democracy?

Military organisational backing

Whilst this has not happened as yet, it has not had to. The vast majority of the public know that we risk mass infection should we gather in numbers, and under Patel and Johnson’s draconian law changes could we even risk allying together without being arrested or- under the powers in this new law- subject to attack by the state?

Unfair elections

44% of the UK voted for the tories and this gave them an eighty seat majority. The Majority – 56% voted for left leaning parties. Over half of the voting public declared they were aligned to the left and yet we are now overseen by a party sliding ever further and ever more openly to the right. FPTP is a poorly designed system whose inefficiencies are bare to the eye after the 2019 election and yet it is maintained by politicians afraid of positing changes to the voting system that would benefit every voter.

Human rights violations

Where to start? Banning of fundamental rights like protest, criminalising helping refugees when BEING a refugee is not a criminal offense & legislation drafted under Patel that international human rights lawyers have warned contravenes the human rights act, misspending public funds, open misleading of the public under coronavirus, mass death due to infection, a doctored report into systemic injustices for people of colour in the UK, and a Justice Secretary dedicated to scrapping the human rights act, enforcing voter ID to combat the more than negligible UK crime of voter fraud, removing the ID documents of addicts which would both strand and disenfranchise them from the democratic voting process…

Dictators are not held accountable for their actions

From all of the above to his actions in doxxing a journalist, being fired twice, Johnson has never known repercussions for his actions. Even his most egregious transgressions either publicly or privately have failed to see punishment in the eyes of the law or the public. The man has failed upwards into the highest office in the land and those who could, should hold him to account from his colleagues to a press whose role is to ensure the public are informed of the objective truth of their country. It can’t be understated that eager pundits like Dan Hodges who, would blame Labour if Johnson dropped a brick on his foot, have pushed the narrative that he just so happens to be in charge during a bad time and that his decisions make the least bad outcome every time- rather than his decisions being the reason behind our present situation. Offshifting blame to the public, to the circumstances, allows a man who should be doing his utmost for the public, to continue to water down accountability.

After reading the definition of dictatorship as supplied by this site, I fail to see how Johnson’s actions, the actions of the press and a complacent tory backbench have led us, sleepwalking all the while, into a dictatorship. Until Johnson faces account for his- everything- from lawbreaking to rule breaking, to turning a blind eye to the same behaviour in his cabinet, the UK will remain under the thumb of a man terminally unable to lead because he does not feel the weighty consequences of his ignorant actions.

There are those who will rail that the opposition isn’t enough and to them I have only this to say: it’s a lacklustre government or a government dragging us further and further down the path of other countries, shocked to realise their democracy has evanesced. Make your choice to stand with those who want democratic rights to remain or remain silent in your complaining; you can hold poor decisions to account and not openly aid dictatorships in overtaking democracy. Most of us don’t think the opposition is perfect- but I will take imperfect over increasingly overt steps towards authoritarianism.

If your bodily autonomy circumvents everyone else’s, it’s not bodily autonomy – It’s health based tyranny

By Daviemoo

Ever since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, something politely termed as debate has raged between a deeply factional society. Bodily autonomy and freedom are two terms thrown around often by people who simply don’t understand the concepts they’re discussing. And whilst we’re told as we grow that we sometimes simply need to learn to disagree civilly with people whose views differ from our own- what do we do when those views carry potentially deadly consequences? Is someone’s skewed view of liberty worth dying for?

What is freedom to you?

It’s a question I’ve asked myself hundreds of times throughout this pandemic. The answer is more closely tied to the repercussions of Brexit, oddly. Freedom to me was the right to rights themselves. Losing the right to free movement sickened me, as someone who always loved, and wanted to move to, the continent but was prevented through fear of distance between myself and my family. The right to rights is a strange sentence, but being bound or restricted But as the coronavirus spread around the world and I saw the death toll mount, I- and many others- knew that our freedom was imperilled.

As the pandemic has raged on burning away people’s lives, making people long term sick, tanking economies, worsening wealth disparity many people have woken up to injustices- but in very different ways. Some of us fight with desperation to remove a government intent on enacting damaging laws, from the throttling of our democratic right to protest, to curtailment of our ability to aid those in distress who are not UK citizens, to removing “dissidents'” citizenship, to the enfranchisement of voting by implicitly attaching a cost to votership.

Some rage against a system they see as horrifically authoritarian for enacting emergency powers to restrict movement and interaction amongst people- enacted to control the spread of the coronavirus but to some, the reasoning of “a virus with a 97% survival rate” is a flimsy one.

This is where so many of us fundamentally differ. In 2020 the human population estimate is 7.753 billion.

If 3% of these people died, this would be a death count of 232,590,000.

Two hundred and thirty three million lives. This of course only factoring in the deaths from coronavirus. All too easily, the deaths from delayed medical treatment, from delayed ambulances, from exhausted physicians are written off.

One of the main kickbacks from my speaking in support of coronavirus restrictions is “what about deaths from the vaccine”.

This is understandable- but does not account for the fact that any deaths are sad, especially unnecessary ones like coronavirus deaths- or deaths from the vaccine, regardless of how low the risk. We should count these deaths as deaths due to the pandemic- because no coronavirus vaccine would be needed without the pandemic. Equally, look at the escalated rate of suicide due to isolation. This pandemic has a huge death toll, that extends it’s sinister reach far beyond the death brought by being infected and every single one of these deaths is a loss, a travesty and should not have happened. The way deaths have been manipulated for a political agenda is disgraceful. Ultimately and objectively, mass death is not a political decision- and the philosophical arguments can be bandied back and forth, but ultimately behind politics and philosophy are humans laid suffering from something that went from being an unprecedented worldwide event, to preventable for the most part, if people curtailed their contact.

The emergence of coronavirus allowed an unprecedented glimpse into the mindset of so many around us, people who openly distain others’ as long as they don’t feel controlled, coerced, don’t feel spoken down to, don’t feel like they have to make changes to accommodate others- forgetting of course that if others didn’t do it, they would also be at risk.

After two years, it’s openly a hostile move to walk into a shop- a place you have to go to buy food- without wearing a mask. Some see it as a laughable move which won’t prevent anything, some see it as a symbol of oppression and control from the state, others simply do not care and still more are a mix. There’s also a small subset of people who just like to annoy other people.

Those opposed to mask wearing, to social distancing, to lockdowns or any other measures declare that it’s their right to DO WHAT THEY WANT. They state that they shouldn’t be controlled, coerced, forced to do things they don’t want to do. But I have to wonder how often they follow that thought pattern to it’s apex of “for the common good”. Nobody that I know wants to wear masks, wants to get vaccines, wants to spend weeks alone. It was, I believe, seen by some as a civic duty or, more simply, the right thing to do. Was it? I believe so. Some are diametrically opposed.

