Let’s play the ‘What If We Had’ game… (487)

I’ve written many times in many posts on this old bloggy about the way the hard won, post-war rights of ordinary people in Britain have been eroded by successive governments since 1979. It’s almost as if those who have historically had everything couldn’t even stand to see ordinary families have the basics. Good education - a reliable, free health service - good policing and decent housing.

The tired pitch is always budget restraints. It beats out like a dull thud on a broken drum. But oddly there is always money for the things they want. So – early in this election year let’s play the ‘What If We Had’ game…

To kick off I might start with;

What if we had the £30billion (according to The Resolution Foundation) lost to the UK economy when Truss’s catastrophic and right-wing dogma driven autumn budget spooked the markets in 2022

You get the idea – so play along…

What if we had the extra £6 billion for the underselling of the Post Office (JP Morgan said it was worth 10bn the government flogged it for just over 4bn)

What if we had even the £1billion Theresa May paid to the DUP in order to bribe them to help her stay in power.

What if (London) had the £53 million (£43 of public money) Boris Johnson wasted on his vanity Garden Bridge project.

What if we had the £240+ million spent on the useless/corrupt/unworkable Rwanda scheme.

What if we had the £22billion allocated to the useless Test and Trace scheme during covid.

What if we had the £60million profits made by peer of the realm Michelle Mone through covid profiteering sanctioned by Matt Hancock.

What if we had the £140 billion (according to Cambridge Econonometrics – Jan 2024) lost to the UK economy since Brexit.

And so on...

And remember – Osborne’s horrific austerity and the misery it has caused ordinary working people was justified because of the 2007/08 crash – or banking crisis. ‘Banking crisis’ is another political euphemism for the greed and mismanagement of fiscal bodies. The loss to the UK economy is almost incalculable but you bet it’s the poor who are paying and not greedy bankers or the ministers whose weak policies enabled them.

In 2021 the OBR reported that the cost of the ‘necessary interventions’ i.e. to save banks – alone cost £33billion. So – yes – what if instead of justifying poverty and misery we had that £33 billion and some of the very rich who caused that crash had been made to sort through their off-shore accounts and pay something back…

On a minute scale – families supplementing their survival with visits to the now ubiquitous food-banks might wonder how they’d have spent some of the money used to fund Boris Johnson’s covid parities. A recent freedom of information request revealed the cost of alcohol for these illegal events. According to The Mirror – the covid party drinks bill was £7,897. A tiny amount in terms of the money successive Tory governments have squandered but possibly looks like a fortune to an ordinary family hit by the cost of living crisis.

So just remember – next time some Tory twonk  gazes into the middle distance and talks about more and more cuts to public services being painful but necessary and how they are ‘prepared to take the tough decisions’ it’s only the tough decisions as relate to people not like themselves…

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As always – for lighter reading do check out My BOOKS

Westminster & the habit of getting it wrong... (486)

The wrongness of the government at Westminster has been a theme for decades and simply escalated since Cameron. If you were to take a broad brush swipe at why, you could do worse than conclude it’s because those in charge live lives more vastly removed than ever from the majority of the population they are supposed to serve.

But there is something more rotten at the heart of government now.

If you are my age or (even) older and pay attention to the world around you – British politics as acted out at the heart of government has been almost a constant internal groan since Thatcher. An obsession with the rich has morphed into callous disregard for the poor. Xenophobia is the go-to when the peasants get pissed off and the clarion call of profit drowns out everything.

And now we reap the horrible rewards of the selfish, wrong-headed religion of privatisation – whether the Post Office Horizon scandal or the fuel poverty epidemic that rages while companies make profits you can barely calculate.

Maybe like me you are a regular train user and find that over-expensive fayres mean severely limiting the number of times you visit family and friends or that – when you do turn up at any given station – you feel you’ve won the lottery if the train is even running. If it’s on time it seems a near miracle and yet – train company bosses are also trousering bonuses that would be obscene even if the train service in the UK was not an utter disaster.

I could go on.

