Total Pageviews

Tuesday 20 December 2022

461. Qatari cash converters, cantankerous king Charles & conniving, complicit commentators… It’s Christmas!

Interesting aint it?

Over the last few months while there has been intermittent interest in the Qatar mass crime event (sorry – the football world cup) – the equally hideous reports of (then) Prince Charles, now King Charles III and his guzzling of Qatar millions conveniently evaporated from the consciousness of the UK media.

As I said in a letter to editors yesterday –

Presumably – now the Qatar World Cup men’s final is over, the media might go back to pretending they care about the dead, abused and exploited workers on whose misery the football stadiums were built.

Just joking!

Of course there is now another Qatari ‘cash converter’ – Greek MEP Eva Kaili caught doing Qatar’s bidding for Q.cash.

The person who seems to have slipped the memories of the press, commentators and broadcast media this Christmas is cantankerous king Charles.

If it weren’t for the bitching and whining about the couple who fled institutional abuse (for not toeing the line) and, in Meghan's case, racism and extreme misogyny, they could claim they’re just not that interested in a defunct, dysfunctional, expensive, past-its-sell-by-date, inbred institution. But they clearly are.

So, when it comes to Qatari cash converters, where are all the questions related Charlies’ Q.cash?  Where are the enquiries into the millions he accepted in shopping bags (how pedestrian) along with the questions about FIFA and the MEP?

I hope those of you watching chump Charlie doing his first Christmas speech this year, to a bemused nation and an increasingly disinclined commonwealth, will consider a few things; his abusive act of marrying a young woman he knew he didn’t love while carrying on with the woman he did (that would be Camilla who just hosted the two worst Meghan abusers - Clarkson and Morgan for lunch) and his whining and bitching (the pen that didn’t work – the wife who was too slow leaving an event he’d had enough of) and the scuttling off to his Scottish estate in breach of covid rules. I mean he’s not exactly his granny, sticking around during The Blitz is he? Charles Mountbatten Windsor is much more like Prince Prospero in Edgar Allan Poe’s - The Marque of the Red Death - minus the colourful personality.

No, consider that all the above is paid for out of the public purse and he also has the ill-gotten gains of centuries but it’s still not enough. He covets bags of Qatari cash.

Happy Christmas.

Back in January.

*

Remember to check out My BOOKS

Tuesday 13 December 2022

460. Fear + Dysfunction = Catastrophe

- domestically, politically, globally. 

It’s a simple equation. One we know – in theory.

The problem is that extreme right-wing activism and in fact all forms of authoritarianism, thrive on this equation.

It is no coincidence that many of those on the lunatic right – when we take a closer look – are deeply inadequate people and attracted to fear and dysfunction like Harry Potter dementors.

From Donald Trump, a man bursting with insufficiencies to Boris de-Brexit Johnson. From migrant botherer Nigel Farage to America’s white supremacist and anti-Semite Nick Fuentes. In a dark irony, it has been noted many times - there is no one on the side of white supremacy who looks and/or sounds anything other than extremely inferior.

And we do not hold these people to the standards we hold our contemporaries to. We don’t even hold them to the standards we’d hold their contemporaries to – i.e. more moderate politicians or commentators. To give one tiny example – during the pandemic when then PM Boris de-Brexit Johnson partied while people died – Scottish 1st minister Nicola Sturgeon was publically shamed because she broke the rules. In her case she stood up. Yes. She stood up in a social setting where she would have been within the rules if she’d stayed seated. It’s a false equivalence that has gained corrosive traction.

 For a current relevant example of how this plays out in the media and with those at the top – you only need look at how the right-wing UK press were happy to make non-too subtle equivalence between teen sex-pest and friend of famous paedo - Prince Andrew and Prince Harry. The latter's crime was fleeing the country to protect his wife from racism.

Here in the UK, how many truly vile inadequate human monstrosities have been elevated to The House of Lords (including the Tory peer being investigated for enriching her family during covid to the tune of £29m from a dodgy PPE contract) – to the point when you have to conclude that any decent law abiding citizen would be morally bound to refuse a peerage. Though, of course, constitutionally The HoL is an abomination anyhow.

And of course Putin - the Russian authoritarian (and war criminal in the style of Blair and  Bush) once brought a large dog to a meeting with Angela Merkel just because he knew she was wary of dogs. Though, we have to bracket him. How much choice the people of Russia actually had in ‘electing’ him is debatable. Well, it’s debatable as long as you don’t live in Russia.

And party affiliation or label or even cultural background matters not a jot nor does the subject. The hideous far-right Itamar Ben-Gvir has been given political breathing space by blot on the landscape Benjamin Netanyahu trying to escape corruption charges. Despite the anti-Semitism recently washing Trump dirtier than ever – these people could be part of the Trump fan club. They sound and look the SAME.

But these vile individuals are not really the question.

The question is why – at certain points in history - do we (THE public) give them such prominent platforms, listen to their poison and follow them down the sewer.

Fear and Dysfunction.

When humans are scared and not acting or reacting properly they do weird stuff. They will listen to nonsense. They will act inappropriately. For some reason they actively move away from the common sense and the practical.

What folk are scared of is often real.

I think collectively at some level we know the planet we all rely on to survive is creaking under the weight of our collective apathy. Our abuse. Our over-use. It’s like we know we messed up - we actually did leave the house without turning the gas off but rather than go back and sort it out we are listening to the guy who is telling us that the coming explosion is someone else’s fault. The poor person taking benefits – the migrant – the Jewish/black/gay person.

However, at the back of our minds we really know that the problem is we left the gas on. We fucked up. Are we too far away to get back in time to turn it off? Dare we call emergency services and admit what we’ve done. Or should we just bury our heads and join in screaming at other people and when the house blows up point at those other folk – all the while knowing – really knowing - in our heart of hearts it’s not them. It never was them.

We all should have checked out own behaviour.

