uk politics – 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.

“Acceptable humans”- the modern fascist movement and the UK’s role.

By Daviemoo

Today I read the first few chapters of Judith Butler’s “Notes Toward a Performative Theory Of Assembly”. This book was written by Butler in 2015 and served as a stark warning to those listening that the removal of the lens of humanity was all too easy under the state & in the public sphere, using the dual tools of governmental discourse and the media.
One sentence which grasped my consciousness was the idea of the dehumanisation of humans, and served as a splinter of cognisance of what would transpire and lead to the events of the myriad moral panics of 2023 Britain and the US- and from this paragraph I felt the need to expand on the collective dangers of the UK government’s quest to enforce a hierarchy of humanity.

Think about the people in your life.
Are you better than them, or worse? Do you deserve more rights than them? Is it acceptable that, due to their gender, sex, age, race, sexuality, they need different rights in order to exist in parity with you in our society? Would it be fair if we all had the same basic rights and nothing more, or is equity a cornerstone of a society which has fostered the type of inclusion which gives everyone a fair chance at betterment?

These should not be difficult questions, and yet our existence is currently limited to a society which seeks to obfuscate that simplicity, smokescreening the neon bright answers behind the idea that “just asking questions” about basic rights and equity is not a dangerous path down which to tread.

Some look at rights like specific anti discrimination legislation or protection from misogyny as entitlement and not a grim indictment of modern British society- because in a truly equal society one would not need anti discrimination legislation as protection from bodily harm, workplace harassment or mental duress.

The ECHR was established on the 4th November 1950, in response to the atrocities of World War 2- a solemn promise to the countries involved that the very fundamentals of human rights would, should and must be upheld- that it is anathema to human existence to allow these rights to fall into question. The UK government’s narrative that the ECHR meddles in its decisions should be a death knell for their leadership- for if a court dedicated to protecting and enshrining the basics of human rights protections is interfering in your decisions, this follows that your decisions run counter to the respect of human rights.
There is no “hierarchy of human rights”. If you are human, your rights as a human should be respected. These do not give favour, they do not elevate you above others. They are rights universally agreed upon- and opening questions on whether all humans should have access to these rights is the first, and most troubling sign of danger- but one could argue that it is not a step but a slippery slope.

Once you begin questioning human rights and who deserves them, it is a simple matter to widen the discourse.
Only the most heinous, unforgivable human beings do not deserve to lose their human rights: But who decides what is heinous and unforgivable- we live in a world where Daesh believe that grooming and raping girls is part of a holy mission, where women and girls in Afghanistan are beaten with sticks if they go outside without men or boys as guardians, where in America the right to bear arms is sacrosanct and yet if I saw a person with a gun on their belt in my city I would flee and call the police for fear of the danger they could bring with them. The reason human rights are iron clad and unquestionable is that the very act of questioning them, weakens them. All and sundry, no matter how evil, deserve human rights and if we decide a threshold, we begin the process of collapse.

Additionally, are we not inhuman if we then wreak horrors upon a human who we have decided is not deserving of these rights? Another question for another time, but an eye for an eye is a wise proverb in a sea of theological nonsense.

The government’s determination to demonise certain minorities is a key substrate in a wider movement towards enforcing “acceptable humans”. By placing terms and conditions on what a “good” human is and even moving towards rhetoric that removes humanity entirely, the government is eminently capable of disenfranchising individuals amongst the collectives.

Look at Shamima Begum. A fifteen year old girl was groomed on the internet by Daesh, because of failures of state security- meaning the state let her down and could possibly let down others. Rather than face blame for their poor handling of Begum’s radicalisation, the state designated her the root issue. Begum’s behaviour was objectively bad- and happened to a British born citizen, indicating that it was not merely the groomers nor Begum who had the issue- the state under which she was raised contained fundamental lapses of protection. She was a product of a state not equipped to prevent her radicalisation- not only should the state face censure for their failures to safeguard her and others, but she is a product of a flawed UK state and therefore our problem, and should have been brought here to face questions over it. By the government refusing to allow this & making her stateless this is a visible refusal to accept blame for their failures- but also serves a troubling double purpose of driving home a message that compliance with good, state endorsed behaviour brings the reward of citizenship. This also raises the idea of citizenship as supremacy- those who have it are superior to those who do not. You don’t have to like Begum or her actions to understand that there are lines of questioning that must be verboten, about when and if we lose basic rights.

The most troubling and yet overlooked aspect of Begum’s treatment by the state and media, is that it begins the process mentioned above. There is now a threshold, a precedent set at which you can act which will prompt the state to remove your innate right to citizenship. Something which we have always declared a sovereign, basic right is no longer- and a worrying proportion of the UK’s population celebrate this as a win, whilst others hesitate to point out that those rights are rights we also hold- and the question now falls from “will it happen” to “how low is the bar for the enforcement”: Will people like I who openly question the state and its methodology one day be stripped of citizenship for querying their implementation of this legislation? Who knows- we have far to fall, but are moving at disturbing speed.

