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

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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.

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...

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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…

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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

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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

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...

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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

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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...

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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.

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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.

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

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.

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