Many posts ago I wrote a blog called Living in The Penisic Era - 165. Now, it
seems, we’ve morphed to a new era, not just into post truth and post-shame but one where
there is only feeble push back. There is no effective challenge as day after
day the falsehoods spew. It could be that there is now just too much, it comes
too fast and sensible voices and coherent thought are drowned in the
turd-filled verbal sewage overflow.
Another older post is called ‘Deference is killing us’ - 391. and that is part of the problem too.
Tories have that overweening sense of entitlement that resonates with too many
in other positions of power and especially the media, so that tribal instinct
kicks in before duty to country and fellows less fortunate has time to impact.
There are many things we should not be ashamed of
that we were, in past times, taught to be mortified by but something shame
should definitely still attach to is lying through one’s teeth, repeatedly and
publically for personal/political gain. Or - more so recently – just to get your
mug in front of a camera gearing up for a lucrative GB News slot.
From the lies that brought us Brexit to the
re-writing of history we saw at the covid ‘inquiry’ we now have a fluid, ever-present
liquidity of lying in our post-Brexit, austerity-devastated, wealth-divided,
privatisation-poisoned land.
Unflinching dishonesty has become so ordinary that
while it still leaves a bad taste and a sort of fetid stink in the air – like
the sad, un-cared for smelly folk I increasingly encounter on the bus – you
just sort of grin and bear it and hope someone opens a window (real or
metaphoric…)
But the damage is becoming catastrophic.
Take the muddle-mumbling and obfuscation of
the vile, slimy, should-have-been-gone-long-ago Minister for Levelling up
Michael Gove and the bollocks he’s been spouting recently about housing. Promising
again to do away with no fault eviction – something this government had ample
time and opportunity to do and have not done – IS lying - surely?
Take the nightmare deliberately and falsely created
over the UK migrant issue that became, via the forked tongues of Boris Johnson,
Priti Patel, Suella Braverman and, more recently, James Cleverly and PM Rishi
Sunak – nothing at all about fixing the problem but all about dog-whistling to
racists to flex the xenophobic muscle and keep in with the right wing
head-bangers. Oh – and wasting £240m in the process for no result. Is obvious
false presentation of reality not also unabashed lying?
The afore-mentioned Gove and afore-mentioned Johnson
could be lined up with Farage if we wanted to talk about the biggest and most ruinous
lie so far this century – Brexit. I’ll leave that one because even the folk who
were taken in now realise it was a massive con. Only Johnson could think of
putting such a huge lie on an object so associated with solid, work-a-day reliability – a red bus.
Not so long ago – amidst the howls of the Right-wing
claiming left-wing bias by our so called public broadcaster the BBC – we had a
chairman who was appointed by Tories and who had previously been a Tory donor
and also an advisor to both Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak. The said Richard
Sharp was only forced to resign when it emerged he was further mired in muck in
an attempt to fix a mate’s loan for Johnson.
Watch any other party or other politically
involved person who is not a Tory and see how they are minutely examined,
probed for explanation, eviscerated if every i is not dotted every t not
crossed.
But we have to find something to counter-act this dangerously
unequal playing field.
When a Tory stands up in front of the media and lies
about the mess the country is in (even though we are all living it) or tells us, yet again, they ‘have a plan’ to fix the, e.g. waterways of England, polluted by private
companies that have simply sloshed away profits over the decades; when they
tell us poverty is down when we know it’s not, when they tell us they are
‘investing’ in the NHS and the NHS is on its knees and literally no one is
going to get the kind of response to their cancer awarded to Charles recently,
when they lie and lie and lie about how state school kids were
abandoned during covid - what do we do?
For once this is not one of my rhetorical questions.
I don’t know.
But we need to work something out because the
shameless liars have razed the social structure of Britain to the ground along
with much of the physical infrastructure and they have tainted all government administration with their slurry.
They are successfully blaming their mess on the
least vocal, least powerful, poorest and most vulnerable people in society –
and often – without challenge – claiming that somehow it’s the fault of other
political parties. And they are getting away with it…
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Plus if you google Amanda Baker Edinburgh letters you may come across some of my editor letters - too many to put links to.
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