One must also note the involvement of the British (and American) media in the enabling of this discourse. Academics warned repeatedly that the British press’ foray into open, daily transphobia would lead to danger- why even Judith Butler wrote a piece for the Guardian which laid bare the links between the far right and the TERF movement across the U.K., and the piece was surreptitiously edited to strip this paragraph despite its objective basis in truth- and if journalists strip out truth to protect the feelings of fascists one should find grave concern in its operation- and if someone like Butler warns of fascism, one does not stop up their ears.

To return, though, to the “small boat” moral panic that has swept the UK, one must find it almost comical to watch the UK subsumed again by a government narrative. The Conservatives are almost comedically unpopular, reviled by everyone from the supposed libertarian sect of political adversaries we hear regularly espousing their views from behind England flag shirts, to those who call ourselves true patriots because we question the country and ask for it’s improvement rather than accepting it’s gathering descent into mediocrity. Yes, the number of small boat crossings has ramped up in recent years. Has the government explained to the peoples of the UK why? Have they admitted to their own roles in destabilising countries which people are fleeing from by leaving Afghanistan to the Taliban, by working to arm anti government forces in other countries to enable cheaper sales of fossil fuels? Have they worked to re-stabilise countries blighted by damaging regimes or demagogues? And can they truly fall behind the “not our job” defence whilst we arm Ukraine- a noble, important requirement which brings the question of when the state should intervene into sharp relief. The UK should be cautioned on its intervention in some places -for it is our dark past of western imperialism that has caused a dizzying number of the issues for which the world is paying now.
The key language of Sunak and Braverman is “stop the boats” where they refer to “small boats crossings”, completely failing at any point to acknowledge the people involved, the humans within those vessels. The people arriving here in small boats are people. People with fears, wants, goals, dreams, biases- fully, achingly human. Are all of them good? Of course not. When large numbers of people are in a group, the likelihood that they are all good people is not going to be high- unless you group them by your very subjective definition of good. There are those who would fail to line me up in the “good people” group simply because I am a gay man, would refuse to add women who believe in feminism. Good, bad- these are abstract and personal and the U.K. has fallen victim to allowing the subjective morals of objectively bad politicians (who hide lies by prime ministers, funnel money from the public to private individuals, who strip back rights like protest, like striking, like voting) to be used as a public yardstick for lawmaking.

Just because bad people may exist amongst a demographic of people does not mean that all of them should be treated like the worst. To hate, fear and punish an entire group of people for their membership of a group is to give in to bigotry and that is an iron strong fact. If British citizens allow all migrants to be punished for the worst amongst them, British citizens are the group sprinting fastest towards inhuman behaviour- not those being punished.
Look at it this way: as a gay man I am painfully aware that bad persons exist amongst my demographic- those who do not respect bodily autonomy, those who are misogynist, even those who are cruel to others based on their subjective appearance. Does the existence of these bad elements mean that all of my demographic should be subject to censure?

Worse still is an insistence that the government’s methods are “tough but fair” and will “break the funding model of smugglers”. This sort of thinking is both cognitively dissonant (tough, yes, fair to deport those who have arrived via supposedly illegal methods because there does not exist a legal method? No.)

Break the funding model of people smugglers by allowing them to smuggle people then punishing the people they smuggle? It is equivalent to arresting the victim of a mugging to disincentivise the mugger because less people are on the street to mug!

Braverman, Sunak et al are firmly entrenched in fascist behaviours. The UK believes fascism to be waving swastikas daubed on big red flags- and part of the danger is that people do not see the obvious. Fascism and Nazism are different- Fascism can strip the clothes of Nazism and dress itself up as something else- Christian Nationalism, small statehood, the silencing of any dissent towards your thinking. When you see a government draped in Union Jacks enforcing laws which rip away your right to protest, your right to strike, your right to vote, when they dress up their failure to hold the NHS together or their manipulation of contract tendering to enrich their friends and family, when you watch them mock and revile transgender people, migrants, “lefty lawyers”- you are looking at fascism under a new dress code. And so many British people fail to acknowledge the hypocrisy this government condones. Sunak and Braverman speak with open hatred of the “lawbreakers” arriving in small boats yet Sunak has broken the law twice, Braverman supported breaking the law in a “limited and specific” way… the lawbreaking is only a problem when it isn’t the conservatives doing it.

The dehumanising rhetoric will continue, and more will fall prey to its fervour. I have no doubt that corners will turn in future, that down the line, should I be lucky enough to make it to my later years I will watch documentaries of people tearfully apologising for being radicalised into the demagogues of TERF beliefs or believing that migrants on boats are the root cause of their poverty. But right now, as we live and breathe this slow immersion into rhetoric that becomes more deadly by the day one must wonder how far the British public is willing to go in ignoring the construction of a hierarchy of behaviour to which we are all subject- and when the thumbscrews we’re all forced to wear are tightened, how long until the bulk of us cry out in the pain we’re forced into… and will it be too late to extricate ourselves from being subject to the question: are you an acceptable human?

