Brexit - the greatest contradiction NO ONE has mentioned...

Shortly, MPs of differing persuasions will agree to polish the turd which is Johnson's Brexit deal.

Then Ireland will, de facto, no longer part of the UK.

Surely I’m not the only person in the whole of Britain to notice?

'Deck the Halls with Endless Folly'

 Deck the halls with endless folly

Covid covid covid ni-i-nteeen

Tory mates made lots of lolly

From their profiteering covid scheme.

 

Fast away the old year passes (thank god)

Fa la la la la la la la la 

Healthcare staff are on their arses

Fa la la la la la la la la

 

Sick, unwaged and mired in debt

Fa la la la la la la la la

With a leader most regret

Fa la la la la la la la la

 

Pretty soon it will get worse

Fa la la la la la la la la

Brexit’s coming in a New Year hearse

Fa la la la la la la la laaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaarhg!

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This is another 'Friday extra'. BGOTR posts will be back in January on regular Tuesdays, thanks for reading. Merry Christmas

376. Never in the field of human con tricks...

As we arrive at the inevitable turd pile-up which is the Brexit endgame and the only question remaining (excuse the unintended pun) is whether Britain will be fucked or super-fucked, the hardest part to get your head around is the reality that we’ve been brought here – the whole of the UK – by a lying, cheating, low-grade, low-life con man who has been a well-known public and private wrecker and disaster most of his life.

The delusion element cannot be more clearly demonstrated than that he believes himself to be – not Napoleon – as per the usual stereotype of the nurse-bothering megalomaniac, but Churchill. Now – fan or not of Winston Churchill - the idea that this dithering incoherent blob with less backbone than a slug (no offense to slugs) who has brought Britain to a level of self-harm and catastrophe – in other words, the opposite of the British efforts in WWII -  is beyond satire.

So – as we wearily regard the bad pantomime which is the dying days (again no pun intended) of 2020 and ogle in disbelief at the cabinet of craven, crawling fools that make up Johnson’s enablers, I shall misquote Churchill.

Never in the field of human con-tricks was so much damage done to so many by a deluded few…

Boris Smirch-Swill

 

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Brexit - The Boris Delusion (a limerick from Scotland!)

 

Brexit - The Boris Delusion

We’re a hulled boat near rocks without anchor

Sailed by Boris whose touch is a canker

On a sea of confusion

We’re doomed by delusion

Because he is a useless wee wanker

 

(Yes – I know - being a poet/author , ex- lawyer and English Ba Honours graduate the best I could come up with today was calling Boris Johnson a wanker in a limerick. But we’ve not had a Friday poem for a while and that is just my level today... You can check out my real writing here My BOOKS

And remember, I'm not on any social media but there are still 'share' facilities on this bloggy.

375. Brexit, Thundersnow & a Fish called Boris…

 A fish few Brits actually eat looks set to scupper a Brexit no one actually voted for.

Yes – bigly Boris is heading to Brussels to sort out Johnny foreigner and protect our sovereign right to protect the fishing of herring that, in fact, is largely shipped to Europe.

It is a fitting end to a lunatic debacle where xenophobia, bleating about sovereignty (in a period that saw our sovereign putting a protective ring around her paedo-loving son and the flight of the Royal family’s only black princess, driven out by hideous and blatant racism) and flag waving maxed out.

Jingoistic rhetoric – empty stale and hysterically loud, smashed and drowned out once and for all the already fractured certainties of our lives. It is just one of the reasons – you know the other one - 2020 has felt so tenuous; so like a living nightmare.

Even Leavers didn’t vote for this annihilation; death by dithering, disinterest and delusion. They were told by the screaming, spasming Brexit harridans that leaving our decades-matured, overwhelmingly important and stabilising trade relationship with our nearest neighbours would be easy. The silly flag wavers would get everything (no one was quite sure what that everything was) for giving nothing. Leavers chose to believe that in exchange for some thin rhetoric and ever popular foreigner bashing. The reality is bitching about herring in the dying (excuse the awful dark pun) days of 2020.

Reeling from a year that began with a pandemic ignored for far too long by Boris Johnson, busy as he was congratulating himself that Brexit was “done”, I thought this year had no more unnerving surprises. But last week I got another one.

Like many here in Edinburgh I was woken early on Dec 4^th with a sonic boom caused by Thundersnow. https://youtu.be/uUhaw1oECSs . Maybe it’s the year it’s been or I was tired or we’ve come to expect the apocalypse at any turn – but I did not hear the weird noise and think – oh – an unusual weather event. No. I thought jeez – a building is down or a plane has crashed. I lay still held my breath and waited for sirens. Nothing. Then there was more and I thought it sounded sort of like thunder but not like any thunder I’d ever heard. On learning about Thundersnow the following day, I was pleased to find that my cousin in Canada – where they get a lot more snow than I’ve ever seen – had not heard of it either.

Not understanding the very loud very eerie noise in the early hours of the morning was scary. I do not understand and never have – the loud eerie noises of Brexit either. The thing is Thundersnow turns out to be natural if rare phenomena. Brexit is also rare, like a two-headed goat born dead. Unlike Thundersnow, Brexit will not result in a pretty landscape to wake up to in the morning; it will stink like rotting herring…

 

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374. Why Sunak does not fear Britain’s economic suicide-by-Brexit.

