184. Boris Johnson the London Mayor racially insulted President Obama. Why is that OK?

…according to Ian Duncan Smith.

So, one has to conclude that if the Mayor of London is insulting and racist to the President of America it’s not the same as if a working class person was racist to their neighbour. You can be racist if you went to Eton…

WOW

Spot the double standards anyone? You gotta give it to the Elite in the UK. They do double standards SO well.

As part-pig man Boris Johnson denigrates the first black president for being ‘part-Kenyan’ and somehow not being able, therefore, to form intellectual views of the world separate from his ancestry, one wonders just where the hideousness that is the pointless EU referendum will end. In a mess of duplicity and xenophobia it seems.

That Johnson, the repugnant progeny of privilege currently sitting as London Mayor, should spew this vile prejudice while in such a prestigious position is way more than just a national embarrassment. This is the guy who was coughing up all sorts of guff about inclusivity and reaching out to the world in the run up to the 2012 Olympics. But then big money and prestige were at stake and it was a chance for him to buffoon around at tax payers’ expense. 

Boris Johnson should resign - at the very least.

A couple of weeks ago a Falklands War veteran was jailed for 15 months when a military pistol was found in his home. He had kept it as a memento from his time as SAS fighter in the 1980s. Having or secreting weapons of any description is not desirable. However, as we STILL await the Chilcot enquiry – Bush and Blair live their rarefied lives floating high above the realities of life. Tony paying £100k+ salaries to the staff helping to make him rich.

Spot more double standards anyone?

And two companies which are (depending on your social and political views) pretty much reviled, just gave their CEOS multi million pound pay awards. BP and BT. In the UK BT is a customer byword for incompetence and crap service. At the same time high street iconic store British Home Stores has gone to the wall taking employees pensions with it and possibly their 11,000 jobs and that’s just tough while their CEO who walked off a few months ago with a £multi million golden goodbye aint touched.

Here in the UK also, David Lammy MP proposed a ‘diversity’ clause in the new BBC licence agreement. Yes – in 2016 the publically funded broadcaster is still unequal, unrepresentative and riddled with sycophancy, nepotism and London centric snobbery – while taking multi millions in licence fees off the whole of Britain.

(I’m not saying you’re a moron if you live outside London or are not white / middle class and pay your licence fee but hey…)

I am sick of listening to programmes masquerading as either topical or nationally relevant which are in fact hobbies of the comfortably off delivered in a manner you'd expect at a cosy dinner party where the edge is taken off debate by a glass of good Beaujolais... (no offence to Beaujolais either).

We’ve seen similar duplicity in the economic environment. Tory ministers have been queuing up to bemoan the failure of Tata steel in Wales tut-tutting and ‘isn’t it sad but the market must take its course’, blah blah blah. Ironically the same market forces were most definitely not applied to bankers when they wrecked the global economy plunging us into debt and austerity for eternity. The banks (and the bankers) had to be saved with state intervention and tanker loads of public money…

Poor people claim benefits and are vilified at every turn and become a punch-bag for the media. Billionaires and global companies hide their wealth in The Cayman Islands and all of a sudden we get all civilised. The HMRC will ‘negotiate’ with companies to get tax off them! This would be the HMRC that have just had massive staff cuts by this government.

The government can afford £9m+ for a leaflet about the EU referendum that I would argue we should not even be having in the current global mess. On the other hand we cannot take in unaccompanied children fleeing war and languishing right now in unsanitary and dangerous conditions within the EU and on EU borders. My God.

So here are a couple of questions-

·       Do you see a pattern here?

·       Do you think it stinks?

If you answer yes to both questions you are sane and humaine.

Well done

183. Is Saudi Arabia the world’s Moral Cesspit?

There is some competition…

On this blog I’ve battered you verbally with my objections to global greed, the cancer of consumerism and, recently, the limp leadership in Europe (honourable exception Frau Merkel). I’ve hammered my keyboard at the perilous state of the poor the powerless and refugees from conflict.

You’ve heard (read) me groaning about everything from the ankle-breaking coffin-sized wheel suitcases that epitomise Western materialism to our lack of priorities in a world where we have Viagra but no cure for Malaria.

Recently I’ve decried the criminal absence of compassion shown by stable, comfortably-off Western nations in the face of the Syrian Pogrom (see blog172). I have despaired at the woeful, destabilising global flight of peoples as everywhere fear forces families from their homes, their friends and their roots. Where do they fly? To uncertainty and possibly an early grave in an unknown place.