When it comes to politics and more, it’s inevitable that disagreement will pop up. But the sheer volume of working class people cheerfully arguing that the economy can’t be allowed to fail if it means keeping people alive is terrifying – it’s the height of “it won’t happen to me”.

And of course it’s right and normal for humans to disagree on matters- but matters of mass death? It’s a strange world we’re forced to live in where people believe that their own, their loved ones- and strangers, who they don’t know- will die and that’s a worthwhile sacrifice.

It’s completely understandable that people are sick of living the lives we’ve had to under coronavirus- but it’s so often missed that people’s lives will continue this way until the virus has become endemic (we all knew from the start we’d never eradicate it). It’s the very people up in arms about masks and health measures who necessitate it’s continuance.

I read the story of an oncology doctor on Friday, who had to cancel a cancer patient’s operation because the bed they would have taken was now filled with an anti vax covid patient.

The covid patient would likely be moved to a ventilator soon, but the loss of that precious window for the cancer patient likely meant that they too would die. The cancer would grow, it would metastasise and just like that, another two people who didn’t have to die, but died, because of this virus- and because of the choices of an anti vaccine enthusiast.

Your choice to kill?

You see, there was a tipping point in the pandemic where your choices were miasmic and didn’t have the sway to hugely impact on the outcome. We were uninformed, we were all waiting for more research, more information. And now here we are- where your personal choices, from declining to wear a mask to refusing vaccines- are in a very real way, wreaking real life consequences upon people.

I’ve always levelled a deep and profound blame at a government simply unable to act decisively. Wishy washy guidance, hand wringing over following their own rules, duplicity- but now the onus truly has shifted to a split with those who wilfully will not comply building off the ignorance of the Conservatives.

It’s confusing that people are being given the choice to risk others’ health, all under this strange umbrella of bodily autonomy. Many of the people who support forced birth have appropriated their hated moniker, “my body, my choice”, for their crusade for the freedom they find difficulty in defining.

The co-opting of pregnant people’s rights

A pregnant person can, and should, be able to choose what happens with a pregnancy for many reasons, from whether they wished to get pregnant in the first place, financial and emotional readiness, health, safety and more. This isn’t a debate. A pregnancy can’t go on without a body to co-opt, but a body can go on without a pregnancy. Human beings are not incubators and pregnancy can have horrific consequences- from thinned bones, post partum depression and psychosis, scarring, bleeds… death. Every pregnancy constitutes a risk towards the pregnant person’s health. Their body will be, no matter how smooth a pregnancy goes, permanently changed simply by going through it.

And when it comes to being forced to take vaccines, this argument is, while controversial, more understandable. But that’s the essence of “my body, my choice”. You choose not to take a vaccine and you take on the risk to deal with consequences- societal (being excluded from mass events etc) or personal (dying or becoming disabled from long COVID). And of course, anti vaxxers will point at the death rate of vaccines- but again, this is bodily autonomy in action. Choosing to take the vaccine is you choosing to take that risk- negligible, but existing risk. Every person who died from the vaccine to my knowledge took that needle because they chose to, and accepted the risk.

The gleeful appropriation of “my body, my choice” is a misnomer. Pregnancy doesn’t spread via the air. Pregnancy only puts risk on the body of the person carrying it. You won’t spread mass pregnancy simply by being in a room while pregnant.

Outside of a pandemic the choice to make is whether to take a vaccine. Whether to take that risk, on the off-chance you come across the disease in question. During a pandemic, the choice is NOT to take the vaccine when there is a silent timer counting down to your exposure- and whilst it’s seen as bodily autonomy to make that choice, it’s not bodily autonomy- it’s bodily tyranny, because your mere presence in a room- especially if you’ve been wandering around with no mask, no social distancing, no vaccine- creates a risk, removing everyone around you’s bodily autonomy, their choice NOT to be sick. So now the question is- does one person’s bodily autonomy supersede that of the rights of everyone they could come into contact with?

People believe the merits of the anti vax movement- but isn’t it strange how the movement went from telling us that vaccines cause autism (neurodiversity by the way is a normal condition and function, though there are naturally extreme cases) to being silent, when 5 billion doses of vaccines were deployed over months. Suddenly the threat is “oh within two years you’ll be sorry”… about what?

Once some credible evidence comes to light we can discuss the nuance of whether vaccination vs non vaccination is worthwhile. Otherwise we continue to debate the efficacy of medicine that works vs rolling a lottery of disability, sickness and death.

Do I have to die for you to change your attitude?

Lets say coronavirus didn’t kill anyone but makes them sick like I was. Desperately poorly for weeks, exhausted, dizzy, sick, unable to eat, unable to sleep, in pain, headaches and more. I lost weight, I was light sensitive, my body ached. I still have a cough in December and I stopped actively suffering in mid October…

Is it worth running the risk of spreading that en masse? Even without death, mass sickness and disruption to peoples’ lives is a huge ask of everyone you may walk past in a day.

Society has not changed, no matter how much we can state it has. Change would be adaptation to the crisis at hand. What has changed are the circumstances in which people can easily advertise to you whether they care about those around them or think their own welfare comes first. No longer can we believe the myth that humans would try to collectively come together to protect each other- because all too many of us have joined the war on coronavirus on the wrong side.

The societal shift

One can’t necessarily pinpoint why society is how it is, and it appears that it’s a mistake to imply that we haven’t, at our core, always had this type of person in our society who will refer to those who make sacrifices for the collective “sheep”. But sheep do what they do out of fear, and out of instinct. I’m not overly scared of coronavirus, of isolation, of masks and vaccines- I’m scared of human beings who would rather lash out in violence than give simple proof that their claims of government takeovers, of poisoned vaccines, of masks causing health issues.

Until we can move past this virus as a collective, this battle will continue and the victims will continue to mount until common sense can stretch to both sides of the aisle. There will always be exceptions to those who can follow restrictions. But there will also always be those who spurn them. And the question continues to gather urgency – how long can society countenance the outliers when their actions, or lack thereof, endanger us all?

I’m not scared of any variant of Coronavirus- I’m scared of the pathology of a populace who demonstrates their disregard for human lives

By Daviemoo

Every day in the UK, being in any way politically savvy becomes more and more mentally exhausting. Bottom drawer pundits from Farage to Hartley-Brewer or McKeith or Melville bombard social media- or, often, the airwaves- with their self involved, “me first, but I’m also a patriot” backwards mindsets much to the frustration of those of us who count ourselves among, if not the decent, at least those with humanity.

In the last week, as restrictions were debated and finally brought back, I’ve seen an uptick in the relentless, background hum of online abuse from anti…whatever’s. Anti lockdowners? Anti maskers? Anti vaxxers? They’re not all the same but they all share disturbing common threads.

