470. Bits of Bonkers Britain…

This week some random thoughts from the past couple of weeks…

Tone-Deaf Coronation

We're getting used to the commercial world and even the celebrity universe being more in-touch with the public mood than establishment figures hence brands often moving away from toxic situations before politicians/figures of state have got their ducks in a row.

So, it will be interesting now that big names Adele, Sheeran (and a growing list of other glitterati)  have reportedly turned down the 'honour' of performing at the inappropriately lavish coronation.

Sounds like it will be as literally tone deaf as it is socially tone deaf.

 

Tony Blair and the Amnesia Aftershave

Does Tony Blair's aftershave contain an amnesia inducing chemical?

When Putin illegally invaded Ukraine - a few brave souls pointed out the similarities between Putin's invasion and the horrific Blair/Bush Iraq adventure.

A year on in Putin's nightmare and Blair is schmoozing comfortably in top circles and having his utterances on multiple subjects reported like a normal person by the mainstream UK media 

Why?

Sunak Sans Boussole

As two spectacularly disastrous, failed ex-prime ministers haunt the dark corners of the Tory Party one thing is clear, Rishi Sunak is a nobody PM leading a nothing party and taking the country nowhere...

This week our desperate school prefect is seeking a pat on the head for shaping the turd his party dumped with his 'Windsor Protocol' attempting tidy the Boris NIP mess.

 

Tawdry Tories

It’s a tired and wearying kind of fun – even at Christmas – the ubiquitous pantomime. All that ‘oh yes you did’ and ‘he/she’s behind you’. But its February and the tawdry Tory pantomime is refusing to leave town.

Johnson the clown and the hideous panto dame Truss are still hanging about in the wings not realising their season is over. Gurning like lunatics behind Sunak’s lifeless principle boy, they screech inappropriately, completely unaware that their bad blonde toxic presence is way past its sell-by date. 

The audience have left the building. The props are looking tatty in the daylight. There is rubbish everywhere and we’re well into the new dark reality they’ve not yet accepted.

Is there anything left to add except – gerroff  and  BOOOOOOOOH!

 

Why is Britain only interested in sex equality when it’s detrimental to women?

In just over a year’s time I will qualify for my bus pas here in Scotland. If retirement ages had remained as they were while I was growing up – I would also be due to retire. Not that I have anything to retire from being what we euphemistically call a ‘struggling writer’ with no pension.

But years ago that rug was pulled from under women’s feet. That sense of a little bit back for the low pay and the taking the domestic strain and lack of promotion and remuneration which never seems to have evened out.

Long gone are my dreams that Britain would be so civilised that we’d all work a 4 day week (something recently heralded as hugely successful but unlikely to become mainstream). I imagined retirement ages would fall for all. I especially treasured this idea when my dad died 5 months to the day after he retired having been one of those ‘never a sick day’ kind of guys.

But  I digress

The UK retirement age for women was raised on the basis of equality… Really?

 Somehow all the other stuff that would make things more equal for women are still lagging far far behind.

According to TUC general secretary, Paul Nowak - “Working women deserve equal pay. But at current rates of progress, it will take more than 20 years to close the gender pay gap.

ANOTHER two decades!!!

Then of course there is childcare and promotion barriers in the work place, sexism in the workplace.

On a possibly more trivial note but nevertheless interesting – I was hugely entertained a few years ago when it was ruled that insurance companies could no longer distinguish between male and female drivers when it came to offering discounted premiums.

 Suddenly the judges were all over equality. That the insurance industry is based entirely on risk assessment seems to have been ignored. That women were statistically safer drivers and therefore earned the discount was ignored. We must have equality said the law – and women's premiums went up.

If you don’t see a pattern here I’ll spell it out.

Society can move to equality very sharply if it feeds money into the system and does away with historic rights. We can move to equality if its women whose benefits are withdrawn.

When it comes to equal pay or any of the things that women have been fighting for for decades – don’t hold your breath…

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469. Brexit Britain is bleeding and this government does not care.

Scotland’s SNP is searching for a new leader. Nicola Sturgeon – who in this mess of politics deserves praise for her stoicism - has often been cast as ‘just like the rest’. The press have contorted themselves to draw false equivalence between her and some of the most disastrous leaders the UK has ever seen. I’ve written on this subject before and won’t repeat all but a good example was when then PM Johnson was partying while people died and much was made of Nicola Sturgeon standing up in a public place when had sheen been seated she would have been within covid rules. So a distance (and she is a physically diminutive figure) of a couple of feet. Meanwhile considerable numbers of the Conservative administration seem to have strayed from the law, from decency from morality and from humanity a very long way over a great period of time.

But then corrosive false equivalence in our media is something I’ve also banged on about on this blog. Sturgeon stepped down with dignity. The Conservative conveyor belt of disastrous leaders grinds on.

If proof were needed – and it isn’t – that Johnson is Britain’s down market dull Trump then his unerring instinct for wrecking and wrecking and wrecking would be that evidence.

I’ve nothing but contempt for bronze medallist PM Sunak and his weak as water nonentityness (!) however – in case we forget – there is the country to consider while the years long infighting of our atrocious Tory leaders continues unabated – through disaster, crisis and increasing economic woes.

The machinations of this Tory government become more like interactions of delinquent brats in a playground where the bullies rule because the teachers are AWOL and the little kids are divided, distracted, distraught and too desperate to think straight.

