Tag: politics

The Great Theatrics of Modern Politics

By Daviemoo

Roll up one and all and see the greatest performance ever given by politicians! A play so absorbing that its enthralled a nation of those willing to buy the unlikely story that a group of people responsible for nearly 200,000 deaths due to a preventable disease, who have overseen scandal after scandal from blackmail and bullying to their stirring performance as reverse Robin Hoods- stealing from the poor to give succour to the rich- were ever interested in making our lives better.

We live in a remarkable time. Many things have contributed to the through the looking glass state of affairs we find ourselves in. 9/11, the incompetence of the Bush administration, Blair’s descent into useful lapdog and overt liar who pushed an agenda of war on us for the sake of the black lifeblood of the planet- oil. There’s a distinct delineation between the performative lies of someone like Blair and- as a byproduct- Starmer: they lie about sticking to promises and policies because they genuinely think and perhaps know that lying for the greater good benefits the majority. I do not hate those politicians who lie thinking they must do so for “the greater good” but lying, nonetheless, leads to the sort of crushing disgrace that ended Blair’s tenure.

But this type of performance, this lying is different than the insidious lies of people like Trump, Johnson, Patel and almost every single member of the conservative party “functioning” in the uk today. It is not to excuse it- but a lie told in isolation is different than the constant performance of roles that has encompassed the tories for the last 12 years.

The theatrics of Johnson’s red faced rants at the despatch box are meant only to absolve him of culpability in his now myriad well advertised crimes, some of which are listed above. A man who oversaw wholesale death at the hands of a plague then stood in an expensive press room, studiously dishevelled as only a man running a disaster can be and who barely contained his scene-breaking smirk as he blamed everyone from NHS staff to care home workers to the individuals ourselves, failing at every turn to grasp the depths of the role he plays- his own vital and completely unfufilled role as arbiter of safety. A man who somberly promised there were no parties- but then there were parties but he didn’t go- but then he did go but he didn’t know it was a party- but he did go and he did know it was a party but parties are ok: bravissimo! Johnson truly outdid himself as an actor through those scenes; I know were it me, I would likely have broken and laughed at the obscenity of such poorly written lines- but he performed them with gusto!

The playbook which this government has functioned from has always been written to shirk blame: you will note that not once has any tory, even performatively admitted responsibility for the outcomes of brexit on our economy, of coronavirus and the deaths therein, of rising hate crimes, of the knighthood of a man who oversaw the worst exam results because he would not factor in a pandemic, of the lobbying scandal or of a doctored race report or even of Johnson’s apparently strenuously rehearsed insinuation that Starmer was responsible for the monster that is Jimmy Saville. But that is because any person- not a minority, not even the majority, matters in this play we’re swept up in. Johnson tore up the playbook of politician and is rewriting as he goes, forgetting to refer to his own source material. That’s hardly surprising- Johnson’s prose has always been harshly critiqued by anyone unfortunate enough to delve into it. His half baked lies about political correctness being an import from the EU, fallacious claims of government ministers potential homosexual affairs… he may be an actor. A great writer he is not.

As a man, and a government obsessed with market prominence, the market itself took on the role of judge, jury and indeed executioner of coronavirus. If you couldn’t afford to stay home then perhaps you should have worked a bit harder, studied more, perhaps you should have saved more to get a mortgage then you didn’t HAVE to go out to work: you could have been offered a more prominent role in the play of modern Britain: But we weren’t all offered the stage Johnson was, we worked for our meagre bit parts and we were shunned from the spotlight- a man such as he would never understand this life because it’s so alien to his own. Every pundit who worked as his agent to install him knew he would deliver a brilliant performance as a prime minister, but when it came to fulfilling those duties he would, and has, and is, and will continue- to fall flat, miss the notes, forget the lines.

This mindset so common amongst the elite is not surprising. Those born to be stars are so used to it that it fades into the background. What’s surprising is how successfully this government has played it’s role, plying the working class with this message- and how many have accepted their bit part at the coliseum of conservative- how many working class people stand and cheer at the interval, crying “yes, yes our lives are worse, we’re poorer, more unhealthy, our family and friends died, we can’t afford to heat our homes- more, more!” They leave rave reviews for a government performatively talking about wanting to be the party of tax cuts as taxes go up, the party of individual responsibility as they shirk their own duties- they go off book every day on stage, speaking contradictions to their character and yet the proletariat rise from their seat, applauding.

9% of the UK tested positive for coronavirus last week. Where was the scene of a PM worried for the health of his nation? Was it cut from the play? No.
Because the UK are bored of hearing about covid, because the government and a less than useless media are not pushing the message- there are many reasons. But most of it, to my belief, boils down to a prime minister who stands unflinching at the despatch box, his brows knitted in consternation as he orates about how well we’ve done (despite having the highest deaths in Europe), how great our vaccine rollout (which is now woefully low on the world table and doesn’t even factor in children) is, how we’re levelling up (as 1.1 million people are due to drop into the trenches of poverty). Johnson’s lines are well rehearsed, and of course, complete nonsense.

The prime minister’s bluster is performed by a master of wordplay with absolutely no substance. I often imply that he is a stupid man, and I do believe that there is a dearth of common sense in that head- but to deny he is consciously complicit of his decision to let the market dictate death is to offer him a disservice- I credit Mr Johnson with knowingly leading us into mass death and a decimated economy. Because Johnson and huge swaths of those who gather to watch him perform are fans of hope. They want to live off the great glory of a Britain that never existed. “Built by hard working people” they will extoll in parliament. Built then by slaves imported in droves to fulfil the wishes of our ancestors, and built now by the poor whose earnings are being pared down to nothing by a government who will take our taxes and stuff them in the coffers, ready to drip drip drip feed us until the run up to an election they hope to storm. Suddenly the magic money tree will bloom and Johnson will cry ‘ITS BECAUSE OF ME- I WORKED TO GET YOU THIS MONEY’. A performance worthy of Shakespeare- a man Johnson is writing a book about and being paid more for than I will earn in 5 years no doubt.

Boris Johnson could, tomorrow, convene parliament and do all manner of things to help the cost of living crisis. Energy companies cannot just up and leave; their earnings should be capped and the extra money reinvested into consumer savings, or into green energy which would and should be cheaper. But he would have to eschew the role he’s played for so long. Out would go the spotlights and in he would step, the caricature lost, and we would finally see a contrite, a worried, a selfless PM who would do what he could to help us: but this is a role Johnson is utterly incapable of fulfilling: he is typecast. He will not change.

