Blair & a Convenient Untruth – (510)

 I re-start this blog with the nasty surprise I got a few days ago because political Nosferatu Tony Blair has reared up again, possibly revived by sucking at the arteries of Labour’s resurrected political body and with the aid of his media thralls.

As those achieving power seem to come and go faster and have (with some not particularly honourable exceptions) come in younger, our tired political circus is having to juggle departed but undead politicians – post-party/ post-mortum (!) politicians so to speak – ever faster.

There are none more shudder-inducing than the cadaverous old war criminal Tony Blair who is still – against all decency and sense of moral fairness – platformed by straight-faced journos who clearly have selective and collective amnesia. Or, journalism school teaches them that if the mass murderer is a. one of their own b. a millionaire c. mates with Rupert Murdoch d. so personally delusional that he himself does not believe that being responsible for the illegal (ref; Chilcot Report) and entirely unnecessary deaths of untold, uncounted tens of thousands of innocent civilians matters, then he’s in the clear.

Tony Nosferatu has conveniently forgotten what we all learnt in political history 1.01 - that destabilised and ruined countries spew out fleeing desperate people by the thousand. Fear of that mass movement of the distressed, dispossessed and dislocated, feeds reactionary fascistic narratives as it has throughout history.

OR maybe – in the same way that the right-leaning media serve up Alex Salmond at any available opportunity – in a way they would not have done when he was actually leader of the SNP – ie in order to create discomfort for the current leader of that party – maybe the legacy media see Blair in this handy role for Starmer’s Labour. Nb. Starmer needs no help peeing into the tent. He’s doing fine on his own…

You have to hand it to them. Reminding the public that this scrawny old shit,  was the Labour leader who took us into the absolute disastrous invasion of Iraq while Starmer (40+k Palestinians deaths and counting – plus hostages and the spread of the conflict – still doesn’t seem to have a clear line on Gaza genocide, unlike the other 3 nations of the x4-naiton union) – is a real dooozie in terms of juxtaposition. Just what is it with Labour and feeling so entirely comfortable with the mass slaughter of brown people?

Or does Blair really just think it’s all about him plus his correct instinct that the legacy media do not care as long as they’ve got a rich white bloke to share his opinions.

His latest ‘I got it all right about Brexit cos I’m Tony’ tone – would be laughable if it weren’t so mad. Listen to anyone with two brain cells to rub together who wasn’t David Cameron and more interested in trying to keep his party together than doing what was right for Britain – and literally anyone could (and did) predict the horrors of Britain’s tortuous European exit.

Tell us something we don’t know Tone, like where you buried your conscience.

I’d rather read Lizz Truss’s appalling book cover to cover three times while sharing a taxi with the fascist frog-faced Farage and watching a video of Michael Gove cocaine dancing to the sound of  Jabob Rees-Mogg warbling about Brexit benefits in one ear and Boris Johnson  burbling about fatherhood and Peppa Pig than hear Tony Blair on any topic at all. Ever.

Call me squeamish - I just cannot stand war criminals.

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Thanks for reading as always. Some of you been sharing my political therapy with me for a dozen years now, thanks.

And please do also check out My BOOKS

Mend My Heart - a love song to Scotland (with the help of 'alien code'...)

 Though I'm not blogging again until after the summer, I said I'd post about any creative stuff.

This was a huge surprise as I'm not a musician. How it came about and the involvement of 'alien code' is explained in the blurb that accompanies the piece on bandcamp

Do check it out here - Mend My Heart

Terminal Carelessness. (509)

In the context of one of the most erratic, contextually crazy general elections I can recall, charting the fall and fall of rationality, there are couple of glaring things-that-should-concern-us.

The media, chasing ratings and hysterical headlines have pretty much ignored smaller parties including those with a legitimate reason to be represented – Greens, Liberals and the parties representing the 3D (devolved) nations – Scotland, Wales and Ireland.

On the other hand one party – the private company of one Nigel Farage – has featured endlessly. Farage himself, 7x failed UK parliamentary candidate – has been able to rely on media attention at every turn in what I’ve referred to in letters to the press and on this blog as a devil’s pact of rabid rantings for ratings.

