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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