395. Never mind the Johnson/Symonds’ wallpaper – what about the lumpy rug?

I mean, where is it? How big is it - the gigantic rug Boris Johnson has swept the dirt of reality under?

All we’ve heard since Brexit is closures, closures, closures and companies moving abroad. From manufacturers to financial institutions, they’ve bled away. Then there were the raft of companies that realised, in the aftermath of Johnson’s Brexit “done” declaration (just as he went AWOL to sort out his latest divorce to smooth the way for the pregnant daughter-age GF – thus leaving the country to its own devices at the start of the pandemic!) they would at least have to move their headquarters to the EU to avoid the mountain of business-destroying bureaucracy created by the man who said we needed out of the EU to counter Brussels ‘red tape’.

Then there were the further failures of businesses during covid and the economic damage exacerbated by Johnson’s terrible handling of the pandemic (see multiple previous posts) and until recently the government line was, as it has always is – nothing to see here.

I don’t know a lot of people and I am not on any social media so I don’t even have the sort of echo chamber group links that pass for social connections these days, but even I know of a significant number of people who have lost jobs. Some in their 50s and 60s three of whom have never previously been unemployed. Plus I know one young person who recently lost a job in insurance sales - something that traditionally does well during good times - the replacement job she was able to land is in debt recovery...

But where is all this in media or government gush?

Day after day after day – especially on the TBC (Tory Broadcasting Company) we get throw-away twaddle about percentage growth. There is no context so no explanation that this is often growth – compared to last year when literally nothing happened.

Slavishly, the majority of mainstream media outlets focus on vaccines and whether the brutish (see Luton Airport last week) British traveller will return to cheap climate-decimating flights to ‘boost the economy’. Again – no explanation as to what is meant by THE ECONOMY. On this blog I’ve outlined two types of economy that are both toxic and prevalent and barely sustainable. The TAT Economy (post 202) and  The Cannibal Economy  Underlying both is that they are not real or sustainable.

But we’ve moved on so far from not real we are now in Johnson Land where grubby con artists and tricksters – manage an alt universe. Somehow Johnson and his government (I use the term loosely) are keeping the balls in the air and the plates spinning. The carnival has not lost its thin lustre but the cogs of the dilapidated machinery are grinding alarmingly and soon, very soon, there will be a reckoning. If I had to take a guess I’d say this winter, after the Brexit can which has been kicked so far down the road so many times finally comes to a full-stop.

Then the economic sleights of hand, all done with the connivance of a public willing to be diverted by bollocks top stories about dog detectives (both The Guardian and The Independent - I shit you not!) will suddenly come into sharp focus. Because the dirty lumps under the rug (yes, you know I mix my metaphors) are becoming so huge that even those deliberately averting their gaze will eventually stumble over them.

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394. Half a Cup of Concern for the Climate Crisis

Last week’s English election results show that a significant number of people in what were traditionally working class Labour-voting areas significantly like jingoism and xenophobia. They not only like and enjoy the racist Boris Johnson and his Rule Britannia rhetoric but they are prepared to accept the bollocks that the Eton-educated twonk who literally didn’t care if they lived or died at the start of the pandemic (see previous posts – too many to list) is 'one of them'...

BUT

Does that really mean that – on Monday’s early morning Tory Broadcasting Company ‘news’ spew – climate catastrophe warranted no more than a stupidly childish 30ish seconds about how you might not be able to get your morning cuppa soon because tea plantations could be destroyed by global warming… Really? Was that it?

I mean I know there is the ridiculous distraction that is this dumb as shit government, its corruption and cronyism that could – yes – be mistaken for a very poor quality reality show for a nation obsessed with reality TV but surely, SURELY someone somewhere in authority or the media or government cares that we are one of the worst polluters of the planet and decimators of the natural world and its literally killing people more effectively than covid.

NO?