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.

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

By Daviemoo

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stop Normalising Suffering!

By Daviemoo

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We are witnessing the biggest scam in history.

By Daviemoo

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The cruelty is the point

By Daviemoo

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Give us democracy- or prepare for consequences

By Daviemoo

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Daviemoo is on hiatus: or, why the left in the UK doesn’t deserve to win right now.

By Daviemoo – who is posting this and running far away from social media for the foreseeable.

My last post was my hundredth, though it’s not the hundredth article I’ve written for politically enraged- I cleared out 23 drafts the other day. Thank you to everyone who reads what I write and enjoys what I do but I have to be honest, of late everything has become somewhat exhausting– and not because of the always growing wankery of tories and their voters, of the arm waving gammonry of the politically dumb- because leftists in the UK are, as a whole- acting like fucking dickheads.

I wasn’t aware of the shitstorm ignited by commentary on a video which emerged recently until last night, and truth be told I was not sober when I was made aware. I read with abject horror some of the comments I, and my friends, had received for calling out what I pretty confidently would call racist dog whistling.

I have to be honest, in the way that my latest podcast episode is quite honest; I have no idea what people actually want any more, and as I grew from “back labour no matter what” to “we can critique labour healthily and listen to those with opposing views but I can’t see an alternative that works in this broken system”, my surety in what I was saying diminished.
I look at that as a gift.
I don’t want to parade the digital halls of social media, telling everyone what I say is definitely right, throwing out deliberately divisive tweets and confidently telling you any alternative to what I say is wrong because I don’t know. I don’t have the self confidence, nor the confidence in any political figure or leader, to state that we’re doing the right thing, on the right track, and that you should lean over and copy my answers on the test of “how to move forward”.

Equally I’m disillusioned with any faction I once called mine. The more center-left labour seem, no offence to those who keep staunchly backing it, to be willing to compromise on stuff that I’m not; but also lack the nuance to understand that just because I’m critical of labour’s brexit stance or Wes Streeting’s weird “they’re both bad” stance on transphobia in labour for example, doesn’t mean I’m trying to subvert support for labour. Dealing with problems is how you deal with them, and making compromises for them or flatly ignoring them doesn’t. Labour has some issues it needs to deal with by talking about them out loud, and by allowing voices who want to bolster the movement but don’t understand the direction to speak up, labour could allay these fears, embolden its supporters and move ever onward to a progressive alliance- not with other parties, with it’s broad-base supporters itself.
On the “far left” which is a term that makes me wince a bit because it’s so often used to describe the “has socialist in bio but acts like a 4chan edge lord” type, I’ve been absolutely stunned to see misogyny, bullying campaigns, I’ve had direct homophobic nonsense and people like the ragged trousered philanderer blithely being disgustingly transphobic guff – behaviour I genuinely thought was beneath people I once respected and now can’t stand to know I associated with.

I made fairly definitive critique of a man who used the argument “ethnic minorities and upper working class people want to destroy labour with liberal politics” (its Neo-liberals you’re referring to I assume) and spent 4 hours reading comment after comment of people deciding I was trying to sabotage labour, sabotage EiE, sabotage socialism itself, and not merely pointing out that if socialism means small-state bollocks where you point the finger at “ethnic minorities” and fellow members of the working class as the enemy instead of trying to make a cohesive movement with those very people, I don’t align with those views. It’s not exactly guy Fawkes-ing the EiE HQ is it, saying “wow this is really disgusting sentiment” and yet I had supposedly left wing people saying shit like “Tommy Robinson isn’t a bad guy now, he realises it’s the state, not muslims who are the enemy”. This the same Robinson who, literally 5 days ago was demonising Pakistani men? Or saying that I must be tory if I don’t imbibe the sentiments that foreign working class people are trying to sabotage the… what, “native” working class? Sure, Jan.

Dempsey’s views on calling Tommy Robinson supporters “the scum of the earth” make me laugh. Because Robinson supporters are the scum of the earth- not indelibly, forever scum- racism is a choice, bigotry is a sword you can put down at any time. Robinson supporters don’t care about unionisation, or workers rights, or emboldening the working class- they care about ‘the nasty foreign people coming here to steal are jobs’ and whatever other half baked cuntery they pull out of their racism-frazzled brains. There is no excuse for what he said- none. Pushing divisive rhetoric about factions of the working class, levelling blame at ethnic minorities? No way would I ever align with those views, and offering forgiveness to Robinson supporters until they showed actual contrition for falling for the racist dog shit that gave him the money to put a swastika on his neck? No thanks. You don’t fix racism by not being racist, you fix it by being anti-racist- and you dont fix capitalism or FPTP by espousing more politely worded, general racism.