He could have worked collaboratively with the EU on a brexit deal that didn’t involve heinous red tape and therefore push up the price of goods, ruin businesses that rely on import/export expedience. He could fairly tax the hyper rich, close the tax loopholes that the EU was working on so those who earn obscene amounts of money pay fairly and proportionately. But Boris Johnson will approach the despatch box with his sneering surety that Britain must suffer under his guidance because the market dictates it so. So it is with this that we must realise: Johnson is not a prime minister, he is an actor on a stage, performing a brilliant imitation of a businessman running the country like a firm to maximise profit even at the expense of the workers. As long as the CEOs are rich our lives or deaths do not matter.

Johnson and his allies have each stepped up to the spotlight to perform wonderfully convincing soliloquies, each convincing us of a different reason for the play we’re unwittingly performing: it’s the people of colour, the foreigners, the LGBT+ who have stolen the show, made the whole performance about them: but it is the minorities who simply ask for time on stage- we didn’t write the play. those who proceeded Johnson’s government did, and this government’s wilful continuation of a storyline of deflecting blame is the true reason we are here.

As the audience of the Johnson government’s play dwindles due to covid deaths, due to starvation, hypothermia in their own homes, due to rising hate crimes one must wonder: who will be alive to witness the curtain fall? Will we be lucky enough to survive the full tenure of the Johnson government- and of those who do make it to the final act, who will stand and cry “encore”.

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

What would a world without “woke” culture be like?

By Daviemoo

Many of us who are labelled “woke” already live in a world suffused with anti minority sentiment- a cursory scroll of someone like Katy Montgomerie’s twitter shows the relentless onward rumble of abuse that she faces from those who are mildly uncomfortable with transgender women, to those who outwardly call for the arrest and forced de-transitioning of anyone transgender; conversely, many of the most outspoken critics of “cancel culture” live in a world where they can and do say whatever they want to and face absolutely no consequence for it. But what if those who rage against cancel culture win? What would that world look like? And could we really stomach a “so what” society?

Society at it’s core is huge, vast and varied and unfortunately it’s a simple fact that society must function by making allowances for divergence from what could be termed as the norm. If every person who did not fit the norm was ostracised from society, human civilisation would be laughably small and far away from where we are now. Human acceptance has been perilous ever since the first human emerged from their cave, saw another human and wondered why their hair was a different colour.

The benefit of intellect is that we can discuss how we can co-exist and make each other’s lives easier- but humans are still in some strange phase of our existence where we’d rather exhaust debate on why we shouldn’t, than why we should.

Let’s say the anti woke brigade won: how would life be for anyone outside of the lucky few who aren’t affected now by, and would continue not to be affected by the implementation of a “so what” culture?

People of colour

“Woke” sentiment is closely linked to anti racist sentiment- so scrap any and all discourse around racial inequality. It doesn’t mean racial inequality doesn’t exist- merely that it is not discussed. Any person of colour who faced inequality- be that micro aggressions or outright hatred- would be met with indifference in the “so what” society. Racist hiring practices could continue unabated with employers merely shrugging when called out on their inability to hire people of colour. Tests on blind CV’s have highlighted a worrying disparity on conversions of people with ethnic names to employees at organisations- and the backlash to organisations offering roles to people of colour has been thunderous- even when those roles are either best filled by people of colour due to the nature of the job or are specifically designed to wall over a shortfall in representation when it comes to broader society.

In the “so what” society, systemic racism would be glossed over with reports from the government that would reference experts who were not consulted to contribute. The inequalities faced by people of colour in the UK would be explained away with “agency” rather than a deep look into how the continuation of ostracising behaviour propagated by the government and a systematically racist society has contributed to worse living conditions, worse mental health outcomes and worse treatment by institutions like hospitals and police.

When nation wide protests are sparked about racial inequality and how to deal with it, including the glorification of slave traders, a “so what” society would likely spend more time focusing on the damage to a public statue and the four white people who did it than the feelings of people of colour who had to walk past a statue of a man who may have enslaved their ancestors.

LGBT+ people

Often when we speak out about the abuses we face, whether again micro aggressions like being asked invasive questions about who puts what genitals where, who has what genitals, or disgusting comments about STIs – we’re told that it “could be worse” and to be “thankful” for how we’re treated or spoken to or about.

We’re treated to regular sermonising about how we’re perverted or seen as unseemly because we have different sexualities.

Gay men are often accused of paedophilia as a pejorative, never so much as recently with the stoking of anti trans sentiment- if you publicly defend transgender people on the internet you will, it is a solemn promise, be labelled a paedophile.

In a “so what” culture, one could expect that hate crimes would rise precipitously because anti minority sentiment would be allowed to go unchecked to the point that organisations would step away from legislation designed to protect minorities from discrimination- and in fact, aid it.

In the microcosm of anti LGBT sentiment in the “so what” society, the BBC would knowingly allow a lesbian rapist like Lily Cade to contribute to an article about fear of rape, and use widely questioned figures- like a survey run by a transphobic group to indicate societal findings about fear of trans women.

In this “so what” society, discrimination like my own, where I was called “faggot” in front of everyone at work would be allowed to happen with no punishment: I was slurred in front of half the office, some of whom were my literal employees and in response my boss- the company owner- did nothing to protect me, to punish my aggressor- I would suggest that this fits in quite well with what would happen in a “so what” society.

Of course as an already polarised person I’m looking at this through my lens- but it’s the lens of those who don’t follow the flow of society on dint of who we are that need some social consciousness in public or we’re the ones who suffer.

Women

Need I say it?

When women can be murdered in the street by policemen and the police response is to wear the right shoes or that you should flag down a bus and not to look at serious police reforms, one starts to wonder whether this is exactly what a “so what” culture would do.

When women’s reproductive rights are restricted or debated, and women are overruled on their own healthcare regularly, and when medical problems are under-diagnosed even though they are common, you could surely say that this is indicative of a so what society- or when women speak out about their genuine fears in a society that is pervaded by men who don’t respect bodily autonomy or boundaries, and “not all men” is the immediate response rather than any attempt to work with women to allay their fears or deal with the causal root of the issue one could say that’s very typical of a “so what” society.

When violence against women is met with questions like “but what was she wearing“, or when society sexualises young women like schoolgirls and thinks this is normal- the infantilisation of women for sexual pleasure- one must truly question whether society works for women, or whether it’s already the common case that when women speak about women’s issues they’re met with “so what”.

