465. The effluence of affluence in Britain.

UK Con-servatives have polluted Britain with plutocracy; the Tory legacy will be the effluence of affluence.

We have bidding wars instead of government in the latest mad ‘levelling up’ nonsense. As many have said before me – a sort of Hunger Games for struggling infrastructure.

Richard Sharp – head of the BBC was, it turns out, not just a previous Tory donor and crony of both Sunak and Johnson, he was also a money loan enabler for his old pal Boris de-Brexit Johnson immediately prior to his appointment.

Meanwhile Nadhim Zahawi – Tory party Chair (ex-chancellor and man who had to return tax monies he’d used to heat his private stables) has had chit-chats with HMRC about his not very transparent tax omissions. But he’s paid a fine now so nothing to see here! But the question is – do we want this kind of ‘mistake’ from the man who was at the time running the nation’s fiscal infrastructure.

James Cleverly (sec of state for foreign affairs) drew the short straw at the weekend and was wheeled out to defend Nadhim Zahawi. It was a full on shit show with not-so-Cleverly excusing NZ because he was a successful businessman who fled Iraq with his family as a child. Cleverly is currently part of a government that literally dreams of cruel treatments for desperate migrants  fleeing dangerous  regimes who maybe also wish one day to be British Chancellor to which one can only say - pick a lane...

Another defender of Zahawi was deputy PM Dominic Raab currently under multiple investigations for bullying. He’s the man who makes Patel look like Mother Theresa – the man who was too busy when Home Secretary – to get off his arse on holiday as the horrors of the bungled withdrawal from Afghanistan unfolded.

But – back to bidding for crumbs from the millionaires’ many tables.

Last week Michael Gove – political rubber man – denied and defended the appearance that wealthier southern areas are getting more of the ridiculously named ‘levelling up’ fund than more deprived areas. When Sunak was losing his Tory leadership bid to terrible Truss (woops – there goes £50billion) he was caught out at a Tory pep talk in Tunbridge boasting that he’d take monies from deprived urban areas to hand to wealthier ones. At the same time he and Gove and previously Truss and Johnson continue to talk out of their arses about levelling-up. Levelling Up is phrase that has embedded itself into the political consciousness if not the political understanding like a tick.

Local government is no longer really that. Since Thatcher it’s just a series of decisions about services that were ‘put out to tender’ usually to be done cheaper and inadequately. Who gets the contract is the game they now play. More rich pickings for corruption and cronyism.

Also in this list of governments no longer governing would be the setting up of ‘independent bodies’. Sounds great doesn’t it. Ditto enquiries.

Very often these cabals-of-pals are used to deflect. In the case of the ubiquitous inquiry – they’re used to kick the can down the road when hopefully the public will have forgotten or at least be less angry about the government failure/disaster  like – the Iraq war inquiry or the current – still ongoing - Grenfell tower or the reports on the Windrush scandal. Of course sometimes there are multiple inquiries/reports as into racism and they are ignored only to be followed by another report/inquiry the next time one is needed as a distraction from actually doing anything.

I’ll stop here because you really get the point.

The thing is Britain is not governed any more. We beg for services – get some if we’re lucky and if we’re not lucky enough to live in a wealthy Tory borough – tough. Politicians don’t make decisions they pass things off to convenient bodies and bide their time until they can leave politics and cash-in on their status and contacts.

But we are paying politicians more than ever while they twist and turn to avoid the rules that are supposed to supress their side earnings where they are at the beck and call of lobbyists and vested interests.