At the start of the pandemic I put up a post about the ‘other things’ apart from the pandemic that kill humans so very very efficiently - 393. Deadlier than Covid 

Of course  what I now realise is that if you want a cure for deadly diseases in a hurry just make sure that cossetted Westerners think they might get it. Tadaaaaah – more vaccines than you can shake a stick at in under a year.

But when tame estimates tell us that deaths from pollution in a 12 months period surpass covid by at least 100% surely we can have regular air time for environmental devastation? When we know that covid will peter out to an irritation as other viruses have done and media outlets will, in the not too distant future – have to fill the airwaves with something other than blah blah covid blah blah pandemic blah blah – wot we said yesterday – pollution will still be killing minimum 4 – 5 million every 12 months.

CO2 emissions are out of control and the best scientific estimates now tell us we cannot keep global warming increase to safe levels for many fragile, essential eco systems – like coral reefs. Coral reefs support so much other life in the ocean Boris Johnson may be relieved of future election stunts like sending navy vessels to Jersey to sneer at French fishermen the day before British elections because there will be no fish.

Surely – this warrants more than a few seconds in-between a rehash of yesterday’s nonsense and the sport?

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My BOOKS to buy/listen to Casey & the Surfmen

393. ‘Intelligent’ is the new ‘Moronic’...

…was going to be this Tuesday’s post - based on recent news that 60 countries have agreed to legalise semi-autonomous driverless cars on certain roads. These cars would allow drivers to (we were told) play computer games or use their phones in slow moving traffic. There is a 10 second revert-to-driver function if things go wrong. What could possibly go wrong on a road in 10 seconds when you are behind the wheel of a vehicle weighing 1.5 - 2 tonnes? And anyway how is this any sort of priority? Who asked for it? When was it debated in parliament? Why are we just being towed behind random tat technology? And that is all putting to one side that roads in the UK are not in a fit condition even for the vehicles we already have.

There was also the new robot dog in the US. And who am I to say that the millions spent developing something that looks like a cheap prop for a forgettable sci-fi film that might appeal to 15 year old boys could have been better spent training the police not to shoot unarmed black men?

But as I considered this theme – ‘IT is the new Stupid’ or ‘Intelligent is the new Moronic’ – I felt I was losing the will to live. So I’m not going to write that.

Then I thought I might bang on about this Thursday’s UK elections – local and mayoral elections in England and Wales and parliamentary elections here in Scotland. But then I noted that despite the horrific, unnecessary death toll under Boris Johnson and the news that despite his corruption, despite the profiteering of tory cronies during the pandemic , despite the multiple enquires now under way into this government’s sleaze – and that is before we even start on the low-life mess which is Johnson and his ilk generally (check out blog post – British Boarding Schools Breed Posh Sociopaths) – the Tories still command a significant poll lead – and Johnson has - today - got himself in our tame media as the saviour of wickle doggies everywhere with his master plan to thwart naughty doggy thieves– well – we’re just back on a theme – only this time ‘Knowledge is the new Dum-as-shit’?

 

So – instead – as the lovely Bandcamp are again waiving their revenue in order to help hapless artists like me who’ve seen no income from our endeavours for over 12 months now – I am going to link you again to my wee piece on that website –  Casey & the Surfmen .  Part 1. Down by the Sea. Part 2. Ripping the Earth. You’ve heard the planet groaning for decades and felt it trembling over the last few years – now listen to its raw message in this lyrical family-friendly epic tale of environmental peril and triumph.

Sample for free then by on Friday 7^th May.

OR

Buy a copy of the paper back or e-version by checking out My BOOKS

And we’ll see if the world is any saner this time next week…

392. Dominic Cummings spews stale news - Boris Johnson is a low-life liar…

With the media froth about DC’s ‘revelations’ concerning his former boss and who paid for the wallpaper at the Downing street flat – you’d think Boris Johnson never cheated, lied, misled his way into that property with the latest woman to add to his random offspring (and no – in case you are losing count –not the one he was shagging in the then family home who later received lucrative government grants). 