But how tempting it is when some gob-shite comes along and pours poison in our ears and persuades, with our collusion and willingness, someone else is to blame…

*

And of course - as always - I invite you to check out my adult novels, children's books and anthologies by clicking here My BOOKS or check out any good independent online books tore.

Tuesday 6 December 2022

459. TWITTER

 

Thugs

White-supremacists

Imbeciles

Toady

To

Elon’s

Rectum

Tuesday 29 November 2022

458. Word Laundering – by the mainstream media has to stop…

As we limp towards the end of 2022 there are many things we might wish were different or had not happened or were long gone.

Putin and Trump are rotten and ragged but still extremely dangerous, like cheap fireworks that have spent their main force but are far from extinguished.

Bolsonaro is gone but the amazon rainforest destruction he accelerated along with his vile right-wing hate and lies, wrought permanent damage.

Brexit is now an acknowledged blight as opposed to something politicians and the mainstream media dare not mention.

 But we still have a government of the craven and the hopeless. We still have a Prime Minister (our 3rd unelected) who was building a £400,000 swimming pool at one of his domestic residences while beachgoers in England, over the summer, could not go into the sea due to raw sewage dumped by the profiteering water companies his party privatised. Out-of-touch hardly covers it.

Crypto and Twitter are exposed as the big pile of bollocks most sensible folk knew they were (see last post). But, like Trump/Putin, continue to harm.

Afghanistan seems to have further to slide after being abandoned by the countries that have played war games there for decades. In one of the most hideous displays of lack of organisation and appalling mess and chaos anyone in the military has possibly seen, Afghanistan was abandoned in the most callous way. I include the action of our then PM Boris de-Brexit Johnson – we presume on the say so of his ridiculous wife – greenlighting the rescue of pets before people and the current deputy PM Dominic Raab, currently under investigation for bullying but who was then – as Foreign Secretary - AWOL on a beach holiday when the horrors were unfolding.

The world still burns and saving the planet is way down on anyone’s priority list especially in a world where many millions of folk seem entirely comfortable with celebrating the big pile of corrupt, oppressive shite which is the Qatar world cup.

As usual – I could go on

But for me, what I’d like to see for 2023 is Word Laundering by the mainstream media end. To turn around the famous Nike slogan Just DON’T do it.

By Word Laundering I mean the careless, lazy way that mainstream broadcasters in particular (and especially the publically funded BBC) smush out second-hand shite from social media guff. So and so on Twitter said blah blah blah. So and so on Fb claims rhubarb rhubarb rhubarb. This is no different to money laundering. You take something with no credibility or value and elevate it simply by including it in the mainstream where it comes out shiny.

It’s lazy. It’s dangerous. It serves no purpose and it is commercially completely idiotic. How much would these platforms have to pay to have their nonsense legitimised if it were properly analysed and examined and authenticated? None of that happens. It’s just - Tada – from gutter spew to glittering factoid. Word Laundering. More powerful that money laundering.

It has to stop.

*

As usual do check out my novels, children’s books and anthologies by clicking this link My BOOKS or on your own favourite online book stores.

Also – bandcamp have another bandcamp Friday December 2nd in support of artists where their fees are waved so do check out my environmental audio story Casey & the Surfmen (you can sample for free).

 

Tuesday 22 November 2022

457. So many emperors, so few clothes...

... so much exposed, shrivelled inadequacy!

Has my big 2022 ‘comeuppance’ wish come true?

In blog 418 I pleaded with Fate to let 2022 be THE YEAR OF COMEUPPANCE.

I know it may not seem it as the world sinks and conflicts and human suffering remain somewhere below reality TV in people's reckoning. It may not seem it with the cost of living crisis in the UK while the rich get richer and the wealth divide continues to widen exponentially.

However, many astonishing things have happened even in the last couple of weeks that suggest the year was just waiting for us all to be lulled more deeply into a false sense of cold, grey ennui.

Who knew that the US Democrats would overturn all political precedent and maintain vital Senate control in the US midterms?

Who knew Trump would be the architect of the implosion of the rabid right (well I did but hey…)

Who thought we’d see the rot of what remains of the UK Conservative party so nakedly on view to anyone with more than x3 brain cells.

And despite his occasional presence in Parliament, (presumably in-between the holidays paid for by willing richer mates) Johnson has become his own worst nightmare – a bit player in the catastrophic drama he constructed. But, for what he has perpetrated on the UK public, this is way too light a reckoning for Boris de-Brexit Johnson so – as the end of the year looms – watch this space.

Who knew Brexit would finally be acknowledged – even by a limp media – as the terrible self-harm sensible folk (incl this blog) always predicted.

Who knew that a country the world had previously paid little attention to – Ukraine – would begin to bring Putin to heel.

Could we have predicted that creepy crawly Elon Musk, the world’s richest man would be properly exposed as an unstable racist, misogynist ego and even thinner skinned than Donald Trump? Well – yes – again – many of us have been rolling our eyes at those proclaiming his genius for many years. However, to have so totally miscalculated that in an entity like Twitter the employees ARE the company – oh boy. Seriously WTF did he think was going to happen when he sacked all those geeks?

The druggy delinquents who were scamming folks for years in the whole crypto crap craze are also recently exposed thanks to super brat Sam Bankman-Fried (nominative determinism if ever there was…) who headed up the FTX crypto currency exchange.

Bonkers Bolsonaro is gone.

Qatar’s clearly corrupt acquisition of the football world cup –  how’s that panning out? I’m sure they must be concluding that the bags of cash handed to then prince now king tampon-Charlie in supermarket bags, was money much better spent than the eye-watering amounts they used to bribe super-corrupt FIFA to get the World Cup - check out my letter in today’s The Guardian

 

The list goes on but I’d simply remind everyone – there are still one and a half months to go of 2022.

