Tag: Suella Braverman

Mediocrity in British politics

By Daviemoo

The British political establishment continues to decline before our eyes, and though at the beginning of 2023 a national revolt or general strike seemed inevitable, confoundingly these rumbles of discontent have ebbed- but the steady stream of stories highlighting Westminster corruption continue, today with the news that ex Attorney General and now deportation enthusiast Suella Braverman has been breaking laws in a “limited and specific way” again.
One must begin to ask at what point we look at the decimation of political standards which, coincidentally, fits hand in glove with the erosion of our standards of life and question when we begin to fight back bodily for a country we know lies under the mire of corruption spilling from our political leaders.

I’ve already had pushback for mentioning the Braverman story. “There’s bigger issues going on than something like speeding” I’m told. But it’s not about that one incident- it’s never been about the one incident.
One thing like this would be enough to sink any other party’s minister: Diane Abbott had weeks of racial abuse for drinking a can on a train, Gordon Brown was decimated in the press for calling a woman bigoted on a hot mic. So the first bone of contention to note is the slavish attitude that terminally mediocre politicians like Braverman are given by the press and even their own party- the double standardisation of who is castigated and when we’re given the old eye rolling forbearance of our complaints. Let’s look to Boris Johnson who weathered the scandal of breaching laws he himself implemented to stop the spread of a virus which took the lives of hundreds of thousands of our countryfolk- Braverman went to bat for him, scoffing at the idea of his law breaching- much as she did during her defence of his “damn them all” Brexit strategy.
Secondly though, it’s not just about the hypocrisy which threads every damn thing the conservatives do- the “I can do it but not you” serfdom wound around their reign, because one instance of hypocrisy is, as the pathetic weasel that is Matt Hancock described of his own disgusting dereliction of duty, “only human”- it’s the never ending, always expanding patina of lawless indecent behaviour which has typified this radical, useless government.

The conservatives hold everyone else to standards they fail to meet. Johnson broke the law not just with Partygate but with PPE contracts, with an arguable churlish attitude over protecting British lives when he ignored a joint EU/UK ventilator scheme, he fell foul of the laws around his flat refurbishment paid for by a tory lobbyist- and what sank Johnson in the end? His flipping appointing of a man he knew was a sexual pervert to his closest aides, with the wink wink dismissal of the man’s propensity for sexually assaulting his colleagues. Then we had months of absolutely no leadership as the conservatives collectively decided to let the country falter under a cost of living and cost of heating crisis. After a juddering competition where even ex-“moderate” tories like Penny Mordaunt gleefully carved up any decency they had and threw it to the pyre of potential governance, Liz Truss inexplicably emerged on top, perhaps winning because of her repeated demonstrations of propensity for throwing her own beliefs in the sewage pipes formerly known as the British coast- an ex republican who paid cringeworthy deference to the royals, an ex remainer who sold out common sense for popularity like so many other awkward dolts, Truss’ time in power was underscored not by myriad small scandals but by the echoing shotgun blast she delivered to the throat of the UK economy.
Truss and Kwarteng’s blazing stupidity will echo across British bill payers’ lives for a generation, as she melted down our banks in one fell swoop. A decent political would have quietly resigned and gone to live somewhere far away. Truss is now attempting to restyle herself as a misunderstood genius, appointed at the wrong time- I personally get the same vibes from Truss’ redemption arc as I do every awkward tweet from Elon Musk from his large and no doubt echoingly empty home. There’s as much collective genius between Truss and Musk as there is sexual chemistry between me and fitness model Ken Bek- and he doesn’t even know I exist.

Finally Truss slunk awkwardly out of the job and the role- the top governance role in the entire UK I may add, the job reserved for the best politicians we have, the most able, brilliant minds we keep on shore- was handed perfunctorily to Rishi Sunak, a man who ostensibly played a role in the Bankers crash that necessitated austerity. Sunak was described as a “winner” by Sky’s Beth Rigby recently- an irony. Can you call it winning when you have every single thing handed to you whilst you lay prostrate, sticking your nose up at the idea of having working class friends?
Sunak fucked up his banking role in tandem with so many others that we had a world wide recession, he married someone else who is eye bogglingly wealthy, as chancellor he open handedly threw public finance into the sea and continues to float on the idea that he came up with the furlough scheme. Whilst the scheme was good, its no less than I’d expect from a mildly talented chancellor and I saw it with a pall of dread, knowing that it would lay the groundwork for more predictable tory gutting of an economy already threadbare since 2009. And what has the illustrious Sunak done with his time in office? Brexit prevarications, bending over for Braverman’s ERG racket, scandal after scandal from the front benches to the back- and of course, a second FPN for his casual lawbreaking in the back of a car, not to mention we’ve never heard the conclusion to his “oops I forgot to declare my actual domiciliary status correctly so my wife and I underpaid our taxes” saga.
It’s said that Sunak is a big fan of the Star Wars movies- one wonders whether he’s rooting for the plucky rebels or sees himself in the shiny bleak surfaces of the empire’s ships – I know which side I think he’s on.
It just seems ironic, doesn’t it: seems to me that the party of law and order has something of a problem in adhering to the law.