 

In a solid article in The Guardian on Sunday, William Keegan, in his economics column asks

If Rishi Sunak fears for the deficit, why does he back Brexit? The Guardian

 

Sadly, supplying the answer is all too easy. Those who have been baying to unlink from the EU almost since our membership – and yes I know Sunak is too young for that but seems to have imbibed the notion with mother’s milk – have always seen the EU as a regulatory weight around their necks.

 

The British public has been trained by the anti-EU brigade to see all such regulations as inherently bad – in the same basket as all that “PC nonsense”. The reality is that it is bad for those who want to exploit others for profit and not for ordinary people. Doing the right thing has never been a negative for ordinary people.

 

The current crop of Brexit lunatics salivate for a de-regulated society Thatcher could only dream of. And it is worth remembering at this point in the UK’s history when this administration is all about obfuscation, positioning and trying to pre-load our future problems into the overstuffed excuses bin of covid – Brexit – deal or no deal is an economic disaster. Remember – even those clamouring for it did not deny it. It’s just that one of their many many lies was that it would be short-term.

 

Here in the UK we already live in an economy that has seen hard won worker’s rights and standards eroded dramatically. Despite the minimum wage, many workers now have much less job security working on zero hours contracts and for the on-a-shoestring subcontractors of subcontractors whose only goal is profit. Just last week the further horrors of ‘Sir’ Philip Green’s cavalier attitude to workers who make up the Arcadia group has again hit the headlines with MPs pathetically calling for the little shit (click here for  blog 185. ‘Does Sir Philip Green kick disabled orphan kittens in his spare time’) to cough up some of his personal wealth – from plundered pension funds – to be used – well – to fund the pensions of the workers he conned and exploited. Fat chance.

Unless you’ve lived under a rock for the past few decades and believe in Trickle Down Economics (the theory – in brief – that unfettered capitalism leads to economic prosperity with the subsequent economic benefits of increased wealth at the top ‘trickling down’ to the poor!!!) sane observers of global economics have long concluded that huge disparities in wealth have always been an indicator of instability and anathema to healthy ultimately prosperous societies.

 

Decent commentators – like Williamson – query why Brexit is such a wet dream for the wealthy when it will mean economic chaos for the country. But that is because too few still, in this day and age – will accept that economic ruin for the country does not mean economic ruin for the very wealthy. In fact economic ruin for a country whether through war or plague or fiscal collapse means the complete opposite for those at the top. During a depression economic life becomes a smorgasbord of opportunity for the wealthy to get even wealthier. With cheap credit and failed businesses and desperate workers and high unemployment it is literally ‘rich pickings’ by which I mean pickings for the rich. When countries are going economically own the pan, rich people get stinking rich. And if that seems unpalatable – read my last post about those who profiteered (are profiteering) from the covid crisis with the blessing and the cooperation of this very administration.

 

We need to understand that economic success or failure is not the same as prosperity or poverty for ordinary people. So, there is every reason to understand why, while Sunak can claim he worries about the deficit, he is stull gung-ho for Brexit. He and his Tory tribe are rich. Simple.

Sunak and his ilk do not fear the economic suicide of Brexit because vultures are never better off than during a famine…

 

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373. Covid PROFITEERING… Please call it what it is.

 Covid Profiteering seems to be acceptable and accepted in the UK…

December 1778 George Washington said

“No punishment, in my opinion, is too great for the man who can build his greatness on his country’s ruin”

But a couple of hundred years later not a huge amount had changed and wherever there is a crisis in the world you will find someone making money out of other people’s misery – just look at the traffickers pedalling watery graves for grubby money as the world fails and fails again to care for its most vulnerable and displaced.

In 2007 new anti-war-profiteering legislation was implemented in the US following damning evidence that the profiteers were at it again during the Iraq invasion.

And – here we are in the UK in 2020 and the Tory cronies are also at it - profiteering on the back of the misery of a pandemic; being handed £multi-million contracts for equipment that has often not turned up or been fit for purpose. The eye-watering amounts of money handed to them by the very government mishandling the pandemic.

In WWII companies were fined for even minimal profiteering e.g. selling over-priced apples. How times have changed under the Prime Minister who erroneously and preposterously fantasises that he is some sort of latter-day Churchill… Now it is the government not just turning a blind eye to profiteering but sanctioning and facilitating it.

If you think the UK’s monumental failure over covid is through lack of spending – you would be mistaken. Multiple news outlets have covered the facts of the spending. In the first six months of the pandemic here in the UK £18bn was spent, the vast majority with no element of oversight or competition – Yes from the party that thinks of market forces and competition with religious fervour. It is estimated that at least £1.5bn of contracts have gone directly to pals of the Tory party. As the mother of a Doctor who worked in A&E during the first wave and also a midwife – I know that PPE has been a bad joke, a disaster when it could have made a difference in the early days. And it’s no secret that some of those in receipt of these hugely lucrative contracts have no experience in providing such equipment and have nothing whatsoever to do with supplies of the kind required during a pandemic. And that is before you look at appointments like those of ‘Dido’ Harding whose only qualification for her appointment as head of the UK’s Test and Trace programme seems to have been that she is married to a Tory MP. In case you missed it – Test and Trace in the UK has been a complete and utter and is an ongoing monumental FAILURE.