The fact is, there is no perch on which I’m comfortable on “the left” after all of this, after being squeezed between the pro and anti starmer people to bursting point, and I’m certainly not a centrist but I don’t necessarily hate those who are (there’s a difference, to me, between ‘this policy isn’t pragmatic enough to work’ and ‘oh sure they want gay marriage illegalised but look at that tax plan!’- that’s not centrist pragmatism, it’s selfishness which is a byproduct and ethos of the right)- and I cant stand the right. It’s to the point where if you still back right wing parties now, now that the masks are off, you’re either so deeply radical I can’t help you or you’re so twisted you don’t need guidance, you need an assessment.

I call myself a progressive now for lack of any better option. Because the factionalised shitgibbonry of the left as a whole is pathetic, puerile, childish and yet it’s also deeply dangerous. I’m sick of big leftist figures acting like paragons of goodness whilst setting their followers on other left wingers, unleashing tidal waves of vitriolic bullying and acting like making other leftists come away from social media is some sort of victory for your movement instead of proof that you don’t give a shit about politics- if your entire goal is just to push your own agenda so hard it steamrolls other people, that’s not ok.
I’m sick of seeing people demonise those they share particulates of political leaning with rather than taking aim at the actual enemy. Half of you are overthinking it- it’s not some secret complex game of guess the secret baddie, like ‘Guess Who’ with rosettes- you’re either for voting against the tories or you’re not. I say it a million times a day, the system is broken so if you’re not happy with this iteration of labour, what’s the plan? Oh some long winded spiel about reforming the system by not partaking in it- apparently it’s actually a huge part of disinformation farms to push the idea that not voting is some wise political choice- not voting just means you need to shut the fuck up about any and all repercussions because you literally cut out your own tongue when asked for your opinion. Miss me with that “I’m so big brained I don’t participate but I feel entitled to moan” shit. And even better, nobody who insults Labour seems to have an actual plan- even big leftist figures whose bank is aflow with the money they earn by bashing labour come down on “well im still voting for them but I’ve been consciously telling people not to for months”. Mmmm, I also like hypocrisy. Again, the lack of nuance. You could constructively criticise and platform those who do the same, but I guess acting like rabid dogs with 200 characters or 2.20 seconds to bark is easier. The option I often have wafted at me is “i’m just going to vote for this other political party that won’t win, but at least my hands are clean (and the tories will still win but that’s not MY fault, right)”. Every person who suffers under tories doesn’t really give a shit about your clean hands but whatever helps you sleep at night I guess.

I genuinely hope we get PR in the near future- not just because I have grandiose hopes for a more democratic spread for voters to choose from, but because I’m sick of being hemmed in to a wing of politics that’s become even more toxic than the forced birth loving, force my religion on you-ing, worship the rich-ing tosspots on the other side. Having to share politics with people who act more despicably than right wingers is pretty grim- and because the system is fucked up, there is no alternative.

I’m taking time away from it all, to sort through my feelings on it. The fact is, I see little point in talking about politics right now, because there’s no view you can have on leftist politics that isn’t polarising. The left is radicalised against itself and it’s pathetic. We don’t deserve power any more than the scum in power right now do. It’s an embarrassment of a movement- half of it more bothered with deifying the dusty words of old white men who engaged in theoretic thinking, whose lives didn’t even slightly reflect our way of living than actually looking at the system we’re in and asking how the fuck we make these hazy dreams come true without employing the same scary ass totalitarian governments who push for socialist structure, the other half desperate to compromise on some of their own long held beliefs because they think winning can come at a stupendous cost and that giving up on long held core beliefs of their movement is acceptable. Ah yes, we win everyone! Brexit’s never being reversed, it’s ok to be transphobic and the laws that stop us protesting, force us to abide by ridiculous voter disenfranchisement and keep us locked in a broken system of capitalist dogma even as we cant afford electric or water are still all things, but we win!

Frankly everyone, go for it. Tear yourselves apart, tear each other down, demonise each other- I’ve pushed for unity on the left ever since I saw a bigger picture lurking in the background. But what’s the point. I don’t want to align myself with any of you right now because all of you are behaving shamefully. So do what feels right to you, be tribal, be vile to each other- It’s nice to see under the mask and understand the dangers of political polarisation laid bare and to understand this ever growing “if you’re not in, you’re out” mean girls politic in the UK.

I’m taking some time away from all of this because my head is abuzz with realisations. when I come back I hope some semblance of maturity magically manifests itself into the forebrains of leftists in the UK because right now- you’re all acting like idiots, and as loath as I am to level the accusation of enabling the tories I am – the whole lot of you attacking each other instead of talking constructively are doing exactly that.

Peace out, enjoy your fighting folks, I’m going to work, gym, read some political theory and come back ready to focus on the actual enemies rather than my bedfellows.

