uk government – Politically Enraged

You don’t fight authoritarianism with dad jokes at the despatch box

By Daviemoo

Here we collectively sit, watching a christofascist radical wave sweep the US whilst in the UK, our politicians openly lie in the public sphere.
Political honesty is decimated, taken to ruination by those in charge over the last thirteen years in the UK- though one could argue that Blair’s later stances were more aligned with center right politics than any iteration of leftism: and in the US, Trump’s meagre four years has left the country torn asunder- guns deregulated, women’s rights assaulted, LGBT+ people being legally ring fenced from the public under threat of literal capital punishment.
And what are we being offered in the face of white supremacy, of Neo nazism mainstreamed to the point that literal white nationalists marched on DC with a police escort the other day? Who will come to save us from the radical right wing rhetoric of Braverman’s “down the boats” speeches or Sunak’s calls to strip back the equality act?
“Moderation.”
You don’t fight against radicalism with moderation, you don’t offer a return to “sane politics”. You crush fascism and extremism. Moderation is capitulation. So be radical- you’re our only hope.

Many folk think that Starmer’s efforts to shift labour towards what I gingerly refer to as “the centre” is a master stroke- a repeat of Blairism for the iPhone age, a brilliant stroke of political engineering that will shore up victory for those tired of tory rule for their bakers dozen of disastrous years.
And whilst I’ve no doubt that some iteration of labour can potentially wrest victory from the tories in 2024, one has to wonder what we’re replacing radical conservatism with. But the centre isn’t the centre any more- everyone’s heard the allusion to the shift in the Overton window meaning the UK’s politics is more right wing than it has been before- so the centre isn’t the centre of the political spectrum- it’s the centre between a party who eschewed any more radical leftism and a party who is lurching towards fascism so quickly that even former members are leaping on stage to warn of fascist leanings at conferences.

Starmer himself has stated recently that labour is now the party of true conservatism- he doesn’t I’m told by many a labour supporter- mean that he is now a tory, and I don’t believe that either – because I believe you can be not a tory and still have bad politics.

I don’t believe in the disgusting radical conservatism that spills from the Conservative Party- it’s politics built on a lack of thought and even conservative MP Danny Kruger has said that the party must no longer appeal to the “intelligentsia”, but must work with “the values of it’s people”: no doubt a difficult task as the conservatives thrust their values into the flames of brexit, promising to forge a new way forward for Britain and emerging as a smouldering ruin, thick with shards of scandal and burning with political mediocrity. The party has wrapped its hands around the neck of the UK and dragged us bodily into culture war cacophonic nonsense, blaming people of colour during the BLM uprising in 2020, blaming people from the EU during 2016, blaming trans people from 2021 to now, or migrants, or “the woke”- as if daubing the label of “not insensitive” upon someone is somehow offensive.
And as this shift in the Overton window has occurred, we note a distinct lack of meaningful policy: no assistance with the cost of living, the highest energy bills in Europe, the prevention of scabbing by landlords, a protection of runaway mortgage increases- no protections for coronavirus which is now tangibly proven to be causing long term health conditions (I know intimately, for I am mid diagnosis for a health condition which coincidentally only began post covid)- and all the while we’re told that this is what the people want: but which people, and how big that group is, seems to be lost in translation from lies to alternative fact as it’s broadcast across the face of the media by compliant presenters.

Equally, dear reader- I don’t believe in traditional conservatism. I have no doubt it has its place in certain aspects of political discourse- none that I’ve ever encountered- and frankly I just don’t believe it works. Conservatism is what the party espoused from 2009 to 2018, before their radical cliff dive- conservatism is in my eyes the defining shift in the later Blair years- not wholly, but enough to be of note. Traditional conservatism got us here– through throttling of the public finances under austerity, through cutting welfare programmes for disadvantaged young people, upping university fees, a reluctance to update a curriculum to prepare people for life after education- plus, endless deregulation of banking, despite Sunak and his fellows being the arbiters of the crash that ostensibly necessitated all these cuts. Then after years of dissatisfaction, it was traditional conservatism being corrupted by radical elements like Patel et all, that led to the referendum that saw us leave our space in the EU.

Ultimately, conservatism is a brand of politics that appeals to the post-imperial ghost lurking in the attics of British- mostly English- people’s brains, decrying that we can do better on our own, that we don’t need trade deals or regulations on fairness, that we must eschew workers rights that supposedly protect the lazy, that political correctness is the cause of all our woes even when the anti politically correct people have been in charge as we’ve declined. Now we can see Patel again rising to critique the “central” Conservative Party eschewing her radical wing, claiming they’d be better placed if they would embrace her hideous vision of politics. All the while Rees-Mogg is on stage declaring that their attempt at gerrymandering failed- openly admitting to voter suppression to the roaring silence of the UK press. So why is it that the UK’s opposition party in chief has sought to embrace the same ethos of politic that has brought us to ruination? Frustratingly, the people seem to be to blame. Many people enjoy this iteration of labour, believing that things will be magically healed under a Starmer primacy.

But will it?
No doubt Starmer will steady the ship, a phrase I’ve heard often and loathe. No doubt he will deal with some of the haemorrhaging wounds left behind by the Conservatives. But a quick look at the positions espoused by labour typify the lack of braveness that encompasses the traditional conservatism he has seemingly embraced.

Brexit and its fallout batters the UK economy, causing a deficit bigger than covid. Trade deals in place that the government has sought out create a negligible boost and in fact our trade deal with Australia benefits them so much that the news coverage of it’s announcement was thick with the type of “I cant believe they agreed to this” that speaks to political illiteracy which throngs the tories’ current iteration. Starmer’s stance? “We’ll make brexit work, we’ll take back control”. I don’t know about you, but the cut and paste repeat of the conservatives’ own line on brexit- all aspiration, no actual promise, no solid information, no promise to actually deal with the issues which may or may not encompass a partial or wholesale about face- is entirely unhelpful.

How about NHS privatisation? Streeting states that there will be no NHS privatisation- as he promises to “temporarily outsource struggling areas to private companies on limited term contracts to deal with backlogs”. As someone whose entire career was built on maintaining the compliance of those private entities I can tell you that calling privatisation “temporary outsourcing” doesn’t prevent it from being, in fact, privatisation.

Worst of all, the draconian laws the tories have given concerted effort to implementing must be given time to “bed in”, says Starmer, that they have other priorities than simply removing legislation like the ID gerrymandering that Rees-Mogg spoke of, that repealing harsh anti strike laws don’t matter as labour is now the party of working people – seemingly forgetting that strikers are the working people.