Yes this has been turned over in the press. Everyone knows it’s going on but we are almost inured to it. If I had to describe the collective response to the inevitable news that friends of the Tory party with no relevant experience have been handed massively lucrative government contracts it would be a sort of collective weary shrug. Some of these covid contracts make the Brexit contract – the one given to the ferry company (by – then transport minister Chris Grayling) with no ferries, look modest and well considered.

But where is the outrage? During WWII many thought the penalty for profiteering while troops were dying should have been the most severe – well what is the difference now. Innocent ‘civilians’ and front line workers have died. Are dying. Even the press have been mealy mouthed about it. Search the headlines and you will find phrases like ‘chumocracy’ lots of references to ‘cronyism’. It doesn’t really cover it does it. Is that because we are beyond shock? We kind of expect it. And politics is all about managing expectations – well, we have none where Tory morality is concerned. OR maybe it is because the upper echelons of the media in the UK also operate the ‘chumocracy’ and it’s really difficult to come down hard on a system you subscribe to.

We must outlaw profiteering from human crises and not just the specific crisis of war. It must include the profiteering of being promoted to a post one is wholly unsuited to or qualified for as that is simply profiteering through another door. But who would need to bring that legislation in? Oh yes, the government currently facilitating the profiteering…

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372. Trump, Johnson (Bolsonaro?) & the Duvet of Failure…

 Boris Johnson’s premiership, what with holidays, proroguing and just general absenteeism is not so much Hide & Seek as Hidden & Weak…

It’s too disgusting even by Johnsons’ low, low standards. Illegally cancelling Parliament last year. Preparing to hide behind a previously unknown post of US style press secretary is not enough. Hiding behind his girlfriend when the excuses start coming out re the exit of Dominic Cummings – while convenient for a gullible press is just crap. But now he’s hiding from reality and handy enough – the pandemic he has failed and failed and failed to manage has provided him with the cover just as time runs out. Yes, as the “oven ready” Brexit ‘deal’ turns to a blackened crisp before our eyes, the shyster extraordinaire is away and self-isolating because he appears, like Dominic Cummings, not to have followed his own government's guidelines.

Maybe he is as aware as any that the populist bubble is well and truly deflating. Trump hid behind inept lawyers like Rudy Giuliani when he lost the US election. Johnson is in hiding again (sorry – self isolating) now that we have less than a week to come up with a deal in time to be ratified by the EU. Will Bolsonaro be the next lying, womanising, populist, covid-disastrous leader to head for the Duvet of Failure now that he has done badly in local elections?

You couldn’t make it up (making things up is – of course – Johnson’s specialty).

Cumming’s has departed and good but it is not the shock the media says it is nor is it – as The Telegraph tried to spin it – evidence of Johnson’s masterful leadership. Here’s what I said about a Cummings departure in post 357 August 4th 2020

I do not dispute that Cummings was the cynical brain behind Johnson’s election and has done the leg work since but the idea that he was not expendable to a lifelong member of the Tory club was preposterous. How convenient, now that it’s time to change gear in the light of the White House loony bin being cleared out, for the lunatics and incompetents in Westminster to have Slender Man to hang out to dry for a gullible public and sluggish media.

It’ so predictable that if it weren’t for the fact Johnson’s delusions, vacuity and low grade grubby corruption and his government’s gross incompetence, cronyism and dishonesty is actually costing lives, it would be boring…

But never mind. Never mind the Brexit we have because the likes of Johnsons made EU bashing a personal hobby for decades. Never mind that the lies that brought us the 2016 result (and the fear of Farage) are now playing out during a pandemic – which should have seen a reverse of this self-harming nonsense. Never mind that at the start of ‘all this’ Johnson was too busy trying to hide the fact that the latest daughter/partner was pregnant while he shuffled to get rid of the wife in remission from Cancer. Never mind all that. He will not clear up the mess and – like the spoiled brat he truly is, he is in hiding now that there is less than one week to find a settlement with the EU in time for ratification. Cummings and Johnson have dropped their turd pile and now they are going to sit back and watch the mess spread and stink and rot Britain.

Rat-ification – new meaning – what Boris Johnson does.

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371. Biden’s job is the same as mine…

… so hold your nose Papa Joe.

Relief. That is what we all felt – the sentient decent people. If relief gave way to anything it was a kind of wonder that this old guy had also done something SO radical as carrying with him the first woman of colour (as the Americans say) to the position of VP in the midst of some of America’s most hideous racial monstrosities this century. Here in the UK, the left-of centre party hasn’t even managed a non-white leader and they did have the chance a couple of years ago as Labour leadership in Scotland was up for grabs. They chose a grey, grey Corbyn shadow when they could have had Anas Sarwar... 