The illegal invasion of Iraq – so wrong, everyone apart from the old war criminal himself – seemed to know. Tony Blair also introduced tuition fees so that – unlike the slippery eel himself who was born with the proverbial silver spoon – many ordinary youngsters are suffocated by debt before their lives have got started.

Move on and we have ‘Call me Dave’ Cameron – Old Etonian – with all the odious habits that seem to go with his ilk – including a massive sense of entitlement and an idea that his tribe – rich Tories – mattered more than the country he was supposed to lead. In that mind set – in order to settle the internal wranglings of his petty, fractious party he served up Brexit. The rest –as they say – is history.

Cameron’s side kick the truly vile George Osborne gave us austerity XXL. Austerity plus failures of government oversight left us with – among other things – the horror of Grenfell.

Rock up Theresa May, who was happy to dole out a £billion to get the hideous DUP to support her failed leadership. They in turn now hold N Ireland to ransom in another casualty of Boris Johnson’s Brexit.

The odious liar and sexual incontinent chancer himself - Boris Johnson - lied and partied his way through Covid. Demeaning Parliament was his signature tune and illegally proroguing Parliament was his first deed when elected.

Then the unelected Truss spectacularly tanked the economy in her nano-second of premiership. And – now of course – we have Sunak, also unelected. The current PM looks like a pup that just shat on the carpet after chewing the furniture and peeing in the hall and still wants a biscuit.

Ministers include the con-man and terrible human joke Grant Shapps who, over the weekend verbalised that a newscaster should know more about the Royal Navy’s mishap than he. Shapps is current Defence Secretary.

Therese Coffey, as environment secretary, thought shit in the water system was not a problem and didn’t seem to know, when addressing Parliament recently, that Kigali is the capital of Rwanda!

And – oh boy – Rwanda… This bonkers Johnson diversion has somehow – via Priti Patel, the evil Suella Brevareman and the total twonk James Cleverly – become central to the Tory Party identity. Being cruel to migrants and wasting millions of pounds of public money now defines what is, not just The Nasty Party any more but the party of absolute fucking morons. The Numpty party. The Numskull party. The Nut-job party.

AND – on the most important issues of the day – the Westminster lot have been found wanting oh so badly. 

Like the invasion of Iraq, it seems those outside the bubble were able to see what those inside would not. Netanyahu’s slaughter in Gaza is Genocide (see last post). With the right-wing horrors he has sold his soul to in order to stay in power and out of prison – it was never going to be anything else. But Sunak and Starmer slavishly followed the US line – business as usual. And even now with 25k dead including at least 10k children, they are not calling for a full ceasefire.

I am sick and appalled but history will judge them more harshly.

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Remember – for lighter reading to check out My BOOKS

Sunak’s election-year, unsanctioned military action v Houthis - to protect your cheap garden furniture… (485)

Thatcher had The Falklands to save her from election oblivion. Blair – the war criminal – got his rocks off in Iraq for reasons which still defy logical examination. And now – it seems – in this election year (oh coincidence I hear you cry) Rishi is rattling his little manhood in the Red Sea. For the Houthis who thrive on anti-western rhetoric, the promotional possibilities of Sunak’s action – unsanctioned by the UK parliament – will vastly outweigh any damage the missiles can do – they’ve been on the receiving end of similar for a very long time.

The people who brought you the disastrous management of the greatest domestic crisis since WWII – covid – are stumbling into another unwinnable conflict and further risking escalation and destabilisation in this terribly fragile, volatile region where millions are suffering unimaginable hardship.

And – perhaps most pathetically of all – this military action – mobilising depleted British forces and sending other people’s children into harm - is so that your cheap garden furniture or other sweat-shop produce can still get through the shortest shipping routes. This from a government that has failed repeatedly to call for a ceasefire in Gaza where 10,000 children have been slaughtered in just over 100 days of assaults on this tiny strip of land.

A couple of blogs ago I made the point that all wars are basically now resources wars. And – yes – of course – we cannot underplay how much the disruption of, for example, oil supplies might affect the everyday Western comfort of the average reality TV watching Brit. But then again – are we not underlining another great and terrible failure – that of reducing our reliance on fossil fuels? And do recall at this point – the UK rep to COP 28 just a few weeks ago – had to fly home early so as to support Sunak’s cruel, failed, idiotic Rwanda deportation bill.