After 13 years of Con-servative governments, the one thing it seems we cannot expect from our government is government…

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464. ‘When it comes to the subject of Harry’ (a la - Calamity Jane)

When it comes to the subject of Harry

A pub ‘stallion’ who went off to marry

A girl with brown skin

Now he cannot win

And it’s Harry they’re planning to bury

 

He’s a spare just an extra just other

But much the more interesting brother

He rejected The Firm

Then made them all squirm

But I bet it would tickle his mother

 

Then we all heard about the royal todger

T'were used the horse lady to rodger

Far too much detail

From this royal male

But you’re payin he’s sayin so sod yer

 

And while Harry says like it or shove it

Kate and Wills pretend they are above it

While side-briefing the press

And channelling old Bess

It’s comeuppance in buckets, I love it

 

Charlie wants his big bling coronation

Qatar money and plebs' adulation

I wonder if ‘one’

Knows the monarchy’s done

Yield your loot to a tired struggling nation

Yield your loot to a tired struggling naaaaaatiooooon…

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463. Top 20 unlikely news stories in 2023!

1.     Telegraph readers admit Brexit is a catastrophe and they were conned for the sake of xenophobia.

2.     Woman (possibly me…) walks more than 20 yards from home without stepping in dog shit.

3.     Daily Mail readers have an epiphany and see that Jeremy Clarkson is a talentless, entitled, misogynistic, desperate twat.

4.     Royal family apologise for slavery, return stolen land, property, jewels and other swag and donate properties for homeless folk to live in.

5.     Suella Braverman stops drooling over intentional cruelty to vulnerable migrants.

6.     The West astonishingly and en masse, cares more about species extinction, the climate crisis and deadly pollution than reality TV programmes (see last post).

7.     Found - an intelligent, good looking white supremacist.

8.     Monarchy is abolished. The silly, expensive, pathetic dressing-up-box pantomime coronation is swapped for an equality street party.

9.     Child of celebrity doesn’t become a model.

10.                        Elon Musk, Trump, Matt Hancock, Jair Bolsonaro, Boris Johnson, +++ are put on The Naked Emperors’ rocket to Mars.

11.                        Voters finally understand that its wealthy tax avoiders who need to be chased by HMRC not the disabled and struggling families.

12.                        Cigarettes are banned and tobacco companies pay reparations to all cancer victims – tobacco land grows food.

13.                        D list celebrity woman you forgot about, frantic for attention - wears clothes.

14.                        Morons stop buying large dangerous dogs and other morons stop cutting down urban trees and hedges. They also stop paving or decking or fake-grassing over their gardens.

15.                        Nepotism becomes deeply infra dig. Talented folk get a chance and the country improves in all ways.

16.                        Black lives really matter.

17.                        Water company bosses of privatised English water companies are forced to drink the turd water they pumped into British waterways.

18.                        ‘Commentators’ stop talking infinite shite about stuff they know nothing about in order to draw attention to themselves – UK public critical faculties improve.

19.                        British public suddenly remember the Tories have been in power for 13 years not just since Sunak became the bronze medallist PM.

20.                        Brexit turns out to have been like Bobby’s dream in Dallas. UK jingoists and xenophobes aren’t really THAT stupid or self-destructive. It was all just a nightmare.

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462. 2023 - the year we accept that the climate crisis is personal?

 The climate crisis is literally at our front doors but it's been easy to ignore while it was mainly affecting poor people in countries ‘over there’. The notion that wealthy, heavily consumerist nations are predominantly to blame is a truth that has been wilfully ignored.

Following the hottest summer in living memory in 2022 and the decimation of important insect species / wildlife and the increase in flooding – even the hardest-hearted, most deluded must now accept that this is personal. It’s here.

The day before New Year’s Eve I walked home in cold heavy rain past the swollen Water of Leith which had burst its banks despite recent expensive and disruptive flood defences. I encountered a woman trying to ‘sweep’ road water away from her front path where it would have had easy access to her front door.

She complained to me that she’d contacted the council and they’d done nothing… Then I looked along both sides of her street.

It was an increasingly familiar and depressing sight.

Front garden after front garden was paved over or block paved or concreted or gravelled. Hedges were ripped out as per my own neighbours, losing precious urban species habitat, often for vehicle access. God-forbid any living thing should mar these sterile monstrosities.