Now, I must again reiterate that I’ve no doubt that things would be better under Starmer and Labour than the conservatives. Starmer offers some broad reforms I welcome- the implementation of EU citizenry voting, the offering of voting to 16+, an economic plan which seems dedicated to shoring up fair business practice and a step far away from deregulation meaning that instability in the markets would minimise, promises to offer out more aid to the young- I know that things will be better for the broad swathe of the public under Starmer- even a stop to the haemorrhage of political honesty would be good, someone preventing the conservatives from driving us down a very dark path paralleling that of the US’ brush with theocratic fascism- these are good things, labour does offer some hope and i’ve no doubt that things will be better.

But my issue links back to that phrase so oft repeated above- steadying the ship.

We have been dragged part way down a dangerous path by the tories, a path that over half of voters didn’t and do not want. We don’t need to steady the ship, to stop where we are, to drop anchor- we must move away from conservatism wholesale- not the least because, dropping anchor where we are still means we’re mired in populist right wing vapidry that continues to affect our life. Labour must make broad brave moves to drag us AWAY from this, we must strike out in the very opposite direction the conservatives continue to drag us towards every day of their tenancy in Westminster. Anything less is a failure to deal with the emerging radicalism that permeates the individual in the UK.

Without a clear departure offered by labour and its environs the worsening wave of hatred towards LGBTQ+ people will continue- our economic and social issues of worker shortages and xenophobia will continue unless common sense is spelled out in the brexit debate- promises to fix NHS shortages by offering fancy temporary privatisation will fail- educational reform to deal with new issues, and to educate the country’s young in politics will go some way towards enhancing our political literacy- offering a vote without perspective on its’ weight is unhelpful.

So whilst I understand that Labour offer some hope to those who feel escaping tory rule is key, it’s also vital to remember that labour must offer a distinction in their politics from what we’ve seen for over 13 years. If they do not, understand that conservative politics appeal to and improve the lives only of those who commit to it so political victory under conservatism, espoused by whoever, is a confirmation that the only politics you seek to support are politics that uplift you, and damn those who fall behind.

Labour has a chance to appeal to those disenfranchised: simple promises made to leftists who understand the broader cut & thrust of UK politics under the lens of hostile media and FPTP and consumed by knee jerk one issue voters. But if we continue to see our own political disabusement in favour of appealing to those very knee jerk voters, we cannot be blamed for losing hope in ever climbing out from under the weighty shroud of conservatism, the brand of politics that got us to where we are.

The clunky and unwieldy truth is that as radicalism has hidden in the dark, licking its wounds, we’ve become complacent and genuinely seem to believe that moderating away from radicalism is the salve we need- when what we need is to attack, to destroy radicalism in its entirety. Leftists are in for a difficult time as we fight back against the violently burning but nevertheless dying embers of a type of politics that has only harmed us as we’ve grown. Watching conservatism warp into right wing demagoguery is proof that its vital supply of ignorance is drying up at source- but we don’t deal with fascism or authoritarianism simply by lining up to vote every few years. Radicalism is dealt with by terrifying those who espouse it into silence, by breaking their chains of support, by wresting them from the positions of power they nepotised into. We don’t defeat fascism or authoritarian governments by asking them nicely, nor can we appease their environs by appealing to logic, because logic and radicalism are not in the same room. And my concern, dear reader, is that under the likes of Biden, under the guidance of Starmer, we won’t root out these issues and destroy them at source, we won’t shine a torch into the deepest, darkest corners of corruption- we’ll ignore it. And under that ignorance it will continue to gather the momentum that has led us to here and to now- to a place where the US is mandating the Ten Commandments on the wall instead of dealing with daily mass shootings, where the UK is giving voter disenfranchisement time to “bed in”, where groups of radicals like the Patriotic Alternative or the Proud Boys can line up in the street unafraid, unmolested- and taking solace from a grudging acceptance of their presence. Tolerating fascism in the street should be a stain of shame upon the tories and Biden’s presidency- and if that behaviour is to continue under yet another supposedly common sense branch of moderate conservatism, whoever espouses it, it is another death knell for progress.

Ultimately, I understand the political climate of the UK. There is a very clear chance that my politics may never be represented in parliament, because the country doesn’t have the appetite for it- and whilst some may find that amusing, that I cling to a branch of politics that others would let go in favour of power, I feel clear in my decision that I’d rather cling to politics that promises to do better for everyone, politics that wants to move us forward instead of “steadying the ship”, than sacrifice my aspirations to attain a power I use to please those who want what I do not. And overall, beyond anything, my final message on this: nobody wants to tolerate nazis right? What happened to the good old days of kicking their asses.

Brittania, Chained: What else must be taken from us before we rise up?

By Daviemoo

Striking and protesting are not primary actions. One does not ask to finish half an hour early then strike when told “no” any more than one immediately takes to the streets when bills begin to rocket up in price. These are desperate actions, taken as a last resort to call heed to the wider powers of the country that a problem unsolvable by workers, or the public as a whole, exists.

For too long now, the British public has been misled by the twin arms of an utterly ineffectual government and a media machine desperate to spin a gaudy narrative of lazy workers wanting more for less. Glaring headlines shared by Conservative MPs declare that Britain has become a “something for nothing” state- and yet an anonymous healthcare worker striking outside Leeds General Infirmary recently told me “some days it’s like coming in to a hospital in the trenches- I’m not striking because I enjoy it, I’m striking because- whether we’re there or not- it’s not safe for patients OR for staff”. When I spoke to a striking rail worker outside Leeds train station a few weeks ago I was told “my life is practically over. My mortgage went up, my electric and gas went up, my food bills are up, my wife is sick- Whether I strike or not I cant afford to live”.

Striking has long been a fundamental right of workers, but this right has been restricted and squeezed continuously since the dark days of the winter of discontent. In 1980 Thatcher passed anti “sympathy strikes” legislation, halting any wider spread of striking. Balloting was enforced, and the time between ballot and response was decreased from seven days to five whilst postal balloting was also introduced- not only did this involve increased cost, but it also meant determined organisation was required in order to even question adequately the workforce involved in the ballot and even these subversive moves were only the quieter actions laid by Thatcher to suppress strike action.

Unfortunately, the previous labour administration did little to remove restrictions on protest. Blair was reportedly focused more on drilling down on the economy and bringing in results, believing it was unnecessary to scrap the anti protest legislation in favour of simply working constructively to address issues which would prompt strikes.

Prime Minister Sunak’s desperation to enforce legislation around striking which guarantees a “minimum service level” is wholly ironic: minimum service levels are not being met at present, even on non-strike days. When I was thirteen I broke my wrist, and I thought the four hour wait in A&E before I was given a cast was exorbitant: now, 36 hour waits in A&E are the norm: people die waiting for ambulances to arrive or inside of them as they queue for triage outside departments crowded to bursting and understaffed.
These issues long predate the pandemic- an NHS staffing crisis has been ongoing for so long that I do not believe we’ve seen normal staffing levels since 2010 at best.