However, Biden has an uphill task and I know exactly what it’s going to be like because he’s going to be doing my job.

Prior to Boris Johnson’s DISASTROUS handling of covid (and remember we were already in the deepest of deep doo doo because of Brexit) I was scraping a living I enjoyed as a writer and performer. Like a lot of creative folk, I’ve had not a sniff of work since March when my 2020 gigs/festivals were cancelled and not likely to have any in the near future.  So, a couple of months ago I took a cleaning job.

I like my cleaning job. Early morning walks while the air is not entirely choked with diesel fumes and a physical job in an empty building really helps work out the mind mess that is living in the UK right now. It’s like going to quiet gentle gym 5 mornings a week but getting paid minimum wage for the privilege and with no need for the ridiculous lycra.

However, someone, on Sunday afternoons in the mens' toilet – behaves like a demented tyrannosaurus with norovirus that has consumed its weight in exploding beans. More than once I’ve gone into the men’s loos on my Monday morning shift to find turd apocalypse. I’m talking cubicle walls, floor, toilet bowl – ok, I’ll stop there. 

The point I’m making is that brilliant as it is that Papa Joe is President-elect he sure has a job on his hands. I struggled for four years to believe that a nasty piece of crap like Trump could be anyone’s idea of a leader but that morphed into feeling that he could not be got rid of, like dried-on mess on a cubicle wall.

When Biden enters the White House after Trump, I suspect it’s going to be the political equivalent of my Monday morning experiences…

Go Joe. You can do it…

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370. Biden or Trump - “Cake or Death?”

‘Cake or Death’ is a wonderful line and style-defining moment from an old Eddie Izzard stand-up comedy routine.

The beautiful simplicity of the humour of the line is the underlying assumption that this is a non-question. No one in their right mind would choose the latter if the former were the only alternative. Even if you’re not, like me, convinced that cake is the answer to all ills, surely you’d choose cake over death.

So why are we all (by ‘we all’ I mean the sentient people, the decent folk and the ones who have been paying attention for the last 4+ years) so very very nervous about the outcome of today’s US election?

Because we cannot bring ourselves to believe that, in the showdown between the decent Joe Biden and the, literally deadly Trump, the US electorate will choose Cake…

I’m too sick with worry to form a full blog post this week – here’s an old cartoon from seemingly centuries ago when we thought Trump’s worst idea was a wall across the Mexican border…

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369. Greece here we come…

Back in the annals of this blog (post. 239) at about the time Theresa May was hooking up with the DUP to force through a Brexit deal which wasn't quite as bad as the one we are about to end up with, I outlined how easy the drop from global cultural, social, military, intellectual and economic power to national has-been. How dizzyingly steep the slippage from a premier league functioning state to a basket case. Like Greece (sorry Greece). The difference being that the UK managed it in about two decades rather than centuries.

Your ‘decline pivot point’ may vary. Certainly if you look at the improvements in the lives of British working people post-WWII, you’d say the decline, the crushing of those hard-won rights and improvements, began with Thatcher. Ironically, the Iron Lady was mad and dangerously destructive but not stupid. She was pro- remaining in the EU.

However – as shorter memories are a feature of modern public life, if one discounts the Thatcherite selling off of the national family silver as the very start of the rot (I don’t) then maybe take the illegal invasion of Iraq? Yes – that old chestnut. Undoubtedly the contemporary world has never been the same and devastating illegal invasions never look good on countries that go around the globe claiming to be morally superior to others. Plus of course – as I repeatedly mention on this blog (I’m sorry if reality bores you) it destabilised the Middle East and led to ISIS and yada yada yada.

But if you want to know not when the disease set in or when the roots began to atrophy but when the tree began to topple – you couldn’t do better than June 23^rd 2016. That was when those like Boris Johnson, who had drivelled on for years that the problems facing the UK were not to do with inequality, not to do with impoverished education provision, the selling off of school land, over-crowded classrooms, growing personal debt deepened by student loans, less and less access to the justice system by those at the bottom (as legal aid was cut and cut and cut) attacks on workers’ rights and wages with the spread of zero hours contracts… no – none of those things had brought British society to its knees – it was foreigners and Brussels in particular. Hey presto Brexit.

Foreigner blaming by those who benefit from a rotten system is as old, obscene and stale as the British aristocracy and Brexit is as much of a nationalist self-harming mystery to the rest of the world as Donald Trump. But while he is – please god – about to be shown the door – we are only just at the very start of Brexit horrors as negotiating deadlines slide and the government pretends they’ve won something only to let the very firm next deadline slide and concede more and more until it starts to look like ‘our’ team are just turning up at Brussels begging to be punched in the face just a little harder – oh just one more please, now we really feel like we’re making progress!

Yes. Here we are with the government bickering over feeding poor children while shelling out £7,000 per day to consultants who have repeatedly failed to get covid test and trace to work, a trick South Korea mastered at the start of the pandemic. For ‘consultants’ obviously read, mates of the Tory party. Here we are with a health service which was the envy of the world struggling badly to cope with its ordinary workload after less than 10 months of a predicted pandemic. Here we are with crumbling infrastructure (e.g. transport) , a miserable record on the environment (now being made worse by the ecological destruction caused by HS2) while Boris Johnson frantically tries to make a pigs arse out of a sow’s ear because his “oven ready deal” of January 2020 turns out to have been cold turd pie.

