319. Edinburgh's' Tree Travesty

Like many concerned people who have been banging on about climate and environmental devastation for decades, the upsurge of action by young folk, spear-headed by the inspiring Greta Thunburg, has raised my hopes.

That is, until you look at pictures like this one

This is just one of a pathetic handful of saplings planted after the stretch of The Water of Leith at the International Murrayfield BT sports stadium underwent extensive ‘flood management’ required because of years of poor/no management. The entire stretch was denuded of established trees and shrubs. There are wild flowers maturing now but flowers are not trees. In the wake of local protest at the wholesale wipe out of the trees, a handful of small specimens were sparsely planted at wide intervals. Some were vandalised. Some died. Some are malformed because the original supports have never been revisited or attended to.

Generally the pathways are less safe since being tarmacked (I can attest to this having been knocked over by a speeding cyclist) and many choose to walk down by the river along an area that used to support many nesting birds but which does not now as the fence was removed and the dogs chase the birds. When it’s hot like it was over the weekend, the stench of warm dog shit overrides everything else.

Here in Edinburgh, local and national government make as much noise about climate concern as anyone. A couple of years ago, after touring the peice around Edinburgh schools, I was invited to the Scottish Parliament for Environment Week to read extracts from my environmental poetry story Casey & the Surfmen – which charts the progress of a solitary child who eventually spearheads a mass movement to defeat those destroying the land. Spoiler alert – they are successful Casey & the Surfmen audio . But just months after I performed Casey, I had another piece of writing to do. A letter of mine was published in the papers concerning Edinburgh council’s vandalising act of cutting down 50 trees directly in front of Waverly Station to make way for the annual Christmas tourist tat Trees v Tourist Tat Included in that letter was a reference for Edinburgh University which cut down mature trees at Potterrow to create a blank, grey, treeless wasteland. More trees were cut down in front of the church where the new shopping centre surrounding John Lewis is being erected. Yes – another huge shopping mal – just like in the Casey story

Many schools – like the ones local to me – are built by roads regularly clogged with stationary traffic during the school run. And I’ve had run-ins with parents churning up verges and damaging vegetation with their huge cars because their little darlings must not be made to walk more than 3 inches to the school entrance. Those same parents, I always assume, like their children to be able to breathe oxygen.

Equally there seems an epidemic of people cutting down mature trees in their gardens, ditto hedges which are a haven for wildlife in suburban areas – and replacing them with the dead wood of fences. When those fences eventually rot they have to be replaced by cutting down more trees to replace the wood. And let’s not even get started on those covering over patches of ground with plastic grass because no sane person can get their head around that one.

There is much talk of saving the environment but little evidence of joined up thinking.

I mention Edinburgh only because I live here and I love living here but this makes me sad especially as I know it is echoed across the UK.

318. The Peasants Revolt 1381 v The Pathetic Peasants 2019

Why don’t the revolting peasants ever successfully revolt?

If you don’t read The Independent or The Guardian – both papers published my latest letter – it gives an indication of my thinking for this week’s post -

Dear Editor,

The most depressing element of the extracts from David Cameron’s almost apology for Brexit in his apology for a book, is that it clearly shows us that Westminster is being run like the 6^th form common room of an exclusive private school for exceptionally privileged, out of touch, spoiled boys.

Basically – the architect of the famously badly thought out referendum of 2016 – posh boy and pig-head poker (see last week’s blog) - David Cameron, has chosen now – the time of peak pain – to promote his memoirs. And – in case you haven’t rushed out and bought a copy – he is just whining on about how the other posh boys didn’t play the way he wanted them to. Hence my letter.

But my question – and it’s as old as the hills – is why WHY when the rich and powerful are shafting the ordinary folk do the arrogant, entitled elite often find they most avid support in those at the bottom of the pile? Why does divide and rule work as well now as it did in 1381. In case your history is hazy – in the summer of 1381 a certain Thomas Baker (well done Bakers everywhere) sparked a revolt against – among other things – serfdom and the poll tax. In just a matter of weeks, armies of peasants and artisans had marched on London and successfully demanded reform. Their leader Wat Tyler – who had – for an erstwhile roofer – a rather sophisticated understanding of politics of the time – ended up in a head to head with  the ruling elite and at the very last moment when push came to shove (literally) his crew failed spectacularly to support him. He was stabbed in the neck and the mob rounded up because at the moment of ultimate decision they chose to trust in the 14 yr. old king and not in the man who actually was one of them and had their interests at heart. Fast forward to Brexit and I see absolutely no difference. Many at the bottom of our current social pile and who will suffer most from the economic collapse due to Brexit are some of the most vociferous supporters of the posh boys who brought it all about. It makes NO SENSE.