Having worked as a recruiter for the NHS directly for two years, I remember being given the amended pay scale one day and being agog: a fully trained, fully qualified consultant earned just over £100,000 at the time. People will, of course, say this is a high salary- and yet I am willing to bet that those complaining do not have to pay hundreds of pounds for indemnity insurance a year, hundreds of pounds for GMC registration, for parking, for a mortgage within an appropriate distance from the hospital in case they are summoned for an emergency. Those who quickly complain that NHS staff salaries are high too often fail to factor in the huge amount of money doctors and nurses must spend in order to simply progress in their careers.

That pay scale has barely changed since 2016 when I left the NHS’ employ and yet, due to governmental mediocrity we have seen an unprecedented rise in everything we are required to spend on: mortgage and rent have spiralled, uncontrolled bill growth continues, in Labour run councils council tax is the only means of funding as it is widely suggested that the conservatives throttle funding, so council tax bills rise and, of course, the very goods we buy- food, clothing, sanitary products- have continued to grow exponentially in prices.
The malfeasance of Truss and Kwarteng led to a fiscal black hole, into which fell the dreams of many- home ownership, reasonable rental prices and more back breaking fiscal requirements fell like lead weights on the shoulders of the British public.

How does the government respond to this shocking burden to taxpayers? By passing legislation preventing us from complaining about it.

But it is not merely workers rights being throttled by the hand of a malfeasant government- the very public’s voice is being smothered under a legislative deluge started by ex Home Secretary, Priti Patel and continued by her contemporary, Suella Braverman.

Patel passed the Police, Crime, Courts and Sentencing Bill, which was given Royal Assent on 28th April 2022. The bill focused on ensuring the police were given further powers through robust expanse of the “unacceptable protests” clause: a deeply problematic clause which was questioned by many a “lefty lawyer”- for what is an “unacceptable” protest?
The act also endowed the Home Secretary with the power to make regulations without having to defer to parliament, essentially widening the scope for prosecution, criminalisation and eschewing responsibility that usually sits in hand with the person in the Home Secretary chair.

Under the PCCSB, you could be charged as a “public nuisance” if your protests were “noisy or disruptive”- unlike those very useful quiet and non disruptive protests we hear of so often in the history books.

As the bill moved through the house of lords, huge sections were excised, deemed too extreme and draconian. Braverman, unable perhaps to create and implement her own legislation, swept the offcuts of this bill up, waited for the PCCSB to pass royal assent, took over from Patel then (ignoring the brief period where she stepped down in disgrace for leaking confidential information), used the new powers included in the primary bill to pass the offcuts unopposed under the Public Order bill.

The Public Order bill essentially criminalises the act of even attending protests- those who have attended protests within five years can be compelled legally to “check in” their nonattendance at subsequent protests and can even be legally barred from referencing or speaking about protests which others may attend on social media, thereby disrupting the possibility of encouraging active participation in protest. Braverman also has the power to give injunctions to those “likely” to protest- and yet the regular crowd of free speech advocates who go to pains to defend peoples’ rights to speak out are suspiciously quiet on this.

Garden Court North chambers had this to say on the Public Order bill:

The right to protest is at the heart of all of the hard-won rights that we enjoy in our democratic society. The Public Order Bill 2022 presents a grave threat to that right and would mark a regressive shift of power away from ordinary people and towards the State.

Not content with stripping protest rights back to the bare sinew, Sunak is now passing legislation so restrictive it even prevents “slow march” protests, where protestors walk slowly in the streets to disrupt traffic.

The overarching question which the wider public should be asking is this: would a government interested in solving problems also actively garrotte the publics’ methods of speaking out about them?

A well run country does not need to pass anti protest and anti strike legislation, because governments which drive results and correct issues are curing the diseases of which strikes and protests are a symptom. One begins to suspect that the disease from which these symptoms emanate is, in fact, a government embroiled in scandal after scandal- from Sunak’s second FPN of his public tenure to Braverman’s lazy dismissal of a holocaust survivor’s warning of her rhetoric, on to Zahawi’s tax affairs which saw him removed in shame- ironic, given Sunak’s taxation snafu over non-do status, or even to the fresh sleaze revelations of Johnson’s securing up to £800,000 loan by a friend he then appointed to a key BBC position and a distant cousin at the bank. We sometimes do not know where to turn in the U.K. because at every juncture lies further injustice, further malfeasance and stricter repercussions for not simply “making the best of a bad situation”.

The normalisation of “suffering for Britishness” is an odd phenomenon, reminiscent of the frog in the slowly heating pan. The citizens of the United Kingdom do not realise that we are, or deserve to, slowly boil in the swamp of corruption pouring steadily from Westminster, subsuming the country and winding us inextricably into the corruption the tories have solidified- and until the British and in particular the English become aware of the steady heat rising around us, we will continue to be scalded by the bad actors who stack the cabinet.

Additionally one must take into account a third arm of state machinery- the police force.
The police are an arm of control the government has been all too willing to use at their discretion, creating the bills mentioned above under Patel and Braverman to restrict our rights. The police force continues to be assailed daily by the excoriating light of truth- police are outed as rapists, racists and bigots, all leading to more state protection through watery statements from Braverman and other officials, or by promises of reform which still does not improve the ramshackle-state of either trust in the police, or the actions of them.
The police are the physical clenched fist of the state, the government it’s rotting brains, the media it’s fork tongued mouth and with these three pillars in place, we fail to be the country we can be, we fail to keep the rights we deserve and we continue to be pinned supine under the conservatives.
A government who takes these radical actions is not a government who will address the root causes- so one must then ask whether a cabinet uninterested in fixing the issues of a divided, exhausted country is a cabinet rotten to the core… and in need of replacement.

We are witnessing the biggest scam in history.

By Daviemoo

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Get Off Your Knees

By Daviemoo

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“God (that you don’t believe in) save the King (that you don’t support) in helping the Government (that 56% of you didn’t vote for)”

By Daviemoo

Truss has had months to prepare for recession, the energy crisis, the cost of living crisis and any other issues headed our way. But empty pageantry, infighting and a desperation to squeeze her neck into the leash of “the donors” has led us to where we always knew we would be- rule by a party who looks after the rich on the credit card of the poor. The hypocrisy is layered deep in the UK status quo: but what is true patriotism if not the antithesis of what we are fed by media and deranged thoughtless reactionaries, and how do we seize this true patriotism, pass it through the bars of our prison and lead ourselves through revolution into the UK we need- not the UK we have?