The problem with British politics is that we’ve normalised weak, average people in politics. We jeer at the corpse haired dilettantes like Fabricant, we mock the 3 IQ on a good day ruffians like Gullis, we mock 30p Lee and his ridiculous half a weetabix mixed with some dehydrated milk, poor person tears and Kleenex lunches- and the stumbling, stuttering and painfully insincere speeches that Sunak awkwardly meanders through: how sad, though, that these people are meant to be the brightest minds in the UK, the most talented and able of our political leaders. The woman currently in charge of women and equalities thinks women should grin and bear their menopause (lets see how quick your tune changes in a few years by the way Kemi), our current chancellor took an open kick at the backside of our NHS workers in 2015 and 2016, the chancellor before him neglected to pay his taxes- maybe it was this slip of millions of pounds in country revenue that endeared him to Sunak who pulled the same trick?

Our politicians aren’t mediocre. Mediocre would be a dream, a gift, a premium upgrade. We started with mediocre and over the recent years have paved way for establishment dilettantes, clinging to bygone eras where the working class was widely too focused on living to fight back- and they saw those heady days of political betterment on the backs of the workers as an aspiration, not an aberration.

Braverman, Gove, Baker, Dorries, Johnson, Truss, Kwarteng, Badenoch and more- all of these names sit in an ever growing pile of political scandal, every day they tip their hand more to the obvious, indefatigable truth that they cannot handle power because they seek to bend it against those they see as inferior or simply ignore it. The conservatives have had their time, been able to try to prove themselves to us over and over again, had facelifts, shiny new slogans, shuffles and reshuffles, they’ve changed their promises, broken the new ones… they are dead in the water, but still swimming: exactly when do we fish them out, discard them as a bad job and get some new guppies in?

Ultimately, the status quo of British politics is woeful across the board. But even mediocrity would be a huge improvement upon this bunch of collective charlatans. The question isn’t if, but when- and between the haemorrhaging of damning news from the front bench and the slow bleed of taxpayer money to projects like “helping the private companies improve infrastructure” (that’s why you were privatised in the first place?) one has to wonder exactly what the conservatives have to do short of collectively dressing like the hamburgler and going door to door to take our valuables, for us to make the move to oust them once and for all.

None of us needed leaked WhatsApps between a right wing hack and a woeful government minister: zoom out.

By Daviemoo

The Lockdown Files are important- nobody would deny that. Equally, we cannot lose sight of a broader, more terrifying picture in the swell of information from Hancock’s phone. The government continues to attack trans rights, demonise “small boat migrants”, platform ignorance and sow deeper division over Brexit. By all means pay attention to this story- but don’t forget about the rest.

No information in the “lockdown files” has shocked me. So Hancock leaned on the press not to report an influx of cases due to Sunak’s “Eat Out to Help Out” scheme- is anybody shocked that “people mingling during pandemic spread the virus” was a thing? Hancock should be arrested for industrial manslaughter- so should Sunak. Families who lost loved ones due to their hare brained schemes and self indulgent idiocy should be allowed to sue them. They should be castigated, reviled from high to low, never allowed to forget.
But these are not shocking revelations that I don’t think anybody ever expected: I mean, really, dear reader- is it absolutely mind blowing to you that Matt Hancock, a man shallower than a Wilco’s spoon pushed to look after his public image? I already knew the man was a seething moron because I had to listen to his waffling prestiges on the news every day. Are you particularly surprised that our Prime Minister Sunak would watch your nan choke on her pleural fluid if it meant an extra £12 in taxes collected? It’s about as surprising as finding out that, shock horror, Boris Johnson likes to shag a lot of people he’s not married to.

But the government’s behaviour prior to and during this pandemic has demonstrated exactly who they were, are- and will continue to be.