Individual acts of compassion are oases of kindness in the dessert of disinterest. A couple of weeks ago I listened to a brief report of an old poor Greek man. He’d opened his home to refugee family after refugee family even though all he could offer was the use of his shower.

BUT

There has been something missing. And maybe because they’ve kept so extraordinarily quiet.

What has been largely absent is a focus on the eye-wateringly wealthy states in the region where a lot of the current miseries are occurring. No real help is being offered by countries that a. have cultural/religious links to many of the refugees and b. are geographically close and c. are richer per-capita than almost anywhere else in the world.

There has been criticism from NGOs but not loudly from Western governments or the media.

Perhaps refugees don’t even think of going to their sister nations because even they know that behind the flowing robes, cool opulent palaces, golden yachts and huge expensive cars, some of the worst human rights violations on the globe go unchallenged.

Saudi Arabia (they buy a lot of UK armaments -  well done Britain!) is the TOP RICHEST country in the Middle East.

And Globally – the top richest countries per-capita include -

Qatar (football anyone?)

Dubai (Luxury holiday / sky scraper / ski slope anyone?)

Kuwait (Trip over a fat Billionaire every few dozen miles)

Where are their vast, well-equipped refugee welcome shelters? Where is their medical aid, their schools for displaced children, safe havens for the traumatised etc etc etc?

So – my dear bleaders. Here is a junior style essay question for you in lieu of my usual longer ramblings.

Bearing in mind the horrors facing many Muslim families in the Middle East right now – as I type – as you read – which of the countries named above deserves the title

MORAL CESSPIT OF THE WORLD?

Answers on a postcard to Riyadh.

182. This Little Piggy…

In the old nursery rhyme from the 1700s ‘…this little piggy had roast beef [but] this little piggy had none…’ which is pretty much the state of the world today.

As we know, poor sanitation kills a child under 5 every 100 seconds. So by the time you get towards the end of this post, a child, probably otherwise healthy, has faded away due to lack of clean water – in 2016. When these things make the news it is as heart-rending images of starving African babies on charity advertisements – in-between the ads for luxury cars (oh and someone is killed in or by a motor vehicle every 25 seconds). They are never portrayed as a damning indictment of global priorities, historical exploitation and the consumer disease of developed countries.

As a little exercise I scanned the front pages in the supermarket news stand and looked at the trending lists on the internet. I saw items about a rich woman’s dress, which celebs were shacking up together and who was appearing in which soap opera.

Yes – this is what the media feeds us – unadulterated trivia and misdirection - but isn’t it time we grew up and stopped chewing it?

Accepting that the current state of affairs is wrong is part way to accepting we have to do something and then we are into the really uncomfortable bit. We may have to alter how we live.

If children in poor countries – not Western darlings with their mobile phones, designer trainers and diabetes – are to have clean water, the earth’s resources have to be better shared. And what a headache that would be. We’d have to – for example – tackle tax havens (see blog 179) in a very direct and muscular way. We’d have to deal with national leaders who see their country’s resources as their personal pocket money fund.

But here’s the thing. If we stopped behaving like morons it wouldn’t just be better for poor people it would be better for everyone.

Inequality is one of the leading causes of social unrest as well as bloody miserable lives for those at the bottom of the pile.

I’m not saying don’t worry about, for example, terrorism. But, you know, compared to pollution, and traffic and bad food and addictions and depression and the diseases of excess and the sicknesses of poverty – it’s a long way from being our biggest threat – whatever the politicians tell us. And many bigger thinkers than me – Professor Noam Chomsky and the French economist Thomas Piketty believe inequality gives succour to the growth of this particular beast. Grand statements about fighting the ‘war on terror’ make politicians feel macho, it provides a smoke screen for the West’s bad behaviour and renders the populous powerless and passive.

Terrorism is like a destructive, invasive plant. Chopping at the branches, however powerful your chain saw, will do nothing. It needs to be dug out at the roots. And the roots of the current monstrosity are deep and tangled; tangled up with gross injustice and unfairness and lack of investment in infrastructure in the region and bent Western foreign policy. No point pretending these nutters sprang out of thin air.

As the elite (in the UK) suck up to Arab royalty and they buy our weapons and football teams and chunks of our capital cities, the oil revenue – (soon to start depleting) – has never been used to build schools, hospitals, rail / road networks etc. It is one of the most unequal regions on the planet and Western intervention helped to make it that way. Terrorism on this scale is a symptom of the whole edifice crumbling.