It’s pointless to point the finger at people with this mentality and try to speak to their compassion for others- it quite literally isn’t there. Today I had the misfortune to discuss this with an anti masker- who happily explained that she thinks that “if it’s your time, it’s your time and nothing will change that”. That’s her justification for not wearing a mask- an indelible belief in fate.

I posed the retort that perhaps it wasn’t someone’s time, but her not wearing a mask made it so- that her negligence could lead to someone else’s death. She mumbled incomprehensibly and went back to doing what she was doing. I suspect it hasn’t changed a thing in her mind- she’s decided that she can wander through life as the arbiter of other people’s fate, and that she’s not responsible for her own actions- some other force in the universe is.

What a stupid, ridiculous point of view. Slight inconvenience for you could mean the difference between Christmas dinner at 4pm or a nurse shoving a plastic tube into your airway to try and stop you from drowning in pleural fluid.

And now here comes a new variant, a variant which threatens Christmas apparently. “It’s not Boris’ fault” scream the usual cabinet of buffoons, correctly of course- Johnson didn’t create or even wilfully import the variant. But we’d be in a better position to face it (if it truly is more virulent or transmissible) than we are, were it not for his flat refusal to have done even a minimal amount of work to combat everything that came before it.

The Enablers

I’ve seen countless numb minded pundits like the above cadre of idiots talk about their civil liberties, their RIGHT to be unimpeded. I have a question for them:
Do you think I give a shit about your civil liberties if they run the risk of killing my dad?
Do you think I’ll lose a second of sleep over whether Julia feels uncomfortable in a mask, whether James Melville felt unwell for 3 days from his vaccine, if those things led to me still having one parent left? Why is you feeling a bit uncomfortable because of a scrap of cotton needs to come forefront in the spread of an illness? I’m not linking their social media- it’s a wasteland of stupid, angry, reactive takes about how they’re unbothered by the plight of anyone that doesn’t happen to be them, and to drop my amateur blogger spiel for a moment- fuck those monsters.

Scrap the worst case scenario arguments of death or long term disability, are you actually telling people it’s fair for them to run the risk of being sick with something that ranges from feeling generally unwell to being extremely poorly- as I was- for weeks, because you feel irritated by material? How laughably self involved do you have to be to think that’s a fair trade off?

I also got told by someone else recently that because it was just like a bad cold for them they don’t see the need to worry. Do you want to know what covid was like for me? My stomach wouldn’t digest food. I was so exhausted I panted going from the bed to the sofa. It felt like my chest had hooks inside, stopping me from taking a full breath, as if my chest wouldn’t expand as far as I knew it should, could. My temperature spiked over and over and over again. I couldn’t sleep. I coughed until i threw up on myself. You’re telling people it’s fair for them to go through that or worse, because you’re so self involved you think it’s a right to show your face to strangers.
Equally these arguments also come from people paid to be hypocritical. The worst pundit for this nonsense is Julia Hartley-Brewer- a poisonous oaf whose opinion could be bought for a steal, provided it’s rancorous and knee jerk enough. Brewer protests that the virus that’s killed 160k people, made millions long term sick and made still more extremely unwell is merely an inconvenience to her as she talks about how trans women will take away women’s rights whilst also admonishing a female MP for speaking out about the frustrations of finding childcare- over the course of days- on her public forum. The fact we have so many of these pundits ready to act like voices of authority is half the reason the UK is so deranged. Critical thinking is long dead, and long live the era of listening to the ill informed speak confidently and completely incorrectly.

At this point we’re not fighting a virus- it’s embedded itself into a world weary from safeguarding and will be around for years, decades and perhaps forever- I don’t know. We’re fighting the ever rising tide of selfishness and ignorance that pervades a society that allows people to speak such ridiculous disinformation. From grand plots about a societal mass murder scheme, to oppression and slavery to the madness of nanobots reprogramming our DNA (for what! There’s never an answer when you ask!) people with foolish ideas are platformed, exalted and respected and experts who dedicate decades of their life to this EXACT SITUATION are sent death threats for speaking out.

Look at it on a different front. After the horrific drowning of 27 people at sea only a week ago, RNLI have released confirmation that one of their boats was prevented from going to a distress call by fishing boats. Imagine a desperate exhausting journey away from a regime who took over your country, that took all of your money away that took weeks and ends with your boat sinking and you drown at sea because right wing fishermen take issue with you not drowning in the ocean. If you can look at me and tell me these people are not bottomless scum then you’re either deluded or a good liar.

The issue of course is what we DO about it. There’s a lot of division amongst people which doesn’t help with anything, but equally nothing which would affect us touches these people. Calling people from Brewer to Lawrence Fox out on their idiocy rolls off them like water off the proverbial duck’s back. Trying to appeal to their humanity results in, at best indifference and at worst a gang of ardent followers attacking you. So what do we do? Of course we can coexist with people whose views differ from our own, that’s fine- but look at the ideologies we’re aligned against: people eagerly demonising trans women, people who actively demonise gay men and women and bisexuals as perverts and paedophiles, people who think that islam is coming to swarm Britain, that migrants are a bigger threat than authoritarian politicians who are stripping back everything from free movement to protesting and narrowing our options for goods to fill shelves, decimating our economy and ultimately the lurking threat of people who believe, in their heart and soul, that their right to show their face in public is more vital and core than your health.

Trying to cope in a nation of people who believe that if they don’t experience it, it doesn’t happen is one of the most demoralising things I’ve experienced- it’s been a life long lesson for me. I’ve had people tell me I don’t experience homophobia from heterosexual men, for example. It’s pretty simple to understand why two men being asked questions like “who is the woman” is annoying, not to mention misogynistic, or why people who assume they have the right to ask you about what position you are in bed when this isn’t information you really want to volunteer is ok. It’s quite straightforward to understand that people who call you a kiddy fiddler because you’re gay are scum, that people who threaten to punch you because you think pecs are sexually attractive and breasts aren’t are stupid. We have to share the world with these people – how long are we meant to peaceably explain that we just ARE and we don’t have to justify ourselves. Our existence, who we think is sexy, who we kiss, who we fuck- these aren’t things that affect you, and they don’t affect others negatively- and yet we’re told that us existing is a bridge too far.

And the irony is that it’s TIRING to be the people who are trying to move things forward, past this virus. We do what we’re told by scientists who have tested to confirm the efficacy of masks, of vaccines, of simple social distancing so we do it- then we’re thwarted by the very people who say they shouldn’t have to bear any of it for a single minute. “What about my mental health” is the usual cry, from people who I’ve openly seen sneering at those whose relatives died alone in ICU beds. And led, countenanced and babied the entire time, whether they like him or not, these people are overseen by a populist weakling of a prime minister, Alexander Boris De Pfeffel Johnson, a man pathologically incapable of actually instilling some iron into the spines of people so pampered by their lives thus far that they think covering their mouth and nose to pick up 40 teabags is tantamount to a spell in Guantanamo bay.