They think you’re stupid

By Daviemoo

The Conservatives think you’re stupid.
This isn’t some controversial hot take from a loony leftie- it’s factual. Do you think when Dominic Raab refers to us as “amongst the most feckless and lazy workers”, or Boris Johnson says “the working class man is likely to have a drinking problem” or Truss blithely declares that we “don’t work as hard as people in communist China outside of London” that they are mentally adding a postscript to exclude you and yours?
The British are guilty of a hilarious type of exceptionalist elitism, where the rhetoric is- “everyone is bad but I”. But every member of the conservatives looks at every one of us, and especially every person who props their shambolic government up, with the open scorn and the quiet dislike we reserve for those we feel are beneath us. This is beyond question- and the only question left to ask is, do you prove them correct by voting for them?

The UK media has propped up and enabled every governmental misstep for years. From it’s “both sides but here is Nigel Farage as an ‘expert'” coverage of brexit to the desperate commands of the Daily Mail and Express to forgive and forget legal transgressions aplenty under tory governance, it’s hardly an open secret that British media is bought and paid for by and large with the thrombosis blue cash of conservative pundits.

BBC Bias & the mishandling of COVID

Emily Maitlis casually confirmed everything we leftists have been saying for years last night; that the BBC is increasingly biased in favour of positive coverage for the conservative government, and that critical coverage of their performance is met with consternation- not just from number 10 which has long been the case, but from within the upper echelons of the BBC itself.
When top advisor to Boris Johnson, Dominic Cummings, broke the lockdown rules to travel the length of the UK from London to Durham- and despite lack of police action, he DID break the rules- the BBC rightly scrutinised his actions. And yet, the BBC, hand in hand with the party, convinced a critical mass of people to calmly accept the lie.

In any other administration throughout history (and no doubt in any future administration which has extricated itself from the miasma of corruption which blights the conservatives now), Cummings’ transgression would have been met with immediate repudiation. His actions endangered people- simply stopping for petrol could, and would, have spread the coronavirus to people around him. Cummings reported later that he was “testing if his eyesight was ok” by driving to a town nearby- begging the question of how he felt safe to drive 200 miles when first becoming sick with the virus. Had Cummings had an accident whilst driving (likely- as coronavirus can make you extremely unwell and especially at the time), his actions would have spread coronavirus throughout whichever hospital was unlucky enough to take him. The hubris with which Cummings et al. handled this betrayal of the British public did two things: compounded the conservatives ability to simply double down in the face of outrage and disgust, and expedited the collapse of the British public’s trust in the government.

Maitlis confirmed in her speech that her opening remarks on Cummings breaking the rules were met with fury from those at the BBC who supposedly oversee impartiality. Justice is blind, the saying goes, but everyone at the BBC who has failed to step forward is guilty of wilfully covering their own eyes to the facts surrounding a lack of non partisan coverage, throughout the pandemic and in the run- up to the leadership contest in 2019.
Many right wing pundits regularly accuse the BBC of a lack of impartiality but when one side says “be less biased” and the other side said “be more biased”, this is not the battle for impartiality the right claim it to be.

Remember as well, the reaction of conservatives to the BLM protests; back then, how dare people risk the spread of the virus at any cost? How disgusting and disgraceful that this is how the social justice warriors flaunt lockdown- and yet every time a conservative broke the rules, that exception was acceptable. the double standards and division of equals has been driven into an engine shaking overdrive by the tenure of Johnson.
Many of us at the time knew that Johnson’s term would be a disaster- and we cannot blame Johnson for the initial effects of coronavirus, as this was a freak occurrence. What we can do, however, is zoom out: coronavirus does not exist in a vacuum. It’s damaging influence also wrapped tendrils into every other problem the UK was facing. From the continuing ablation of security data leaks via Dido “dataloss” Harding heading up the most vital tool in coronavirus protection and prevention to Governmental backroom dealings were brought to the forefront by the brave actions of Jo Maugham of The Goodlaw Project. Even broader still, the economy was already shaking at the knees prior to the pandemic as businesses shored up their interests against the well known but insidiously unreported effects of a horrendous EU withdrawal agreement. This mess, however, can be laid at the feet of Johnson and his unscrupulous enablers, from Priti Patel who formented an anti EU group long before the referendum was announced, to Lord Frost who- just like tinpot Thatcher-a-like Liz Truss, defected from remain to leave just to taste the winner’s champagne- only to discover those of us shouting poison were correct all along.

Coronavirus no doubt exacerbated many problems faced by the British public, but despite being its own distinct illness, coronavirus and its subsequent mishandling was merely a symptom of the long-term disease British people have unknowingly suffered from for many years- governmental malfeasance.