*

As always do check out my children’s books, adult novels, novella and poetry anthologies - here My BOOKS or purchase from your own favourite online bookstore

Tuesday 15 November 2022

456. Zelensky with blood, Biden with Malarky… holding the line.

In 2020 there was every chance that the corrupt, creepy, racist, traitorous, self-serving orange menace who praised white supremacists, locked babies in cages on the Mexican border and hosted the actors of a rogue nation in the Oval Office (among other things) would win a second term.

Biden was far from the darling of the left, or even left of centre but I struggled then to imagine another candidate who could secure Democratic votes and also garner sufficient wiggle room with moderate Republicans to prevail in autumn 2020 and even then it was horribly tight.

Far away in Ukraine and despite Boris de-Brexit Johnson sneering at warnings of the threat of Russian tanks crossing into Ukraine – they did. Boris de-Brexit Johnson did an about turn from partying with Russian Oligarchs, taking their money, meeting with them against the advice of British Secret Services and even gifting a peerage to Lebedev and was subsequently never out of Ukraine taking photo opportunities. As Putin wreaked havoc it was just another ego trip for our Brexit wrecking ball.

In Ukraine – though you wouldn’t know it from the level of media and public attention – Zelensky and his armies have not only held but repelled the might of Russia. Unthinkably, on Armistice Day came the news that the strategically significant port city of Kherson, recently declared by Putin to be “Russian forever” had been freed. Though the cost in human suffering has been truly appalling.

I sincerely hope President Joe Biden does not run for president in 2024. I sincerely hope that Zelensky’s days as leader of an army will end soon and he can return to being a peace-time leader and begin, with the world’s help, rebuilding Ukraine. I sincerely hope we can turn out attention to other long running conflicts that must be resolved and most of all pay attention to the number one priority – the climate.

But make no mistake – while millions of eyes are trained on dirty sport in Qatar paying less than lip service to human rights, while the media overflows with celebrity nonsense, royal guff and the lunatic actions of billionaires – these two extraordinary men in their very different ways – held and hold the line for the rest of us.

*

Thanks for reading as always and do check out my adult novels, children's books and poetry anthologies via goodreads, your own favourite online bookstore - or here - My BOOKS

Tuesday 8 November 2022

455. Tesla top twat tweeting twaddle…

… and my belated ten-year blog birthday.

I forgot to celebrate my 10 yr. anniversary of blogging. So – happy belated decade blogging and doodling to me.

I’d go into an extended piece here about the changes I’ve observed over the last decade  which encompasses my blog but that can be summed up simply as DOWNHILL all the way for the UK.

The last decade has seen global catastrophes link and merge in an as yet barely realistically acknowledged looming climate and environment catastrophe.

Here in Brexit Britain – the privatisations begun last century by Conservative icon and nemesis of the caring – Margaret Thatcher - have come home to roost in truly dreadful ways. A defunct railway system, failing energy provision at a time of energy crises and water unfit for humans around the coast of Britain as the privatised water companies sold off reservoirs and – like their counterparts in other privatised utilities – siphoned off billions of public money to their shareholders. That has always been the point of privatisation.

Many systems are hanging by a thread. The NHS –and many others are in a fight for their lives. Schools. The care system. Mental health services. Public infrastructure. And so on.

And yet still, still – we idolise and follow those born to wealth and privilege with vast personal fortunes either inherited or married into or gained – as per the Russian Oligarchs and those who profiteered more recently from the pandemic - by literally selling their countries down the river.

Then there are others like Trump and Musk pedalling a fake version of themselves so successfully that what we’d revile or ridicule in those without their platforms is idolatrised and made godlike.

Like Trump and Boris Johnson, Musk has made misstep after misstep. He, like Trump and Johnson, is a personal disaster, fathering random children he appears to have little fatherly feeling for. For all the adulation he invokes, Musk like Trump and Johnson is also incredibly thin skinned – taking on arguments more suited to a 7 year-old in a playground but using the mega platforms of our era to amplify his infantilism.

On this blog years ago, I stated that Brexit would bring Britain down to Greece 2.0 and it is. I pointed out that Labour’s Miliband would not win the general election he was predicted to win – not because he wasn’t the best candidate but because I looked at things those in the Westminster bubble did not factor in – the soap-opera loving nation that would not forgive him for stabbing his brother in the back. Also the bacon sandwich fiasco! Looks are everything if you’re not a right wing lunatic in which case you get away with literally having blood on your hands. And so on and so forth.

Johnson was allowed – years later – to ‘let the bodies pile up’ during covid – lie and cheat and bluster and fail fail fail again in office and appoint dreadful people – but he’s a Tory.

Longer more all-encompassing predictions are painted in my novella Zero One Zero Two and also my audio story Casey & the Surfmen. Also coming to sad dark fruition.

Though as we approach that point of no return we thought was still far away at the turn of the century – these can hardly now be labelled predictions. It would be like someone alluding to Orwell’s 1984 in 1982…

After last week’s post I sent out a letter to editors on my usual list (my small number of regular readers will know my letters appear in a number of papers in the UK and some abroad) stating that despite his refusal, Sunak would indeed go to COP27. Not because I’m a seer but just because it was 100% obvious and again – I simply do not understand the surprise of media/Westminster commentators. From the point he said he wouldn’t go and gave his pathetic reason, it was obvious he’d U-turn.

But it’s not a huge mind stretch to predict that Chief Twat will cause more mayhem now he has control of Twitter. You do not need a crystal ball to see that his ego, unchecked by self-awareness or human decency or caring or maturity, will wreak mayhem on the weak-minded and gullible. Mark the lack of real condemnation when he undermined the efforts of Ukraine in its life or death struggle against Russia. A spoilt brat with a too big toy chucking a turd into an operating theatre where exhausted, bloodied surgeons fight to save life – is the image that comes to mind.

But there is lots of good stuff too in my last decade. In that time my family has grown by two sons-in-law and three grandchildren and more children to extended family. Not too many people I love have died. I’ve written more books and read many. I’ve renovated more houses in various states of dilapidation – which apart from my writing is something that gives me immense satisfaction.