Any chance for excess water to be absorbed naturally is blocked. Each front garden turned into an ugly water-repellent void where run-off water gushes into roads and along to drains that can’t cope.

The people responsible for her immediate minor flooding were the woman’s own neighbours.

I wonder if 2023 will be the year we finally take personal responsibility for our immediate environment if not the global one. I include the mountains of toxic dog shit and plastic litter.

Looking to move house myself, I note with increasing sadness and bemusement the number of homes Estate Agents describe as “well maintained” that are green-free horrors. Too many garden make-over programmes? Have these people succumbed to the idea that concrete is an easy maintenance option – because its not. A wild garden always looks kind of nice. Weed-broken concrete or block paving pretty soon looks like a slum.

Often these places have no trees or vegetation or hedges or even grass. More and more brick and concrete. Surely in 2023 this is the opposite of “well maintained”. Instead might we say ‘unaware or uncaring people live here’ or ‘clearly these people have children who don’t need to breathe air’ or ‘these folk have not heard of the climate crisis’ or ‘these people own a well-stocked boat’ or ‘these folk haven’t worked out that we need biodiversity’… This is a sad house.

Yes we need industry to pick up the tab on a grand scale – we need the polluters and environmental vandals of the wealthy West to pay for the global damage it has done and support the poorest countries on the planet; we need to ignore the MAD ads for cruises and cheap holidays but most of all we need to understand the very personal nature of the climate crisis.

It is literally at our front doors…

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I recommend My BOOKS to you as always (UK/US and expanded distribution from you fave online bookstore) but, in view of the topic of the first post of 2023 I'll specifically flag up these two - 

Casey & the Surfmen  (audio version bandcamp)

Zero One Zero Two (goodreads)

461. Qatari cash converters, cantankerous king Charles & conniving, complicit commentators… It’s Christmas!

Interesting aint it?

Over the last few months while there has been intermittent interest in the Qatar mass crime event (sorry – the football world cup) – the equally hideous reports of (then) Prince Charles, now King Charles III and his guzzling of Qatar millions conveniently evaporated from the consciousness of the UK media.

As I said in a letter to editors yesterday –

Presumably – now the Qatar World Cup men’s final is over, the media might go back to pretending they care about the dead, abused and exploited workers on whose misery the football stadiums were built.

Just joking!

Of course there is now another Qatari ‘cash converter’ – Greek MEP Eva Kaili caught doing Qatar’s bidding for Q.cash.

The person who seems to have slipped the memories of the press, commentators and broadcast media this Christmas is cantankerous king Charles.

If it weren’t for the bitching and whining about the couple who fled institutional abuse (for not toeing the line) and, in Meghan's case, racism and extreme misogyny, they could claim they’re just not that interested in a defunct, dysfunctional, expensive, past-its-sell-by-date, inbred institution. But they clearly are.

So, when it comes to Qatari cash converters, where are all the questions related Charlies’ Q.cash?  Where are the enquiries into the millions he accepted in shopping bags (how pedestrian) along with the questions about FIFA and the MEP?

I hope those of you watching chump Charlie doing his first Christmas speech this year, to a bemused nation and an increasingly disinclined commonwealth, will consider a few things; his abusive act of marrying a young woman he knew he didn’t love while carrying on with the woman he did (that would be Camilla who just hosted the two worst Meghan abusers - Clarkson and Morgan for lunch) and his whining and bitching (the pen that didn’t work – the wife who was too slow leaving an event he’d had enough of) and the scuttling off to his Scottish estate in breach of covid rules. I mean he’s not exactly his granny, sticking around during The Blitz is he? Charles Mountbatten Windsor is much more like Prince Prospero in Edgar Allan Poe’s - The Marque of the Red Death - minus the colourful personality.

No, consider that all the above is paid for out of the public purse and he also has the ill-gotten gains of centuries but it’s still not enough. He covets bags of Qatari cash.