At the risk of embarrassing myself and possibly you, here is a sketch of a dream I recently had.

I was by the banks of a river or lake and a small creature emerged from the water – something like a young manatee or baby hippo; a happy amphibian thingy. It trotted along the bank a little way from me.

A while later the creature morphed into a petite warthog or boar or wild pig type animal. When I next saw the small thing it had a huge concrete building on its back. It could not move. There were well-dressed, well-fed people in the building oblivious of the little pig. I went to a window and knocked until a woman noticed me. I was trying to tell her about the hog. All I could discern in the dream was that she was upset or disbelieving of me or cross or all of the above. There the dream ended.

What was obvious was that the little pig’s legs wouldn’t hold out much longer. When it gave way, not only would it be crushed, the building would collapse and everything would be obliterated…

Make of that what you will.

Thanks for reading.

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NB

I’ve been asked about the cartoons. Click on my name in yellow/orange at the side top right or below this blog if you are using a mobile device. Then scroll down the posts. There are some there.

181 ‘Bigot Baiting’ - Why do Brits Bite?

More toxic leaks ooze out from the dark world of the grossly wealthy. The Panama Papers show how Mossack Foneska (MFs!) help the super-wealthy, including many ex heads of state, hide their ill-gotten billions. They protect the money siphoned off from national resources. They squirrel away the proceeds of exploitation so that is not wasted on projects such as health, social care, education, roads, support for the sick and elderly. 

It is vile - it’s also a wonder tax havens are not in the news more. Or is it?

One thing is sure, the masses are not howling for the blood of these super parasites at the same pitch they are for immigrants, and other unfortunates.

This morning I listened spellbound to a gentle, brief chat on BBC radio as a rep from MFs discussed the nuances of tax limitation v tax avoidance. It was all very civilised.

Why is it so difficult to direct popular indignation onto those whose greed really affects our lives and the future of the planet? One answer in the UK is the remarkable success of Bigot Baiting. 

Bigot Baiting is the constant presence of media items on how the poor and the powerless are responsible for our problems!

I’m not saying folk aren't fed Bigot Bait in other countries. In fact it’s very popular at the moment. However – what I observe, for example in the US, is that as Trump dishes out Bigot Bait by the tonne he gets hordes of new admirers but he turns off as many as he attracts – on the stats I read. There is fierce and funny public debate and comment about him, he is challenged on news programmes. In fact one of his few high profile arse-licks is our own establishment boy – Piers Morgan!

Following on from last week’s blog, I've spent some time reading both press and comments and in a very rough analysis I’d have to conclude this is not happening in Britain. Bigot Bait is swallowed hook line and sinker by a worryingly large number of people. Maybe because it is served in bite sized chunks relentlessly, ceaselessly, unremittingly, often by the main stream media.

Step back a few years when the hapless Gordon Brown had a go at the getting-elected-thing. He had an infamous encounter with what politicians like to call an ‘ordinary voter’. Clumsy with the subtleties of media juggling he said, on mic, that the woman seemed bigoted in her expressed views on immigrants. She seemed like that to me too. But he was forced to apologise and became - unelectable.

Not only did it subsequently become de-rigeuer to accuse people of being bigots – even if they were – it became fashionable to be a big loud stupid bigot. Suddenly the age-old politician’s trick of blaming every social wrong on those at the bottom of the pile – the disabled, single parents, those on benefits and now most especially migrants and EU immigrants – started to seem less grubby. It was like a political lottery win for a lazy media, weak leaders and most of all the bigots themselves.

Recently the Arch Bishop Justin Well-heeled was berating the country for drawing a parallel between those who are anti-immigrant and bigots. Which is great from a church that – while the world is burning – is still struggling with gender equality centuries after its famous murdering,  misogynist founder Henry VIII deceased.

The EU is being blamed for our failure to save the steel industry.' Europe won’t allow us to support our steel industry' goes up the cry. Odd.

Fact is that in equivalently developed European nations – Germany – Italy – France, energy is far cheaper than in the UK because they invested in their energy industry and especially in renewables DECADES AGO and that helps the steel industry. Plus, in trying to slaver up to China, it was the UK that blocked steel tariffs within the EU. But the facts don’t get through. Even the steel industry crisis takes on a xenophobic flavour. It’s nasty.

Is the argument ‘we are in this mess because of lack of leadership and planning’ difficult to grasp? Is the self-evident fact that tax avoidance robs the planet of resources, hard to understand?