I watch with interest as fascism in its reinvented forms again has its day – sadly scorching and burning – and leaving us with the tired old questions left over from last century – what will be left and can we rebuild?

So – I celebrate my little blog – albeit it’s more an outlet for my anguish and frustration at times. But it keeps me sane and it is sane. And Twitter is mad. And for all the folk who have told me over the years that I ought to be on social media and definitely on Twitter – I continue to say – thanks but no thanks…

As for what has happened in the decade since I began this blog – I think its best summed up in a couple of old doodles from 2013



In other words – things under the Tories and other right-wing administrations with their greed and short-termism and self-interest haven’t so much changed as got exponentially and unbelievably much worse…

*

Thanks for reading and do - as always - check out My BOOKS

Tuesday 1 November 2022

454. Am I in a crazy coma or did someone drug my cocoa or am I in a low budget made-for-TV zombie series with ‘d’ list actors?

This cannot be Britain 2022. Surely...

Do we really have a Home Secretary – Suella Braverman – who is happy to admit publically that her “dream” is abusing migrants? Just as the people-traffickers slaver over the money they’ll make putting desperate people in un-seaworthy boats, she drools at the idea of those same desperate people herded against their will, onto massively expensive planes to Rwanda - a country that has been bribed to make our not-fit-for-purpose asylum-seeker problem disappear.

Are we really keeping desperate migrants, including children, in dirty, disgusting, over-crowded, disease ridden, dangerous detention centres that would make a backwards dictatorship blush?

Do we really have a PM who was busy completing his £400,000 swimming pool, over a summer that saw record-breaking temperatures in the UK, global climate catastrophes on an unprecedented scale and raw sewage-ruined waters right here in a wealthy developed country? Rishi Sunak is a man who claims to want to give something back to Britain while in fact kept one foot in the US, ready to bolt if he hadn’t got what he wanted from his political ambitions and whose own wife avoided tax while he was chancellor 

Do we really have a public broadcaster – the BBC- where the two top jobs are held by Tory appointees – one – Richard Sharp - a former Conservative party donor and advisor to the previous disaster PM Boris Johnson and the current unelected PM Rishi Sunak?

Do we really have a Met police force in crisis, riddled with racism and misogyny?

Is child poverty on the rise and longevity declining in the poorest areas with drug deaths out of control and foodbanks and now warm banks part of our national landscape in a country that celebrated the birth of a comprehensive welfare state after WWII?

Are the bonkers Brexit bastards still getting away with blaming everything but Brexit for the very Brexit-shaped multiple crises Britain is facing over and above the fallout from Covid and years of Tory mismanagement and austerity?

Is the press lamer than ever – limp – ineffectual and toadying to the party in power at every turn? Is the journalistic race to the bottom – at least in domestic terms nearly over?

I could go on and on but is this not enough? The world’s oldest democracy has an unelected PM and a politically cowed ‘public’ broadcaster. Its banana-republic stuff.

 

Please someone – wake me up…

*

DO click on this link to check out My BOOKS also available on extended distribution through most good online bookstores.

Thank you for reading.

Tuesday 25 October 2022

453. Sunak is ‘same old same old’ make no mistake.

Sunak is NOT an ‘elected’ PM as many in the UK media are wrongly calling him, and neither is he a ‘new broom’ which is the old Tory trick, pretending that the latest leader erases the horrors of the very recent past.

Firstly and most easily to grasp is the fact that Sunak is, was and remains a Brexiter.  And Brexit is at the heart of the economic woes of the country that were ratcheted up by the Truss mini-budget/massive disaster.

Along with his not-long-ago bosom buddy Boris Johnson plus – Union Leader Mike Lynch and ex-minister for desperately seeking Breixt benefits Rees-Mogg and including Truss and Gove and a whole host of other nasties, Sunak et al should be forced to watch the FT video (below) in a cold dark room for the rest of their natural lives .

Of course that would be when, Johnson isn’t on holiday.

Far be it from me – a left of centre leftie – to praise or even agree with any element of right of centre FT but this you tube video of the realities of Brexit should be compulsory viewing – albeit we’d all rather watch the pro-Scottish Independence muppet video.

It was reported last week that a majority of the Conservative party membership wanted Boris Johnson back. They clearly prefer lying, cheating, posh racism, opportunism, toadying to Russian oligarchs, proroguing Parliament and partygate monster etc etc etc to the complete batshit insanity of Truss. I get that. But they are hugely missing the point of how we got here. That is nowhere more evident than the muted praise for Truss’s handler Hunt. (see last post)

Decades of Tory- instigated (and Blair supported) privatisation and involvement of the profit-first sector in public institutions – followed by Tory austerity followed by catastrophe catalyst Brexit led to the current car crash.

One can only hope that when Sunak has completed the £400,000 swimming pool in one of his four 'family' homes, he might attend at the problems of increased rates of homelessness, exponential growth in the use of foodbanks since his party came to power and of the water companies, privatised by his party, dumping raw sewage into the waterways and coastal waters the rest of us like to swim in.

But here’s the video

Reality of Brexit courtesy of the FT

Brexit reality.

*

And, as always - do check out  My BOOKS by clicking the link or on any good independent online book site. Thank you.

Tuesday 18 October 2022

452. The Hunt for Dead October…

The British PM now has a minder – Jeremy (woops – I forgot I owned all that property) Hunt.

After lunatic aunty Liz Truss sacked her chancellor this October for carrying out her agenda in his budget-not-a-budget last month – she was forced to either cut KK loose or take responsibility herself. It was a no brainer for the woman with no brain.