Governmental ineptitude at your expense

Liz Truss has never met a moral she can’t ignore. From a republican to speaking at the Queen’s funeral, Lib Dem to leader of the Conservative party and from staunch remainer to helming a country so battered by the trifecta of Brexit, Covid and lacklustre leadership we’re slipping past some eurozone countries in regards to quality of living. Truss has already demonstrated clearly to us that she intends to do nothing to assist in the living conditions of the downtrodden but will pull out all the stops to bolster the supports holding we, the underclass, under our supposed betters.

Unfortunately for Ms. Truss, that nebulous descriptor, “poor” continues to expand, as more British households slip into poorness, poverty and desperation due to the economic malfunctions of a government long off the rails. Truss has created an energy plan that pushes the crisis further down the ways, all (naturally) to the expense of the British tax payer. Her economic taxation will save the poorest households less than one pound a month, whilst benefitting the already wealthy: but did we honestly expect some subversion of the Truss we’ve always seen when she has so readily shown us who she is and how she acts so many times before?
She describes herself as a “no nonsense northern straight talker”. One suspects that a no nonsense straight talker would have told the companies that have turned unfathomable profit into CEO salary instead of investment into green energy, onshore wind farms, more efficient forms of energy capture- that these failures couldn’t stand, and would have begun implementing hefty reforms on the businesses operating here.
Truss eats out of the hands of these companies not just because she used to be in the upper echelon of Shell, but because these companies throw money at her party in return for their servile response to this energy crisis. It’s like asking your boss to tell the CEO to close their office door when they’re insulting the HR team: it won’t happen.

One must remember that the conservatives who have been in power for almost 13 years have faced a steady stream of reminders from a nonpartisan group of government ministers since 2012 that an energy crisis was looming because the UK had no onshore infrastructure which needed to be addressed: was it? Absolutely not- the flat ignoring of this long-looming crisis has meant that energy infrastructure actually plateaued, with only minor changes made, surface changes which impacted nothing. Additionally, the installation of Truss who is apparently moved to the approximation of teary eyes by seeing solar panels has meant that any government schemes to incentivise businesses to pursue green energy infrastructure are dead in the water- water that is now being filled with sewage, because of course it is.

Broader than this though, the cost of living crisis hangs over us like the clouds we Brits are so used to. And what are the government doing to ensure that we don’t drown in debt just so we can purchase butter for our crumpets? Why, making sure that bankers’ earning potential is uncapped of course!

If the almost immediate move to deregulate bankers bonuses did not plainly show where this government’s interests lie, what does? I, and I’m sure most people reading this, don’t care about bankers bonuses in any way more than wondering why they can have unlimited earning potential when we have empirical evidence of how badly that works for the economy: I give it less than a decade until a harangued and as yet faceless PM (it won’t be Truss) pops up on tv to tell us that we’re not only giving energy companies our money to float their businesses but we’re going to do the merry go round of paying bankers another set of bailouts.

But isn’t this all just the milieu of Britishness now? It feels like we’re a nation of the abused, sat stirring a cup of tea quietly, terrified that we might accidentally tap the side of the cup with the spoon and bring down on us the ire of our betters, be they crown wearing, crown serving or supposedly the businesses that work for us. It won’t be long until the UK’s energy companies take the line of South Africa’s main energy supplier, “load shedding” IE shutting down the national grid for hours at a time whilst admonishing us silly, selfish proles for daring to use the energy that we literally pay for.

And as if having a government of openly hostile, privately-but-not-well-educated bad faithers strutting the halls of our parliament wasn’t bad enough, watching the collective St Vitas’ Dance madness unfold around the death of Queen Elizabeth has been absolutely flabbergasting. However you feel about the royals, and you have a right to feel however you want, the reaction from the British working class has been galling to the point of making me wonder if I should simply delete my social media, the blog, the podcast and just give it up as a bad job. From people wearing cardigans daubed with union jacks saying that “proper British” people accept “the way of things” to watching working class people confirm that yes people SHOULD be arrested and in fact should go to PRISON for being critical of the monarchy, I’ve sworn at my various screens more times in the last month than in the last 6 combined, and that’s quite a feat considering Johnson was still our PM a few months ago.

British people are suffering from a collective Stockholm syndrome. Ruled over by hopelessly distant elites who use their paid shills to tell us over and over that we want it to be like this: innumerable people fit into the openly visible underclass of the UK. We’ll soon have no working time directive to protect us from unreasonable demands from our workplaces, implanted no less by a government who partied during the biggest health crisis the UK has seen in over 100 years, had 3.5 months in meltdown, came back for a week, took 10 days off for the death of the monarch, will go back for 2 days, then will be off until OCTOBER- but don’t forget, little workers, you’re amongst the laziest people Dominic Raab AND our new PM Liz Truss has ever seen. Truss made this comparison against China, and the reason we may be lazier than Chinese workers is probably because in China an errant word against the government can have you arrested. Just a thought.
Moving to the royals: the mere acceptance of a monarchy is to accept that there are greater and lesser humans. To believe that a god chose and beatified a human to raise a lineage of those with inconceivable wealth and power to rule over a land, free of election, free of discussion. The UK collectively allows itself to be held prisoner- and why? Because of the most infuriating adage in the British language: “we’ve always done it that way”. Tradition does not obfuscate the need to question whether, at the start of a cost of living crisis announcement, we watched our now king sit atop a golden throne next to a stolen jewel worth millions in a palace worth hundreds of millions as he told us we were in for a difficult time. If people feel so collectively strongly about the monarchy, put it to a vote! Why are you afraid of reaffirming the nation wants a monarch? And why, in particular, are you afraid of people like me? It’s not like I’ve made a habit of being on the winning side is it? I backed Corbyn, I voted against Brexit, I called for an election when Johnson was finally put to the governmental sword… I’m sure we’d vote overwhelmingly to keep the monarchy but at least we were asked.

Apparently patriotic behaviour is accepting the collective delusion of a nation filled with people who, a year ago, swore that wearing a mask for 37 seconds to buy a 20 pack of Marlboro lights was the equivalent of the subversion of bodily autonomy suddenly deciding that it’s ok to tase people who aren’t openly weeping about the death of a total stranger.

But what IS patriotism?

Patriotism is, shockingly, not the concept that we must unblinkingly accept the foetid corruption of a government determined to undermine those who disagree with it, by stripping back the right to protest. Patriotism isn’t being forced by violence and with threats of police retribution to suddenly give fealty to a man who was hated for his mistreatment of his wife when I was ten years old. Patriotism is not waving union jacks in the streets of a country failing it’s citizens so badly that we went from 35 Trussell Trust food banks in 2010 to having 11,650 by 2020. Patriotism is not the calm and certain acceptance that people awaiting cancer treatment were at risk of, and in fact suffering from, the loss of their booked appointment because of a funeral, a funeral which you were compelled like worker ants to imbibe by the removal of any other avenue instead: shops shut, gyms shut, libraries, museums shut… you will mourn: or else.