Johnson again dropped the ball today (what’s that, ball 2743928490372?) when he refused to say it would be foolish to hold large gatherings at Christmas. “We’ll do it anyway!” sneer the idiots, as if their actions are bravery – not being able to adjust to any situation doesn’t mean you’re brave, it means you’re stupid.

And above it all, how often do you see people like I did today, strutting around a supermarket maskless and sneering as if they deserve applause for their decision to bare arms in the war against covid- they, of course, fighting on the virus’ side. Do you think you look brave, or strong, or smarter than the rest of us? I’ll forget about you after 5 minutes- you mean nothing to me. Your actions both frustrate me and make me laugh, because the height of bravery for these people is to show their chins waggling in the wind generated by the refrigerated sections of a supermarket.

True bravery is doing the things you don’t want to. Going without the support of your loved ones, wearing the uncomfortable thing for the sake of safety, and sharing space with people who gleefully share memes about how doing the bare minimum to stop a contagion from overwhelming hospitals and derailing everything from plastic surgery to cancer treatment is “pathetic”.

Me and my friends have, all this time, held the line of blaming the government for their shambolic messaging, which is true, their contrary advice, which is true, their lacklustre and delayed responses over and over, which is true- and their cavalier attitude towards throwing out the restrictions to please the noisy and the stupid.

The government bear a huge, personal amount of responsibility for this- but in a country where people who act like the worst facets of society are disturbingly common, it’s well past time the people responsible for this childish, weak and frankly pathetic behaviour bear their responsibility- you did this. You got us where we are. You’ve trapped us in this eternal state of open lockdown with the threat of virus or lockdown or more. You think I care about your personal liberties when you won’t even do the bare minimum to safeguard mine? Think again.

I suppose the ultimate question posed has to be: when do we say “enough” and take our society back from the loud, gruff and cowardly minority who has amassed support behind a spineless populist and his scum enabling cabinet? What will be the fulcrum upon which our patience turns- and what will be the igniting incident that forces us to stand together, shoulder to shoulder, and lay down a siege on the cowardice of a populace whose lack of consideration has grown from a thorn in our side to a wound that bleeds us, day by day, into sheer exhausted capitulation?

Why can’t we just unite in the face of actual fascism?

By Daviemoo

I’m so tired of seeing people I respect attack each other.

I don’t care any more what side of leftist politics you sit on. I really don’t. I don’t care if you’re so far left you want us all to live in perfect rainbow harmony or if you think Starmer really is a (the dreaded word) centrist and support him regardless. This is beyond a joke.

Right wing politics aligns on the core axis somewhere of “we are better than/more entitled to things than others”. That’s as simple as I can make it. Money, health, safety, equality and rights- right wing folk seem to believe that they have more of a right to these things than those of us not born the same or on the same political axis as them.

I’ve quite literally seen right wing folk saying that left wing folk should be censured from their protests because they are country betrayers, fascists etc- all the while ignoring actual fascists whose values fall perilously close to them on the scale. Rather than fighting a worthy battle it’s about censuring normal political differences- not fascism.

There though, is the irony of being left wing.

Left wingers won’t, can’t, just leave a difference on the scale alone. It seems to me, as someone who counts himself far enough towards the left that I’ve cheerfully said Westminster probably wants to put a hit out on me, that people I find myself equivalent to on the left will lash out at people who are closer to the center. Do we agree on all points, no. Do I think it’s appropriate to send everything from abuse to death threats to them? No. Do you really count yourself as some paragon of mythical leftist virtue if you’re telling someone you think is a centrist that they’re disgusting? Congratulations- your award for best human, I’m sure, is just stuck in Christmas transit.

I have bit my lip over and over and over with people I respect when I see them attack people I also know are good, caring and passionate about making our politics better.

Do I think some of my friends are as far left, as progressive as me or others? No. Does that matter in the grand scheme of letting people learn and grow? Fuck no. I can talk to people about the benefits of socialisation or public ownership if we have common ground to go from. I can’t talk to someone who doesn’t think healthcare is a human right because that’s an insane viewpoint.

If you want everyone to agree with you and fuck the rest, you’ll stay stuck in the same place, your club getting more and more exclusive all the while getting smaller and quieter as you oust people for not believing in that ONE thing that you do, isolating yourself further and further from a mass of people whose views are closer to, but not perfectly in line with your own. You may learn things from them, but you can take it as a chance to impress on them why how YOU feel is the right path. Leaving someone behind because they’re not a carbon copy of your own views is – lets be frank- ridiculous.

I’ve said so many times I don’t like labour’s current leader. But I’ve also said I’d choose a sentient shoe over the Conservatives. Under them we’ve had:

-The encroaching loss of our right to protest

-160K deaths and counting from coronavirus in the UK

-A huge corruption scandal which fits in to PPE lobbying and massive overspending of public funding on already rich people to make sub standard life saving equipment

-A health secretary more bothered about porking a mistress than saving lives

-A PM who thinks his racist, sexist, homophobic remarks can be under rug swept by using the useless label of “context”

-A Home Secretary who has bullied staff out of their jobs and has quite literally broken international law

-A government who created a practically fraudulent report on systemic racism’s existence in our society

-Legislation that threatens to monetise and curtail our voting rights

-A Justice Secretary who wants to SCRAP the human rights act

-Food/energy crises due to their own wilful negligence

-A rise in hate crimes that is unprecedented and terrifying to the LGBTQ+ community

-A health secretary who, for populism, threw off any safeguards against a dangerous virus

-Deteriorated national relations as the government threatens to isolate us from any of our allies through sheer pig headedness

So read this list and ask me whether I care that the alternative is centrist? Ask me whether I think this is preferable to a government who will make minimal changes I’m in favour of? I’ve said it til my throat hurts but I’ll take a centrist government over THIS!

If you can still make the case that it’s what you want OR ELSE in the face of a government gleefully walking the line towards fascism then perhaps your privilege is something you need to question.

Equally I’m tired of the delineation in the center- you don’t need to hate Corbyn to be effective in politics. Corbyn meant a lot to many of us and I firmly believe he’d have done his absolute best to make us a better country and would have made sure we weathered covid better than the tories – I mean, how could he have done worse. In my eyes Corbyn is a good but flawed man who has an army of people indignant at his mistreatment- ironically a lot of his abusers would support him if they hadn’t been fed on a diet of salacious lies, exaggerations and hit jobs by a press paid to demonise politics set up to help them.