So – while much of the British media and public seem to forget or be unaware that our ongoing humiliations are entirely under scrutiny by the rest of the world – and while many Brexiters labour under the crushing delusion that Britain still rules the waves and is excused any amount of madness due to some sort of overhanging exceptionalism – I’d like to gently ease them back to reality with some of my imagined headlines from foreign journals –

My favourite for obvious reasons –

‘The Hunt for Dead October’

‘Truss trussed’

‘Britannia drools’

‘Hell in a handcart with Hunt (part III How low can we go)’

‘Trussonomics trolled by Greece’

 

And – in a double bill this week here’s a rap (of sorts) In  times of great catastrophe - the ratio of poetry per head of population always increases and its certainly on the up on this blog.


Woz good at banking

Now we’re tanking

In the world ranking

Chad is outflanking

(Britain on cred)

 

 ‘Oh dear’ ses Charlie-king

No he’s not thanking

Cos Truss is skanking

Markets all panicking

(Cos we’re stuffed)

 

Print pounds get franking

Liz thinks its spanking

This right-wing pranking

But I am hankering

(For sanity…)

 

And so on and so forth...

I’ll let you complete the one with the W…

 

These set pieces were also used in letters to the press last week and here's another letter which has been enjoyed by a few folk after it was printed in The Guardian


*

Do check out My Books and remember - re Fun Poems for Children  I put up you tube vids of all the poems for my grandkids during covid - they are still there - you tube.

Tuesday 11 October 2022

451. Epidemic epic stupidity is what will finish us...

Ebola in Uganda

Just over 8 years ago I posted a blog entitled -

Viagra - YES. Cure for Malaria - NO!

Plus I dealt with this whole scenario in my fantasy/sci-fi/dystopian mash up a few years ago called -

Zero One Zero Two

Fast forward to 2022 and, following the immensely impressive fast-forwarded development of the multiple vaccines for covid, still there is no cure for Ebola which has broken out again in Uganda.

Of course there is the inherent racism which is obvious to anyone paying attention in the way we approach diseases that terrorise developing nations as opposed to the 'urgent' sometimes aesthetic demands of the West. 

Also, much as we may not like to consider it - there is the profit motive - as with everything else. The pandemic didn't just make big bucks here in the UK for Conservative cronies and profiteers who cornered big contracts (often for things that didn't work or they could not actually provide) it made massive profits for big pharma. Until it looks like Ebola could do likewise - it will not elicit the same focus.

That inherent stupidity should worry us all deeply. 

Ebola is many times more infectious and deadly than covid. Are we really going to wait until it affects wealthy nations?

Even in the interest of self-interest - surely we can see that is a really bad approach...


*

Do check out my adult novels, children's books and poetry anthologies by clikcing HERE or check out any good online book store.

Tuesday 4 October 2022

450. Where are those sunlit uplands?

While the Conservatives change leaders like dirty underwear, foisting random idiots on the rest of us, the British public look on aghast. 

Are these the promised Tory 'sunlit uplands'?

Yes – I know – poetry again this week but then – I am a poet and this is what we do in times of trauma…

 

Where are those sunlit uplands?

Loony Liz and Kwasi

Dream team of our era

With the joint intellect of half a slug

The apocalypse draws nearer

 

Let’s frack our way to doomsday

While hedge fund managers revel

What’s trickling down isn't wealth my friend

But manna to the devil

 

Never mind turds in waterways

Floods or eco devastation

Lizz is her own universe

And screw the poor of the nation

 

Popularity with the uber rich

Is the only thing that matters

And never mind that the country

Is ruined and in tatters

 

Cameron, Osborne, Johnson, May

Mogg,  Kwarteng, Patel (etc)

Promised sunlit uplands

While steering us to hell…

*

AND - while we cannot expect impartiality - especially from the state broadcaster the BBC - now in the hands of Richard Sharp - huge Tory donor and previous advisor to top Tories Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak before Sharp was gifted the powerful previously a-political position of BBC Chair - in other countries - the dots have been joined up by  savvy commentators e.g. MSNBC

*

As always do check out my novels and anthologies and children's books  HERE or on goodreads or any good online book store. 

Plus - its artists support at Bandcamp Friday again this week so do also check out my environmental epic poem on audio Casey & the Surfmen

Tuesday 27 September 2022

449. UK Government of the DAMNED

Following the poet laureate's interesting choice of the acrostic (a form usually used in introducing 7-year-olds to the very basics of the structure of poetry) for the recent QEII dedication - I have indulged in one for this government. I am more than happy to apply similar levels of consideration and creative input as Armitage…

I also hope it may be a eulogy for the Truss Tory government...

*

Government of the DAMNED

D-list players

Avaricious in the extreme

Mad and deluded

Nasty through the seam

Entitled but so empty they are

Dangerous – dangerous - dangerous

*

Three posts ago I referred to the summer’s insult to democracy - Tory race to the bottom leadership event – as a ‘stupid stupidity’ contest. Since last week’s pound-crashing/humanity crushing/ community-crippling non-budget budget – that seems like a massive understatement.

While Putin is razing Ukraine to the ground, doing a fair job of trashing Russia and threatening nuclear Armageddon, I suppose we at least should be grateful that Truss is only trashing her own country...

*

Do check out my children’s books, poetry anthologies and adult novels Here  or on hour favourite online book site and on goodreads.

Tuesday 20 September 2022

448. Muscular mono-media royal adulation invokes British McCarthyism.

I went to my street party for the silver jubilee and prior to that appeared on an amusing front page in The Leamington Courier after receiving a letter from Queen Elizabeth II (I have the letter still). 

However, I've never been more convinced that castles and unearned privilege and vast quantities of public money siphoned off to the already vastly wealthy ribbon cutters plus tinsel titles and silly dressing-up costumes belong back then, in the mind of a 7 year old.