Layer upon layer of injustice is spread like a permafrost across the UK: a government who continually prioritises the rich few over the poor many, and then with no hint of irony talks about not pandering to minorities… A media who blithely behaves to the antithesis of how media should act, ratifying the lies and missteps of the government, the police, the royals – its own self…

The UK has fallen so far from where I hoped it would be. And yet I, we, fight on. We endure the insults, the degradation, the threats and the infighting, we read and write about how things can be, could be, should be, will be better for people who go out of their way to insult and malign us. We steel ourselves for abuse every time we press “send” on a message- but why? Because despite it all the gossamer thin but steel strong strands of hope run through us: hope that we can reach someone out there who feels similarly and make them keep fighting. Hope that we can reaffirm those beaten down by these injustices that things can and will be better. Hope that those disaffected by the nonsense and noise will rise up with us and fight to improve the status quo.
That- this- these actions, this is patriotism. It’s not the gormless acceptance of a country and state that have failed us for so long in so many ways, it’s the razor sharp and endless conviction that we can, that we will win and that in this victory we will seek a better country and a better future for ourselves and even for those who may not deserve it after aligning themselves with the forces who worked to derail this change.

I know- not think, I know that we can make a difference. That we can change the direction we’re headed. But all hands on deck, people. Things aren’t working, things aren’t improving because not enough of us are willing to throw our weight into it. The tories call us lazy, but laziness is letting the country sink. So gird your loins, wrap your hands in the work ahead and repeat this phrase that I have imbibed on my heart

We Deserve Better.

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

By Daviemoo

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It Is Our Duty To Stand Against Fascism

By Jack Meredith- @politicalwelshy

“We all want to help one another. Human beings are like that. We want to live by each other’s happiness – not by each other’s misery. We don’t want to hate and despise one another. In this world, there is room for everyone. And the good earth is rich and can provide for everyone. The way of life can be free and beautiful, but we have lost the way”
~ Charlie Chaplin, from “The Great Dictator”, 1940.

This was Chaplin’s first speaking role, after years of being a silent movie star. It focuses on the plight of the Jewish people in the face of fascism, with a fascist regime headed up by Hynkel, the leader of the fictional land of Tomainia. The premise for the majority highlights the humanity of the Jewish people, compared to the buffoonery and selfishness of the ruling fascists.

The film’s closing speech, partly quoted above is regarded as one of the best speeches in film history, a call for peace and anti-fascism at a time when fascism was rife across Europe.

It is a shame, then, that this speech is more applicable to the modern-day UK than ever.

SNP MP Mhairi Black recently spoke in parliament, where she stated that we must be aware of the country’s move towards “the f-word” – fascism.

I am inclined to agree:

Asylum seekers are being deported to Rwanda. The Human Rights Act is set to be scrapped. The rights to freely vote and protest have been infringed.

DWP civil servants have been given police-like powers to deliver fines upon suspected benefit cheats, no matter whether the person in question has been found to break the law.

The electoral commission is no longer independent and will be brought under government control.

Trans people are not protected under the conversion therapy ban.

The Prime Minister, despite having broken the law during the Covid lockdown period, remains in power.

The Culture Secretary is selling-off Channel 4, on the grounds of “being too high a cost for the taxpayer”, despite not knowing that Channel 4 doesn’t receive public funding.

The Home Secretary wants to reform the Official Secrets Act, to imprison journalists for up to 14 years for “embarrassing the government”.

These only cover some of the worrying decisions made by the current Conservative government – this rap sheet can stretch back 12 years.

I would disagree with Mhairi Black on one point though: we are not sleepwalking into fascism. We are welcoming it with open arms.

Whenever we say “never again”, we are supposed to mean it.

Instead, it’s become a meaningless phrase that we throw about on social media, along with a load of hashtags that are only included to differentiate ourselves as “one of the good ones”.

It is our duty to stand against fascism.

Let’s do it.

People of the U.K. – We are failed by our government

By Daviemoo

A government in crisis: the cost of living, an investigation into lawbreaking and the betrayal of the public, slow lockdowns and a desperation to ignore the virus still working its way across the country– PPE mismanagement and misspending, rapists and date rape and sexism, islamophobia, a refusal to protect LGBT+ people from legally condoned torture – and what are the Conservatives doing?
Making up excuses for Johnson’s behaviour, throwing senior civil servants to the wolves via the front page of the Daily Mail and assuring us in the face of our rage that we have moved on: I have asked before and I ask again: how much more must we be expected to take, and when will the UK public look around at the troubles wrought by this government and say: no more.

This morning’s front page of the Daily Mail is dedicated to Sue Gray, and is a desperate attempt by the Conservatives to smear a woman who may be about to release a bombshell report into the lacklustre leadership number 10 has endured under the eternally prevaricating hands of Boris Johnson.
Even the snippets of the released report were a tacit indictment of leadership at number 10 under Johnson: but the stories in the news made that clear. Suitcases of booze being dragged into the back door, sneering civil servants mocking the sacrifices of the public on video despite the seniors involved clinging to their role and drugs being found in the toilets of our most ancient and esteemed political buildings. The findings speak for themselves.
As many in the UK shear off into debt and hopelessness under the cost of living crisis, as more fold their businesses because they cannot compete with bigger competitors thanks to the red tape of brexit and as still more sign off sick from work because there is no mitigation against the coronavirus that still quite literally plagues us, the government wraps tightly around itself for protection: but what good is a government more dedicated to self preservation than the country it swore to serve?

Rishi Sunak still continues to ignore the increasing cacophony of voices asking for an emergency budget to ease the cost of living crisis- will this be released at the same time as the Sue Gray report to distract us? Or will the report be a wash, protecting Johnson et al from the accusations that they are simply not up to snuff when it comes to representing the UK as a functional government. One can only imagine the cruelty behind a government who holds back vital relief as a figleaf to cover its continued dodgy dealings- and yet this is the government we have. Johnson appears to have murdered half the cats in London at this point, so desperate he has been to fling a fresh corpse onto the table at PMQs for weeks to distract from the shambles of his cabinet: and yet no amount of salacious stories can detract from the very real bodies of the over 155,000 dead covid patients, or the upcoming wave of people who starve or freeze because simply living in the UK has become too expensive.
Today Johnson’s face adorns the Guardian as he apparently “insists that working is the solution to the cost of living crisis”- yes, make more money for the conservative government who wasted billions on dodgy PPE, wrote off still more in covid fraud, who signed a brexit deal that has decimated businesses across the length and breadth of the country– but don’t work from home of course, you’ll be too distracted by pelotons and ironing to make that vital money to ease us through the crisis that’s completely out of our control and has always been in the hands of the tories.