Ultimately though we are where we are in UK discourse right now and revisionism and factionalism in UK politics is leading us down a very long, twisted path to end up where we are again- with a tory majority, with 46% of us- a minority- exerting their wish for power on a nation divided by ideologies that can- should- be discussed in harmony.

But I know i’m not the only one who thinks it’s this simple: if you want to keep arguing amongst yourself as our real enemies continue their plans to fuck up voting rights, strip our ability to protest back, remove vital parts of education that make people kinder, smarter, MORE than just uneducated daily mail swilling gammons- by all means keep going. Keep attacking each other, keep belittling ideas for how to better our lives, our country, the world- does it feel good to think you’re the most moral, the smartest, because you GET IT in a way the “other side” doesn’t? Shock- there is no “other side” but the tories, and they’re stood watching you all argue.

But when the guns fall silent and you’re all stood looking in confusion at an enemy on a tea break and your own side’s bloody bodies, ask yourself whether your moral posturing, or your pathological need to belittle other people’s politics was worth it.

Your understanding of someone does not limit your ability to respect them

By Daviemoo

It seems almost farcical that in a world as complex, diverse and nuanced as ours, it needs to be said that people will live different lives than you will; that they will experience the world in a different way than you. It seems that too many people are stuck in a mindset of “people who aren’t like me are wrong/ defective”. This goes from horrific mindsets like white supremacy to casual homophobia- and it’s so easy to fix. But the question we need to ask as a society is- why are so many people unwilling to do the bare minimum of showing respect until they understand- and, in fact, even if they don’t.

I could be very far off base with this article, but I’ve noticed that political allegiance is akin to a protected characteristic in the heads of many folk these days- not specifically a right wing issue, but close to it. Speaking critically of someone because they hold conservative views is often compared to hate speech which, as someone who has been victim to literal hate speech before- is laughable.

Let’s start with two ideologies which, in my eyes, are closely linked if not always paralleled in people’s heads- gender critical thinking and right wing allegiance.

To a gender critical thinker, being called a TERF is often conflated with being slurred. I find it hard and almost comical to understand why people see this as hate speech- the essence of hate speech is as simple as, someone with higher societal standing than you insulting an immutable, unchangeable characteristic which many in society see as undesirable. I’m afraid, little gender critical readers, that being called a TERF isn’t hate speech and it’s this simple: You can change gender critical beliefs. You can’t change being trans. You are the societal outliers, but denigrating someone because of a characteristic they can’t control means you are engaging in hate speech- you can change, trans people can’t.

The same with right wingers. It seems that right wing thinkers believe their entire identity, their whole ideology, is under threat- that you “can’t say anything these days” without the WOKE CANCEL MOB coming for you.

a cardboard sign, with "we all bleed the same colour" written on it is held aloft by a woman's hand in front of beautiful stonework on a building.
Photo by Mathias P.R. Reding on Pexels.com

The people who think this must use the phrase “free speech” more times a day than I drink coffee- and that’s saying something. But it seems that no matter how many times you remind these people that free speech very much only applies to government censorship of individuals. But even in this case legislation exists to curtail speech that can encourage or embolden terrorism etc: sorry free speech warriors, you’re fighting for a cause that doesn’t exist. Free speech is the white whale of entitlement- an ironic statement considering it’s usually slavering racists desperate to throw around racial epithets without consequence who yell so loudly about it.

I also find the endless discourse around the gender binary itself quite comical at this point: there is no gender binary. Let me put that in simple, if reductive, terms: a binary means the answer is either 1 or 0, yes or no. There is no wiggle room, nothing in the middle, no outliers. It is light or dark, up or down- nothing betwixt.

Let’s pretend that the gender binary then, is a fact- if you made 3 rules for what a man is- Tall, beard, flannel shirt – but meet someone who is tall, bearded and is wearing a plain shirt- then that person can’t be counted as a “man”… but does that mean (we’re in a binary here) that he’s a woman? For a shirt? No. So he sits further down the “scale” of manhood, manliness… ah. So it’s not binary is it.

Gender exists in a huge, diverse and 3D spectrum, and again- in a world as massive and diverse as ours, gender can be experienced in different ways by every human being walking this earth with some commonalities. It is a unique experience for what I imagine is a huge amount of people, and it does not “belong” to a certain group, either cis or trans. It just is, and will continue to be no matter how humans, with their reductive writings on how YOU CAN’T BE A WOMAN IF YOU DONT X continue to try to wrestle this inexorable concept into a box.

And when it comes to the definition of existence under sex- well, intersex people exist and they’re just as valid as people who aren’t intersex…

Again though, when it comes more specifically to right wing ideology, there’s a certain conviction that you’re born right wing, grow right wing and die right wing and it’s as immutable as skin colour or sexuality.

It isn’t.

The reason right wingers seem to have been agitated so, is just how many younger people, brought up around right wing parents, in right wing fixtures are turning away from hypocrisy politics – let’s be honest, that’s what a significant portion of the ideology the more extreme right follow- rears it’s head.

I can give examples here- from Donald Trump decrying cancel culture for being removed from Twitter, only to create a social media platform that explicitly forbids negative comments around Trump himself or the platform, to Boris Johnson trying to disband or limit the efficacy of an investigative panel because he is about to be investigated by it (again…), or right wing pundits like Isabel Oakeshott defending Stanley Johnson by saying he does indeed feel people up, touch you inappropriately- but it’s not a police matter because SHE feels comfortable with it…

Conflating your choice of ideology or politics with something as bone deep as your actual identity is incorrect. If education on certain topical issues can change people’s political alignment, how is it comparable to something like my sexuality- even if I never touched another man again for the rest of my life I would still be gay, my friend would still be trans and feel trans regardless of her body or her hormones… these things are immutable.

This now leads me into the topic that made me write this piece: understanding.

A woman lays on a bench reading a book
Photo by John Ray Ebora on Pexels.com

Understanding is brilliant, and the saying “walk a mile in someone’s shoes” is a clever way of giving people an understanding of others’ lives, and a way of furthering equality and equity. If you look at half of modern media, messages encoded into our most classic films or our favourite TV shows give us tiny flavours of people’s lives and lifestyles, and often suggest to us that perhaps we don’t know what people are suffering, how their lives are or why they are the way they are- and from this message we gain a tiny particle of understanding, furthering the idea that perhaps we are not superior, perhaps we should try and accept, tolerate (a hated word but true in this context) other people and forge better relationships through understanding.

But I want to take that thought a little further; why do we need to understand someone to accept their legitimacy?

I don’t understand the mechanics of how a person with a certain disability negotiates their daily life- but I don’t need to, to understand that they deserve to do so. I don’t understand what it must be like to be a person of colour who cannot (and, it goes without saying, shouldn’t have to) hide their skin colour to avoid discrimination in the street- but I know they don’t deserve to face that. And I know that many cis women & trans men have biological processes going on inside that I will not experience- but I don’t need to directly experience everything that everyone goes through to know that they’re still, to coin a phrase that gender critical people do seem to enjoy so, “worthy of respect”.