In a contemporary Britain where honours aren’t worth having (ref Sir Philip Green) and lying and racism are not a bar to high office (Boris Johnson) and you can stay in high office even when, as Foreign Secretary, your response to murder on British soil was to tell the Ruskies to “shut up and go away” (Gormless Gavin Williamson) nothing makes sense. Plus if the former Brexit secretary Dominic Raab – who admitted that he didn’t understand the importance of the Dover to Calais trade route while he was in that office can be promoted again (education secretary) and if Westminster can tell an entire country (Scotland) that the only way they can stay in the EU is to vote to remain in the UK and then force them to leave the EU on the most damaging terms imaginable (Indy ref 2014 + Brexit 2019) and another country (Ireland) that voted overwhelmingly to remain in the EU can have its security and economic stability thrown to the wolves by a government of half-baked lunatics (this one)  that neither cares or understands Ireland  - why don’t we just abolish Parliament (Oh Johnson already did that) and share out any money we find down the back of the speaker’s chair (when he’s finished bullying, sweating and pontificating in it) and all have a bag of chips before the ship goes down?

There are working class Brexit supporters in England right now who genuinely believe that an elitist git like Jacob Rees-Mogg has their interests at heart in all this.

It must be a matter of psychology. 

At the end of the day – the half-soaked, incompetent, delusional, venal, narcissists who now fill the top jobs are entirely convinced that they are entitled to be there and, just like the mediaeval kings, somehow, they managed to convince enough peasants to keep them there. Until that mind set can be altered we will always be at the mercy of posh, inadequate charlatans like Boris Johnson and well-meaning but useless, mentally insufficient also-rans like David Cameron.

As I said in a letter that has not (yet) been printed - 

If, tomorrow, Boris Johnson decided that his personal best interests and chance of remaining in the top job meant lighting a fart with the Magna Carta – he’d do it.

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If you bought my new comedy novel (see last week’s post) THANK YOU. And if you are in Edinburgh on October 9^th – you might like this especially as it’s NOTHING TO DO WITH BREXIT

317. An incontinent hamster. That's how to end this disastrous administration...

Stay with me. You know I make sense eventually.

Have you ever sweated and toiled over something only to discover that there was no need? In fact if you’d made less effort things would have worked out?

Maybe you once slaved over the production of a beautiful, carefully crafted birthday cake for a friend because you were worried their birthday would not be properly celebrated only to arrive at their house and find a table groaning with cream and confectionary – better than yours. Maybe you contracted, at great expense, a building firm to pull down an old dangerous wall only for it to be blown down in the night by an unexpectedly high wind.

Well, here in the UK we have a much more impressive irony at play right now.

The most significant political observation of at least the decade if not the century is that it has taken the most vacant, incompetent, pointless, directionless, ‘leader’ of Labour’s opposition existence to fundamentally break the Conservative party.

Had Labour realised, in the days of Thatcher, that vigorous opposition was not the answer, in fact total lack of opposition was what was needed, they could have saved themselves and the country much heartache and dreadful damage.

It seems that all the Tories needed in order to fall at each other’s throats was a. a ridiculous ill-thought-out referendum and b. a complete lack of leadership of The Opposition. By being an utter failure, Corbyn has done what others failed to do.

Britain is no longer a two party system it is a whose party? mess.

Blair may have destabilised the middle east with an illegal invasion, set off mass migration and thus planted the seeds of the rise of right wing populist nasties and his political tag partner - following on, as the two had agreed and without anything so old fashioned as an election, Gordon Brown - continued the light touch fiscal regulation which helped fuel the 2008 crash – further destabilising an already wobbly system and let in Cameron/Clegg. Ed Miliband stabbed brother David Miliband in the back for the Labour leadership (because by this point British politics was already resembling a mediaeval English court) and failed to realise that a soap opera obsessed British public wouldn’t forgive him for this, thus letting in Cameron clear without the Libs in 2015. Clegg, having lied and crapped on the youth of Britain pissed off to work for Facebook so the porky teller let in porky-poker Cameron who opened the gates to political hell with the 2016 referendum yada yada yada to the pig in a suit himself - Johnson. 

Meanwhile, the Blairites in the Labour Party – not wanting to look undemocratic – added Corbyn to the nomination papers for their next leader and – because he was the ONLY lefty on the ballot at a time when the party were heartily sick of the Blairites - Corbyn won.

The rest as they say is history. Very recent, painful and unpleasant history.

After more than three years of Brexit hell, Corbyn has only recently – and I’m talking days – come to some sort of position on the country’s greatest political crisis since WWII and even that will-o’-the-wisp has already lost form.

Meanwhile – with zero opposition on the opposition benches and Corbyn still apparently stuck in the student common room of the course he never finished – the world moved on without him. More importantly – without an opposition to kick - the Tories started kicking themselves. Maybe kicking is just what they do. They can’t help it. It’s like political Tory Tourette’s.

So, what was needed all along was undiluted incompetence from those supposedly representing the ordinary people of Britain and the Tories, as a party, would be done for.

