296. The freedom of 20 years without it…

2019 marks 20 years since I went television-free. Younger folk may be saying – so what! But trust me – many of my generation regard TV as second only to oxygen in their list of essentials. Once, when the TV licence Gestapo came to my house, they even checked the bathroom for signs of TV usage.

But then, I've never owned a microwave / dishwasher / smart phone, never had a Fb or other social media account (this blog is it) never used a credit card despite persistent pressure from my bank. I don’t own a car blah, blah, blah. For the strange and looming month of February why not step out here with me; outside the ring, outside the loop, outside the matrix.

Yes, I know, I’m never going to be 'liked' by 20m people because I post a picture of me with new nail varnish but, I’m just saying, a lot of the STUFF we're conned into thinking is life enhancing and essential really is not. Plus, if you get rid of those ‘time saving’ devices and apps you’ll actually have real time. Time to think. Time to look. Stop following mediocre exhibitionists and you may have time to make your own life special. So, come on out, the air is lovely (in a few remaining places) and the mind space is amazing.

I just mention this because it came to mind as I schlepped into 2019 almost pre exhausted. Also, if things continue as they are, many things we take for granted may soon become scarce. Just yesterday top supermarkets warned that crashing out of the EU with No Deal will lead to shortages and empty shelves.

Of course, if humans continue the way they are, none of this will matter because the planet will become uninhabitable for most living things including ourselves.

So lighten up and chuck some stuff.

And - check out one of my more unusual books

Zero One Zero Two

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1539762602

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1539762602

295. Brexit is Britain’s Hecatomb

Boris Johnson claims he didn’t mention a Turkish migrant invasion during the referendum. Oddly, everyone remembers his scare tactic comments  so clearly there's no need even to fact check. But, in the scheme of things frankly you have to respond – yes, so what?

In Corbyn we have an opposition leader who neither leads nor opposes (any fellow lefties who took me to task when I said – on this blog - that he would be a disaster for Labour - shortly after he was elected - may want to come back to me now with their current arguments about the great man? No? Ok...

We have a leader who does not lead and cannot even claim now to have her own faction – despised as she is by the rabid Brexiteers, the soft Leavers and the despairing Remainers.

We have ten DUP members brought and bought in to prop up a pitiful administration. They, of course represent Ireland. Ireland voted to Remain as passionately as Scotland did and yet the DUP dinosaurs hover like Dementors in the dark screeching and swooping out on a Brexit full moon to feast on Theresa May’s hopes  if she dares deviate from the Brexit disaster they crave.

Gove was one of the big liars of the referendum con and now simply sings out his silly tune about a No Deal being a disaster as if the results of May’s Brexit deal would be a picnic.

And Farage – that maggot in almost-human form – is warning people to prepare for another referendum – when presumably he’d dig up some new improved xenophobia.

The history of war is littered with the trusting masses being led by their social superiors to slaughter. Time and again, throughout the ages, those vain or stupid or stubborn (or all of the above) ‘leaders’ led ordinary men to useless deaths. The Charge of the Light Brigade the famous poem by Alfred Lord Tennyson (my mother forced me to learn it when I was a child!) was an attempt to make a silk purse out of that particular sow’s ear. The infamous charge during The Battle of Balaclava 25^th October 1854 was one of the worst massacres of the Crimean War. Of the 675 infantrymen who were ordered into the cannon fire – few returned but they were sent into the horrific suicide charge without there ever being a chance of any other outcome.

The Charge of the Light Brigade was a hecatomb.

In ancient Greece – a hecatomb was a great and public sacrifice – initially of 100 oxen. It became a term attached to war carnage on an excessive and pointless scale. Unnecessary sacrifices led to slaughter in other words.

Brexit is Britain’s political hecatomb and above are listed some of its perpetrators.

294. Brex-Zit. If you’re not embarrassed, you should be…

Yes. The big Brexit zit on the face of Britain is still there. 

We may have hoped it would go away over the too short winter break of the Christmas / New Year holiday but it hasn’t. It is the result of eating, not sugary fatty foods but the unwholesome stodge of xenophobia, stupidity and populist soundbites and the horrible zit is unlikely to be lanced by the vote scheduled in Parliament today. We will, instead, like a greasy muddle headed, self-centred teenager – just end up with a messy, infected sore on the face of UK democracy.

A world habitable by humans moves exponentially closer to the precipice while Britain throws time, money (ferry contract anyone?) effort, media obsession, passionless posturing, exasperation and exhaustion into the pointless but cavernous Brexit pit we dug ourselves into.

Prime Minister May is still pretending she has a deal that makes sense to anyone.