And what have the tories done over the last six months to prepare us for this? Spent hours shoving officials into every news stream to talk about how minor and unimportant our officials throwing off the laws they enshrined is, blamed woke lefty remainers for being outraged about lacklustre race reports of the relocation of refugees to Rwanda, or made fat jokes at Ian Blackford when questioned about their behaviour. This is the bar of governmental probity set by Johnson, and the sooner he is gone the sooner we can ask that this bar be raised- and yet a core of the British public still admire the man for simply ploughing on like the titanic across the face of an iceberg- but we cannot hate the people who believe Johnson is above reproach because he has cultivated this opinion carefully via manipulation across the face of the country over many years.

Once upon a time, the Conservative party was a party that commanded respect for their rigour in adhering to the letter of the law- now they are stewarded by a man who is so dishonest we find ourselves questioning even easily provable statements he makes: people spend their time untangling the prime ministers’ words which are always dishonest at their core: G7 recovery is slow when he tells us we excel, the vaccine rollout is a storming success when it has all but stopped, the virus is over as hundreds of people die a week, brexit is done as he argues the importance of a border he signed into existence, work will fix the cost of living but he has done nothing to address the root cause of energy pricing, infrastructure, he hiked NI… tories tories tories, always the answer comes back to the government and their poor showing, but listening to them, we refused the lockdowns, refused the vaccines, refuse to work to address the cost of living- Johnson creates the problems then uses the population of the UK to soak up blame for them- and to the rest of the cabinet?

From a justice secretary with an appetite for scrapping human rights protections and replacing it with his own twisted version of what protection he, a man who believes “British workers are amongst the worst idlers” to a foreign secretary who was forced to resign for holding meetings with foreign officials for undisclosed reasons- and is now being asked to do the same over her lies about humane conditions for refugees and signing off on multiple bills which break international law- from a culture secretary who doesn’t understand the funding model of channel 4 and ITV and who thinks 96% of people being against privatisation is 96% of people for it: then we have an education secretary who wants to place trans children in harms way and endorses smacking, a transport secretary who denies the very existence of brexit backlogs… these are the bedrock of the government that continue to rot away at their own tenet of “the will of the people”. If the will of the people were to be observed, Boris Johnson with his 26% approval rating would be clearing holes on a golf course or back to writing his poorly researched columns: but still he sits on the proverbial throne of the UK and the UK public continues to reap what it sowed by installing such a man.

Whatever happens next the UK is in for a rough ride: even if a Starmer government took over tomorrow, a hostile press plus the malfeasance of the tories’ 12 year tenure has poisoned the UK’s political purity and left us with myriad issues- and so many are asked to believe over and over that the only cure is to just believe in Johnson harder, believe he can fix his own mistakes.

Brexit was a byproduct of the UK being sick of the status quo, an arguable thumb on the nose of our collective ire with how things were being done.
When people realise that this constant upheaval and political punditry to the detriment of the everyman, woman and they is the status quo under Johnson and that they could have it better under someone else: what will they do?

I’ve been told many times that I cannot rely on a litany of the terrible things the tories do to endear people to voting for an alternative: and yet I have to ask why? Why people are willing to accept this over anything else? “Labour would be worse” doesn’t wash with me: I’d rather see Starmer, or Rayner, or anybody else on the left try and fail than watch as Johnson continues to wrap his tendrils across the face of our struggling country and drag us still deeper into the mire of his government’s creation because trying and failing is, by all accounts, better than wilfully allowing the UK to degrade as Johnson climbs on our piled bodies to claim he alone is above it all.

(You can’t) Read all About it- The UK’s Press is Bought and Paid for by a Corrupt Government

By Daviemoo

When news of partygate began to ripple through the UK’s media, broken by the enterprising journalism of Pippa Crerar, the immediate thought was – what else have they done? It had taken a year for partygate to come crashing down around the conservatives & it fell amongst the raft of other scandals that have dogged Downing Street during Johnson’s short but damaging tenure from PPE VIP lanes to the Paterson scandal.
But yesterday’s casual announcement by Johnson’s former aide, Dominic Cummings that the press was quite literally bought and paid for by Johnson and then lent credence by Peter Jukes of Byline Times who shared the article by Brian Cathcart, should have blown the doors off parliament: are the press taking backhanders in the form of covid relief on the proviso that they would write only the stories the government allowed? Or are the government wilfully underfunding those who do not favour them in coverage?
The UK’s press is as complicit in the mire in which we find ourselves as the callous men and women running parliament like a circus- But how does one hold the press at large to account for something the press at large won’t report?

During an age of endless news streams where we are bombarded with news updates from apps, social media, popups, papers and 24 hour channels, it made sense that companies so large would require funding – Johnson’s government insisted on plying the larger, established news corporations with funding they scarcely needed in favour of eschewing the smaller ones who would fall to rack and ruin.
One only needs to look at the Murdoch empire to see a network suffused in cash from the top to the bottom, but the government happily threw them “bungs” as Cummings described it.

One can intimate it is because of the political leanings of said corporations: nobody can deny that the press in the UK, so often referred to as a shark tank is more akin to a bowl of goldfish where the Johnson cabal is involved. Whether this is correct and the government gave funding to press it felt would favour them is a matter for debate- but hardly a debate that would challenge ones faculties, as Johnson is an ex-journo and knows how the system before him works: don’t bite the hand that feeds you- but if you are bitten, the government realised, better a domesticated pet than a scratch from a sharks tooth.

Other smaller news corps were forced with difficult funding decisions to keep reporting and suffered as a result:

Seats on the subsidy life-raft are reserved for the News Media Association (NMA), the corporate press club in which most members have turnovers exceeding £100 million. The rest are being told to swim for it or sink.
This approach privileges the corrupt past over the innovative future; it helps the lumbering legacy brands while allowing the COVID-19-induced crises of circulation and advertising to sweep away smaller outfits that are far more innovative and free-thinking.
The winners here are the sun, the Mail, the times, the Telegraph, the Mirror, the Express, the Guardian- and the big asset-strippers that have so devastated the regional press: Reach, Newsquest and JPMedia
https://bylinetimes.com/2020/05/13/strangling-democracy-millions-paid-to-corporate-press-at-the-expense-of-journalism/

The battle for a fair press has been fairly openly debated in recent years: nobody but the most strident amongst us can deny the open favouritism displayed by the press towards a right leaning government: but it has become confusing to see the press become tantamount to a lapdog under this government. Barely any news coverage that Johnson’s win as prime minister was celebrated by an immediate vacation- at a time when he should have thrown himself into the driver’s seat to wrest the nosedive towards a no-deal brexit, he vanished to the beaches of another country… one you would soon need to take the longer queue to visit or return from. But a holiday upon a victory is hardly an act to win condemnation- his actions since, though, are.