OF course the question remains how to get them out of government. Not having a majority won’t do it. Three times now they’ve side-stepped that one. First Cameron and Cleggy buddied up in the rose garden then May bought a few DUP dinosaurs. And now Boris Johnson simply shits on democratic protocol.

Maybe the Labour leadership’s incompetence is enough to destroy the Tory party but to finish the job and get them out of office, the next leader of The Labour party needs to be an incontinent hamster…

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And remember – if you need a laugh, my new comedy misadventure novel starring a mixed-race Edinburgh granny (!) and her ‘special set of skills’ is available in e-book or paperback now. Any resemblance to any mixed-race granny you may know living in Edinburgh is purely coincidental...

Sex, Violence & the Wrong Mobility Scooter (UK)

Sex, Violence & the Wrong Mobility Scooter (US)

316. Brexit – 'Tom Brown’s School Days' meets 'Deliverance'…

With Trump descending into obvious madness you’d be hard pushed to think of a more embarrassing developed country of residence than the US – unless you happen to live here in the UK.

Since I took my summer break, that age-old usually rhetorical question ‘can things get any worse?’ has been answered.

Yes.

Definitely yes.

Since my last post, the ghastly time-filler Theresa May who followed Cameron, the pig’s-head-botherer, has been superseded by the pig man himself – Boris Johnson. Not with a proper election obviously. And, because irony loves these kinds of mad situations, strident declarations regarding our constitution and parliamentary democracy are never louder than when the posh boys are wiping their arses with both.

In the premiership of this vile, slippery, privileged conman we have a nightmare scenario where a faux, flaccid, fleshy Flashman from Tom Brown’s School Days meets ‘Deliverance’.

You have to wonder if the Prime Minister’s infamous anti-Muslim, misogynist rhetoric ‘Women in burkas look like post boxes’ is a twisted psychological aversion related to his resemblance to a pig in a suit. Any insult to pigs is unintentional. Always remembering that he sneers at and insults other minority groups too.

There is a dreadful, difficult to watch scene in the iconic 1972 film Deliverance where one of the naive city men is raped by a hillbilly.

During the rape scene the hillbilly exhorts his victim to squeal like a pig. The even more disturbing implication is that the rapist’s early sexual experiences involved the abuse of swine.

We know Boris Johnson was an Eton pal of that alleged pig head poker David Cameron who opened the gates to all this madness.

Yes, we have had un-elected Prime ministers before. Our odd constitution allows for it. However, our ‘soft’ constitution also relies on protocol and those in power understanding the unwritten boundaries. Boris Johnson is not someone who understands any boundaries.

Surely, the most striking thing about Johnson is that he has stepped from one self-made mess to another almost all his public life and always in an upwards direction. In that there is no clearer parallel to his bloated, blonde, hideous counterpart in America. For Trump it was business failure after business failure before becoming the President who rode into the Whitehouse on a self-built reputation for great business.

With Boris Alexander de-Pfeffel Johnson it has been lies upon faux-pas upon misogynistic and racist blunder. Plus – like Trump – a dusting of corruption (The Garden Bridge fiasco).

Johnson’s legendary sacking from his first prominent post as a writer for The Times was for lying. Morally it was all downhill from there in equal measure to his rise to power. And yet the media still play ball and roll over for him as the stupid reporters did outside his home when offered tea in the aftermath of his  nasty anti-Muslim comments. Now the press are covering ‘news’ of his new Downing Street dog…

There have been street protests about his proposed prolonged proroguing of Parliament. Because of his premiership beginning just before summer recess, Johnson could take the UK into a no deal Brexit catastrophe having spent no significant time facing parliamentary scrutiny. He does not care. In fact, like Trump – winding up the ‘nice’ people seems to really rock his boat. Again, like Trump, much about Johnson is fake – the clownishness is well known to be an adopted persona for example. He cares about absolutely nothing but getting his own way.

It is difficult for anyone to know what a pathological liar actually wants. However, the more disturbing reality is that Johnson himself seems sometimes not to know.

Like the scene in Deliverance – just when you think what is occurring in front of your horrified, mesmerised gaze in UK politics cannot get more abhorrent or distressing – we get Boris Johnson. Not the swine abuser but de-Pfeffel the porker himself – abusing the whole of Britain.

Check out my latest letter in The Independent today.

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So – its nice to be back and – Brexit/Trump/Johnson/global-economic-wobbles and climate disasters aside – I hope you are doing well.

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Also – here is a wee treat for you from Edinburgh

Check out my new comedy misadventure novel 

Sex, Violence & the Wrong Mobility Scooter paperback or e-book -

Sex, Violence & the Wrong Mobility Scooter (US)

Sex, Violence & the Wrong Mobility Scooter (UK)

Any similarity to any granny you may or may not know of, living in Edinburgh is purely coincidental…