By the time Boris Johnsons and his administration of lunatics and incompetents and corrupt deluded morons is through, banana republic will sound like a compliment…

Greece here we come, minus the warm sea, sun and ouzo...

When Trump is Gone

 

(friday poem)

When Trump is Gone

When Trump is gone I’m gonna smile

Despite the great pandemic

When trump is gone I’ll breathe again

Though triumph be totemic

 

When Trump and his enablers are

Cleaned out like so much litter

I will not mind, for a little while

If victory tastes bitter

 

When Trump is gone I’ll look around

Endeavouring to be glad

Not focus on the grief and pain

The world need not have had

 

I’ll try to block the images of

Young children abandoned in cages

Dampen down the horrors of

The tears that paid his wages

 

When Trump is gone and the air is cleared

And we’ve sluiced out the bile and the slime

We’ll remember not to do this again –

 Until the next time…

 

NB – according to US court  papers recently released – over 500 of the children separated from their parents on the orders of the Trump administration have not been reunited with them despite court orders – some may never be.

368. Boris 'blah blah blah' translated...

 As the real or fake Brexit negotiations continue – or don’t continue – the latest pronouncement from our blob at Westminster is that the UK should ‘prepare for Australia-style trade outcome’. I offer – in this week’s header to translate the latest Boris blah blah blah but in reality – like everything that emanates from the wobbly gob of the blob it's fantasy. There is no Australia-style trade situation. It’s just a euphemism – or lie if you will – for no deal where Britain will be free floating in an ocean of its own shit. Blobbo and Cummings and the other nutters in the fruit house at Westminster are fine with this because they don’t live in the real world but for the rest of us it actually translates to an Australia deal circa 1700s i.e. – brits being shipped to a world they don’t recognise and where they will BURN.

UK newspapers followed each other in 2016 and more recently this summer in dubbing the UK, again, the Sick Man of Europe. They claim, rather predictably and unimaginatively, that the results of the Brexit vote and the subsequent economic and political carnage – has earned that title for Britain once again – a term which it owned when I was born in the 1960s for its ongoing fiscal failures and economic weakness.

This time we are not victims of a post-war decline. This time our sickly status is brought on by a combination of poorly managed world events and a significant dose of political self-harm and crass behaviour fermented delusions of grandeur.

If you don’t believe me look no further than the recent protestations of MI5 that while Russia may pose a great security threat China poses greater ‘challenges’. That word ‘challenges’, hides a multitude of sins/insinuations.

As a blogger who derided the UK government’s reliance on China for tech and infrastructure and was disgusted at our lack of sanctions over the treatment of Muslims held in concentration camps – I am not a fan of the Chinese government behaviour. However, what Mr James Bond fantasy is referring to is that China has surpassed the UK as a world power, world influence and global political player. But who is to blame for that? This is not a rhetorical question – it has a very clear loud answer. Britain is to blame – or more importantly – the English nationalism that has brought the whole union to its knees. We’ve not been surpassed or sunk by pirates we have scuppered our own vessel.

Johnson’s ‘oven-ready’ Brexit deal was a simple lie. Nothing that needs translating. Our world-beating test track and trace system is a bad joke – it needs no interpretation. His constant ‘for us or agin' us’ declamations actually mean that if he has no policy, is inept, uncaring and self-destructive and we – as citizens of this small island - have a duty to go over the cliff with him.

But, lest we forget – as the saying goes – this disaster did not start with Brexit, it most certainly did not start with our 3^rd world approach to Covid. It did not even start with our weak response to the vulgarity and greed-horrors that led to the 2008 crash and all the austerity and mismanagement of subsequent Tory administrations. It began with Thatcher’s abhorrence of working people. It was carried forward by a Blair government that allowed the private sector into Education and Health with PFI and introduced tuition fees that now keep generations of young folk crushed by lifelong debt and then – to top it all – the illegal invasion of Iraq.

If, like me – you actually like to link events rather than looking at what happens today as a self-contained – could-not-be-avoided mystery – which seems to be the way – you could not do worse than track the progress of Britain’s political disease from Iraq – the rise of ISIS – global instability – loss of economic confidence – mass migration s of displaced people – fear of both – and the rise of populist politicians – because they ALWAYS come along and fill that vacuum.

So – I query the press’s predictable dubbing of the UK as the Sick Man of Europe. This time a better description would be the nauseating, demented old fart.

And anything Johnson says does not require translation it needs complete disregard because on a very strong balance of probabilities it will simply be a lie.

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Flush the T-turd on November 3rd (PLEASE AMERICA)

 

Flush the T-turd on November the 3^rd

America please ditch the absurd

Give him the bird

You must have heard

He talks to the unhinged

Their heads Trump is fillin’

With poisoned dementia

Til they’re crazy and killin’

Just a quiet word

On November the 3^rd

Please Please

America

FLUSH the turd…

Another friday extra for ya. If you like the silly friday poems share it around and I'll do some more...