The disabled

What would likely typify the behaviour of a “so what” society when referring to disabled people? Say, in the midst of a pandemic, throwing off all restrictions to mitigate spread and ensure people were kept safe? Or perhaps not giving full living wage allowance to those forced to care for relatives who either cant afford or just don’t want to house their loved one in a care facility?

In a “so what” society, giving space and air time to disabled people would be a rarity because it would underscore the lack of support for disabled people in a country that barely tolerates the audacity of someone to be disabled, and those who do speak against the government struggle to be heard.

And when, at the height of death in the pandemic, the government legislates enforced Do Not Resuscitate orders for disabled people you have the true measure of whether a society does, or does not feel “woke” about disabled people’s issues.

You have what you want

Society has long been about asking people to at the very least control their voicing of their inner thoughts- think what you want, but don’t say it. Even this has become too much for the polemic group of anti woke nonsense pushing. Simply being asked to think whatever you want, no matter how heinous but keep it in your head is a travail they cannot endure. And yet when it is our comfort, our autonomy, our names, our pronouns, our liberties we ask to be respected -they cannot do so. How strange that we must return the favour which is never employed for us?

When you look closely at our society, you begin to understand that the issue that the anti woke crowd have is simply that they aren’t able to thoughtlessly speak with impunity – but none of us are barred from doing just that, we just elect to be decent people. What we have is a crowd of people desperate to have society foster their desire to say bad things without being made to feel guilty for them.

I’m afraid, dear anti wokers- you have the society you desperately crave and you’re wasting time asking for it to be more closed. Imagine what society would be like without allowances for difference, without consideration for other people; a deep, dark and horribly unhappy place where even the discussion of inequality cannot be stomached because it may make people feel bad.

If you really want to know what the society of your dreams looks like, perhaps it’s time to realise that it’s actually your worst nightmare.

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.

Either face some consequences now… or face more when we snap.

By Daviemoo

What was it that broke me? Was it the not feeding school children? Was it the continual Hokey Cokey in and out of lockdown? The deaths of over 150,000 people in the UK? The illegal VIP lanes for PPE magnates to get rich off of defective equipment which was meant to keep people alive? Perhaps it was the lassitude in throwing all restrictions off but gaslighting everyone into “doing the right thing” when people already can’t afford to. I don’t know any more. But what I do know, what I am convinced of all the way down to my bones- is that the Conservative party must face repercussions for their repeated dereliction of duty now, or worse will happen when they break us all.

James Cleverly recently said that we “don’t need a power vacuum at the heart of government”, as if Johnson’s departure would leave us with no prime minister, like a rudderless ship. Firstly the post would be filled but secondly, if a ship has spent it’s time repeatedly careening into dangerous waters perhaps the rudder is faulty. Better, I say, to have a power vacuum at the heart of government than a moral one.

Not just Johnson, the entire Conservative party is complicit in their disgusting actions. Every single dishonest politician who has gone on the news to defend Johnson, to embellish his leadership during the pandemic has done so because of their own pathetic self interest in remaining employed over saving human life. None of the sycophants resting on the front bench would be there without Johnson – Truss who has repeatedly shown herself to be a fool, Dorries who apparently owes Johnson her “undying loyalty” because nobody else would have someone as dense as she in power, Rees-Mogg, a man so ostentatiously wankish that even his own side dislike him, Raab who by all accounts is such a horrific person I dare not write accounts of what I’ve heard he’s done for fear of being sued, Fabricant who seems to want to turn himself into the Poundland version of Johnson, Kwarteng who, at this point, I genuinely believe has a fetish for making himself look like Johnson’s key fluffer on the news.

It goes back further than Johnson stepping into number 10 as the prime minister. It goes back longer than I’ve been alive. The conservatives have mismanaged the UK for decades when they’ve had the chance, and the labour government everyone looks back on in shame only really began to fail in earnest when they adopted conservative ideals. But focusing on the last 13 years of conservative rule has been like watching a person strike a match and gleefully set fire to their own bed because someone told them a foreigner lives downstairs.

Every single day the conservatives push people like those this blog is designed to support, needling us by describing us as woke, picking on our gender, our sexuality, denying the racism felt by anyone not white, telling us that we just need to budget better as we see less money hit our pockets, that we need to take personal responsibility- but our own best efforts are made moot by a populace who just want to pretend coronavirus is gone because it’s an inconvenience. The UK has long prided itself on stating it’s full of strong hard bitten people who live off the pride of our relatives having gone through the blitz- those people survived by taking basic safety precautions and we besmirch their memory every time we talk disparagingly about wearing a mask.

Without fail, the conservatives continue to take aim at our values, taking a paring knife to the bone of protest rights which is only restricted under authoritarian governments. And a complicit populace allows it.

But for how long?

I wrote a post on here once called “The Radicalisation of the Left” and that felt dramatic at the time- but now it’s a label I identify with. I’m radicalised against the moral bankruptcy of this government, disgusted by their flagrant abandonment of a populace beaten into complicity- and disappointed by the sheer amount of, and I hate to co-opt this phrase from anti vaccine propogandists but- sheep.

Sheep are the populace of a country who walk around crying out happily that they have a freedom that runs with it a risk of death. Sheep are the people who allow their government to break the law – repeatedly- and simply respond with a shrug and an “all politicians are as bad”. Because they aren’t all as bad. I hate Teresa May for all she did in fostering the hostile environment but you can be damn sure no parties would have rocked number ten under her.

The conservatives have wilfully sold us out over and over and over- allowing businesses to rake in astronomical profits from us as we were home using our energy more last year, refusing to implement windfall taxes to recoup any money from them and choosing instead to stick their hands into our pockets. They were too cowardly to implement strict restrictions and enforcement during a period where hundreds of people were dying every day. Choosing enrichment of friends, or in people like Paterson’s case themselves led to people dying because of equipment or tests that should have been properly funded and managed. They installed an NHS abolitionist as health secretary after allowing the previous post holder to focus on his mistress instead of his vital role. They have not at one single point willingly put the public first- always choosing to focus on business, on economy and even then, even then when focusing on their, one could say charitably “pragmatic” endeavours they failed. The economy of the UK has been ripped backwards by the worst Brexit outcome.