Listen to any so-called interview on the EU, and immigration is the first port of prattle. Listen to or read the comments pages of the daily rags and in relation to Britain’s failure in the steel industry throngs of voices are screeching 'EU bad'.

If we vote to leave Europe and everything is still shit – what are they going to do then?

Blame the ducks…

180. Gladiator Garrulous...

...performs Vigilante Verbals!

Haven’t tried it? You should.

It’s word blood sport where the commentator is also the combatant. It’s for those who don’t get off on mindless cruelty. In fact if you agree with Winston Churchill (in words spoken years after WWII) ‘To jaw jaw’ is always better than to ‘war, war’ then this is for you.

Internet analysts have been preaching the extinction of the ‘comments’ sections of online publications for years. And yes – the remaining ones are often swamps of badly written, ungrammatical vitriol. But sometimes they are not. Those sites which attract the former seem to do so deliberately and often allow complete anonymity to encourage the most bigoted the ‘freedom’ (lack of responsibility) to display their bile.

Recently – and you know what a Luddite I am by now dear bleader (if not - see blog 53 I suffer from PANTS do you) I joined an online site up here in bonny Scotland. Thing is – like anyone else who has ever done it – I’m on a site with folk who are broadly like-minded. That is what people do.  So far so good. The extreme opposite would be those pundits who deliberately target sites promoted by groups they already know they don’t like. So, for example, homophobes spewing acid and hatred on gay sites.

Is it not a little self-indulgent only being on sites where the greatest disagreement you’re going to have is whether the revolution should be on a Monday or a Wednesday?  So I signed onto a site for a publication I would normally have nothing to do with. Not with the intention of trolling but with the aim of vigilante verbals, batman banter, mixin’ it up Maximus style.

Maybe you already did this. I am slow.

So I’ve dabbled on a few occasions. I am polite but clear, I write thought-through comments. OK. No. The bigots and the nasties didn’t immediately throw down their nail studded word clubs and go home to eat grubs. Farage and Trump and the like have led them to believe its fine to be bigoted and stupid and loud.  But let’s give this a chance.

The phrase ‘the pen is mightier than the sword’ is tired and anyhow few of us regularly use pens. Even Shakespeare’s eloquent version in Hamlet, “many wearing rapiers are afraid of goose quills and dare scarce come thither…” seems thin in the modern mess.

But I am a big fan of words, written or typed, spoken or sung. And when the words stop, you can be sure the swords / guns / clusterbombs will start.

The ones we need to engage with domestically are not those who already agree with us. Often online commentators are a colosseum mob. The lower grade ‘news’ sites are the spoilt emperors throwing them piles of rancid meat to keep them belly aching and distracted. Enter Gladiator Garrulous Maximus.

One recent distasteful online article I challenged concerned a young woman who had first been impregnated at the age of 13. She now has – at the age of 23 – six children. In the UK they run these ‘feckless poor’ and ‘benefit scrounger’ stories regularly as a side dish to anti-immigrant stories when the plebeians are getting bored. There was a photo of the young woman smiling into the camera with un-pixelated shots of her children. Then there was another picture of the same woman holding a large pet rabbit. The predictable ‘breeding like a rabbit’ sniper remarks were rolled out under the picture as the baying crowd responded to the obvious inducement. The young lass probably agreed to the article because she liked the attention and didn’t realise she was mob bait. Shame on the paper. At a time when the teen mum birth rate is at an all-time low in the UK it’s an obvious non-story but a great distraction from rich people not paying their taxes. And shame shame on the photographer who knew exactly what they were doing when they took that shot with the rabbit. So the woman was not just abused by the bloke who got her pregnant when she was a child but also by the paper and by the rent-a-mob commentators – who, in effect – were also being conned.

But you see where I am going. Here is meat. Here is bread.

Remember that scene in Gladiator where Maximus is in the arena. Pretend the Emperor is the national online rag journal. The mob are the potential commentators, howling for blood. If we are going to spend precious time commenting shouldn’t we be like the gladiator who steps into the arena and does/says something a wee bit different? With style and good grammar?

Well ok – but you have to be prepared to get into the colosseum. Choose one arena and never mind the lions they’re just CGI. Don’t stay in your enclosed Villa. Strap on those sandals and that leather skirt and come on in with me.

You will be entertained.

Unrestrained violence is in vogue. It’s all the rage you might say. Open bigotry has become not just acceptable but highly fashionable. Let’s see what we can do with verbal dexterity, humour, satire, wit. Let’s challenge the crap people say/think. Let’s do it clearly and cleverly and on their home ground.