Now, I can hear the right wingers/ gender critical folk who may stumble somehow across this piece asking me why we don’t flip that thinking- why we don’t imagine THEIR plight.

I do. I have. And I decided long ago that the frustration of being called bigoted, the difficulties of always being enraged about something being “cancelled” etc, and the endless thought shifting to avoid admitting to hypocrisy is a terrible fate to bear- but it’s not one brought on by “the other side”. And if you need to understand how I decided that I don’t need to respect you – your ideologues are the proof. I’m sure you feel the same about me.

If you can genuinely look at lacklustre politicians who clearly do not care about people at large unless they can enrich themselves from them, or if you can continuously denigrate minorities- if you can condemn behaviour like doxxing then cheerfully partake in it- you don’t deserve my sympathy, my understanding. You made your own bed.

Ultimately, the simple message from the piece is that acceptance shouldn’t hinge on understanding- so the next time you find yourself ready to rail against someone, ask yourself if that person is worthy of your respect whether you can comprehend their plight or not?

Boris Johnson- Crime Sinister of the United Kingdom.

By Daviemoo

I refuse to use the word “leading”- the UK through the coronavirus crisis was always going to be impossible for Johnson. We have neither been led, nor are we through it -specifically because of this selfish, cretinous fool’s attitude.
Bare below the elbows. Tie tucked. But desperate to show his sweaty, selfish face off for photo ops in a building filled to the brim with people sick and dying because of his, and his worm eaten cabinet’s selfish decision to protect the economy over human life.

The clear desperation of Johnson to make good of his mess in regards to the corruption scandals “rocking” Westminster (I air quoted rocking because- let’s be honest, who didn’t know that Westminster was rotten to the core under the tories) has now led him to the latest in a series of selfish blunders- wandering the halls of a hospital unmasked, his libertarian, or possibly libation addled mind aflap with nonsense.

To prove you’re worthy of trust as a prime minister, you would expect to go further, work harder, and set the examples. How many holidays has Johnson had since he took highest office? How many U turns? How many scandals, salacious headlines, protests and more has he inspired amongst the tired, beleaguered and furious populace of the United Kingdom.
He has been so inept as to make the United Kingdom an ironic moniker, as Ireland and Scotland seem set to take steps to sever their connection to the rest, if only to escape feifdom rule by a man pathologically incapable of enshrining responsibility in his role.

It is only a matter of time until Boris Johnson steps down, or is removed. And he will be remembered forever as a blight on the face of political discourse and honesty in the united kingdom.

Let’s go back, shall we, to Johnson’s election win. Most prime ministers would roll up their sleeves as he so selflessly has in the picture above, and set to preparing the country for it’s exit from the European Union- they would be stepping into briefings on the economy, political division, racial disparity, wealth inequality – Boris Johnson went on holiday to “celebrate his win”- he’s also been on holiday three more times in the last year, mid brexit shortage, covid crisis, increasing bills, increasing NI and more.

The win was a shock for those of us who were left of the center- not just because Johnson seemed inept, but because it came a matter of weeks after police were called to his flat due to a domestic disturbance- the media covered this, but strangely it was seen as verboten to ask whether the man who would take highest office should have his personal life dissected- after all, Johnson’s past exposure to the press hardly painted the image of a salubrious, caring man. Fired twice for lying, exposed for doxxing a journalist so a friend could attack him for writing factual unkindnesses, had an affair when his wife had cancer and lying about it.

Once in the position he had so coveted, Johnson took little time to start appeasing those who put him there- his and Priti Patel’s comments on “do gooder lefty lawyers” preceded a huge spike in violence against said group- and yet an apology wasn’t even entertained. Finally, the right leaners had an unrepentant man in charge.

He didn’t have long to entertain his success at the polls. As coronavirus began to spiral in the news cycles, dogging our footsteps like the virus itself would mere weeks later, Johnson tried to appear unflappable on TV, boasting about shaking hands with covid patients- shortly before almost dying of the virus himself. The government’s reluctance to pre-emptively close the economy was responsible for the precipitous rise in cases- facilitated as well by their early determination to seek herd immunity. As soon as the mass deaths began to show, Johnson performed the first of his many U turns- but that meant little to those who now lay cold in the ground due to his lassitude.

Once the PPE chain corruption was established, it was only a short matter of time until an inquiry into who in the government knew about, and took advantage from, this practice of taking public money to produce sub standard PPE that would demonstrably cause deaths, or simply be a waste of vital public money.

Let’s also not forget the government’s determination to appoint Dido “data loss” Harding to the top job at Serco test and trace- slapping an NHS logo on an app doesn’t make it an NHS project, just means it is shielded from scrutiny in a way it should not as a business swallowing vast sums of public cash. Harding was a terrible choice, proven when her poorly run unit lost thousands of cases because they used spreadsheeting software that’s out of date compared to the software I use at work- but complaining about government corruption would do you little good- Harding’s husband heads up the anti corruption unit- and she is also good friends with Johnson.

Next to come was the discovery that Johnson had dismissed founded- proven- claims that Priti Patel was a bully who had demeaned and undermined her staff to the point that the public had to foot the bill for a payout for a staff member. Johnson’s sticky prints were all over this and the person responsible for the investigation was so incensed, he quit- but as his other job was to report on certain activities of Johnson this meant, somewhat dubiously, that months later Johnson would come under fire for being unable to prove who had paid the exorbitant bill for his number 11, Downing Street flat revamp. Was it the public? Who knew- until at the last moment a scrambling response from the government showed that Johnson had reimbursed a tory donor who footed the bill. Strange that a man who thinks nothing of money couldn’t have footed the bill himself.

We are, though, nowhere near the end of the strange tale of Johnson, part time prime minister and job share with the grim reaper and the snake who lied to Eve in the garden of eden.

Desperate to boost an economy that had already begun to flail under the pandemic’s necessary restrictions and the unprecedented disaster that was the brexit fallout, Johnson worked out a plan with the Chancellor of the Exchequer – Eat out to Help Out- that only took weeks to cause cases to explode in an utterly predictable way. But as long as the economy was rising, Johnson and his cadre closed their eyes to the rising covid numbers.

Suddenly, Johnson’s old ally Dominic Cummings filled the press with excuplatory headlines, trying to out the government as the nest of fools it was. Quotes Johnson had made were everywhere as he talked about letting our corpses pile high in the streets instead of locking down. And still the public forgave.