And so it’s now that I, and I’m sure you too, begin to wonder when the last straw will fall- the camel’s legs are shaking, the next piece is drifting slowly towards it’s back- will this be the one? What will it be? More rights being taken away, another monetary crisis, another scandal? The conservatives think if they can get through Partygate then it’s all said and done. But when they continue to cling to power when nobody wants them there, when they continue to spit in the face of the populace they are meant to (as public servants, lest they need reminding) serve, how can we democratically expect justice to be done if they are the ones holding the scales aloft?

I suspect that the conservatives are due for a fall, and I honestly hope it happens within the system in which we’re trapped- but every day the conservatives turn that system inside out, make it pointless and make a mockery of those who had an iron solid belief in it’s ability to mete out justice. But that iron solid belief is white hot with anger and buckling and something more sinister lurks within it.

As Johnson announces he may not step down from prime ministership for nearly a decade and as the conservatives shore up efforts to roll back even more rights including quite literally THE HUMAN RIGHTS ACT, one can see the steady course of the UK as we head towards their authoritarian dream and how it will end as a nightmare for them. Westminster stands as a tenet of our democracy- but if the lie of no democracy is outed to the masses then Westminster must be torn down brick by brick because it no longer serves the people. Democracy does not exist when a prime minister who has admitted his complicity in hosting and attending illegal events escapes punishment. It does not exist when a government is repeatedly brought to account in court by the gooodlaw project as the only body who tries.

The tories fail to realise that if they continue to propagate the lie of the system that doesn’t work eventually even the slowest amongst us will be radicalised into action and when this happens every smug press interview about the will of the people, about getting on with the job will be shot back in their faces, the shards of the lies they told cutting deep as the anger of an exhausted population explodes into open rebellion.

I don’t call for this rebellion, I am no leader- but I will partake in it. I will make my voice heard in the cacophony against the Conservative party. Because we gave them the chance to lead and they fiddled as Rome- then London, Bristol, Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds, burned.

Let the conservatives face justice before us all or let us take justice into our own hands. If it’s the will of the people that the conservatives be torn from power then who are they, or I, or even you to deny it?

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

Christian Forgiveness in the UK is nothing more than a dog whistle from a government embroiled in scandal

By Daviemoo

Michael Gove, in a recent dispatches documentary about Boris Johnson’s many scandals, suggested that we should find “Christian forgiveness” for Johnson and his myriad scandals- but where is the Christian morality that would have supposedly prevented these transgressions- where is the Christian honesty in confessing your sins- and where is the Christian morality in making a bonfire of human life due to your ineptitude during a pandemic?

An enormous proportion of the United Kingdom is now atheist- this is from statistics taken from the ONS & various other studies- and even if they aren’t there are many religions which do not feature belief in Jesus Christ which feature prominently in UK religious households. So it was a very particularly crafted message that Gove was promoting when he tried to use this wording, appealing to those longstanding hardcore white middle class Christians to continue their fealty to Johnson and his catalogue of embarrassments.

Irony, then, that this hardcore demographic of already mostly long-standing tory voters are the ones most likely to continue to thoughtlessly back the PM in his shuffling mission to take a heated blade to the heart of any tory credibility left. Better, perhaps to appeal to those who have long- or always -felt disillusioned by the representation of a man who has not ever and will continue not to represent us, factor in our requirements, attempt to throttle our rights and more.

From Gove to Truss to Patel and Raab, the tory front bench (suspiciously absent the name Sunak…) have thrown their considerable weight and undebatable lack of independent thought behind the current PM, so desperate as they are to cling to power- Johnson cleared out the tory benches of anyone but sycophants long ago, and now to view those sat at his back in parliament, you’re hard pushed to find those amongst the empty jeers who do not wish to keep Johnson installed- not because he is the right man to lead us through crisis after crisis, but because he is the one who mindlessly collated a brexit deal with has decimated UK economy and betrayed hardcore supporters of the referendum from farmers to fishers.

My reference to Sunak is simply to note that the top job is often quoted as being within reach of his fingertips – his tacit silence when asked to back the prime minister in the wake of the revelations showed a man sitting back to apprise the situation, rather than the sea lion fanaticism of his fellow followers.

The appeal to their already established base from Gove is truly indicative of how lost the party is – desperate to keep that last pillar of support in the form of those who would never waver in their support anyway.

The oddity of appealing to Christian forgiveness in the face of quite real lawbreaking is a shocking mismanagement of public sentiment- whilst there are and should be provisions for forgiving lawbreaking, this is not the case here. Recently a young man drove over and killed a man who was murdering his partner in an attempt to avert her death- the assailant and his victim both died, and the young man who bravely tried to save her life? Facing murder charges. The foolishness of the system being applied to him is only an indictment against the deployment of archaic rule of law. Were I asked to forgive the repeated and obviously gleeful breaches of safety laws by number ten- the institution tasked with creating, deploying and maintaining these laws, or a scared man’s attempt to stop the murder of an abused woman- is there really a choice?

The backing of sycophants

Yvette Cooper, in parliament recently, excoriated Priti Patel’s own fawning endorsement of the prime minister- decrying her admission that she would not even wait for the emergence of the Sue Gray report to continue her backing of Johnson- asking how she can reconcile condemning party goers outside of number ten but backing the prime minister who has now openly admitted his attendance. Patel could not elaborate on this- I’m sure you will be stunned to know.

Another thread, is that Gove has tacitly admitted the prime minister’s wrong doing in preaching forgiveness- for you can only forgive the transgressions committed against you. What this tells us is that Gove himself knows that Johnson’s actions were immoral- and yet he asks us to forgive, rather than holding him to account for his betrayal of the public at large.

Furthermore, we’re regularly told that we should move on from the systemic law breaking at No.10 by public servants. To do so is an insult to those who died following the rules for safety, an insult to those like me who tried their best and got desperately ill anyway, and an insult to those who have worked to exhaustion to stem the flow of the sick and injured over the last two years.

We may be being implored to move on – but the true question, the question that must be urgently asked of the nation is thus:
Should a party incapable, from the lowest civil servant to the highest elected official, be in charge as we face a war scenario?
Johnson’s conservative party has shown a flippant disregard for the wellbeing of the nation and a propensity for lawbreaking which is deeply indicative of a party steeped in corruption. So far from moving on, the time is well past due that we seek a referendum by public as to whether we can trust Johnson’s party- to a man- to continue to oversee the wellbeing of a truly exhausted nation, for if public trust has truly been lost in the Conservatives, let the public decide their fate.

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.