As a grandmother of 3 young children who will never breathe air as clean as I enjoyed as a child in the 1960s/70s, who will not get the free university education I received (twice) and who belong to a generation where ordinary people may never own a home or know real security, I see absolutely zero reason to celebrate the accession of a man who accepted supermarket bags of cash from a Saudi mate, didn't support his black daughter-in-law and who has a hissy fit over a pen that doesn't work. And don’t get me started on how he’s clearly bracketed his ‘wayward’ second son with his paedo brother in terms of how they are treated at public events.

Despite what the focus groups and opinion polls tell you about the generational divide on this issue, not every granny in Britain is on-board with the melodrama and farce - even those of us who received royal mail...

So, ¼ of the union (the English) are actively foisting a new serfdom on their children and the rest of us. Unnervingly, friends/family members – including some of mine are ‘testing’ acquaintances by making unsolicited statements about the virtues of the Queen or questions about what you are ‘doing to mark the occasion’ to gauge reaction – the wrong one they already suspect – like McCarthy era USA.

Meanwhile under cover of hysterical, nonsensical, media-induced public mass stupidity – Truss – the only person left on the planet who believes in trickle-down economics - is handing other rich folk a windfall of cash in tax cuts while refusing to do an EU-style profits windfall tax on the energy companies to help cushion the blow of the extraordinary rise in the cost of domestic fuel – which will see elderly and vulnerable people, not living in palaces, die this winter.

Chancellor of the Exchequer Kwarteng is removing the cap on profits for fat cat bosses because what the country really needs to get back on its feet is for bankers to earn much more!

Home Secretary Suella Braverman (yes – they managed to find someone more stupid than Priti Patel) is gung-ho for the migrant flights to Rwanda – reminiscent as they are of the 1960s ‘reverse freedom’ buses in Southern Unites States organised by segregationists.

Therese Coffey – who looks like a walking heart attack, Secretary of State for Health is dealing with the 6.8 million patient backlog and massive understaffing by tackling poor grammar in an early formal communication with NHS administrators. And that is before you even begin on already over-stressed London hospitals and ambulance services further challenged by those fainting in day- long queues to file past the coffin of QEII

Fascism is on the rise in Europe. Putin’s war is far from over. The forgotten victims in forgotten wars remain – well – forgotten.

The climate crisis is relegated to very low down on the news despite the fires and floods and thousands of resultant deaths of recent weeks.

If the fabled stability provided by the presence of rich people living in palaces that folk repeatedly refer to is in the mediaeval sense of everyone knowing their place and accepting that a very tiny handful of entitled idiots have everything because they were born to other people who also had everything while increasing numbers of ordinary folk and their children shuffle through life’s gutter – then yes – we have stability.

Somehow the vastly wealthy and those benefitting from an increasingly unequal system managed to convince the have-nots that what they have is stability while wiping out all the post-war gains of the working class. If you object to the mad obscenity of it all – you are lacking compassion or unpatriotic or maybe a communist...

It’s an amazing sleight of hand.

*

Do check out My BOOKS


Tuesday 13 September 2022

447. From the catastrophic clown & Carrie to cookoo cuckoo Liz and her cardboard cuckold in N.10 to a clueless king who accepts carrier bags of cash.

You couldn’t make it up…

The echo of medievalism in Britain has grown to a deafening roar. Over the summer the plebs were left in want and fear while the toffs who created many of the catastrophes facing the country held a stupidity contest (see last week’s blog) and the clown Johnson, nominally still in charge, holidayed and took photo opportunities. Just as the person we all knew and dreaded would be handed into No.10 by the swivel eyed loons, remnants of of the Tory party, we were landed with a new monarch whose most recent claim to fame was taking supermarket shopping bags of cash off a Saudi pal.

As the media manipulates the public into the requisite public show of hysteria and anyone who avers is accused of lack of compassion and rare dissenters - albeit non-violent - are arrested as per here in Edinburgh, we enter another period of collective amnesia and madness while the world burns and those in real urgent need are left to suffer. 

And to be clear - the chap arrested in Edinburgh was rebuking Andrew - the Queen's favourite son who she'd recently bailed out with many millions of pounds from a little sexual exploitation problem. Andrew clearly saw more value in mummy - this time to rehabilitate him with a gullible public. Well it seems to be working with all apart from the one young chap who was arrested for disagreeing with the mob.

Back in what passes for politics these days, it would have been hard to think of a more unpleasant pair in no.10 than Boris and Carrie Johnson. Their pre Downing Street interactions will be remembered by a handful of folk with still functioning brain cells as being marked by the police being called on them by neighbours due to a 'domestic'. Their relationship beginnings at Downing Street were stained by Johnson’s absence from COBRA meetings at the start of the pandemic due to a more pressing problem. He needed to shuck off the wife in remission from cancer because the daughter-age girlfriend was pregnant. And all this from a PM with a known history of using the public purse via promises of public offices to get young women to sleep with him. Also something that had been tried and clearly worked with Carrie as it very belatedly emerged he’d tried to get her a cushy well-paid position she was clearly not qualified for in 2018. A secret well kept by the right wing press until recently.

Fast forward and there is another idiot blonde – or “imbecile” to use Mrs Mercer’s possibly more accurate term. After all, her husband - Tory MP Johnny Mercer - has actually worked with Truss. This one also incapable of being faithful to a spouse. And there the two of them were for the pics. He looking very much the hostage, the uncomfortable cuckold with Liz smiling the inane smile of the daft, dim and deluded dame she has proven so often to be. She is off her rocker. I have no doubt. Only someone completely out of touch with reality of any kind could see someone so lacking in every way in the mirror and say – yes – its me – I am the person to steer Britain through the various crises caused by the government I eagerly served in. It is I, vain stupid cookoooo Liz who threatened nuclear Armageddon to get voted in, who insulted the Scottish first minister and the French president to ingratiate myself with some swivel eyed loons, it is I who am the answer to Britain’s prayers. It's me – cookoo Liz and my cuckolded hubby who should now be replacing the Johnson gold wallpaper in the Downing St flat.