The press were all too happy to tread the waters of government briefing over the advice of scientific bodies: Independent SAGE spoke out against the argument for herd immunity posited by an as then uninformed Sir Patrick Vallance who assumed that coronavirus could not readily reinfect people: once the death rate for coronavirus became clear in the UK population, Vallance along with a beleaguered press frantically walked back their message about herd immunity in favour of protective measures- again ignoring scientific advice from a number of bodies regarding masked transmission rates, including studies which had been long used to justify the common sense of wearing masks during operations.
Large scale media programmes were deployed to combat misinformation, even as misinformation was propagated by the government– Johnson’s long segueing speeches were often met with utter bemusement by the public but vital information was simply suppressed: it was widely assumed the rule of six had been developed by calculations of infectivity vs person to person contact but again Cummings blithely revealed that Sunak and Johnson had thought of it off the top of their heads: and the press repeated the line with the confidence of ignorance.

But partygate is the best example of the cancerous spread of nepotistic favouritism from politics to press.
Several members of the press knew of the “briefing” Allegra Stratton hosted. They knew already of stories of a Downing Street party- the evidence was already free to them. Colleagues who had also been journalists alongside her bantered gently with Stratton who chuckled off an accusation of attendance before wondering- to the press, those waiting to receive information, whether cheese and wine was against the rules: it was.
There was the bomb, ready to go off- but it sank below the tides of worsening infections, death rates, lockdowns. Why?
The fact that our highest officials were freely breaking the laws which had been devised and enacted in the very seat of democracy was a scandal that should have immediately rocked the country. Some will of course say that perhaps the press held back for fear that news of Johnson, Sunak and other staffers breaking the rules would push tired members of the public to do the same, worsening the state of affairs: but it is not for the press to decide these things. The press is meant to be the guardian of the publics collective knowledge around governmental actions and their failure to aid us here cannot be venerated- and only has a limited number of explanations: either the press were desperate to curry favour with Downing Street for access to other stories, they did not care about reporting the truth… or, worst of all- they had been disincentivised from telling the truth via coronavirus levies. If this were proved, the twin pillars of government and press would be met with the distrust it seems they are steadily earning.

I argued recently on a Byline Radio twitter spaces that the BBC is a lame duck when it comes to holding the government to account. Happy to smear Jeremy Corbyn with offensive superimpositions of him in the background of debates on potential incumbent prime ministers or to openly disparage him whilst offering favourable coverage of Johnson was proof enough- but the recent debate around scrapping the license fee headed up by Nadine Dorries who doesn’t understand the funding model for channel 4 who she has helmed the privatisation of. The host stated (incorrectly) that the government DOESN’T fund the BBC- all they do is set the cost and decide whether it should be scrapped. Just like a boss setting salary and deciding whether to keep someone employed.

The BBC is now rumoured to be staffed heavily by conservative leaning members in its upper echelon which has led to a soft touch approach towards any coverage of the government, and therefore cannot be used to scrutinise the government – all because the government controls its funding model and because the BBC is infiltrated by those who all but suppress negative coverage.

It is at this juncture that people will leap on partygate as proof that the press ARE scrutinising the conservatives, forgetting of course the amount of op-eds from right wing pundits stating that the conservatives’ willingness to break the laws they enshrined for protection concluded that there was no way we should ever have been in lockdown- rather than after twelve years of failing governance, perhaps the conservatives simply have become a party in freefall, the front bench crammed with sycophants loyal only to Johnson and the power he brings.

But again, don’t take my word for it: Let us cast our eyes over to the daily mail: the paper that pressured Durham police to reopen an investigation- not into Cummings himself and his ambulatory misdeeds during lockdown one, but into the leader of the opposition, Sir Kier Starmer.
During the initial findings of Johnson and Sunak’s lawbreaking the paper angrily shouted at the public- “Don’t they know there’s a war on?”- arguing that Johnson should be allowed to stay in post and (to coin Johnson’s favourite empty phrase) “get on with the job”.

Then, when the public continued to rail against the man who ensured we stayed home to keep our loved ones safe as his staffers dragged suitcases of wine into his home, they pivoted to attacking Durham Police and Sir Kier for what they called a refusal to investigate and hypocrisy.
This was farcical enough, but when the investigation was reopened, the newspaper began to smear Starmer, intimating that he is a liar, only for him to do exactly what they had asked and confirm that if he was indeed found guilty of breaking the guidance (bearing in mind there was no lockdown at the time), he would step down. Not satisfied, the paper, after eight days of headlines intimating the Durham police were lackadaisical, then accused Starmer of “pressuring the police”… then as a final, laughter inducing crescendo removed any and all references from this trail of events when they realised that doing so would pile pressure on Johnson to follow suit in the footsteps of his opposite numbers actions.

If ever was a tale so filled with the blatancy of media supplication to a government, this would surely be it: from “get over it” to “but HE did it” to “He’s doing what we are” to complete ignorance in the space of 3 weeks.

If it is true that Boris Johnson’s government has been lavishing money on the press, threatening them with privatisation a la Dorries and channel four and more then the government tips over into ticking another tenet of potentially fully fascistic behaviour, by preventing its own scrutiny by what should be a press willing to speak out against their transgressions and the British public are being gulled again into backing a man who is as uninterested as improving the standards of living in the country as he is being honest at the despatch box. The press thrive off controversy and here it is in spades in the form of a corrupt, criminal government headed up by a man who cannot find it within him to be honest to his spouses, much less to a country of those who require his fellows’ help to thrive post pandemic.

If Johnson cannot be held to account by his peers for breaking his own laws, by the opposition who cannot force contrition on a man incapable of feeling it, he cannot be held to account by a press too willing to bay his messages under threats or cash injections it is for us- the public, to become the collective fire in the dark of an abyssal government. If they won’t speak truth to power- we must, or all is lost.

If the government IS actively meddling in freedom of the press with cash and threats… we must expose this rot, root it out and start to regrow.

Until Johnson is gone the UK has no hope of democracy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.…’
Winston Churchill, speaking about democracy and it’s flaws

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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”.

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.

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.

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.