This imbalance is matched only by the way the two main parties, represented by Sunak and Starmer have ignored the biggest issues affecting life both here in Britain and far beyond; Brexit, the Climate crisis and the war in Gaza. On the latter, both parties have demonstrated catastrophic moral, political and statecraft failure. Not to mention the way Ukraine fails to make headlines despite it being the literal front line for the battle for European democracy plus countless other areas of the world where Western interference or historic abuse has destabilised or wrecked local economies and eco systems.

But once this Thursday is done (and for me – one of the most interesting aspects will be the turn out) expect the limited attention the public give to the thing that affects every aspect of every part of all of their lives to fade from half-hearted to zero.

The army of folks who have proudly boasted to camera that they won’t vote and ‘they [politicians] are all the same’ and any number of other excuses for not taking the only chance they have to actually influence their own future, will go back to caring about which thin woman is wearing what minuscule bikini - because of course they are not all the same! And which celebrity is making babies with which other person you’d never previously heard of and which remake of which re-made, re-hashed super hero movie is being churned out to a background of cheap CGI. (Am I sounding jaded yet?)

There is a terminal carelessness in countries that are – for now – not forced to care. Countries where the ever-present distraction  and brain-death balm of consumerism, combined with infantilism of adult gaming and gambling plus a permanent sense of an entitlement to be entertained, pushes ‘care’ away from the big issues to the small.

In 2018 the vile Melania Trump wore a jacket with the logo

’I really don’t care – do you?’

It’s a question we should all honestly ask.

Maybe we should consider the old nursery rhyme about caring

Don’t care was made to care

Don’t care was hung

Don’t care was put in a pot

And boiled til he was done...

The point being that by the time enough people care it may very well be far too late…

And on that note I’ll put this blog into summer hibernation in terms of posts. I will pop out to put up info about any new creative stuff I have out.

Other than that, see you in September.

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As always for lighter reading do check out My BOOKS

Why the meek will not inherit the earth… (508)

Worn out as everyone else is by this grim, tawdry, sleazy election, I’ve little to say that has not been said and so resort to printing here two recent letters – one, the first, was published in a newspaper in New York and the second was published in The Herald here in Scotland.

1. Dear Editor,

I see, read, hear a lot from the US liberal left / centre left and mainstream Democrats about how deluded Republicans are in their homage to Trump.

May I respectfully suggest, from here in Scotland, it’s ‘the sensible people’ who seem deluded.

If Republicans cared about Trump being a low-life, mad, racist, misogynistic con man yada yada yada – he would not have got elected in 2016.

Here in the UK one of Trump’s many admirers Nigel Farage – tagged as a racist at his expensive private school by his teachers – continues to wield influence far outside anything he has earned. His main claim to fame – apart from his 7x failure to get elected to Parliament, is as one of the main midwives of Brexit.

Farage is perma-present in all press. As with Trump, the media have played the dangerous Rantings 4 Ratings game and we’ve all suffered.

Polls are suggesting a handful of wins for the party Farage just assumed leadership of – Reform UK. And there is a chance he’ll finally win a seat in Parliament and possibly take over the Conservative Party.

Do his potential voters know he is a racist? Yes. Do they know he is a Trump/Putin stooge? Yes. Do they know his ‘I’m one of you’ shtick is total fabrication? Yes. Will that make any difference? NO.

The meek will not inherit the earth because they are too in the habit of championing their oppressors…

 

2. Dear Editor,

BIZARRELY, in this 2024 general election, both Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer are frantically ignoring Brexit (apart from as a stick to beat each other with), Gaza and the current climate cataclysm.
It’s equivalent to a traditional cooked breakfast without bacon/sausage or eggs or beans.
It’s basically - toast...

 

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As always, for lighter reading do check out My BOOKS

Global Weather Report 18th June 2024. The storm is still coming… (507)

In the light of the way Western leaders appear to have turned their faces to the wall (or their backsides to their people) and particularly here in the UK where the three main crises (national – Brexit. International – failure over Gaza. Global – Climate catastrophe)  are being ignored in the coming General Election by the two main parties, I'm drawn to a very early post on this blog,

no. 12 - ‘Armageddon will not be televised.’