The latest nonsense is Johnson’s intervention associated to the Northern Ireland Protocol. It doesn’t really matter if we understand the intricacies of NIP because I bet my last penny that he doesn’t understand the detail either. Boris de-Brexit Johnson doesn’t care and he has no more interest in the protocol than he had in the detail of Brexit. The lies on the side of the red bus were about disruption and promoting himself – so was the nonsense about an ‘oven ready Brexit deal’ and so is this.

To say that Johnson has form when it comes to creating chaos, deceiving and overweening self-interest is to say fish swim, a bird flies and this big fat wrecking ball lies.

And somehow – somehow – we all – the whole country – all of the UK - those in England and Wales who voted for his Brexit mess and those in Scotland and Ireland who did not, are being dragged behind the monstrous circus of creeps, cretins, corrupt cronies that complete the current crass clowns in the UK Conservative government.

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468. The UK and US showed us that extreme right wing administrations WRECK. Israel completes the picture…

 Even barely contained within the crumbling edifice of 'democracy' the right-wing masquerading as legitimate governments wreak a kind of havoc that is barely comprehensible.

While there was much relief in the West that the Democrats prevailed and there was no second Trump term, only the most naïve believe Biden won as opposed to Trump losing. And following the Jan 6th insurrection that followed, it became clear that Trump not only nearly destroyed the US he has had a long-term destructive influence on the party that enabled him.

Here in the UK it seems only inertia is holding Britain together as 13 years of Tory government has lurched further and further to the right to where now barely a day goes by without scandal and self-harm distracting from real government.  

Our bronze medallist PM, the 3^rd unelected in the space of a calendar year, is gagged and bound by the need to pander to the right wing lunatics - once referred to as "swivel eyed loons" by the weakling David Cameron. Now they hold the reigns of conservatism in the UK. Sunak just appointed the vile thug Lee Anderson as deputy chairman.  Anderson’s opening gambit was a call to bring back hanging for which Sunak lamely rebuked him. Meanwhile we live in a country in both economic and social peril and full denial about the catastrophic effects of the xenophobic wet dream that is Brexit.

And now, if proof were needed of the destructive force of extreme right-wing politics in the 21st century with its aggressive greed, hatred of ‘other’ and narcissistic lack of self-awareness, we have Israel.

Netanyahu sold his soul to the far right wing in a desperate attempt to maintain power and avoid legal peril. He and they are now operating beyond any bounds of real democracy and decency openly planning to politicise the judiciary – the last bastion of any civilised administration. Despite 6 weeks of protest there is no let up.

Yes, we’ve seen in the UK and the US the extreme right destroy themselves and we can only pray that the right in Israel similarly implode but my God – the damage they do to decency and democracy and ordinary folk in the process…

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because its relevant - an old doodle - 

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467. A guy with a leaky bucket of water is more likely to extinguish a raging fire than the one with the empty petrol can and the burning torch… Whatever the latter says.

The UK government has reached the point of nuclear delusion and confusion.

Nowhere was this clearer than on the weekend loony tunes where the boot-lickers are sent out to test the media and public response to the latest ego trip.

The lunchtime news on the BBC featured idiot on legs John Redwood ( it was radio so I cannot vouch for the presenter having kept a straight face) explaining that the problem of last October's fiscal horror show was not that Liz Truss singlehandedly tanked the economy, the issue is that we need to be – and I quote “more cheerful”.

In the pattern of Trump and Johnson – Lizz Truss hovers above reality buoyed by the the hot air of her own self-importance, mad delusions, vanity and deeply needy stupidity.

A modest estimate for the utterly failed Conservative and shortest serving PM is that in the few weeks she held that post (and remember there was a  hold on her implementation of her master plan because of the death of the queen)  it was widely reported by RF economists among others that her irresponsible budget (for which she sacked her chancellor) cost the UK economy a massive £30bn - The Guardian 

Following the kinds of figures wasted by the Johnson administration via erstwhile reality TV star and vomit inducing philanderer Matt Hancock – dealing out useless contracts to mates during what was for the rest of us a national covid crisis – the sum of £30bn may seem minor. However, while the country is embroiled in conflict and strikes with everyone from nurses to teachers and train drivers desperately trying to make some match between their over-stretched wages and the tanking economy – these figures matter - at least in the real world.

According to her weekend article in the Boris-de-Brexit Johnson ever supporting paper – The Telegraph – it was poor Lizzie who was badly done to. She wasn’t given a chance. Frankly if she could do that much damage in a month and a half – what might she have achieved in terms of paving the way to Armageddon if she’d been allowed to run til Christmas? 

But shame and failure and the suffering of others are as nought in the 21^st century Tory party. You can be a tax dodger (Zahawi) and get appointed to cabinet – you can be a bully and remain in cabinet (Patel and Raab) you can party while your voters die (Johnson and Sunak) you can dish out gongs to those who help slide money your way (Johnson) etc etc etc and still think you are entitled to the prestige and remuneration of high public office

In their idea of ‘balance’ the media – and especially the BBC will usually throw in a rhetorical question about Labour’s fitness for office after reading out the latest Conservative catastrophes and its lousy useless corrupt, uncaring and criminally negligent administration. The questions form along the wobbly lines of ‘what would Labour do’? ‘would Kier Starmer be better’ and so on and so on.

For someone who will – again – vote for Scottish Independence so therefore has no skin in the game – I have to say that this question is like asking if a guy with two buckets of water will stand a better chance of extinguishing the inferno than the guy standing there with the empty petrol can and the burning torch…

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And because it seems very relevant right now here is an old post that seems more relevant than ever - British boarding schools breed posh sociopaths 

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