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

By Daviemoo

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Where it began to where we are

Photo by freestocks.org on Pexels.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photo by FRANK MERIu00d1O on Pexels.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

We have to stop making the mistake of assuming everyone has morals

By Daviemoo

When people like Boris Johnson or Sean Bailey tell us they are flabbergasted by reports of rule breaking during pandemics, when people like Donald Trump use blatant wording to stir up racial discord, when pundits like Julia Hartley-Brewer attack trans women as the bane of womanhood whilst body shaming a cis model, our reaction is, always, shock and outrage. But I posit that perhaps it’s time we reconcile ourselves to something that’s increasingly obvious- some people are just bereft of morals, and are immune to the contrition and shame a decent person would feel when called out.

The first weapon in our arsenal against the eyewatering ignorance that is regularly thrown around by prominent figures should no longer be outrage. Calm and collected calls for action should be coordinated against people who simply can not be asked to think morally, think of consequences to their actions.

This has been a long pandemic- but the longer pandemic is the emergence of people gleefully immune to accountability, vaccinated against societal outrage by a desperate need to foghorn whatever ill informed views they can.

Once upon a time, mass anger would have been enough to pull to account people who spout covid misinformation, like Majid Nawaz or Hartley-Brewer. And in society pre- 2020 racists held in their views. Some allowed this uneasy existence to go on, because it was simply easier to let people hold their bigotry as long as it was in silence. Some argue that bigotry must be stamped out, erased, and of course in an ideal world this is correct. But unfortunately we live in a world of people who are seemingly fundamentally incapable of respecting others and now have shifted from quietly being horribly biased and bigoted, to proudly spouting their views as though NOT being racist or sexist or homophobic or choose whatever bigotry you’d like, was some sort of existential punishment for them.

Many people will of course decry their right to opinions which should be held sacrosanct: this piece here on outrage culture by Daniel Sacerio is weighted in favour of moderation to ensure that we do not infringe on people’s right to “opinions”. And whilst this can be common sensical and of course holding opinions about certain topics is necessary and indeed vital for human discourse, he also goes into the accusations of bigotry levelled at Rowling, stating that “It is good to combat discrimination or discuss political issues that one is passionate about on social media, however, it is equally as dangerous when one joins a mob fueled by reactions that are so extreme they begin to shutter constructive conversations and political debate.” The frustration that I and my fellows have, is that it is not subjective, and yet appears to be, to hold discussions around trans equality or the extent and existence of systemic racism. Holding debate with a side who flatly denies transphobia or systemic racism is pointless because it’s like trying to prove the existence of god- it is impossible, and yet there are those who will state that of course god exists, the world is proof! These are, to some, not a subjective issue- and yet they are. Regardless of your thoughts on people of colour they exist and deserve equal treatment and an equal partaking of society. Any arguments to the contrary are utterly pointless. So why on earth would we protect the right to opinion of people who think that, and why are some forms of utter bigotry like racism, or transphobia, or the rampant and horrendous misogyny that is layered deep into society, seen as either “acceptable”, “deniable” or just figmentary imaginings of people supposedly desperate to claim the title of victimhood when in fact, they want to simply be treated as fellows?

Bigotry can only be fought with enlightenment and unfortunately it seems the bulb has truly blown on a large section of society who, rather than engage with the idea that fundamentalist hatred of other people based on characteristics they often do not share is actually counterproductive to the betterment of humanity and society; and some frankly do not care, desperate only to ensure the sanctity of their own microcosm and to live in peace as the rest of the world turns around them.

I’ve found myself so often gasping in anger and horror at some of the statements splashed across the press, salacious sound bites played to push my buttons. But as I age, I realise that provoking this reaction is precisely the end game. Denigrate, detract, distract: here’s my three word retort to the likes of puffed up popinjays like Johnson who still won’t apologise for his disgusting racial or anti gay parallels.
It’s time for the decent layer of society to drain the echelon of arsery from their source of power- our outrage, and hit them back with true practicality. Reasoned argument is the only way to win against their fiery brand of knee jerk statementism. The uncomfortable truth is that perhaps some of our firm beliefs may come under scrutiny- but do you truly believe in something if you can’t have it challenged? Are you truly an ally if you can’t hear the counter argument and fight against it with the conviction that you’ve done the work? Or are we all desperate to shout at each other and choose culture wars as the easiest way to do that.

Moving the conversations forward

I think as well that it’s probably the job of those of us who are not in certain minorities to assist the dialogue in moving forward, specifically by listening to those from different groups and not leaping to conclusions. As an example the trans community correctly states that they shouldn’t and wont debate their rights or right to existence as a trans person. They should not have to. Cisgendered people should listen and weigh the statements of the trans community against the bigoted rhetoric which so often comes from gender critical theorists. It’s not for the victims of oppression to continually stand at the gate, holding back the baying mob- it’s for their supporters. As a gay man, I know my existence doesn’t threaten or lessen anyone else’s freedoms. I just am, as are they- but why should I have to spend my own life and time debating with people who think I’m mentally ill or sinful or evil by dint of part of who I am? I have done it, will- I’m sure- continue to do so. But where are the allies who’ll stand with me and debunk the falsitudes of bigotry so often levelled at the door of those who just want to live without the shackles of hatred holding them to the ground?

As much as I believe that those who perpetuate disgusting ideas, ideology or disinformation are the generals of the supposed “war on woke” or the fuellers of outrage porn, we, those who constantly react with anger instead of reasoned rebuttals, are allowing this perpetuation. I, for my part am going to work on becoming deeply steeped in factual rebuttals to the most blatant and problematic arguments like the denial of systemic racism, like institutionalised misogyny and more and when, yet again, the ghostly spectre of another fictional moral panic looms over the hill, I’ll hope that a change of tact from the usual enraged retorts I find it so easy to fall back to. Someone has to be the adult in the room and move discourse forward- and it certainly isn’t going to be those entrenched in propagating and gatekeeping bigoted ideologues.

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

Is it too late to stop fascism?

By Daviemoo

It sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it. The idea that our nation could give in to fascism. But that’s the insidious reality. We aren’t “giving in” to it- some Britons accept it, condone it, and think it’s a good thing because fascism, the politics of discord, division and elitism reinforces the bone deep conviction that to be British is to be superior, as surely as white supremacy is the conviction that skin colour is equivalent to superiority. Do you think the citizens of Germany in the 30’s thought things would escalate to their heights? Some knew, cried out, shook their fellow citizens with the dire need for action and were ignored- are we headed down the same political path as the literal Nazis?