Truss, Sunak and post-Johnsonism

The liar, the switch and the million pound wardrobe

The most insidious aspect to hiring Johnson on as prime minister was the tacit acceptance of the normalisation of political lying. Johnson’s duplicity was “priced in” we were told, better to have a disgusting truth twister as PM who could bluster his way into every situation that came up and leave wreckage behind, because at least he has funny hair and makes us laugh?
The country is in shambles, in every possible way it can be- Johnson cleaved a divide in the nation through nationalist rhetoric, polluting the nature of pride in Britain- it was wrong to be proud of Britain for being multicultural and diverse, wrong to be proud of our progressive steps towards acceptance of the LGBT+: the only thing to be proud of was Britishness itself. So long as you help your bloo passport up high and kept quiet about the ever decreasing living conditions you passed the tory test and were welcomed into the fold as a true patriot, glibly accepting the country’s decline whilst denying the evidence of your eyes.

Who cares if your rivers are suffused with human offal, it’s BRITISH offal…

And what has that led to? Johnson’s eventual ousting has left us with two choices:
Rishi Sunak, a man who has been variously seen to disparage working class people as roundly as his other colleagues, a chancellor whose short sighted stabbings at sense have decimated the economy that, as aforementioned, was already bowing under pressure, a person whose moral fibre is falling apart because he committed the same open transgressions against the British people as Johnson did during lockdown.
And Liz Truss, a woman who has never stuck to a point she didn’t hear cheers for, a woman who changes her allegiance like some people change shoes. Truss has been widely derided in every position she’s been in- known as the “inequalities minister” down the corridors of Whitehall because she’s done not one useful thing for LGBT+ people during her long tenure- except for trying to sneak the LGB alliance, now deemed a hate group in Northern Ireland, in the back door to replace the LGBT council she dissolved out of spite when they criticised her.
When sent to the UN to hold talks with Russia about its assault on Ukraine, Truss managed to infuriate Russia so much that it was rumoured they stepped up their alert on nuclear weaponry and laid the explanation of why squarely at Truss’ lack of diplomatic skill.

The shadow of Johnson looms still over the country, dampening the light of truth- but in the dimness, puppets like Truss and Sunak have been able to fester, and so we end up here. Their normalisation of lying is enabled at every step by tory rags like the express, whose front page today (Thursday 25th August 2022) Tells us that we all must suffer because it helps Ukraine in the war: Make no mistake that our suffering is a political choice by a party so consumed with self masturbatory leadership hustings that they think we can wait until they’ve settled on which head of the hydra gets to speak.

The leadership battle has shown another crack in the conservative armour- so eager they are to blame social justice for the ills of the nation, that they overlook their 12 year tenure; if anyone is responsible for the culture of a country it is the leaders of it, especially when they have had almost 13 years now to address it…

The UK is dying- Scotland wants to leave, Wales will seek to leave, Ireland even hopes to reunify. And still there are those amongst us desperate to cling to the long-dead conservative ideology. Starmer appears to have won back those who defected to tory in 2019 and whilst many of my fellow lefties see this as an indictment on Starmer and his stances (and whilst you may have validity in some of your criticisms) there is no doubt that traditional conservatism has a certain brand of popularity in the UK, and that brand has long since failed to be offered by this iteration of the Conservative party.
Johnson’s (and soon Truss or Sunak’s) cabinet is crammed full of the sort of political ne’er do wells whose entire ideology rests on the accurate recitation of the party line. Not one tory has actually had the courage to draw a line in the sand since Christian Wakeford defected to Labour. I have my own issues with Wakeford simply because he was who he was and did what he did prior to his defection. But every single conservative sat on those benches has been taught, like hell’s own choir, to sing in tune for their supper, to repeat the same tired lines about levelling up, about getting Brexit done, about getting on with the job or the vaccine rollout- to gulp the oxygen in the room and strangle any talk to the contrary, and in doing so they have imbibed every other egregious fiction the upper level of the party have spat out.

Every tory is as guilty as the wordsmiths for their failure to condemn Johnson and Truss’ dismissal of working class brits, every single MP on those benches is culpable for the mass death and ongoing trauma and misery the UK face with the coronavirus pandemic (and no doubt monkeypox). And every person who continues to spiral in tighter and tighter turns to deflect the constant patter of criticisms of this government, wears the badge of dishonour Johnson tore for himself from the ragged material of the Union Jack he so vehemently claims to stand for.

Restricting your rights

Would a prime minister confident in their ability to discharge this oft-fabled “will of the people” feel the need to force through strict curtailment of protest rights?
It seems to me that it simply would not occur to a decent prime minister that he, she or they would have to safeguard against an uprising of people furious at their malfeasance. And yet that is what Johnson and his lieutenant Patel did- despite the open fury at the legislation (I myself attended no less than five protests specifically about the injustice) of the Police Crime Courts and sentencing bill, they kept pushing until the Lords accepted that it was merely- what was the phrase? Ah yes, “priced in” as the cost of a tory government, that UK Citizens should have a tightening of the restrictions on their ability to protest.
Tory supporters would and should have felt a frisson of horror at their government placing these collars around their necks, but were too busy pointing and laughing as it was fit around ours- but a government doing a good job does not waste time debating legislation around whether it’s people can protest or not, because a good government isn’t protested against.