367. Brexit Britain will be the junkie left on a derelict street when Biden takes the US into political rehab.

Trump is the pestilence that matters between now and November 3^rd… for the UK as much as the US.

IF Papa Joe takes the US into political rehab after November 3^rd Britain will be alone on the streets without a supplier and no one to ‘chum’ them – as they say in Scotland. Alone and newly vulnerable on Rogue Western Democracies St…

IF you think Johnson and his mob of morons have finished wrecking Britain – take note that Parliament just voted NOT to protect food standards after Brexit.

We have learnt a lot since March 2020.

One of the main things the UK learnt the very hard way was that – while a significant percentage of the population adhered to what felt like extremely draconian lockdown rules towards the end of March – a late lockdown followed by flipping and flopping and U-turns and the undermining of even the belated rules – have turned out to be both a health and economic disaster. However, if you believed in conspiracy theories - I don't - you might conclude that the political carnage was deliberate as Johnson and Cummings cook up something far worse and long term for post-Brexit Britain.

In summary – the UK falls into the club of countries that have been mismanaged to the extent that it has suffered both high mortality AND extreme economic hardship. Unlike others that fall into that unpopular global club (the US and Brazil) we also still have the economic wrecking ball of Brexit to hit us.

It is worth a reminder that the catastrophe of Brexit happened in the same half year period as the election of Donald Trump – and for broadly similar reasons. The populist lunatics took over the asylum and they are completing their smashing game also in a similar timescale.  Brexit is about to finish razing the UK to the ground – November will show us whether the US has come to its senses in time. The difference is that Brexit will only wreck the UK. Trump – unstopped – could yet wreck the world. Only the UK is in the unique position that it will be further weakened by the failure of Trump whose shitty coat tails Tory administrations have clung to. 

The sense of gloom you feel is almost palpable (if you live in the UK – I can’t answer for other countries). You can almost reach out and grab its grey clammy, flaccid tentacles.

But if you were checking the global as well as the national body politic – you would sense a febrile unit, fragile emotions, general aching and disorientation but you will also detect something else we associate with viruses – lethargy.

I believe the lethargy is not just due to the realisation that we are being led by buffoons, that things are bungled daily, hourly by those paid and trusted to run the country but there is another much bigger question hanging in the air – like a miasma. The US elections.

Yes – Donald Trump – the man who has flouted every rule – political, moral, legal and who has just used up and estimated $100k of medical attention at the Walter Reed military medical facility – having paid approximately $700+ in taxes over the last two years and is currently hell bent on infecting as many other humans who don’t have access to such platinum edged healthcare, is about to face an election. Such is the position of the US in the world – even after four years of mismanagement that the shock waves of the result on November 3^rd (or the morning of nov 4^th) will wash across the Atlantic like a political tsunami.

For us here in the UK the results may be more extreme than anywhere else. Boris Johnson has aped the political style and approach of the White House and the blond blob himself – from the multiple wives and uncounted children – the faithlessness and the daughter-partners, the racism and lack of care of other human beings, has become what we might have called Trump-lite – except ‘lite’ is never something you’d associate with Boris Johnson. His political footprint could have been left by a prehistoric Giant Sloth.

These two men are not only cut from the same cloth, they have had the same divisive effect on the countries stupid enough to elect them and they have been supported by those who thought they could ride their poisonous popularity to victory.

Now the reckoning.

If Trump is re-elected I’d say only this - we (everyone) is screwed. I mean look at what he has done to his own country in just 4 years

If Trump a. loses b. they are able to remove highly contagious and deadly disease which is both metaphorically and literally Trump, from a White House he clearly feels is now his personal property -  Brexit Britain is screwed. I mean even more than we are right now.

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Mike Pence’s fly

 

Mike Pence’s fly

(Based on the children’s rhyme ‘There was an old woman who swallowed a fly’)

 

I know an old man who hosted a fly

On top of his head, the fly wasn’t shy

I wonder why

 

Pence wittered about

False reality

He must have spent time

With Sean Hannity

 

His head was so full

Of masses of shit

Maybe that’s why the fly

On his pate did sit

 

Mike got a fly

Because he spews rot

Nobody knows

How he got where he got

 

Perhaps the Pence head

Has just spent so long

Up Trump’s derriere

The fly liked the pong

 

The fly sat down

On top of the clown

It stopped to think

Cos he liked the stink

It did not detect

Any sign of life

With Kamala there

Where was [mother] his wife?

 

There was an old man

Who hosted a fly

I dunno why

He hosted the fly

IFthedemsdon’twininNovember we’ll all CRY…

366. NETFLIX/BREXIT scammers & my naked dream...

Like you, I get scam emails. The latest was a febrile, pyretic spew about my Netflix account needing attention URGENTLY. The sort of attention that would – obviously – involve  giving bank details.