Even by the standards of the current UK Tory government - does it get any sicker than this?

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For lighter reading – do check out My BOOKS

Voter Apathy Is A Deadly Disease...(484)

It’s easy to forget that prior to Thatcher, armies of homeless on the streets of Britain was not a norm.

The political punishment beatings of working-class people that began with the 1979 government, went nuclear with the Tory administration of the 21^st century.

Even during the Labour government from 1997, which began with two years where Blair stuck to Tory spending restrictions – it was the rich who got richer with the most exponential growth in the wealth gap the country had seen in the post war period. And that is before you take into account the illegal invasion of Iraq and subsequent global destabilisation.

Cameron’s debacle gave us a Con/Lib coalition which saw a generation betrayed over tuition fees and finished off the post office (subject of much current debate due to the Horizon scandal and miscarriages of justice that have been allowed to linger for years) But it was the cruelty of Osborne-led austerity which saw the introduction and the normalisation of Food Banks.

Today we live in a Britain where – while those on benefits are still vilified by wealthy Tory ministers, targeted by the right-wing media and demeaned by thugs like Deputy Conservative chair Lee Anderson – it’s actually working families who are most likely to be in receipt of some sort of benefit or subsidy.

In September last year, a BMJ article indicating that the cost of living crisis could lead to thousands more premature deaths (The Guardian). Additionally and shamefully, longevity fell in poorer parts of Britain this century for the first time since such records were kept by the likes of The Rowntree Foundation.

While the recent expensive Covid enquiry provided the opportunity for many we hoped we’d seen the last of, to get before cameras again and lie again – little we heard was new or surprising. What we do know is that the cavalier attitude of ministers who literally partied while people died and who used the pandemic to enrich their mates, meant that a country with a sophisticated, developed health system, nevertheless had one of the highest excess death rates in Europe (according to the BMJ).

Historically, low voter turnout has favoured The Conservatives. When I was campaigning for election as a very young labour candidate in 1987 I was told by more experienced members to pray for good weather because that would definitely help labour. I thought they were joking. They weren’t. But we did have good weather and I did win. In 2024 I will, again, be voting for the party that supports governing Scotland from Scotland and, come flood or heatwave, I pray for all who can to exercise their precious democratic right.

Young people, while eschewing the mass student protests that were a regular feature of my student life, seem happy and willing to go on demos, enjoy photo ops but are difficult to get to the polling booths. Meanwhile complain that those in power do little for them. I wonder why…

Voting is more important than demonstrating. Especially these days when those in power know that the reality TV-watching public have a short attention span.

Being politically active through a union is still important, however, since many of the larger unions, apparently stuck in the 1970s voted for Brexit and encouraged their members to do the same – I question if they really understand where their workers’ best interests lie. Certainly the harm done to the economy and Britain’s global standing not to mention opportunities for business, commerce, science and the arts by Brexit has been catastrophic and highly damaging to the UK workforce.

From 1922 to 1997 voter turnout held above 70%.

In 2001 voter turnout dropped below 60%

In 2019 Boris Johnson won (or the abysmal Corbyn lost) on a turnout of 67.3% - of that turnout, the win rested on 42.4% BJ 40% Corbyn (Statista)

Huge numbers of people are not voting. The majority are not actively voting for the people who rule our lives. This is very problematic in what we think of still as a democracy.

And yes – what you hear when things go wrong is people pleading for accountability. Pleading to be heard. Disgusted that they are not treated as if they matter. However, unlike the vast majority of the disenfranchised – those in power are not reliant on food banks, or the NHS or the state education system.

There is one simple answer to this. Vote. Vote every time. Vote vote vote.

Forget bitching on twitter (or whatever).

Voting is more important than being a member of a union or waving a placard.

Some countries including Australia have mandatory voting.

UK Conservatives would never introduce such a thing. If they did, they’d be out of power for a very long time…

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Thanks for reading. There are links to my books on the previous post.