Corbyn still has not let us in on the secret of what he actually thinks about Brexit despite the best endeavours of Emily Thornberry (should-be leader of the Labour party) and Keir Starmer (shadow secretary for exiting the EU) and John Macdonnell (shadow chancellor) to come out and pretend to everyone that he has. 

Macdonnell and Corbyn see the current mess – which, as I’ve said many times on this blog, Corbyn was, by his ineptitude and prevarication and confused thinking, complicit in – as their chance for another General Election. I presume these two old farts think they will then ride off to Brussels a couple of hours before the deadline, explain to the 27 remaining countries that they too actually hate Europe in a stuck- in-the-1970s way, not really understanding modern work practices – but could they please have a better deal than the one given to Theresa May?

I wonder how that would go?

Despite the enormous amount of time and effort it has taken for Boris Johnson to contribute to wrecking Britain he has, apparently, found yet another woman to shack up with… He’s still lying his head off while she, presumably, is lying back and thinking of Little England.

And the craziest thing – apart from the way the Scots and the Irish were conned out of a hopeful future by English Nationalism - is that those, dizzy and blinded by the dusty, destructive windiness that is Westminster, seem to think the rest of the world has not been watching every mean, miserable moment aghast.

The idea that the countries formerly exploited by Britain are not now sitting in bemused judgement on us, like young adults watching a senile bullying old uncle slavering into his incontinence pants, is so naïve as to constitute raging insanity.

 But the world is watching this car crash. The world is appalled that a wealthy nation with everything of its own resources and all that it has gained from the rest of the globe over the centuries, should be squandering what other countries can only dream of and we really, really ought to be embarrassed…

Check out my comedy poem on this subject

African Journalist in Britain.

https://youtu.be/IC0agIVMRng

BREXMAS

Corbyn is a pudding and the PM is a turkey

The railways are in chaos and the banks are rather murky

But at least it’s Christmas and we’re buying piles of tat

Oh Jesus Christ, what d’ya think of that?

Corbyn is a fruitcake, Theresa is a stick,

The high street’s for the high jump and the NHS is sick

But at least it’s Christmas with our faces in our phones

Oh Jesus can you please control those drones.

May is a bit racist, Corbyn’s a bit slow

The environment is knackered and we ain't had any snow

Theresa gave us Windrush and the nasty ‘go home’ van

Jesus help us, Jeremy Corbyn still thinks he’s our man.

Jezz cannot articulate and May don’t give a shit

Brexit is Apocalypse and we are all bound by it

There is no Great Escape; there is only Die Hard 4

Oh Jesus Christ I can’t take any more.

There is no leadership, there is no opposition

Nobody is driving so we can’t change our position

How did we get to such a state, we didn’t think it through

Its Christmas once again lord but

It’s now to do with you…

MERRY CHRISTMAS

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blog book page

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BACK PROPER BLOGGING ON JAN 14th 

293. BREXIT – The conclusion of a Con.

Brexit will conclude the betrayal of Britain’s Working Class and the corruption of the post-war promise of equality.

I once heard a young journalist talking about the Iraq war after its nominal conclusion but before the financial collapse of 2008. He declared, even back then, people were – in his view – bored of talking about it.  I’d argue that we are still very much in the thick of the consequences of that illegal invasion so that comment seems even odder to me now than it did then.

To put this in context – I believe that Brexit – for those of us who don’t put political economic and social phenomena in neat boxes with a public interest sell-by date – has its roots way back before the turn of this century – and before the gutter press seriously got their teeth into anti-EU rhetoric – straight bananas and all that crap.

The betrayal of the peace dividend, the trashing of the welfare state, insane foreign policies and a stranglehold gained by the sly, stealthy and wealthy, is actually what led to Brexit. Bizarrely, many voters were easily diverted to an incongruous and catastrophic conclusion by the very people and the very class that betrayed them.

Here I offer up four videos I made for this blog, three short talking heads – two comedy and one not - and one monologue.  In this first extract from my recent show Just Words (a rather ropey recording – sorry)  I start with the world I was born into in the 1960s and the beliefs people then had, that slowly emerging opportunities for equality would grow not diminish...

BREXIT: 1 - The Con - a slice from my show 

Just Words clip

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When the world around us starts to feel scary, the con artists have an easier job and they love to offer rose-tinted spectacles.

BREXIT: 2 Rose tinted twaddle  - comedy poem

The Good Old Days!

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As the world was destabilised by the illegal invasion of Iraq, mass migration and economic corruption and with inequality growing exponentially especially in the UK and the US, terrorism (like much of everything else) went global. Predictably, people began to fear the mass migration set in motion by that destabilisation.