Yes, sleaze is something that resonates when talking about the Tory party but I do not understand why the possibility of dodgy décor grabs the nation/opposition’s attention when thousands of unnecessary deaths in an entirely careless approach to a pandemic and the accompanying profiteering did not. You’d be forgiven for thinking there aren’t multiple ongoing investigations into this government’s grubby behaviour. There are half a dozen. Do a significant number of Brits secretly have wallpaper fetishes?

After the first wave of the pandemic hit – the one that really tested the metal of each country in terms of reaction and resources and simply caring about its population, the UK had the highest excess mortality rate in Europe barring only Bulgaria. And Bulgaria is in no way on a par with the UK in terms of resources and infrastructure.

Excess mortality is the most accurate measure of success or failure as it shows rates of death over and above what could normally be expected. This is hugely important because this government has tried to fiddle the figures by, for example, only attributing covid deaths where the patient died within 28 days of diagnosis.

Check out the British Medical Journal  BMJ

The Tory Broadcasting Company was breathlessly recounting gossip about whether Johnson said or didn’t say he’d ‘let the bodies pile up’ rather than go into another lockdown. Why is what he may or may not have said news worthy when he did actually LET THE BODIES PILE UP?

As the summer gave some respite we moved into a strange autumn. Boris Johnson more often flanked himself with grown-ups from the world of science – Vallance and Whitty – though he still refused to follow their advice in a timely fashion.

I highlight this single issue of excessively high excess mortality because it’s easy to get lost in the fug of stats and endless government briefings – and that is partly the point of them. We segued neatly from deaths to infections and for many – odd as it seems to me – vast numbers of unnecessary deaths at the start of the pandemic evaporated as yesterday’s news as if Johnson was caught dropping litter in a nice park. Remembering how Gordon Brown was hounded and – in many ways had his political career ended - when he was caught on mic calling a bigoted woman a bigot – I do begin to wonder if we passed through some warped space time continuum after the Tories came to power over a decade ago.

Add to this the third rate reporting - somewhere below what Kate wore to the shops or some bollocks on the shite TBC shovelled down to the plebs – about the economy and you begin to wonder just what deal Johnson did with the devil. As per my doodle of two posts ago – we step blinking out of the latest sort-of lockdown into the glare of economic ruin of a truly terrible Brexit  deal but all anyone can talk about is can they go on holiday or to the pub?

What I do not understand – and this relates, I supposed, to the previous post concerning The Deference Disease – is why… WHY after over 40 years of almost unbroken rule by Tory and/or public schoolboy disaster-bots, do the working class of Britain – and especially England – keep voting for self-harm. It’s as if someone who regularly takes a punishment beating went out once every few years to buy the thug dishing it out – a new baseball bat…

In a world where attention spans are short and distractions are legion, and Johnson seems to be portrayed as the guy who not only invented the vaccine but personally jabbed into everyone’s arms and then saved football, it’s hard to remember important stuff. But we do not need Dominic Cummings to tell us that Johnson is a lying lowlife. 

Who paid for the décor in Downing Street is a nothing news item. The corruption and profiteering of Johnson and all the Tory pals will seem as nothing in the Brexit mess that is to come. So, let’s all grow up and start talking about the stuff that matters – like how Britain is going to function economically now that literally all the family silver is sold off and we’ve pissed off our main and nearest trading partners.

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391. Deference - the Disease destroying Britain.

The Deference Disease is epidemic in the UK. Following energetic social measures last century, DD became less virulent after WWI and significantly after WWII but seems to have gone crazy this century. New, aggressive variants have invaded all organs; the media, politics and wider society.

No, it’s not just the ridiculousness of a royal family and all the feudal nonsense that entails. It’s not just the different standards so clearly applied to people depending on where we see them in the stultifying social strata. It’s not just the starkly differing life chances that still depend on which school you attended and it’s not just that your prospects of living a long healthy life directly follows what class you were born into. It isn’t even the worshipful status afforded to the who-even-are-those- celebrities who’ve bared their dull souls, shallow personalities and baby bumps/new partners/near-death experiences/new kitchens in a magazine. No. It’s all of the above and x1000.