Next came his defence of Matt Hancock’s ineptitude. “He’s doing a fine job” said Johnson dismissively – continuing to defend this viewpoint even as Hancock was outed as a clueless, corrupt and inept health secretary- and even into the proof that Hancock was having an affair with an aide paid by public funds, more bothered about filling his hands with her pant suit than working on plans to save the lives of his fellow countrymen. Johnson rolled his eyes, probably thrilled that he wasn’t the only person incapable of fidelity – but as the public’s ire rose, suddenly Hancock announced he was leaving the role of health secretary and immediately Johnson claimed he had fired him. Demonstrably a lie- and shortly after this, Dawn Butler MP would call out Johnson’s lies in Parliament, something heretofore unprecedented.

Johnson’s government’s venom truly started to seep into the nation at the point where he decided to scorn providing school meals to school children.

Many ardent tories jumped out of the woodwork to repeat the same recycled media lines of “oh so they can afford cigarettes and iPhones but not to feed their kids!” And while none of us denied that there are some who will abuse benefits or mistreat their children, to tar everyone with that brush, and to deny children free food that would ease the burden on their parents and fill their stomachs was a truly monstrous move on behalf of the government.

This though, highlights a wider problem of the poison of the Johnson prime ministership. The emboldening of tory MP’s to self radicalise, to talk absolute tosh, to purposely be offensive or to do outrageous things. Ben Bradley accused his constituents of “selling free school meal tickets to pay in brothels”. Dominic Raab has accused the British populace of being amongst the most lazy – despite his insistence on not leaving his holiday resort as Afghanistan’s last defences against the Taliban crumbled. Priti Patel, already let off for bullying, her literal subterfuge against the nation forgotten, has now written legislation that has killed refugees in the sea- it has already happened, but you may not have read about it in our biased media. But don’t forget, this legislation is also widely hailed as illegal by other countries and has soured relations between England and Britain even more.

John Redwood, once hailed as an intellectual, regularly spends most of his time positing wild nonsense theories of how to improve relations between the UK and other places. Michael Gove, exposed for being biased against the north then made director of schemes to improve infrastructure in the north… the ineptitude, purposeful prodding and open idiocy of this cabinet is plain to see for those who look.

When his appointee to succeed the inept Hancock, Sajid Javid, immediately caught covid then threw off all restrictions, most of those who have railed and raged at Johnson’s inability to do a good job waited with bated breath, assuming that SOMETHING would stop the foolishness of our “freedom day”. Over 6000 people have died, needlessly, since freedom day because our government is derangedly driven to placate a small but loud minority of idiots- and a worse pandemic has spread in the UK- lack of consequence culture. But looking at the contents herein, can you be surprised.

The next hand clutching slip-up of Johnson’s was his deep desperation to facilitate a trade deal with India to make up for the yawning maw that is the post brexit trade deficit. His insistence on throwing off travel safety made it perfectly convenient for the delta variant to pervade the whole country, swaths of infections following his foolish decision to kiss up to the Indian politicians he hoped could enrich our trade. There was money to be made- money that came again at the expense of the vast majority of Brits.

And when Peter Bottomley MP said that new MPs find it “desperately difficult” to cope in their £81k salary with huge expenses, subsidised meals and more, at the exact same moment that the government removed the £20 uplift from universal credit, how much clearer could it have been that our duly elected did not, even in a blindingly fundamental way, understand the travails of the working class, either in, or not in the covid era? And again, during this latest scandal with Owen Paterson thrown under the bus and forced to step down he decried the salary scheme for MPs... why a man so out of touch with his constituents retains power so easily is beyond me.

This latest controversy has prompted a splashback that nobody could have predicted- Johnson’s determination to defend a colleague who provably took money to lobby for a company who has caused a surge in infections (strangely just before he faces an investigation by the committee) saw headlines from usually slavish newspapers critiquing his and his government’s foolish actions. Open evidence of corruption – “vote this way or your constituency will be defunded” has finally seen people shake off the pall of indifference we’ve been pushing back against for months.

But Johnson’s controversies predate his role as PM and continually during his tenure he has refused to apologise for contentious remarks he’s made in articles, from calling muslim women letterboxes, calling gay men tank topped bum boys and in his book, using the phrase “he was stupid because he was a c**n”, and far more. Johnson always falls back on context- always missing the point that the context makes the comments worse. He sticks to these views because this is how he sees anyone not of “his level”.

Johnson has, somehow, clung to the strange moniker of a man of the people, “just like us”- but how many people do you know that describes their £250k salary as “chicken feed”? Daffy Johnson is an affectation that too many British people are happy to swallow in their ignorance- ruled by elites, the UK’s government is as far from “people of the people” as you can get- and in fact, to quote a disgusting and inflammatory headline from the time where the path of Brexit was open to decision, at the moment this government walks ever closer to the deserved moniker of “enemies of the people“. A friend of mine has created a podcast about extremism based specifically on that headline that painted judges as traitors for questioning the legitimacy of the brexit vote, in case the severity of it is lost on you- and all the while, headlines just like that were thrust to the fore by a media determined to placate a rapidly right-sliding government.

And yet no matter how much evidence is thrust into the light by enterprising journalists, researchers and, of course, the “woke do gooder lefty lawyers” who work for places like the goodlaw project, Johnson’s strange and fraudulent presence as a man of the people just wont die- even with the death of 160,000 of his fellow countrymen Johnson has clung to popularity.

And today, 08/11/21, we see Johnson parade down a hospital corridor, bare below the elbow, tie tucked in, maskless and oozing ignorance. The face of our country, red cheeked and belligerent, determined to strengthen the foolish confidence of his populist base.

Many of us are awake to the injustices and corruptions of this government. When will the rest of us awaken from this spell, and finally step forward to remove power from a man desperate to obtain it, but fundamentally incapable of wielding it for good?

The Lie Of British Democracy

By Daviemoo

It all started as it’s gone on: David Cameron, full of pomp, arrogance and misplaced self confidence stood before the nation and announced a referendum on the UK’s membership to the European Union. Perhaps it even goes back further- but in that moment, and in several moments since, it’s become crystal clear that British democracy was fallible. And now the fraudulent claim of demonstrable choice is exposed for us all to see as another corrupt conservative MP escapes punishment for lobbying, mere days after a different conservative MP convicted of sexual harassment is welcomed back to parliament with open arms- all at the behest of Alexander Boris De Pfeffel Johnson. The swamp, far from being drained, soaks the carpets and seats of Westminster- and a compliant British public enables this lassitude, as those who are elected to power seize it, throttle it and force us to bite the curb.

If youre like me, you’ll have grown up with a family member or two reasonably invested in politics, who impressed upon you that British politics was, is and would always be a proud institution, where democracy was at the forefront of every gathering of politicians. Where the will of the people was followed to the T, even at the expense of parliamentarians – whose role was to oversee the fairness of political discourse, to put forward points in politics which made the path of progression clear for our nation.