It’s almost comically ridiculous to think of the UK as a fascist nation. A great many things lined up politically to allow Germany to slip into such horrific politics. And it’s only yesterday I was talking about totalitarianism- I know, which is it?

But when you stop to examine the state of affairs in the UK, the desperation with which I push my anti-tory agenda becomes clear.

People will tell you that “all politicians are the same- labour are as bad as the tories”. It’s nonsense, pushed by a gleeful tory party who thank people for endorsing the quiet humdrum that’s allowing creeping fascism to take hold.

Look at today- Johnson’s party is in deep trouble. A party at number 10 in December 2020- as we all followed the rules put in place to prevent the spread of coronavirus. Horrendous behaviour from selfish and disgusting individuals.

This must be punished- but to overlook the horrendous actions of the tory party outside of the headline grabbing bluster of their disregard for life is to miss the overarching theme of a government up to their necks in corruption, desperate to hide the stench and to extend their powers to being held beyond reproach.

Is fascism the right word?

Looking at policy implementation and general political output from the conservatives over the last 11 years, a slow burn into an explosion appears to have allowed this strange slip towards the far right.

Fascism relies on nationalism, firstly, and the weaponization of the Union Jack as a symbol of imagined freedoms. The aggressive push- not just for Brexit, but for a total severing and complete dissolution of the relationship between the UK and the EU- the spinning of EU officials as unelected officials muddling into UK business and stirring the pot instead of conglomerate sensibility and safeguarding. The sickening stories of migrant “incursions”, open glee or indifference to refugees drowning at sea, the mentality that any and all from outside are evil and coming to steal jobs, money, women, land. The idea that there is the “right” type of British- from gender identity as one of the most hotly debated and pointless (trans people will exist regardless of their access to clothes, toilets, prisons, healthcare…) tropes. The disregarding of our true history, linked intrinsically to colonialism and the slave trade in favour of the mealy mouthed notion that we just happened to be there. The embrace of a fictional history where Britain were always the heroes instead of a nation aggressively pushing it’s agenda. Nationalism is one of the key tenets of fascism and nationalism is as deeply rooted into British culture at the moment as it has ever been.

Look also to the fact that fascism opposes liberalism – explain to me why else this constant, laughable “war on woke” is being thrust to the front of every red topped newspaper, every magazine wrapped in salaciousness, every bottom drawer chat show.

Woke is simply defined as aware of social injustices involving systemic racism, but has swollen under the half lidded stare of those fed up of hearing about how their behaviour contributes to other people’s oppression at worst, unhappiness at best. And before I was referred to as a woke liberal on the daily, I was often called a marxist- often by people who, when I requested if they could define marxism, would hurl abuse and block me or, if in person, give me the look of someone recently concussed.

The press gag

Looking at accountability for the government also, we see concerted effort to expatriate them from the regular flow of accountability – firstly, open plans to prevent the government to be reported on negatively by the media, as seen in these headlines:

Sources: The Guardian, and Press Gazette

The curtailment of freedom of the press is an irony and embellishment at best- as seen in the footage of Allegra Stratton gleefully mocking the public with journos, the Christmas party at Downing St was already known in journalistic circles, kept in the dark until a time where the headline would be most salacious. Nevertheless, the freedom of the press to report on the government honestly and allow genuine public reaction has always been both vital, and increasingly distorted in the UK. The BBC, long reported as a paragon of journalistic integrity is now seen by many as state sponsored propaganda- on both sides of the political aisle. Many say this means it’s doing it’s job well. But when one side says “this is far right propagandism” (stories of trans people as sexual deviants, migrants as criminals and more), and the other side says “it’s not far right ENOUGH”, you begin to realise this is a misnomer- and intentional. The BBC’s funding comes from the government, so any implication that bias cannot apply to the BBC is wrong- especially under a government desperate to throttle press freedoms, and who has installed ex donors to highest office at the BBC.

Again, the pushing of the fight for trans equality – ridiculously framed as a “debate” – would you call it the “black rights debate?!”- is clear evidence that this manufactured culture war is being fed to blinkered people, desperate to assign their difficult lives to a physical, to a person, to a group- and trans people fit that bill, ironically, to a T. If you weigh in to the anti trans side you are an enabler of fascism, but this time it’s a different group in the crosshairs. If you genuinely believe a small group of people who identify AS WOMEN want to take away women’s rights or stop the use of the word woman you are both stuck in an echo chamber and hopelessly misdirected to fight against women you should be calling ally.

The public’s handcuffing

But it’s not just the press whose freedom to report honestly about the actions of the government has been throttled. We as individuals are seeing our rights removed, throttled, oppressed. When we, as a large group are dissatisfied with something, one of our most basic, fundamental, vital rights is to gather in numbers and stand in solidarity- so when the police, crime, courts and sentencing bill was introduced after the BLM protests, most of us knew it for what it was: not just a lazy attempt to stop the police from being held accountable for a poor job and seeping corruption (see the murder of Sarah Everard and the met’s predictably ludicrous response). It was a co-ordinated push to prevent the British public from uniting together under issues so vital that we co-ordinated to speak out against the government.
Notice the reaction to women gathered at a vigil for a fallen woman, murdered by a policeman- violence, cruelty, arrests. Notice the reaction to peaceful protests- police hitting sitting protesters with shields, batons, provoking a violent reaction to justify this legislation’s supposed urgency. And the British public endorsed it! Then suddenly up arises Insulate Britain, a group set on solidifying it’s uselessness with gestures designed to frustrate the public- not actually fix the problems it complained about- and magically this already insidious legislation is amended to prevent us from blocking roadways, ports, etc, etc with mandatory sentences and uncapped fines. Coincidence? Hardly. I don’t believe Insulate Britain are tory stooges, but I believe they were manipulated into thinking their mission would do anything but allow condoning of this disgusting government pushing restrictive policies.

Everyone else as “the other”

Even the refractive divisions amongst British politics viewed with a wider lens than tory trouble has allowed for fascism to bubble and boil under the surface- hyper right groups like the BNP, Britain First, Farage’s UKIP party- and indeed pundits like Farage, like Julia Hartley-Brewer, Katie Hopkins, Darren Grimes- all designed to package up another step, another step, another step to the right, further, further- and normalising it. Cheap slogans like “taking OUR country back”, “building back better” and every other ridiculous daubing you can think of, all designed to promote separatism and create the mythological “other” who wants to come here, steal our jobs, change our laws, kill our women folk. Take away the politely indignant bluster of these individuals and lay bear their deepest agenda- Britain First- The literal name of one of the fascist parties.