Rather than knuckle down, they buckle- refusing to review economic models that have been thrown into abject chaos with the double fisted throat punch of brexit and the pandemic. Instead of focusing on how to protect and enlighten the British public, to combat disinformation, to improve British lives- they sow culture war seeds then use the sweat of red faced nationalists to water them. If it’s not small boat migrants or trans people or “THE GAYS” it’s people of colour or women, all bothering everyone with our polite requests to be treated with a modicum of respect. The government and a compliant media relentlessly feed us with the idea that we need to pull ourselves up with our bootstraps, that it’s nobody’s fault but ours – unless its migrants or LGBT+ people or our mothers, sisters and daughters.

The most frustrating part of the Lockdown Files is that it’s predictably being used by the media to justify a narrative that we were forced to abide by inhumane conditions. Perhaps we were- but what alternative was there? Should we have all taken the risk, never followed any restrictions and just hoped that getting infected with covid multiple times wouldn’t kill or disable us or our loved ones?

Lockdowns were awful. I grieved for my mother in total isolation, couldn’t even hug my father or touch her coffin to say goodbye to her. I didn’t do it lightly. I did it because my mother’s death from cancer was not a simple passing into the afterlife- her body was failing and, much like covid, her lungs filled up with pleural fluid and she drowned in front of me. And if I knew that there was a one in a million chance of suffering that fate, much less passing it on to someone else, someone with a wife and kids, I’d never have done it. I don’t know how much the government misled us- I’d like to. But I don’t regret being in lockdown if it meant that I didn’t get covid more (I’ve had it twice and am currently trying to find out if I have permanent lung damage from last time) and that I didn’t play a part in making more deaths inevitable.

The tories are scum. I’ve no doubt they manipulated us- because that is the essence of the tories. But they didn’t need to do it by enforcing lockdowns… The sleepwalking public in the UK has allowed them to decimate our protest and strike rights, made barely a peep as they enforced harsh new voting laws which currently have an estimated 2 million people without ID, they have unleashed a hurricane of hatred towards minorities and vulnerable people. All of this in plain sight, all of this widely spoken about.

As the tories continue to firm up on their nonsense plans to “stop” the small boats “crisis” one has to roll their eyes. Today, Braverman was quoted as stating that she hopes to “break the business model of people smugglers” with harsh new directives aimed at punishing… the people they smuggle?
Firstly, if you aren’t going to do anything to the people smugglers one would assume they won’t care. Secondly- people smugglers. Not known to be the nicest of folk. They don’t and won’t care what happens to the people who get here- because they got paid already.
Thirdly- there are ways to easily deal with people crossing on small boats. Opening processing centres in key countries would mean that those seeking asylum could do so from abroad and be retrieved should they be successful.
But the government does not want to solve the “small boats” issue. Because if they did, who would they blame for their uselessness?
The moment the government actually makes a depreciation in small boat crossings it will be hailed as a victory but they will never actually try to solve the root issue- because these crossings make a convenient scapegoat.
The same with every other minority with whom the government is playing chess right now.

From transgender rights and equalities being the subject of casual debate now, to Badenoch, our “women and equalities” minister who ignores myriad studies about benefit schemes for those suffering menopause, who cheers the bravery of a woman who says she would vote against equality for lesbian, gay and bi people- this government is utterly bereft of policy, they are without direction and vision and rather than any attempt to do better, to help the British people – they unfurl new banners to rally behind in culture war after culture war. The conservatives themselves are the rot at the center of our society- Boris Johnson was the first prime minister found guilty of breaking the law in office, Sunak has now broken the law twice. Braverman has been warned her rhetoric is akin to that of Adolf Hitler and she “refuses to apologise for it”. Hancock mocked the British public, saying we needed to be ‘scared into compliance’- treating us as cattle, rather than human beings with whom he could reason.

The conservatives are not good for the British public- they are malignant, a stain on our country. They help nobody, stand for nobody, stand for nothing. They should rightly be punished for every scrap of information leaked in the lockdown files- but this is not their only transgression, their only crime. They have spent years letting us down, severing our ties to a better economy, a brighter future, deepening our immersion in fake news. They play to the basest crowd, ignoring the majority of the UK who are decent people wanting for better. So if we are to hoist them by their own petard, let that petard weigh heavy with the shrapnel of the tories in totality- not a mere sliver of their crimes, neglect and abuse.

Political lying is Normalised worldwide- it is a travesty

By Daviemoo

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

Rwanda, ‘The migrant problem’ and fundamental falsehoods

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

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

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

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

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

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

Failing the NHS-a capitalist choice

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The cruelty is the point

By Daviemoo

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Daviemoo

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Boris Johnson is a symptom- British politics is the disease

By Daviemoo

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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