All is ashes.

Despite today’s hurried, harried and flagrantly churlish U-turn, we are a country thrown deep end into a government unmoved by decency, by knowledge- and by the rule of law their own party line so touts.

The government were desperate to lay down a pathway towards MP’s being able to escape even meagre punishments for their corrupt actions. If you’re not familiar, a tory MP- already paid £85,000 by the British public to represent his constituents – already able to claim twice that in expenses, paid back by the British public- was paid three times his salary to do four hours work a week, to promote a company, Randox, to take on millions of pounds of publicly funded coronavirus contracts. Here’s a dispatches article about just how well that went- Hint, not well. Essentially this MP was paid an exorbitant salary to lobby for this company to take on work it could not do, and this was demonstrably proven- and he was rightly investigated and found to be in breach. Has he held his hands up and accepted he did wrong? Not quite- he’s disputed and disparaged the investigation, blamed them for his wife’s suicide and even in parliament yesterday reaffirmed that he would do it again.

We can kid ourselves that the tory party saw the flagrancy in their corruption and changed their mind because it was a bridge too far- but I think we all know that a daily mail headline critical of the result of last night’s vote will have caused this. When the media turns on the tories, they U turn. Because they are the party of populism, they are the party of “at least we’re not Labour”.

If this was an isolated incident this would be salacious enough- but corruption runs thick, deep and iron solid through the backs of the Conservatives.
Here is evidence that Michael Gove has been participating in meddling with PPE contracting awards.

Here is an article about how the Prime Minister has referred to minorities, including people like me as ” Tank topped bum boys”, comments which- to this day- he has refused to apologise for, stating that context is key. But no context exists to allow the sentient shoe buffer that claims office to refer to people like me in such salacious terms.

Here, we can read a story about how Rob Roberts, a tory MP, was welcomed back to the fold after a short suspension for provably sexually harassing members of staff.

The sleaze so oft referred to is not an aberration in British politics- it’s now become it’s backbone.

Peter Osborne’s “The assault on truth”, in my eyes, acts like this modern political movement is a sudden, juddering jolt from the politics of old- but the groundwork for this backlash was laid every time someone spoke out against racism, against homophobia… as the world became more willing to accommodate those who did not fit the mould of white, straight, cis and male, the rage of those who feel that sharing the stage is tantamount to their oppression have become more enraged- no longer allowed to continue their blithe disparagement of every minority with no pushback, their rage boiled over into a movement of people who feel like ignorance towards others is a legitimate lifestyle choice, and that their decision to not even do the bare minimum should be respected over the literal rights and liberties of others. Osborne’s regular jibes at “lefty” politics are ironic- his book is about the rise of a NEW moral barbarism- based around the endless lack of attention right wing figures pay to reality.

That we respected the Brexit referendum is something incontrovertible that was utterly foolish- I’ve tried many times to explain that a choice of the magnitude of leaving the EU should not have been given to the British public. An enormous amount of Brits think it’s their RIGHT to have had their say on EU membership- but upon questioning of even the basic intricacies of EU-UK Relations, can only repeat the faded lines handed to them by figureheads like Nigel Farage- “The Corrupt EU cabal” (of which we were an influencial member)… “make our own laws!” (we do, and we very rarely objected to EU legislation or law, and often when we did – they caved) “take back our sovereignty”- this one is the most ironic statement because since we left the EU, we’ve had a government feverishly pressing through authoritarian legislation to curtail human rights as basic as protest or- recently, with Priti Patel’s legislation against migrants at sea- survival.

Brexit should never have been in the hands of people ignorant of the heft of what they voted for, simply desperate to be rude to some imaginary enemy buried at the heart of Brussels.

But on we move to Johnson’s instalment as Prime Minister. Osborne’s book is right in that Johnson is the figurehead (though not the leader- he is simply not smart enough) of this new moral barbarism in the UK- but it’s fairly transparent that America had Trump’s horror ridden presidency, and the UK used this formula to improve on it’s framework. Now we see a figurehead trying- and by degrees, succeeding- in removing any meaningful way to challenge him.

From blaming the pandemic for increased cost of living and rising taxes, the pingdemic for food shortages instead of their own brexit deal (and as extra proof, the immediate complaints from Lord Frost- who negotiated the deal and immediately declared it “unserviceable”), Johnson’s ability to divert responsibility is the only thing I actually compliment him on. He exemplifies todays white cishet man – absolutely convinced he is not at fault in any situation no matter his involvement, blithely confused as to why he’s even in the conversation when he was the one who made the situation occur that the conversation describes.

Johnson’s desperation to alter the accountability process for MPs seems to stem from the fact that he, too, is up for scrutiny by the panel who found his MP (and by the way, personal friend) guilty of lobbying. As always, the foetid trail leads back to the ringleader and as always, his supporters simply clap like seals at his daffy hair and his smirking postulations on his positions.

The most frustrating part of the political landscape of the UK is not even the ever increasing obviousness that the Tories are, to turn a common phrase, bad people, poor politicians, corrupt, inept- it’s the continuing laissez faire dismissals of these incontrovertible truths by the public. With the rise of epic-scale disinformation campaigns like Q anon, with the alacrity of mistruths spreading across social media, it’s more difficult to fight lies- lies which politicians in the UK are now happy to weaponise, endorse and accept- but so too do the British public at large it seems.

So many people truly believe the nonsense that the public are out of control of politics (a temporary truth at the moment- but not one that cannot be changed) that abuses of power as flagrant as a vote to upend the ability to hold politicians to account simply rolls off their notice, like so much sewage filled floodwater off a duck’s feathered back. This- this is the greatest lie a politician ever told- that the public don’t have power. The voting masses of the UK outnumber tory supporters- and especially Tories- by a huge margin. And the urgency with which we need to exercise this margin grows every single time the Tories strip back another right like protesting, every time they hand friends huge packs of public money to issue sub standard PPE linked to deaths, whenever they deny the systemic problems of racism, transphobia, homophobia.

The irony is- this would even benefit the gammons who bluster at any attempt to address these problems. To finally acknowledge the problems festering at the feet of our beleaguered society, to flush out the sewage from our waterways AND our politics- would enable us as a society to move on from them, to close down the culture wars and make positive steps for everyone instead of those happy to live in ignorance of the discontent that surrounds them.

Until, though, the British public face up to the urgency of scrutiny against our political leaders- until we prevent their continual deflection of responsibility, we are doomed to watch as the Tories push and strain against the reins of accountability, finding the very furthest point they can reach without public backlash. Living in a country which allows politicians to walk up to the line, lean over it, draw another line and erase the old one is not a democracy- and it’s time we stopped pretending that we live in a democratic state with a government so enmired in corruption that other countries study us for tips on how NOT to operate.