Now – as my bleaders (blog readers) will be aware, I’ve not had TV since last century so if you assume I also do not have a Netflix account you would be correct. Suffice to say I did not need to read the email detail to realise it was yet another ruse to empty my already echoey bank account. (Someone should tell these people not to target artists who’ve not had a sniff of work since March)

As I was wearily deleting the email it occurred to me that this scam – which presumably caught some folk or they wouldn’t do it – is exactly like the Brexit scam or Brexit as it is called.

The sad thing is that instead of taking a moment to look around or a second to think – the duped masses who voted for the current self-annihilation simply responded to the fevered nature of the jingoism, the heated rhetoric of the racism and anti-foreigner slurry which has served the ruling elite so well since 1381 and forever. 

The turkeys who voted for Christmas looked at the big red bus and its big purple lie and did not stop and think – hang on – the last time I went to the GP she was a foreigner. The last time I was in hospital it was an immigrant cleaning the ward – it was a Spanish nurse who looked after me. They did not stop to think – hang on – large companies who want to screw over British workers actually do it by shipping call centres out to countries that don’t pay minimum wages – it’s nothing to do with immigration. They did not stop to think that if they don’t want migrants displaced by war and a destabilised Middle East they maybe should be tackling war criminals like Tony Blair not talking about building floating walls in The Channel (presumably – Trump-like – they’d get migrants to pay for it???)

No – they just mentally clicked the link and handed over their lives to the arseholes. Thing is – they handed over mine too – and that’s not fair.

I keep thinking I’ll wake up and it’s all been a stress dream like where you are running naked down the street and there is nowhere to hide. Perhaps it’ll be one of those confusing reveries, like that ridiculous episode of Dallas back in 1986, where an entire series was wiped out by the it-was-all-a dream trick. 

Sometimes I imagine the grown-ups will walk into the room and laugh at me when I say I thought the whole country voted for self-harm based on obvious and ridiculous deceits. Then they will really chuckle madly when I tell them I thought Boris Johnson and a load of other corrupt half-wits were running the country…

Because surely – no one would fall for such an obvious con…

 

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365. What we could achieve if the decent sensible people worked together…

…or Casey & the Surfmen!

It’s worth remembering that the decimation of our environment will not kill us in 100s or 1000s it will wipe us out. And yes, that is a heavy message to keep pushing when everything else is pretty awful and Johnson’s cabal of incompetents is trying to shift the blame for their disastrous handling of a predictable pandemic onto young people – as if they haven’t suffered enough.

However, this week I’m reminding readers of my audio story poem about ordinary people – us - repairing and saving the world. It’s a gentle piece, easy to listen to and - while I won’t give away the ending – positive. Do check it out on bandcamp. You can listen for free OR buy and download a copy if you feel like supporting an artist you know - MOI. Also, if you purchase on Friday October 2^nd – this Friday – bandcamp are again waving their commission to support artists like me who have seen little or no work since February.

And for those who balk at the notion of having to think about the ongoing threat to human existence amid an immediate threat, please try and remember these are not two separate issues. Eco-scientists have long been warning that damage to ecosystems could be a major trigger for new pathogens jumping species and as this mad government pushes ahead with HS2 and relaxing planning laws, Britain remains one of the least wooded countries in Europe where towns and cities regularly have poor air quality

'A lyrical, whimsical uplifting story in verse - easy listening for all ages' 

Do check it out by clicking the link here -

Casey & the Surfmen -audio version. 

Cheers

Is Covid-19 a self-inoculating virus? (weekend extra)

Ok – it’s been a rough night – and like a lot of folk there's not much sleep going on in my life. However, this occured to me and seemed almost lucid (at 4am GMT)

Is Covid-19 a self-inoculating virus?

Folk don’t – as we know – always make logical decisions or they make horrible decisions for terrible reasons – especially in politics. However, you’d need to have been buried under bedrock for the last 8 months not to have worked out one very simple truth about this pandemic.

Countries with terrible leaders – right wing, populist, corrupt, racist, vain sociopaths -  in particular, have been relatively far more deadly places to live than comparable countries.

Donald Trump, Boris Johnson, Benjamin Netanyahu, Jair Bolsonaro have a lot in common (apart from faithless marriages and multiple wives) which I've posted about before. The list includes corruption, populism, idiocy, right wing spite and bigotry, I could go on. The other thing they have in common is exceptionally poor handling of this pandemic.

IF people put 2 and 2 together (which I know is out of fashion in the world of 2020) this might inoculate the world – for a while – against electing morons… 

364. Armageddon Will Not Be Televised (replay)

A good friend directed me to a (now) chilling snippet of Benjamin Zephaniah on Question Time outlining the clear and present danger of a Boris Johnson leadership back in 2012. BZ points out that Johnson is a. racist b. not fit to be in charge of the lives of others.

I bring this up only because I’m sick of the now tired line – usually trotted out about the pandemic – ‘yes its bad but no one could have known’ when in fact lots of folk did know and tried to prepare (a. President Obama b. anyone else with a brain cell) but which is also often spewed out about Johnson – like people are surprised what a total disaster HE is personally and politically. We knew.