The BBC, bloated with deference and an idealised out of date notion of tradition is running scared of losing its licence fee and gave no push back when two Tories were put in charge of our supposedly independent public broadcaster. And, predictably that particular strain of social illness – one we associate with banana republics, has spread as the government are now interfering in Chanel 4. Dictating who can and cannot serve on the board - The Guardian

The recent conclusion of the all-party Public Accounts Committee was that Johnson’s test-and-trace programme was a complete failure by any measure related to affecting the outcome of the pandemic. It cost £37 billion and was run by life peer Dido Harding, someone with no relevant expertise/experience but married to a Tory. So, x37 what Theresa May paid the DUP to keep her in power and enough – if spent wisely – to have lifted many families in the UK out of poverty. Flushed down the sewer of cronyism.

But negative public reaction is barely registerable.

Early on in the pandemic Dominic Cummings famously and in pantomime villain fashion broke the belated lockdown rules set by his own boss – oh and – briefly had a young eugenicist embedded in government. ‘Nothing to see here’ was Johnson’s response – is always the response. Cummings – albeit gone now – did not have to resign over his infamous dash to Durham.

Not only has Boris Johnson gotten away with being a racist, corrupt, misogynistic liar - he was elected PM after these things were publically known about him. He has behaved with bare faced contempt for any standards of decency or restraint – buying water cannon to use on the credulous Londoners who elected him mayor. More recently, when the mad idea of a bridge from Scotland to Ireland re-surfaced (presumably the millions of pounds in feasibility will go to Tory mates a la the PPE contracts) I scanned the press for reference to his previous bridge scandal – The Garden Bridge – and came up with very little.

The sad case of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe surfaces occasionally but my scanning of the main media outlets failed to find significant, effective, critical editorial comment to the fact that the length and depth of her misery can be laid at the door of the current incumbent of no.10. Boris Johnson did one of his infamous ‘gaffs’ (that is what you call it when a privileged person carelessly fucks up someone else’s life) when he was foreign secretary  in 2017 – (no I’m, not talking about singing colonial ditties in an ex-British colony or racially insulting Barack Obama) claiming, wrongly, that NZ-R was ‘teaching journalism’. This statement was used in court against her and he was forced to apologise – though that did her no good. None of that was a barrier to his moving on up to the highest political office in the UK with significant support from areas previously decimated economically and socially by a predecessor of his Margaret Thatcher. I mean I know Corbyn was unelectable but jeez...

How does this work? (That is not a rhetorical question; if you know tell me…)

Yes – I know that whenever the peasants get restless – the toffs just start screeching and scare-mongering about foreigners and – here’s a flag to wave – and oh look – here’s someone wearing dressing up clothes and a crown – how marvellous.  But dear god – as I keep saying - that might have worked in 1381 – WHY IS IT STILL?

While this Deference Disease is rotting Britain from within – preventing the real talent from rising and ensuring that we are governed by the half-baked (Raab), the witless (Williamson) and the gormless (Gove) the talentless bullies (Patel), the catastrophically useless (remember Graylings £13m+ contract for ferries given to the company with no ferries?) etc etc etc– that is not the worst of it.

When we look up and see incompetence and politically and socially incestuous behaviour choking our progress in the world, it is a depressing sight. However, we are missing the fact that – for a while now – the rest of the world has not been looking up to Britain. It’s been staring down, down, down - in disbelief.

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390. SIX things we thought we’d fixed…

 There are many things we thought we’d fixed or were at least well on the way to fixing which have become inexplicably ‘broken’ again this century.

Post WWII gains for ordinary people have been under threat since Thatcher. 1979 began an almost unbroken chain of either Tory or private schoolboy rule in Britain which has left the lives of those lower down the social pile increasingly in tatters. Deference is still with us further whipped up as part of the jingoistic package of Brexit while the gap between the haves and have-nots, which increased exponentially under the Blair administration, has become a canker in our social midst with symptoms such as the spread of zero hours contracts. 