All wars are resources wars now. Ukraine & Gaza are part of ‘the brink’ we’ve talked about for so long and ignored… (483)

All conflicts are now either overtly or covertly about resources. One hesitates to call them wars as that suggests equivalent forces on either side. The  21st century is marked by aggressors attempting to grab what is someone else’s when they think they can overcome the other side with fear and overwhelming short-term violence and the complicity of the lazy comfortable West  – even if – in Russia's case – they turn out to be not quite right.

 

The current ‘war’ in Gaza so called by the legacy media, is anything but. It is a slaughter. Bush and Blair’s ‘war on terror’ was anything but. The irony there had to be that if the rich bros genuinely thought Iraq had WOMD ready they might not have gone in for their horrible adventure so costly in the lives of other people’s children.

 

As an aside – while many in the UK, orchestrated by The Telegraph and Daily Mail etc, bitch about migrants from their sofas, the flaccid response of more moderate media has led to a dull acceptance that the migration debacle is a problem that sprang from nowhere and is nothing to do with government foreign policy or domestic incompetence. In fact, decades (centuries) of wealthy countries stealing resources and messing things up in other people’s back yards - white mischief in Africa and contributing to chaos in the Middle East, is having a NOW effect.

 

Possibly mad Vlad Putin was encouraged by Trump’s lunatic administration and the UK Conservative party's love of Russian oligarch money plus the moron Boris Johnson who openly sneered when his military advisors told him that Russian tanks could be crossing the Ukraine border any day.

 

What, I wonder, must it have taken for Zelensky to allow the blithering blonde blob to constantly pose next to him for photo ops with that brain fart in the background?

 

China wants Taiwan, Venezuela  wants Guyana’s oil meanwhile the world is allowing Trump and Netanyahu to use their country’s precious time, energy, lives and assets in a game called ‘keep me in the spotlight and out of prison’.

 

In the olden days it was less complicated for top predators to grab stuff and commit genocide. America was taken from the Native Americans. Australia from the Aborigines. Britain and America both decided it would be convenient to pretend black people were sub-human for a few hundred years so they could literally ‘steal’ people; their lives, their families, their labour, their dignity, their pasts and futures.

 

I would wonder if the above atrocities could have happened in the full glare of daily as-it-happens social media but Gazagedon has answered that question.

 

Biden’s costly misstep over Gaza in unquestioningly accepting that the horrors of October 7th equalled day1 of this conflict will haunt him and possibly the world.

 

And put simply – the THING that is wrong is inequality. Gross inequality. We are on this brink because we’ve ignored the environment crisis and continued abusing the planet so that those with everything could have more.

 

The real solution to sustainable and secure living is so unpalatable that the answer seems to be – grab what someone weaker has. But – unlike the olden days – those resources are running out and the planet is weary.

 

Inequality is destabilising. Extreme inequality is catastrophic. We know this.

 

Every dystopian movie and novel you could name – and some you couldn’t - like my own offering Zero One Zero Two - teaches us this very obvious disastrous lesson, as does history. Without equality we are all doomed. You can’t buy your way out of the flames.

 

All us Cassandra’s out here are getting mightily tired of seeing the bleeding obvious come to pass.

 

Let 2024 be the year we wake the fuck up.

 

And by the way welcome to the New Year. For my regular readers thank you for your patience – this is my first proper post in 7 months but I aim to get back to regular weekly posts.

 

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As always – please check out novels, novellas, children’s books and poetry anthologies either HERE or other main online stores. The silly you tube vids that go with Fun Poems for Children are still avail. Thank you.

 

Finally, as regular readers know, I’m happily lodged in the Stone Age and have never had any kind of social media account (I don’t even have a smartphone) but if you’ve read the letters sections over the last two decades in –

The Guardian

The independent

The New European

The Glasgow Herald

The Daily Record

The National

The Scotsman

The Times (a couple of times)

The New Statesman (once)

a couple of the smaller papers in New York

The Jamaica Observer

plus a handful of others (even one in Wales once!) then YES that ‘Amanda Baker Edinburgh’ banging on about stuff, using a quill pen – IS ME 😊