The fact is- the tories aren’t wrong when they look with distain upon some of us. Because a disturbing chunk of voters wilfully crossed that box, gave the tories their assent that this was the status quo they wanted. They were tired of listening to experts so they hired on a government of headline grabbing louts, affair having, law breaking, contract stealing, rights curtailing scum. And some of them have at last woken up- not that they’d admit that we were right all along, no, they’re convinced that swapping Johnson for one of his lessers will improve things, but Truss is as inept as Johnson and much worse with her verbiage and Sunak is just as likely to lie and fall back on culture war garbage to distract from his unfunnily laughable performance: and still yet, behind these folk are the worst- those who still believe wholeheartedly that the conservatives are the best choice for us, that the continually obvious evidence of poor governmental management is just because of social justice and equality even with a huge Conservative majority and compliant media. These people are stupid. And frankly I am tired of capitulating to them, giving in to their ongoing foghorn yells that they are oppressed because they are asked to look critically at the state of the UK and take ownership of it. You are not oppressed, you are not on “the winning team”- because of you we all lose, and those of us who aren’t stupid, who don’t buy into culture war drudgery and the continued propagandist push to accept lacklustre government are sick and tired of having to baby a population of UK citizens unwilling to accept that their ideology was always a shibboleth for the small minded, xenophobic bigots to gain and maintain power.

You made your bed, we warned you it was full of glass- don’t complain to us about your cuts.

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.

Knives at Dawn: The Attack on the ECHR

By Daviemoo

Following the public emasculation of the much reviled “Rwanda plan”, a very neutral name for a plan to ship refugees thousands of miles away, the right wing and its dogs of war have immediately mounted an attack on the ECHR, the European Convention on Human Rights. The very fact that its name contains EUROPE seems to intrinsically link this organisation with the EU and has therefore drawn the well worn ire of brexiteers who cannot hear the word Europe without brimming with detestation. But what IS the ECHR, why was it formed and what is its purpose… and why is this attack from the right deeply troubling?

Origin

At the end of World War Two the world was reeling from endless atrocities, both well publicised and kept away from the mainstream for various reasons and Winston Churchill, along with several other states, realised that there must be an overarching accountability for human rights protections that extends beyond states. Though Churchill is rightly a controversial figure now, this need to create a council to protect human rights at a Europe-wide level was a master stroke in accountability for the protection of individual rights and, indeed, group rights. Thus was born the ‘Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms’.

Since 1949, a scant few years after the end of the war, the ECHR has overseen judicial decisions to ensure that human beings in countries under its membership- not citizens, simply persons within these countries- are treated with dignity, humanity and that their individual rights are respected.

The ECHR has overseen many different fundamental rights, listed on its’ own site, but shortlisted here:

the right to life (Article 2)
freedom from torture (Article 3)
freedom from slavery (Article 4)
the right to liberty (Article 5)
the right to a fair trial (Article 6)
the right not to be punished for something that wasn’t against the law at the time (Article 7)
the right to respect for family and private life (Article 8)
freedom of thought, conscience and religion (Article 9)
freedom of expression (Article 10)
freedom of assembly (Article 11)
the right to marry and start a family (Article 12)
the right not to be discriminated against in respect of these rights (Article 14)
the right to protection of property (Protocol 1, Article 1)
the right to education (Protocol 1, Article 2)
the right to participate in free elections (Protocol 1, Article 3)
the abolition of the death penalty (Protocol 13)

As you can see from the list, the ECHR is not simply extant to meddle in country affairs; it exists to add a veil of accountability overarching that of government: something which, in normal times, the law does too- but we are not in normal times.

The prime minister himself has broken the law and, but for a £50 fine, escaped punishment. The government as an entity seeks to undermine the NI Protocol which could destabilise the uneasy peace in Ireland and has already led to huge issues across the length and breadth of the UK.
The reason this is so concerning? The law of the land won’t hold the conservatives back from their degradation- but the ECHR just has…

The “Rwanda Plan“

The plan to ship refugees off to Rwanda is sick, jingoistic and appeals only to those people who think that genuflecting the Union Jack is the essence of patriotic behaviour, rather than trying to improve the land on which it’s flying. Claims from the likes of Priti Patel that it will deal with traffickers are laughable: those desperate to flee to the UK are not going to be put off by threats of further deportation at tax payers expense- they are regularly fleeing war zones, atrocities, mass murder, truly authoritarian governments, rape, war…

Patel has shown herself to be reductive and appeal to the likes of the above before (we’ve all seen that interview where she defends the death penalty even for innocent people)- but I refuse to believe she does not understand how ridiculous a policy like this is. If you want to stop people crossing the channel unsafely: make safe passage.
Were it possible for refugees to apply for asylum from outside the UK, were it possible for them to travel here safely and be met safely to be processed, were the processing times quicker, the process more humane- this would completely depower traffickers at source. They rely on fear and lack of option. Offer options. Unfortunately, “make it easier” doesn’t read well with those who would read the Daily Mail or the Express with beady eye. They fear a tsunami of people suddenly deciding they don’t like where they are who would flood to the UK’s “easy” immigration system. It wouldn’t happen. Those desperate to flee would continue to flee, they just wouldn’t die on dinghies at sea any more.
But this is the essence of why Patel and her slowly marching army of gormless nationalists are so heinous- and why the “Rwanda plan” is so ineffectual. She knows this. And she does it anyway.