Leave your comfort zone and come do some vigilante verbals. Apart from anything we should know how people who have been granted the right to vote in our own countries think and challenge the damaging, bigoted, xenophobic, racist, anti-working class, misogynistic things people say. ALWAYS.

And if you want to play – perhaps sign your comments S&H

Strength & Honour J

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NB. Maybe I’m not a Pigeon is on special offer for about 48 hours from time of posting this blog. http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B017BKM93C

179. No Bravehearts here.

Scottish land reform shame and why we need the EU (or maybe Mugabe?)

Up here in the land of blue faces, sporrans and men who wear skirts, land reform has been a big deal for a long time (I mean 100s of years). Sadly, the Scottish parliament turn out not to be Bravehearts.

A Green Party proposal to outlaw offshore ‘ownership’ (estimates suggest that around 750,000 acres of Scotland are ‘owned’ in offshore accounts) has just been rejected by a Scottish National Party majority in Holyrood. And if they cannot be radical during their honeymoon period, history tells us they may never.

The aristos are being mean and the peasants are revolting, the leaders are dithering. Where is Mel Gibson when you need him? Oh yeah – he’s in rehab from being a misogynistic, anti-Semitic git.

Right thinking Scots feel they’ve taken a Claymore in the gullet as Holyrood side-stepped this chance to take a long overdue move towards land equality.

My dear bleaders (blog readers) may do a double take. Lairds getting their own nasty way? The masses cowering? You may ask yourself, ‘am I reading Browngirls’ blog or have I stumbled on a manuscript from ye 1600s written on sheep guts by yon scribe?’

Of course not being one of the aristocracy (or male) I would not be writing at all. I would perhaps be talking to a kindly clergyman who is writing this down by light of a stinky tallow candle while ye olde rats chew our toe nails in exchange for me washing his undies on a rock down at the river’s edge hoping not to get ravaged by marauding white walkers – (oh no that’s Game of Thrones sorry) while my husband picks tics out of the sheep with his cousin’s second-hand wooden teeth.

Having been victim of the droit de seigneur (which I don’t think every actually got to Scotland apart form in Braveheart) my eldest boy looks a wee bit like the duke and is also a total bastard. But my other bairns – with their deformities and nits and rickets and plague boils are real sweethearts and catch rabbits and collect dry grass for the fire in our hovel – apart from the one that was hung for steeling dung….

I mean bloody hell.

If like me your geography is a bit crap – let me tell you The Cayman Islands (there are three) where the duke keeps his chunk of Scotland, are situated a bit south of Cuba and a bit North West of Jamaica. They don’t wear tartan in The Caymans but obviously have a nasty history with slavery. Maybe that is why tax-evading Scottish feudal lords feel at home there?

Basically, faced with the proposition that they put an end to this fiscal farce and centuries of exploitation of ill-gotten gains, the Scottish Parliament DIDN’T. Maybe Uncle Bobby Mugabe should have a word with Nicola? I don’t mean the starving your own people, political repression and using public funds to buy yourself a millions dollar birthday party yada yda yada – just the getting rid of the nasty greedy land thieves thing.

When the bogey man of ‘legal challenge’ was dangled, the politicians in power (!) turned and ran with their yellow bellies showing (actually that doesn’t work as an analogy because you would see their bums if they were running – but you get me). The particular selfish bastard (I use the term bastard advisedly in relation to the Duke Beccleuth) has approximately 240,000 acres of Scotland registered in the Caribbean. Even I know that Scotland ain’t in the Caribbean.

And this is a global problem. Maybe it’s not fair to expect Scotland to start the ball rolling on something that requires major untangling. Many of these havens have their own registered banks and Oxfam – for one – reckons these banks hold TRILLIONS of dollars of individuals’ wealth, much of it accumulated from tax avoidance and other gross behaviour (that's a tax joke by the way).

Ask yourself this, with the world in the state it’s in – what kind of person uses a tax haven because they have more money than they know what to do with and don’t want ANY of it going to fund hospitals, roads, schools, provision for the elderly or disabled, in the country THEY LIVE IN? 

And back to the current Euro sideshow - we need a body the size of Europe to tackle this pandemic cancer, eating away at the planet’s resources. Is it too crazy to suggest that UK property must be registered in the UK, French property in France, German property in Germany and so on and so forth?