It inspired me to look back at some of my early posts and in honour of BZ and any number of other folk who pay attention, I dug this one up for this week. If something can be truer now than when it was first true – this is… so here from Tuesday, 30 October 2012 a scenario we are now simply 8 years closer to…

12. Armageddon will not be televised

 

I enjoy a pacey paranoid action movie as much as the next person.  Give me Bruce Willis saving the world at the last second with a self-satisfied smile any day over another Jane Austen adaptation. Show me silver screen worlds exploding in Technicolor, tidal waves engulfing everyone apart from the main character plus love interest, asteroids missing the earth with only meters to spare, sudden freezes that only the good-looking survive. Dish up alien invasions from creatures able to cross galaxies but unable to anticipate a sucker punch from Will Smith. Tremendous. In reality the four horsemen of the apocalypse aren’t galloping out of the gates of hell on their white, red, black and pale green stallions, they are plodding about even now on knackered old nags in a dull, bored way because frankly they’ve nothing to do.

 

Is it too extreme to suggest that the woman parading down the high street with the $1,000+ designer handbag may as well be walking round with a sick child under her arm? Might the guy driving the sports car fuelled from products that could have fed people, just as well line up twenty sub-Saharan villagers and run them over? Ok, maybe that’s a bit dramatic for this blog space especially when theorising that Armageddon could be a surprisingly limp affair. All I’m suggesting is that like a Hollywood blockbuster, the event in all probability will not live up to the testosterone-charged trailers. It may just be a metaphorical dismal couple of hours in the dark where nothing significant happens and then it’s over.

 

It’s not that designer stuff is intrinsically bad nor is the fast car or any number of things that we don’t need; it’s just that life has a very simple equation to offer us, one we are constantly told is more complicated than it is. If some folk have too much others get too little. Let me say that again – if some folk have too much other folk have too little. There is no getting round it or under it. There is a connection between some people owning three cars and living in mansions and other people living on less than a dollar a day. Why does saying that feel like claiming moon is made of cheese? Perhaps because vast amounts of energy and money go into maintaining the more comfortable collective falsehood that there is no direct connection. We believe the world somehow got so complicated that 2+2 no longer = 4. But is it an unfathomable mystery that desperate farmers grow cash crops such as tobacco and coffee instead of food for their families?          

 

During the Blair affair with Britain we got used to the phrase “difficult decisions” which was euphemism for ‘the wrong decisions made in the face of the absolutely bloody obvious’. Though he was not the first to employ this euphemism it settled, through persistent use, as a staple of political rhetoric. In the same way that Cameron’s “I’m absolutely clear on this” as double speak for ‘this may sound like bollocks but I’m saying it anyway’ is bedding in. The idea that things are way more complicated than logic or common sense suggest is a notion we are force fed to steer us away from seeing that the emperor is wearing no clothes. The brother in arms of this falsehood is that someone who makes ‘difficult decisions’ is off the moral hook.  Sister to these two bastards is the notion that ‘there isn’t anything we can do’.

 

Let us deal with the first tired old horseman representing conquest and social inequality. Has there ever been an era where inequality has, in the light of our knowledge and technical skills, been more inexcusable? What I’m saying is that if our Victorian forebears could see that it was wrong, it’s got to be more wrong now. Close to home, how many of us have considered, when choosing a bank or law firm, checking what proportion of senior employees are state educated before giving them our business? I’m state educated and I haven’t.

 

As for war – there are more conflicts raging round the world than you could shake a stick at – using more sophisticated technology and on-going for reasons that defy not just ethical considerations but basic common sense. Death and disease are bestial bedfellows and never more so because we know so much about preventing and avoiding much of the disease that leads to premature death. Do you need to say more than that we have Viagra but no cure for Aids? The new strains of deadly malaria were upon us without adequate medicines when we’d known for years that they were heading our way or at least their way. Now that aesthetic (cosmetic) surgery is spoken of as if it’s as normal as going to the dentist, it seems outlandish to ask why personal or public resources are being spent in this direction when children die in obscene numbers for want of a diarrhoea tablet costing pence. When I was last asked my opinion on animal testing I had to say I might be more positive about it if the medicines and knowledge we already have were being used to their full effect and for everyone.

 

Stuff Botox and ‘shopping therapy’, if you want to feel better about the life you have, spend a week in a refugee camp and it’s likely you will have a very rosy view of your existence when you return. You may even have younger looking skin; certainly you might lose some weight. Meanwhile the bees are not pollinating properly, the ice caps are reducing, the coral reefs are dying and a huge percentage of preventable western disease is the result of affluence. The system we idolatrise is based on shoring up this monstrosity. It is ultimate pyramid selling and the pyramid is one of humanity. The world will not go out with a bang but a whimper. The four horsemen of the apocalypse returned to their hellish caverns a long time ago and are playing scrabble to pass the time. We have unemployed them.  The world is already the cancer patient in denial still puffing away on that cigarette. Armageddon will not be televised because it will not happen in a sudden identifiable place or time, it will not be dramatic and it will not star Bruce Willis. It is happening now in a bland, slow, miserable way. If you stand still you can sometimes smell it in the air, sense the paradigm shift, feel it like a depression.  At some point we will become aware that we recognise the plot and the narrative is near the end but there will be no one around to see the credits roll.