Boris Johnson – The Worst Prime Minister at the Worst Time

By. Daviemoo

Boris Johnson has bound the hands and feet of the nation. His slavish allies have picked us up, and carried us to the altar of his ego. Today Johnson is set to slit our collective throats on the altar of populism. Our lifeblood is set to be spilt into the foetid grounds of populism, and thousands of people will die… to save Johnson’s tenure in office… Do you think the deaths of thousands who wouldn’t have died had we kept mandates in place is a worthy sacrifice for a less than mediocre politician to stay employed?

Look to the social media of any prominent scientist and watch them, agog in horror at the behaviours of the conservative government and the wet eared cowardice of their supporters who simply cannot bear another moment of coronavirus restrictions. It’s been so hard to follow the guidance they say, as if they ever did. Selfish people cackling about you wearing a mask in the fruit aisle of Tescos, who never stopped visiting relatives for Sunday lunch and who look down on you for following scientific advisors’ dire warnings. Maybe you do it because you lost someone, or more than one someone, to covid. Maybe you had the virus and it frightened you just how sick you got- or maybe you’re just a decent person who realises that the world didn’t slow to a crawl for almost 2 years for no reason, no insidious plot of replacement theory to be seen except in the rheumy eyes of these freedom fighters who didn’t show up to protest against literal human rights being debated in parliament.

Today I signed an open letter Professor Christina Pagel is advertising, to hear experts like her speak about the lifting of restrictions.

Experts like Professor Pagel have, the entire time, erred on the side of caution because she, like most decent humans, believes that everyone deserves the chance to live through the pandemic. But today, Johnson is revealing his plans to “live with the virus”, which involve payment for testing, obfuscating numbers and allowing those infected to be able to wander around positive without any mandate for staying home. Boris Johnsons’ plans for living with coronavirus will kill people. Hundreds, thousands of people, who will die because he has become a populist fundamentalist, who seems to think you are free to become a vector of mass infection if you want to, and the cherry on the cake is that we simply won’t even know it’s happening because he refuses to even keep tabs on it.

Why has he done this, you may ask? Because it distracts us from the sheer, unquestionable fact that Boris Johnson is terminally inept (quite literally), selfish sheister, a terrible PM, a man who is more vacuously obsessed with his ability to keep reflecting back British law like the flesh of a Y incision so he can carve out the still weakly shuddering heart of British democracy and hold it aloft as a prize before losing interest and casting it off.

Since Johnson took power in 2019 he’s appointed someone who committed something tantamount to espionage as our Home Secretary, a man who wants to repeal the human rights act to justice secretary, a woman who was surprised people use YouTube to learn (what did you think it was for Nadine?), has had a doctored report on racism produced which stated it consulted with experts who were shocked to see their names included. He’s presided over the worst death rate in Europe, lied about the EMA’s capabilities of stopping vaccine rollouts and taken credit for the NHS’ stellar job in the first deployment- speaking of the NHS, he’s continued to slowly pare away funding for it and has thrown GPs to the wolves to distract from his role in covid mismanagement. Whilst many of us were burying relatives by zoom or saying goodbye to people we love via FaceTime he was throwing back Moet with colleagues, convinced by virtue of political party or class that they were exempt from the rules they themselves created.

He’s presided over the most disastrous outcome for Brexit, and rather than face up to that has circled the wagons of the British press to disseminate distractions about trans athletes in bathrooms or other such nonsense, instead of showing 12 hour queues to drop off goods- he blamed COVID for Brexit issues, Brexit for COVID issues and not once through all of these debacles, not at one time- has he ever said “It’s us. We’re sorry, we made mistakes”.

Whilst Hancock and he were breaking the law with PPE procurement, he never once paused to wonder if this was the wrong thing to do, the wrong way to act. Because to Johnson, the job of PM is simply a badge of honour, the next “to present” on his CV. He doesn’t care about decency, the rule of law or any freedoms but his own. Our highest office, the most vital political job in the UK will be used as fodder for dinner parties down the line. He’ll sit, clutching a designer glass of designer champagne telling people about the time a billionaire oil baron shook his hand and he came away richer than he was before, skipping over the shambles he’s left the country in. No matter how poor, or miserable or sick you or I or our friends or family get, Johnson’s future is writ large: as long as he can continue his decadence we could all die tomorrow. It won’t change a thing for him.

Now as we all walk, open eyed into a country with no covid restrictions some of us see three lions, strutting down the street proudly as the “winners” of the pandemic. But others see vectors of infection, a populace strolling sullenly into the maw of the beast, wondering who we love will die or become disabled now because the libertarians amongst us think that’s a worthy sacrifice. The sad thing is, people genuinely believe that it’s worth people dying for them to be able to go into Tescos without a bit of cloth on their face. This is where the poison of populism has gotten us to – everything is the enemy. Masks, vaccines, Corbyn supporters, the left, the woke, everything out to stop people living how they want- but the people who deeply believe this don’t seem to realise that we don’t live how we want – because of them. This imposition of their imaginary freedoms has now stretched to being a climate denier- the seriously bad weather was the enemy this week, how dare that woke storm stop me from… doing what? It’s cold, wet and rainy, just stay in the house and antagonise social justice warrior on twitter like normal you losers- but they didn’t did they. Just to spite the weather(?) people went on walks and got blown over, and that’ll show… Mother Nature I suppose, that these people can’t be stopped from their stupidity. Michael Gove said we’re “sick of listening to experts”. Apparently we are, but we have an unending zeal for listening to absolute morons.

Johnson stands as leader on the cusp of a potential war. Look at the outcome of brexit- more expensive goods, a cost of living crisis unprecedented even when the country’s covid debts are already repurchased, lower world standing, worse quality of life. Look at the outcome of covid- worst death rate in Europe and still going, a stalled vaccine programme, no attempts to even mandate safety via healthcare workers and literal capitulation to anti vaccine terrorists (I’ll use that word even if the press won’t). If Johnson remains in charge for war I suspect the country will suffer untold levels of misery there too, starving in the street as our pleura fill up with covid pneumonia fluid, homeless because we couldn’t afford the rent- and still the Johnsonites will cry “but imagine what it would be like under Starmer”.

I normally urge people to stay safe, to wear their masks, take their vaccines, to social distance- but it’s actually reached the point where I don’t think it’s pointful. Too many people have become inured to death and misery and just do not want to try to avoid it. Some even take a strange and perverse pleasure in being as obnoxious as possible. So I suppose now I must change my signoff from that to – I hope you survive, dear reader.

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Governmental ineptitude at your expense

But what IS patriotism?

We Deserve Better.

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People of colour

LGBT+ people

Women

The disabled

You have what you want

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The “other” problem with Britishness… The British

So we know what it isn’t- what is it?

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

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