Happy Christmas.

Back in January.

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460. Fear + Dysfunction = Catastrophe

- domestically, politically, globally. 

It’s a simple equation. One we know – in theory.

The problem is that extreme right-wing activism and in fact all forms of authoritarianism, thrive on this equation.

It is no coincidence that many of those on the lunatic right – when we take a closer look – are deeply inadequate people and attracted to fear and dysfunction like Harry Potter dementors.

From Donald Trump, a man bursting with insufficiencies to Boris de-Brexit Johnson. From migrant botherer Nigel Farage to America’s white supremacist and anti-Semite Nick Fuentes. In a dark irony, it has been noted many times - there is no one on the side of white supremacy who looks and/or sounds anything other than extremely inferior.

And we do not hold these people to the standards we hold our contemporaries to. We don’t even hold them to the standards we’d hold their contemporaries to – i.e. more moderate politicians or commentators. To give one tiny example – during the pandemic when then PM Boris de-Brexit Johnson partied while people died – Scottish 1st minister Nicola Sturgeon was publically shamed because she broke the rules. In her case she stood up. Yes. She stood up in a social setting where she would have been within the rules if she’d stayed seated. It’s a false equivalence that has gained corrosive traction.

 For a current relevant example of how this plays out in the media and with those at the top – you only need look at how the right-wing UK press were happy to make non-too subtle equivalence between teen sex-pest and friend of famous paedo - Prince Andrew and Prince Harry. The latter's crime was fleeing the country to protect his wife from racism.

Here in the UK, how many truly vile inadequate human monstrosities have been elevated to The House of Lords (including the Tory peer being investigated for enriching her family during covid to the tune of £29m from a dodgy PPE contract) – to the point when you have to conclude that any decent law abiding citizen would be morally bound to refuse a peerage. Though, of course, constitutionally The HoL is an abomination anyhow.

And of course Putin - the Russian authoritarian (and war criminal in the style of Blair and  Bush) once brought a large dog to a meeting with Angela Merkel just because he knew she was wary of dogs. Though, we have to bracket him. How much choice the people of Russia actually had in ‘electing’ him is debatable. Well, it’s debatable as long as you don’t live in Russia.

And party affiliation or label or even cultural background matters not a jot nor does the subject. The hideous far-right Itamar Ben-Gvir has been given political breathing space by blot on the landscape Benjamin Netanyahu trying to escape corruption charges. Despite the anti-Semitism recently washing Trump dirtier than ever – these people could be part of the Trump fan club. They sound and look the SAME.

But these vile individuals are not really the question.

The question is why – at certain points in history - do we (THE public) give them such prominent platforms, listen to their poison and follow them down the sewer.

Fear and Dysfunction.

When humans are scared and not acting or reacting properly they do weird stuff. They will listen to nonsense. They will act inappropriately. For some reason they actively move away from the common sense and the practical.

What folk are scared of is often real.

I think collectively at some level we know the planet we all rely on to survive is creaking under the weight of our collective apathy. Our abuse. Our over-use. It’s like we know we messed up - we actually did leave the house without turning the gas off but rather than go back and sort it out we are listening to the guy who is telling us that the coming explosion is someone else’s fault. The poor person taking benefits – the migrant – the Jewish/black/gay person.

However, at the back of our minds we really know that the problem is we left the gas on. We fucked up. Are we too far away to get back in time to turn it off? Dare we call emergency services and admit what we’ve done. Or should we just bury our heads and join in screaming at other people and when the house blows up point at those other folk – all the while knowing – really knowing - in our heart of hearts it’s not them. It never was them.

We all should have checked out own behaviour.

But how tempting it is when some gob-shite comes along and pours poison in our ears and persuades, with our collusion and willingness, someone else is to blame…

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459. TWITTER

 

Thugs

White-supremacists

Imbeciles

Toady

To

Elon’s

Rectum