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Tuesday 23 January 2024

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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