Posted in October 2012 when this blog was relatively new, style and content have morphed with my mood but that post more than any, underlines to me the whole sense of having fiddled while Rome burns...

So click HERE for a quick archive read.

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For fiction reading on the same subject try -

Zero One Zero Two (UK)

Zero One Zero Two (US)

Clacton don’t be catastrophically clueless - please! (506)

 Put to one side that the man whose only significant contribution to UK politics has been the utter disaster of Brexit is still happy to show his frog features to the multiple media outlets more than happy to elevate and fete him – Farage’s 8^th attempt to slime his way into Parliament is no joke.

Oh – and I hope that if he gets in this time – as the media are doing their autopsies – they give thought to the endless hours of unearned media attention they’ve gifted him over the last decade in a quid pro quo of rantings for ratings…

Put aside that he is a blatant racist whose sole aim is self-promotion.

Put aside that he was tagged as a racist while still at his expensive private school.

He is the ultimate turd that won’t flush.

And – yes – while I have been sceptical for a while now about the ‘ordinary folk’ the media find for their on-street interviews, you have to say the mood music aint great.

One suspects that ‘researchers’ are often sent scouting for the stupidest, most reactionary, incoherent lunatics to pose as ordinary folk.

But one woman – in an interview shortly after Farage announced that he was going to be the candidate for Clacton after pushing aside the nominal leader – Mr 1975 himself – Richard Tice – while praising Farage, looped Tommy Robinson (violent white supremacist) into the same sentence. Could there be a bigger tell as to the mind-set of the people who find Farage acceptable.

I’m way past asking the obvious question about how the rich get the poor and down trodden to constantly vote against their best interests with the very tired, grubby old trick of playing the race card but they do. They’ve been doing it not for decades but centuries. They’ve also been getting away with the whole ‘I’m one of you’schtick. I wonder how many of the folk in Clacton are millionaires or have set up companies to make money from elections and are funded by billionaires?

So yes – these elections seem to be as hideous as we expect these things to be these days.

Nery a day goes by without another bribe to electors from the two main parties that both we and the people spouting know aint gonna happen.

Nery a day passes without more evidence of pandering to the mob.

Selective amnesia is also handy and many, like Farage, are actively relying on a public that seem entirely willing to comply.

Surely two of the biggest absences from this current carry-on are any mention of Brexit or any mention of the biggest threat to our very existence – climate change.

Though we do carry on regardless – the one thing that would make this half bearable would be knowing that the good folk of Clacton were not going to show themselves to be catastrophically clueless by falling for Farage.

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And no – another reminder – I am not on ANY social media (for those who’ve enquired) I mean - come on - I don't even have a smartphone...  This is just political therapy.

For lighter reading do check out my books HERE. Other than that it’s just good old fashioned letters to the press which you’ll find randomly in quite a few papers here and abroad. If I could use a quill pen and parchment I’d be up for that though I’m very much enjoying my Remington typewriter. May have to get splints for my fingers but it’s very like the one I learnt to type on in 1979.

And – yes – I know – there’s me referring to Tice as Mr 1975! What a hypocrite.

From "The United States of Amnesia" to The United Spindom... (505)

 

Note to Kier Starmer...

Regarding Labour’s Kier Starmer upping the anti on Sunak’s ‘dangerous world’ pitch with his own statement on the “new age of insecurity”.

The current ‘age of insecurity’ with global terror, mass un-managed panic migration around the world and Middle East destabilisation began when Labour’s Blair and US Republican Bush illegally invaded Iraq.

The rest is climate devastation, a subject making very little sound in either his own or Sunak’s who has the biggest willy UK general election posturing…

It was Gore Vidal who coined the phrase ‘United States of Amnesia’. Here in Britain where all is spout today and re-set tomorrow, do we now live in The United Spindom?

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As always for lighter reading do check out my books HERE or on goodreads. Soz no social media.