…just as Trump is trying to kill off his Deplorables?
I cannot understand why Johnson is now working so
hard to kill off his BiFeMs (Bigoted, Feeble Minded Supporters). Just as Trump
is organising mass indoor rallies to help spread covid among his faithful,
Johnson is focused on getting folks queuing outside Primark, flying to
costa-del-puke and back in pubs asap. Never mind that there is no clear
strategy to get state schools working again.
Back a few posts (339) I wrote about some of the
other many things that kill humans much more regularly and in huge numbers and
of which we take very little note. Cars (in terms of road carnage and
pollution) damage to the environment, poverty and curable/treatable diseases
etc etc etc. One of the very few – maybe the only - positives from the pandemic
was the effect on air quality and reduction in pollution. In large part this
was due to the sudden decrease in traffic – road, air and sea.
Much of that traffic was not for business purposes
or any of what we’ve come to term ‘essential’ needs but simply to drive to
shopping centres to buy crap made in modern slavery factories and then to drive
home and do the same the next weekend. Also, to drive to schools instead of
walking, further damaging the health of those in and out of the cars and – to
fly to foreign destinations three times a year to get skin cancer and do more
consuming and pretend that Spain and Portugal were just put there for British
ex-pats to play golf.
Images of morons on cheap flights – fists in the air
like they just defeated the Terminator - were in the popular press and online.
And I cannot work out what they were celebrating.
You’d need to be bigoted or feeble minded to have voted for Brexit and Boris Johnson. Nothing that has occurred since June 2016 has materially altered that view. And you sure would need to be at least feeble minded to regard a cheap flight to a cheap holiday destination as anything even approaching a priority in June 2020.
But – as BJ is exposed as having planned to get an aeroplane
painted with the union jack at a cost to the tax payer of £1m – Chief BiFeM
clearly hasn’t worked out that the very folk he is likely to kill off are his supporters.
Just like Trump putting his deplorables at risk in Tulsa.
Since Gordon Brown’s faux-pas in 2010 calling a bigoted woman a bigot on mic, an inordinate amount of time was spent trying not to upset bigots by calling them bigots. Conversely, repeated efforts were made to paint racist comments – by our now PM - as not racist e.g. when Johnson’s pal Rowan Atkinson came out to defend his inflammatory comments about Muslim women as – ‘just Boris’ - a bit of humour.
It is past time to join up the dots between bigotry, poverty, inequality and ecological disaster. Covid follows a similar pattern and has laid those links bare.
The same people globally suffering most from covid are those who suffer most from the effects of pollution – the poor, the disadvantaged and people of colour- and it’s time to acknowledge that link.
Politics is no longer about left and right. As the runes settle, the new politics is defined by selfishness and stupidity verses compassion and decency.
However, if the selfish/stupid folk – Johnson/Trump
supporters start to realise that some things, like pathogens, cannot be stopped
by a rousing chorus of Rule Britannia - covid may have done us a favour.