BREXIT:3 Reckless destabilisation - performance poem

New Improved Terror

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And with global credibility so important to all political, social and economic aspects of national life – the empire / colonial fantasists forgot that the world is watching.

BREXIT:4 Collapse of credibility - performance poem

African Journalist in Britain

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I'll be back blogging in January.

remember to check out my books

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Amanda-Baker/e/B0181KEN9E

https://www.amazon.com/Amanda-Baker/e/B0181KEN9E

292. ‘Respecting the Will of the People’ is the nastiest Brexit euphemism going.

Respecting the Will of the People, is the nastiest political euphemism going and it is vomited up daily by Brexiteers and even politicians who voted Remain and know this is a disaster.

Satirists in the US are complaining they have a weak, senile, nazi at the helm. Here in the UK, we have no one driving this tug.

The offending phrase is worse than ‘let me be clear about this’ which occurs just before MPs prevaricate and muddy the waters. It is worse than ‘I wouldn’t insult the intelligence of the British people’ just as they do that very thing. It is worse than going all dreamy eyed when talking about our ‘friends and allies’ while alienating those very countries. It is marginally worse even than the phrase ‘taking back our borders’ when pretty much anything worth building a border around – all the family silver – was sold off between 1982 (first public utility sale of The Docks Transport Board  under Thatcher) and 2013 (last major sell-off - Royal Mail – thanks Vince Cable – undersold by £190m).

Many voters were lured in by the jingoism and xenophobic rhetoric, entirely missing the point that what the big hitters of the Leave Campaigns were actually slavering over was total de-regulation at a level thatcher could only dream of, the obliteration of all those pesky workers’ rights and environmental protections that stand in the way of profit.

The utter delinquency of the phrase ‘Respecting the Will of the People’ which is trotted out, ad infinitum, as an argument against holding a second referendum, is that  it means the double opposite of what it says.

a.     The ‘will of the people’ has palpably altered now folk know the extent to which they were lied to and catastrophic reality is staring them in the face.

b.     If the Will of the people is to be respected with regard to the above point, a full second referendum is not just common sense it is a democratic imperative.

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Thanks hugely to everyone who came to my gig last night. It was very, very much appreciated. This will be my last post this side of 2019 but if there are any good video clips I will try post them. Meanwhile – don’t forget to put one of my books on your Christmas list.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Amanda-Baker/e/B0181KEN9E

https://www.amazon.com/Amanda-Baker/e/B0181KEN9E

291. Brexit T.V. debate - May v Corbyn? God please no…

I’d rather watch blood drying on an abattoir wall – and I’m a vegetarian.

I wonder though, does Corbyn’s eagerness to debate Brexit on telly with Theresa May mean he’s actually made up his mind which way the wind blows? Are May’s delusions now so complete she thinks she is Darcey Bussel? Once again I can be glad I gave up on TV last century.

It’s not exactly the Rumble in the Jungle is it? More like your local GPs oldest receptionist v that dull guy at the allotment you keep mistaking for a scarecrow. I listened in fascinated horror this morning to the radio as Labour supporters were interviewed about Brexit. Yes they were against May’s deal. No they have no idea what Labour’s position is.

While Trump is having wet dreams about the possibility of vulnerable migrants being shot on the Mexican border (because that is the situation he has set up in case you weren’t paying attention), Britain is shooting itself in both feet.

I assumed even the  foolish, blinkered, Blair old guard who put up a left winger to protect their democratic creds – would see Corbyn’s surprise election as evidence the rank and file were sick to the stomach of Blairism and New Labour and not that they were simply gagging for a different white male messiah. The party glitterati did not understand this and nor does Corbyn.

So, now here we are again – at crisis point(s) – which I know is the new normal. Our opposition political vegetable just sits there clogging up the drain while the most electable and capable and on-the-ball potential leader the Labour party has had in decades is trotted out for the media bits because she – Emily Thornberry – is actually, clearly leadership material.

You do have to ask of the party that has struggled with anti-Semitism, whose leader flirted with jingoism when he supported the Farage stance on no free movement of people yada yada yada – er, what about the misogyny? How come Labour remain the only major party – not just in Britain but in the developed West that seems to be woman-proof even when the most prominent woman is head and shoulders (and torso and legs) above the current lacklustre bloke?

I was right about Miliband – hang on to the bloke you’ve got and pretend everything is ok - FAILED. It will fail again with Corbyn; it will just be too late to matter.

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6 DAYS TO GO…

And remember to check out my books@

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Amanda-Baker/e/B0181KEN9E

https://www.amazon.com/Amanda-Baker/e/B0181KEN9E