*

DO check out My BOOKS

*

Plus - Ill be doing a very short slot at the Edinburgh Poetry Festival at Ocean Terminal 12.30 this saturday

Tuesday 6 September 2022

446. Johnson’s government left Britain bleeding out from Tory injuries to hold a stupid stupidity contest.

When I parked this blog back in July – I thought there would be real new news for comment at the start of September. A faster slide down the Brexit sewer as the buffoon, partying PM Boris Johnson attended to his own appetites while the people of Britain suffered, was beyond what even I could envisage. And my opinion of Johnson has always been that he’s far south of deplorable.

We were made to hang on while Truss and Sunak entered a who-can-be-the-worst-person and therefore appeal to the 160k-ish 'swivel-eyed loons' (what is left – or rather far right – of the Tory party membership) who again decided the resident 10 Downing Street. For 6 weeks, literally nothing has been done of any significance to avert the very obvious and very grim crises facing Britain. And yes – the UK is not alone in the troubles of 2022 – but much of Britain’s hurt has come from the self-inflicted wound of Brexit.

As for Liz Truss, it’s just a case of how much lower the UK goes under another vain, wispy blonde, careless idiot incapable of fidelity before we reach rock bottom…

Recently – as a form of escapism – I re-watched Predator – the original with Arnold Schwarzenegger. I realised that Predator was more realistic, less alarming and far better scripted than the summer Tory leadership contest where Liz Truss – who was still Foreign Secretary at the time - threatened nuclear Armageddon, insulted the Scottish leader and played silly games with the notion of not being friends with France – a NATO ally. All that in-between promising tax cuts that will overwhelmingly benefit the wealthiest.

Meanwhile the privatisation shit has really hit the fan in so many ways. There’s a new UK beach pass-time of ‘swimming with solids’ or ‘paddling with pooh’ in rivers thanks to decades of mismanagement, lack of investment and pumping money to shareholders by the privatised water companies. Those same companies now intend to increase household bills to belatedly pay for all the maintenance they never did and the infrastructure they sold off for profit.

Up here in Edinburgh the streets were strewn with uncollected rubbish during the August festival as workers across the country showed their frustration with strike action that will never gain them pay rises sufficient to deal with huge hikes in the cost of living.

Plus, just as a side issue on the scale of the apocalypse, years of ignoring obvious in-our-faces climate disaster warnings resulted in 40 degree heat in July in the UK, extreme global forest fires, droughts and now devastating flooding across 1/3 of Pakistan with massive loss of life.

The cost of living crisis came to a crescendo – but the morally, politically, intellectually ever-absent Prime Minister Boris Johnson did not let that stop him enjoying his holidays abroad, a little top gun cosplay and his further photo ops with Ukrainian leader Zelensky. Zelensky – the man who went from comedian to admired warrior and crisis leader while Johnson has only ever remained an over-promoted posh twit with multiple delusions, spreading disaster and mayhem like an incontinent toddler with diarrhoea and no nappy.

As we begin a new chapter in the increasingly down-at-heel, dirtier, falling apart book of The Recent Sad History of Britain – I can only say that moving on from the catastrophe that was Johnson into existence under the premiership of one of the most vain, stupid and intellectually dishonest women British politics has ever had the misfortune to endure is just deeply, deeply, deeply disturbing.

*

As always - do check out My BOOKS thank you.

Friday 22 July 2022

post-apocalypse reading for this summer...

Regardless of which carpet stain becomes Britain's next Prime Minister, 

if you're interested in humanity's general direction of travel, try this -

check it out on goodreads by clicking this link

Zero One Zero Two 

(we are all dead)

nb. normal posting will resume in Sept.

Tuesday 19 July 2022

445. I was punched to the ground by a public schoolboy who wanted to practice [his] boxing. Does that help explain Britain?

 (This is the last post for the summer)

When I was about 8, an older boy my brother knew punched me so hard and so unexpectedly that my face was badly bust and I was laid out on the ground bleeding profusely and half unconscious before I knew what was happening. My friend Jane ran screaming for her mother who came and carried me home.

This boy was previously quite encouraged by my mother who liked that he was from a wealthy family and went to a fee-paying school. When asked why he’d punched me he calmly said he’d ‘wanted to practice [his] boxing’.

In the 70s I went to a comprehensive school in Solihull – a place with a disproportionate number of fee-paying schools and I later attended a 6th form where a number of students from those schools ended up. There was a casual racism and snobbery anyway among the cliquey horrors who made up the generally well-healed youth of Solihull but those who’d come in from the fee paying schools had an air of assuredness and entitlement that usually bore no connection to their actual abilities. It was grim. I discovered what it meant to be rejected for reasons I had no control over and regularly went AWOL in the second year.

Later on, studying law at Northumbria uni, a course which attracted a good number of privately educated young people, I was again spending time with some of the entitled, the well-healed with a group-think so obviously borne of entitlement and a sense that The System was there to serve their needs, it was almost tangible.

Disclaimer – I also know a handful of truly decent ex-public schoolboys – who through sheer strength of personality – seem to have avoided being dehumanised by the elite end of the private and especially boarding school sector in Britain.

However, most of the public school brats who’ve run the country since Thatcher administered the first mass punishment beating on the working class, have behaved like that boy, as if the rest of us are peripheral to their wants and needs. 

To date they’ve trashed the NHS, completed selling off UK infrastructure to their mates, taken already meagre benefits from the poor, abandoned the vulnerable (poorer old people / children in low income families / the unaccompanied migrants promised help under the Dubs Amendment / even the poor of the world were hit with a cut in UK aid during the pandemic) because throwing their weight around seems to be what they enjoy.

So now, I look around me and everything is broken. It –Britain - like the office of Prime Minister and bits of Downing Street after a Johnson knees up – is trashed. We are collectively lying on the ground, feeling sick and dizzy, looking at the sky wondering why we’re bleeding.