But putting Britain first isn’t a sin or a crime, it’s what should be a necessity for those of us, whether nascent Brits or not – working for the common good is not a sin or a crime, and framing it as such has created a wave of rage against… nothing. The memo that none of the angry supporters of these supposed revolutionaries gets: everyone wants to work for the common good- or do they?

Look back at these social commentariats- who among them pushed sacrifice for the common good of all Brits? Or did they all, to a man, spend the entire time telling you to be selfish? Throw off restrictions, look after your own needs, wants, requirements? That’s the true face of the nationalism they pushed, it’s not about inclusion of your own, it’s about exclusion of the other- now no longer presented as some mythical foreigner or trans woman- now the other is your fellow countryman, the sheep in the aisle with you wearing a mask.

Platformed to present outrageous- but not TOO outrageous views, always just enough to provoke reaction without backlash, we became numb to it. We allowed these shills to push the painkiller that let the government inject increasing fascism into the country.

Who is the other now? Is it the refugee clinging to a dinghy on the offchance they make it to shore, the trans woman working in the coffee shop, the fellow Brit who thinks brexit didn’t work out well? Is the other everyone? Or is it no one.

Nationality as status

Furthering nationalist agendas, let’s look at the removal of foreign people’s ability to move and settle in the UK without specific reasoning a la the visa system. This gives British nationality a “status” of attainment- an attainment that could only be revoked in the minds of foolish people who believed your deep ancestry instead of location creates nationality. We’ve all seen the radio clip of David Lammy being told he’s not a “proper” Briton because he’s not white by an ignorant caller on LBC. That’s not a rare mindset- it’s common. People who are born here but born with dark skin are seen as “tolerated” Britons- disgusting as that mindset is, it’s frighteningly prevalent. And those, like the doctors who work for the agency I work for, who attain citizenship through hard work do a damn sight more to be able to call themselves Britons than those of us who simply were born here- and yet their citizenship is seen as not real by those who think it’s a status, instead of an accident of birth or a transactional relationship. And now, to add credence to this flawed view, Patel creates legislation to strip citizenship of those she and her fellows do not agree “should be” British. Nationality is a flawed and foolish concept.

The nationality and borders bill further separates those from abroad from us- another nationalist pandering legislation.

Legislation tabled by the tories recently has been so fascistic as to create terror in the eyes of those who understand the implications.

If the government creates legislation which contravenes human rights, judges can rule against it, forcing the legislation to be reviewed until it does not do so. But not only do we have a Justice Minister in Raab who wants to repeal the human rights act and “create their own”, we have a government actively pushing legislation which would allow them to overturn, overlook or outright ignore the rulings of judges in cases of judicial malfeasance. Any rulings would therefore become advisory and would allow the culpability of the government for transgressions against law, land and the public to continue unabated.

This is quite literally one of the steps that the Nazis took before the beginning of World War 2- the unbinding of judiciary scrutiny from government action.

This unshackling of the government is a terrifying move to allow a government we cannot trust to access their full potential in authoritarianism. They must be stopped from instituting this bill.

Brexit’s “benefits” only benefit the far right

The rise of nationalism came when the EU was cast in the light of legislative oppressors, meddlers and more towards the UK, infringers of a sovereignty we already had.

The severing of oversight from a larger body who could sanction or impose legislative challenges of members is, was and would always be the goal for a government aware that they could seize and maintain power so long as they stirred the issues aforementioned. The cataclysm of brexit came in legislation – with the damnation of the NI protocol as a hinderance and the reason brexit has caused issues, and with the in your face horrors of very real goods, medicine and food shortages. But the true damage was the breaking of long placed bonds on a corrupt government now free to ramp up their power- at the expense of a populace battered by fighting for union and fighting against a virus. Our resilience has been worn out, fighting figmentary culture wars and this exhaustion has allowed this horrific situation to sweep forth.

Equally brexit benefited the rich- and we all know which side of the bench the rich usually sit. Relocation of businesses and evasion of scrutiny of taxation and ill gotten gains is a core tenet of this current tory government. Let those subject to the law be damned in the face of those above it- the law of the EU, the law of the land, and the laws of the time.

The overt denial of systemic racism from a report claiming contributions from experts who didn’t even know they were being consulted and the almost immediate drafting and imlementation of legislation criminalising aiding “immigrants”- note, not refugees, plus the regularly falsely pushed line – pushed in fact, on the 6th December by Scott Benton on the news, that you can be an “illegal” immigrant (again- refugee) has allowed the British public’s most dense subset to imbibe an automatically negative perception of anyone who challenges their rigorously structured fiction of “the unwashed dangerous foreigner”.

The strangulation of the unheard voter

I’ve written a piece on my blog before about voter disenfranchisement- I urge you to read this piece, as the dangers of creating difficulty in votership are impossible to understate. Mandating voter ID will, intrinsically, affect the voting eligibility of the poorest in society. Passing legislation to remove ID documents from voters is a terrifying step towards fascistic restrictions on votership- if the cornerstone of democracy is the allowance to partake, then any efforts to restrict access to this even under the guise of “preventing fraud” is the dismantling of a democratic right. And please remember the 2019 election resulted in less than 50 accusations of voter fraud and six proven cases- out of tens of millions of voters.

The throttling of votership, especially working class voters, only ever benefits a party who does not wish to be challenged by the people who need their help the most. I urge you to read my post on voter disenfranchisement.

Conclusion…?

Ultimately, I am terrified that we are past the threshold, through the looking glass. We have borne so much under a party so clearly bent on self preservation that they have resorted to actual fascist implementation of policy.

The question now is two fold and simply: What next? And what else?

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.

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.

Dear Businesses: Stop Co-opting Minority Identities To Sell Your Services

By Daviemoo

Every year around pride, companies who engage in pinkwashing proudly display the flags of minorities whose identities they endanger, funding right wing pundits. Since BLM, people of colour have had to defend their right to exist in advertising. And every time a new LGBT+ character appears in a show, LGBT+ people have to defend ourselves. We don’t not want representation, we all want reparation, and we want our own peoples to be brought into discussion of how we’re represented. Heterosexual white cis people have had the forum for thousands of years. It’s past time you shared it.

“Woke gay boy”

I got that three times yesterday on social media because I was laughing at the latest target of homophobes across the world.