Despite the MPs’ expenses scandal 2009, which saw the public aghast at things such as an MPs claim for £30,000 garden expenses including the infamous ‘duck house’ - the last decade has seen a catalogue of low-grade, no-consequence behaviour ending in the gilded cage of Boris Johnson’s cabinet of the craven and the cretinous. Corrupt or vile behaviour by elected officials now barely causes a blip on the public’s Richter scale of disgust. But here are just half a dozen of the things that we thought were fixed which are very broken.

 

Workers’ rights. Post war unionisation saw a huge increase in workers’ rights including safe working conditions and fairer pay. Since Thatcher decimated mining communities and snatched other working class benefits, the EU partly took over when it came to things such as safety at work (something derided by the right wing as the nanny state) and working time directives. This century, with the rise of zero hours contracts and now Brexit – deregulation is again the holy grail of the extreme capitalist right and we have seen the sad sight of, for example, deliveroo workers fighting for rights we thought were ours already.

 

Racism. Despite the government marking its own card on this one with the much derided government report on racial disparity – just NO. So many reports have been written so many recommendations made and ignored. Simply coming up with a government issued document saying there is no racism when – apart from anything – the PM himself has form in this field is beyond satire. As Doreen Lawrence said – issuing such nonsense puts race equality back decades. Check out  Dear British Black People

 

Poverty. Since the Rowntree report Life &Labour of the people of London 1891 which first scientifically measured poverty in the UK, Britain has been shamed as one of the world’s rich countries where it is still possible for children to go hungry. One of the pushes for the establishment of the Welfare State after WWII was government embarrassment at just how poorly nourished and educated British conscripted soldiers were compared to allied troops. And now – with austerity which we have Cameron and Osborne to thank for – we have food banks as a regular feature of our social landscape and declining longevity in the poorest regions.

Ireland. I was a huge admirer of Mo Mowlam – the behind the scenes driver of the Good Friday Agreement – a process begun under John Major’s administration. I spent regular and significant time in southern Ireland in the 1980s and 90s and the way the country had been held back economically and socially by what was euphemistically called The Troubles had to be seen to be believed. And, despite the collapse of The Celtic Tiger boom – the country made great economic and social strides in the intervening years. The unrest and destabilisation we now see is beyond sad. It will rightly be put at the door of no.10 Downing street’s current incumbent as the man who lied used into Brexit and struck a ridiculous deal for the sake of saying ‘job done’. Now he refuses to attend summit talks on the crisis. Ignoring crises and wilful ignorance are blissful bedfellows for the man with no shame.

Sexism. I had a view when I was a student – that this, at least – would entirely be a thing of the past by the time I was a ‘proper grown up’ Well, I am a grandmother now and I see misogyny thriving - see my recent post -  Misogyny is Alive & Kicking in Britain.

 

Pollution. I would not go as far to say we even thought this one was on the way to being fixed but maybe we thought we'd got folk to the point where they care or were paying attention. We've had almost exclusive wall to wall ‘news’ of covid for over a year now. Recently and while the world is far from over covid, all the UK middle class media seem to be doing is bitching and whining about when ‘we’ can go abroad on holiday. Because we deserve it… Well it’s worth remembering – as I’ve pointed out endlessly on this blog – and not least at the start of the pandemic – that while covid is deadly, pollution is worse by several miles. 12 months of covid brought a global death toll of 2.5 million. ANNUALLY according to the WHO pollution delivers a death toll of 4.5million. And many in the green movement regard that as a massive underestimate. Remember that, here in Britain it took the mother of little Ella Kissi-Debrah a long and painful fight to get her daughter’s untimely death listed correctly as the result of pollution The Guardian

 

Our real rights and freedoms were under stealthy, successful assault long before the pandemic arrived to act as a social catalyst.

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389. British Summer Time...

 Yes! It's B.S. Time...