Sentient Scots hoped that early legislation would pave the way to substantially fairer land policy. However, last Wednesday 16^th March, the day Osborne delivered his latest Viagra budget (I’m no good at this but I’m all pumped up so I will just keep on and on and on…) the Scottish Parliament rejected proposals which would have made this particular type of massive tax evasion and humongous Scottish CON illegal. What a sad day for ordinary people – another one…

SHAME

178. Children of the Damned.

Why does government hate young people?

For eye watering student debt -thanks Clegg.

For PFI in the NHS allowing public health funds to be channelled into private bank accounts undermining the service for future generations - thanks Blair – oh and for global instability as well.

For weak financial regulation which helped bring about financial collapse, the repercussions of which we won’t see the end of any time soon - thanks every administration since 1979.

And for the growth of zero hours contracts, the unceasing attacks on the welfare state, effectual abandonment of the idea of a secure pension plus the ever disappearing retirement age etc. - thanks Osborne.

[Watch Osborne’s latest budget tomorrow. I absolutely guarantee there will be more pulling-up-the-ladder leaving the under 35s flailing in a land of unaffordable rents, Neverland mortgages, debt, poor job security and a flimsier welfare system while the comfortably off stay – comfortably off.]

In fact you’d be hard pushed to find social legislation of any significance since Thatcher that doesn’t damage the prospects of upcoming generation.

House ownership is at an all-time low and those lucky enough to get a foothold are juggling student debt as well as mortgage debt. It’s a wonder the increasingly high suicide rate is not higher. Certainly the numbers of young homeless, homeless families and homeless ex-servicemen is a barely hidden scandal and personal debt has gone nuclear.

‘Build more houses’ goes up the eternal cry – usually from those with a home (or homes) of their own. Where? The easy line, we-don’t-have-enough-houses, is only partly true. Yes, as part of the on-going UK jumble sale, social housing has been obliterated. However, in the same way that we hear, innovate-to-create-higher-crop-yield, as a solution to world hunger, these false prophets neatly step over the obvious hurdle which is unfair distribution – or GREED to put it in easy biblical terms. There is currently enough food on the planet to feed everyone. It is imbalanced distribution, waste and corruption that fails us. Equally with some imagination and a lot less greed we could house many more people. Those with huge properties or more than one home get off lightly as things like the infamous council tax favour the wealthy as do the very low interest rates. Unfortunate, poor and disabled tenants who have more space than the government decrees they require, are maliciously penalised with the notorious bedroom tax or left at the mercy of Rachman landlords.

From Pharaoh and Herod to Blair and Cameron there seems to be a non-too subtle grinding down of the following generation. Not their own kids obviously – just everyone else’s.

Just what is it that turns those who’ve had every advantage of a post WWII West into the mean, spiteful, youth-averse, gits who rule? Thatcher may have been famous for taking free school milk from the mouths of primary school children “Thatcher, Thatcher - milk snatcher” but subsequent leaders also seem intent on obliterating the future for those below them.

It makes the government seem like the child snatcher from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, it really is pretty shitty.

Ok – I know young people are self-obsessed and smell and listen to awful music and think it’s time well spent posting online pictures of what they had for breakfast but this is not fair.

Is it because some adults forget they were young? Maybe they had disturbed childhoods and don’t see why others should be happy (the current crop of boarding school brats?)

It’s morally wrong (yes I am banging on about morals again – how old fashioned am I?)

If government fails year on year to tackle tax loopholes that let their pals off paying their dues in the country they derive so much benefit from thus degrading the economy, public services, education , health, infrastructure - that government is morally in debt to the ones who will be left in the fiscal wasteland.

If the food industries are not tackled when they fill their produce with crap for profit so we have record numbers of obese children with diabetes, is the government not culpable?

Then the elite (and the media) non-too-subtly pick the easy fall guys – ooh look – it’s the scary migrants. And a handful of morons pick up that baton and run with it. (See this week’s cartoon – click on the orange Amanda Baker top right)

I was lucky enough to grow up in Britain’s socially responsible age when if you were bright enough you could do a degree without incurring life obliterating debt. The health service was reliable and you didn’t have to spend half your free time online to privatised utility companies trying to work out which one was ripping you off the most.

This shower of bastards – and their predecessors –systematically dismantled the post war dream. The shame is that the majority of them benefited from what was bequeathed to us by a generation stripped of their pride by the experience of world war.

Maybe the Child Snatcher is too kind an analogy. These leaders are more like the blind voracious monster from Pan’s Labyrinth.

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Thanks for reading and yes – copy and pass around the cartoon if you like.