Firstly let’s not forget the irony that people see woke- slang for “aware of racial injustice” as an insult, because frankly I wear it as a badge of honour. But secondly, let’s examine why people feel the need to be angry at my laughter, when it comes to their hysterical flailing. You see, the advert that’s got all the anti gay people frothing at the mouth again is a Christmas advert from Norway, with a gay Santa Claus kissing his husband. The advert was funded by the post office to celebrate 3o years of an inclusive law brought in to protect the rights of the LGBT+ citizens living there.

Some of the, and I’m using this word with every ounce of festive generosity I can summon here, “arguments” around this advert which came up were thus:
1 “Why are they sexualising Santa!”

2 “I don’t want to have to explain to my kids what Santa does with his penis”

3 “I don’t mind people being gay, just don’t know why it has to be forced in our faces all the time”

4 “I’m sick of seeing these companies doing this, advertising with stuff like that”

Lets take these one at a time- briefly, simply, for the people whose histrionics may overwhelm a longer, more finessed answer.

1 They aren’t sexualising Santa because he kissed a man- you are. You saw two men kiss and your mind, homophobia ingrained, immediately jumped to gay sex- because you have homophobia in your head and need to deal with that.

2 “Hey kids, sometimes men like men, and sometimes women like women, and sometimes they like both, or neither”. All done, time for an earl grey.

3 How do you think it feels as gay people to be constantly surrounded by gyrating heterosexual couples kissing and touching on champagne adverts, and posters and tv shows and movies, in magazines, in public, in clubs and pubs, bars, restaurants? Heterosexuality is the majority, which is fine. But seeing something that isn’t heterosexual… one advert a day, one poster, one character… it’s not exactly going to give you renal failure. If you’re so delicate that the simple reminder that gay people exist- that we have lives and loves, health problems and more- bothers you so, you have no right to ever complain that we’re the sensitive generation.

4 So am I, really. Do you think I enjoy seeing endless heterosexually invoked pastiches of gay men and women, from companies who don’t donate to or do anything for the LGBT+ community? What happens when people create these adverts and flaunt minorities- this is much broader than the rainbow community but I can’t speak on behalf of POC- is this.

An advert is created featuring gay people, or a show is made with a bisexual, or trans, or gender neutral character. The IMMEDIATE reaction from right wing reactionaries is to be OFFENDED! How DARE this company flaunt this disgusting behaviour in our faces as if it’s NORMAL- as if the act of kissing another man, or heck, even just showing affection towards someone of the same sex is an unforgivable transgression. And of course, this rantery spills over onto a community just existing. We have to, as always, legitimise ourselves, our existence and enter discourse about how our mere presence on TV is so offensive, so graphic and sexual, that gay men having a smooch on tv somehow morphs into a 3 hour long video of two men clad only in sweat, rolling around in various positions. Our existence isn’t innately sexual, it just IS, much like heterosexual people. And yet we must defend ourselves against allegations of trying to make the world bi or gay simply because a company tokenised us.

And what happens from this? Discourse about the company abounds. They get word of mouth advertising, for free, from a community of people just trying to exist in their own skins. Is that fair? To force confrontation between people who think we’re literally disgusting and us, the people who just want to be alive in peace. Are we rewarded for this labour? Absolutely not. As always, we come away from another confrontation brought about by the machinations of someone else, pushed on us by people so weak they can’t cope with our mere existence and the fact that we sometimes have sex in a different way than them. It’s tiring. I am tired.

The same can be said for POC in the UK. Since BLM, POC have been platformed in more adverts- rightly so. I don’t care if the lady on the lemsip advert is black or white, if I need lemsip, I need lemsip and the skin colour of the actress doesn’t matter- to me. To a POC in the UK, much like me with the adverts I’m talking about above, I’m sure it comes as a double edged sword- “excellent, representation!” along with a weary certainty that somewhere out there, Sharon, 45, from Barnsley is angrily tweeting that WHITE PEOPLE ARE THE MAJORITY as if that has any bearing on anything at all other than Sharon’s blood pressure- We literally had this recently with a bunch of racist folk tweeting their rage that a black family were Christmas shopping on the Sainsburies advert. I’d love to ask why these, frankly weird, people can’t relate to what is essentially a loving family shopping for Christmas- is skin colour so important to these oddballs? But the answer there is – yes. But why? It’s not a mindset you can understand if you’re not in it and frankly I feel you have to lack a certain level of intellect to be that sensitive to inclusion.

We saw the same issue with the John Lewis advert- a young boy in a dress causing destruction in the house while he had fun… Sarah Ditum, a prominent transphobe took it as writ that this little boy was a representation of trans people and even referred to him with swearwords on twitter. The boy isn’t trans, just a boy in a dress acting daft as children are wont to do. But the trans community of course had to leap to the defence of a literal child who wasn’t even in their group, in the face of knee jerk bigotry from people who claim to “just have concerns about their rights”.

I’m sure this post will come across as the whiny diatribe of another SJW asking people to do inclusion the RIGHT way- but I don’t care. I’m tired, because I know now that Christmas songs are being played on the radio it’s only a matter of time until we have the row we have every single year about A Fairytale of New York. Straight people, intentionally homophobic or not will express annoyance, dismay, confusion about discourse around censoring, or not censoring, the F slur. And again, LGBT+ people are drawn into a row caused by straight people thinking that it’s censorship to ask them not to repeat the slur I’ve been called every time a straight person has used violence against me on account of my sexuality.

To you it’s just a word. To me it’s a word that strips me utterly of my equal standing in society, and a reminder that to some people I’m a sexual deviant who would have been beaten, arrested- killed, mere decades ago.

Must be nice not to understand what it’s like to have a word out there floating around waiting to be used with venom against people like me, to denigrate and insult and upset us. Some nice privilege not to know that feeling.

And all of these things, these feelings, these issues and rows are foisted on us when we just want to exist in the same space, with the same right to dignity as everyone else.

The so much for tolerance crowd have absolutely no idea what it’s like to spend your life having to face daily slights against your own right to existence and frankly it’s a shame that people are so incapable of putting themselves in the shoes of LGBT+ people, into the lives of POC who face daily microaggressions just for existing, imagine what it’s like to be women and listen to constant comments about how “sensitive” you are, and insinuations that you’re less than societally because of your gender.

And I’d love to sit with those who read this which is both a vent and a request for empathy and ask them why they think their right to exist in peace is not equal to mine, or anyone else- it exceeds it.

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?