Additionally, as we spiral further into runaway cost of living the indescribable cost of the Rwanda plan boggles the mind. The UK taxpayer is footing the bill for an ineffective, inhumane and racist policy – and a worrying portion of the UK taxpayer wants it.
To those who believe this policy is in any way useful may I remind you that immigration is a complex topic that takes years to understand and glancing through the pages of 3 newspapers that are written simply enough for fourteen year olds to be adept in their verbiage may not actually give you the nuance and expertise you think.

Colin Yeo speaks eloquently on immigration regularly and has pointed out the ugliness of the UK’s immigration system including the fact that it is, in essence, designed to off-put people from staying in the UK, even with legitimate interests like work or family- so if the system works against the so called “legal” migrants, the people we want to attract to the UK like doctors and nurses, like those who will do the menial jobs so many here believe they’re above, imagine how poorly it treats those who we supposedly don’t want to come here.

The reason the Rwanda plan is so heinous is that at its core it carries the strong reminiscence of cattle trucks; packing up the meat to send it to the factory, knowing the whole time what its’ fate is and doing it anyway. Rwanda has faced criticism for its poor human rights record: Patel didn’t even bother to rebuke this but other tory ministers described Rwanda as a country that respects human rights.

Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people living in Rwanda face legal challenges not experienced by non-LGBT residents…No special legislative protections are afforded to LGBT citizens, and same-sex marriages are not recognized by the state, as the Constitution of Rwanda provides that “only civil monogamous marriage between a man and a woman is recognized”. LGBT Rwandans have reported being harassed, blackmailed, and even arrested by the police under various laws dealing with public order and morality.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_rights_in_Rwanda

Brave Rwandans are working to overturn the attitude towards LGBT+ people in Rwanda but this, as we know, takes time and can turn on a dime- since author JK Rowling began her descent into anti trans rhetoric we have seen a huge and disturbing increase in anti LGBT+ hate crime in the UK, not wholly the fault of Rowling but, many consider, as a byproduct of her huge platform normalising hatred against those from the group.

The real plan?

One suspects that the government always knew that the ECHR would intervene in the deportation of these poor souls to Rwanda, and that they hoped for these events so they could mount an effective case for pulling the UK out of the ECHR. They haven’t been deterred from their assault on our human liberties so far, or that of those who come from abroad- but this government are determined to lessen the scrutiny they face and leaving the ECHR would do just this. In conjunction with Dominic Raab’s quest to water down the Human Rights Act to his own liking, it takes a few steps back to see an overarching picture of a government, fervent in its desire to leave the EU to avoid the scrutiny of Brussels, who has placed a blanket of silence on its own citizens ignoring poll after woeful poll about the prime minister’s standing, who have effectively strangled the right to protest and now who wish to leap straight for the throat of our own home grown human rights (protest, voting and voter ID), and those protected by the ECHR. That in conjunction with privatising channel 4 for the crime of speaking critically of them shows a worrying pattern of desperation to avoid oversight in any form.

I frequently find myself rolling my eyes at the endless comparisons to Nazi rhetoric bandied about by others who are deeply entrenched in political discourse, but once you do move back from the rapid heartbeat pulse of daily drudgery pushed by the conservatives through the media- but one cannot underestimate the simple fact that regular citizens under regimes past must have been raising increasing alarms as the swirling and nebulous tendrils of authoritarianism descended through the streets, taking their voices and binding their hands. It is far too easy to wonder as we look around right now, what the endgame for the conservatives is- whether they simply wish to rule on high, pockets fat with tax money from a pliant farmyard of poor folk beneath who cannot speak for fear of reprisals.

Remember this: you are not the government fat cats shirking laws with no recompense. You are not the prime minister dodging from crisis to crisis and refusing to step down out of vapidity or stupidity or some confection of both. Those refugees, strapped to boards and placed, terrified, on an airplane to be sent thousands of miles are you, and there, but for the grace of God and the ever evanescing morality of the tory party, goes you.

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.

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Governmental ineptitude at your expense

But what IS patriotism?

We Deserve Better.

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BBC Bias & the mishandling of COVID

Truss, Sunak and post-Johnsonism

Restricting your rights

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Origin

The “Rwanda Plan“

The real plan?

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