A new Tory leader, even if it’s a half-reasonable one (and I’m not sure there is one of those in the pack), is not going to alter that any time soon.  The posh boys have completed the wrecking of our post-war hopes of fairness and decency.  Like dutiful peasants we're all sitting back and waiting for the people in the big house to decide who gets to ‘have a go next’.

But it’s not just Brexit. It’s not just Tory austerity. It is not just the global legacy of the illegal invasion of Iraq which altered so very much it’s hard to know where to begin. And – yes – it’s worth mentioning here that those of us who were so utterly against Blair’s ego fest, DID predict the horrors of that vile adventure just as those who wanted to stay in the EU absolutely correctly predicted the mess we now have with Brexit.

But it’s more than all of that.

In history it is often hard to pinpoint the point; spot the time when things pivoted and altered irreparably.  However, it’s really not that difficult in this instance. It began with Thatcher convincing working class people that they could / should buy what was already theirs. Britain has never ever recovered from the selling-off of council homes. Our current desperate housing crisis has its roots there. Privatisation in terms of its scale and consequence is the behemoth – it is the catastrophe of a very British fuck-up. It was a grubby trick that makes those defrauding old ladies out of their savings look like monks. It makes the ongoing unfairness of the bastard Council Tax seem trivial. I was a city councillor when that monster was let loose - see blog 420 Political bullying claims bring back painful memories .

Privatisation of everything that was seen as the legacy for all of Britain in the optimistic post-war era has brought us to where we are now. It culminated in the sell-off of Royal Mail – thanks Vince Cable. Major beneficiaries included a Saudi royal prince getting shares at bargain basement prices. The rotten irony is that while the right-wingers bang on about patriotism and used raw xenophobia (and blatant lies) to sell Brexit – they have sold Britain into foreign hands at every single opportunity – from energy companies to the water we drink and that is before you begin on the issue of Russian Oligarchs funding the Tory party. Boris Johnson recently put Evgeny Lebedev in the House of Lords presumably as a sweetener to daddy Lebedev – pall of Johnson’s and ex KGB officer.

Except for the decent Gordon Brown, the greyness and hope of a meritocracy which came to nothing for John Major and the dull ridiculous interlude that was Theresa May, the rest have all been public school brats and Thatcher’s bastard spawn. Even Cameron’s lap dog Nick ‘Cojones’ Clegg (Lib) who  – having screwed over the youth of Britain on tuition fees to get short-lived second-hand power and who went on to continue that work at facebook, was one of them. Party doesn’t matter. Never forget – as well as being a war criminal – something the media seem to have collective amnesia over – Labour’s Tony Blair introduced the private sector into schools and hospitals and is responsible for the introduction of Tuition Fees suffocating the futures of thousands of young people who just wanted to better themselves with a university education.

The greed and self-serving, faux nationalism and Dickensian attitude to the poor, unleashed by Thatcher, has never gone away.  I’d argue – it’s why we ended up with a chancellor under Boris Johnson who could shield his own huge family wealth from the UK tax system – while simultaneously spending the taxes of everyone else and see no contradiction. It’s why we had a Prime Minister who had to be shamed by a footballer into feeding poor children during the pandemic but felt entitled to free gold wallpaper.

And now we have a system where the trains don’t work – despite sucking up gargantuan amounts of public funding over decades – much of which ends up in shareholder’s pockets. We recently found out that for years raw sewage was being illegally pumped into our waterways by privatised water companies. The roads are broken. Councils can’t deal with mess (rubbish – dog shit) or repair schools or libraries. HMRC cannot deal with the backlog of folk needing answers to their tax queries or refunds. The benefits application system – deliberately cruel, obscure and hard to access since the introduction of the hated Universal Credit – was broken for weeks while people struggled.

Like the term ‘food bank’, we’ve got used to the expression ‘cost of living crisis’. There is a growing homeless population. Drug deaths are up as services are cut but as often happens at these times of fiscal fragility, the numbers living in extreme poverty shame us more because there are so many with extreme, eye-watering wealth.

The Times Rich List 2022 tells us that the UK now boasts 177 billionaires. So – as I’ve often stated on this blog – the issue is not resources – as always it’s that a few have far too much – and like the Sunaks – spend  time and effort making sure it doesn’t find its way into the tax system to pay for stuff all of society needs. But this government and its cronies will happily tell anyone who will listen that the real problem is that there are too many folk on benefits as did dimwit and Johnson toady Suella Braverman during her recent failed leadership bid.

True, there are far too many people having a free ride – it’s just that – thanks to privatisation and decades of the country being run by those from exceptionally privileged backgrounds – those getting the freest of all rides are the already well-healed.

Everything is broken.

Those born to privilege, like Boris Johnson and his ilk are the wreckers. Johnson was simply the Nero of this Julio-Claudian dynasty. But time and again, somehow, the UK public have been persuaded to vote for those who harm them, and those whose lives bear no resemblance to theirs.

Plus, the calibre of the folk taking Britain for a ride has sunk so low that morons like Grant Shapps, a ponzi schemer with a track record of bullying, actually felt able to put themselves forward as potential PM. The smell from a blocked drain would do a better job.

The people paying the price are the rest of us. Moreover, as we sink deeper into the mire created by those with connections, wealth and privilege, as the tide of shit rises exponentially, those able to keep their heads above the stinking waters will be a fewer and fewer.

I had absolutely no idea that boy was going to punch me in the face. If I had, I’d like to think I’d have taken some sort of evasive action. But the ordinary folk of Britain have been punched repeatedly, kicked and hammered; they’ve had their birth-right stolen by those who already have more than their fair share. I do not understand why they bend over so readily for another kicking.

*

Other related posts – 187 - British boarding schools breed posh sociopaths

*

Contact - I can be contacted at edinburghfft@gmail.com 

Books - do check out my novels, poetry anthologies, short stories and children's books here Amanda's BOOKS

*

I’ll be back at the end of the summer. Thank you for reading.