Wasting the 21st Century… (491)

I doodle when I’m lost for words.

In this post I invite you to DATE THE DOODLE as an exercise in identifying political futility.

Check out the dates (where they are legible) in the bottom right hand corner and you’ll see these issues remain rotting in a back room while dog-whistle politics takes centre stage…

(2013)

Ok - there are more but you get the point but if proof were needed that dog-whistle politics is now the norm do check out my letter in today's  Glasgow Herald

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Who’s more gullible – MAGA mugs buying crappy gold sneakers or UK Conservative voters buying endless, obvious lies? (490)

Across the pond, Donald Trump is attempting to sell gold Trump sneakers for $399. Apart from the general incredulity from anyone with registerable brain function, it’s been pointed out that the high-tops bear a strong similarity to a pair of cheap gold sneakers that can be bought from general stores for about $18.99. But if tacky gold Trump toddler shoes don’t rock your boat in the latest Pay My Legal Bills Trump grift – he is also selling, for a mere $99, Trump Victory perfume!!!

Make no mistake – MAGA rubes will pay. Some of the poorest in America will buy this shit in order to fund the self-styled billionaire’s legal penalties, ratcheted up in court as a result of his being found guilty of (among other things) defamation, rape and false business practices.

Here in the UK, the Tories are simply asking voters to believe their lies old and new, buy into the narrative that the devastation of their multiple administrations is really nothing to do with them and they have shiny new ideas and plans to fix Britain. The Britain they broke so badly. 

After decades of economically debilitating and socially damaging privatisation, the calamity of putting people before profit – the short-sightedness of lack of investment and the constant attack on the things every-day people rely on – public services – which are now on their knees – The Tories want the electorate to buy the idea that it’s all the fault of migrants.

Nothing to do with them. Look over there…

Never mind that poverty, homelessness, foodbanks, rent stress, covid education failures – broken infrastructure – schools, roads, hospitals and on and on have all grown exponentially during the last 14 years of one disastrous Tory government after another. 

A couple of posts ago (487) I invited readers to play the ‘what if we had’ game; what we might have if various Tory PMs – elected and unelected, hadn’t wasted billions on failed pet projects and poor governance. But they continue to this day to push the lie that if we could just be crueller and crueller to the most desperate, the poorest, the most vulnerable – those elusive sunlit uplands will magically appear...

Many people will buy it.

At least the folk buying the Trump perfume might keep the bugs away.

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As always - for lighter reading do check out My BOOKS

Post-truth, post-shame, post-challenge Britain (489)

Many posts ago I wrote a blog called Living in The Penisic Era - 165. Now, it seems, we’ve morphed to a new era, not just into post truth and post-shame but one where there is only feeble push back. There is no effective challenge as day after day the falsehoods spew. It could be that there is now just too much, it comes too fast and sensible voices and coherent thought are drowned in the turd-filled verbal sewage overflow.

Another older post is called ‘Deference is killing us’ - 391. and that is part of the problem too. Tories have that overweening sense of entitlement that resonates with too many in other positions of power and especially the media, so that tribal instinct kicks in before duty to country and fellows less fortunate has time to impact.

There are many things we should not be ashamed of that we were, in past times, taught to be mortified by but something shame should definitely still attach to is lying through one’s teeth, repeatedly and publically for personal/political gain. Or - more so recently – just to get your mug in front of a camera gearing up for a lucrative GB News slot.

From the lies that brought us Brexit to the re-writing of history we saw at the covid ‘inquiry’ we now have a fluid, ever-present liquidity of lying in our post-Brexit, austerity-devastated, wealth-divided, privatisation-poisoned land.

Unflinching dishonesty has become so ordinary that while it still leaves a bad taste and a sort of fetid stink in the air – like the sad, un-cared for smelly folk I increasingly encounter on the bus – you just sort of grin and bear it and hope someone opens a window (real or metaphoric…)

But the damage is becoming catastrophic.

Take the muddle-mumbling and obfuscation of the vile, slimy, should-have-been-gone-long-ago Minister for Levelling up Michael Gove and the bollocks he’s been spouting recently about housing. Promising again to do away with no fault eviction – something this government had ample time and opportunity to do and have not done – IS lying - surely?

Take the nightmare deliberately and falsely created over the UK migrant issue that became, via the forked tongues of Boris Johnson, Priti Patel, Suella Braverman and, more recently, James Cleverly and PM Rishi Sunak – nothing at all about fixing the problem but all about dog-whistling to racists to flex the xenophobic muscle and keep in with the right wing head-bangers. Oh – and wasting £240m in the process for no result. Is obvious false presentation of reality not also unabashed lying?

The afore-mentioned Gove and afore-mentioned Johnson could be lined up with Farage if we wanted to talk about the biggest and most ruinous lie so far this century – Brexit. I’ll leave that one because even the folk who were taken in now realise it was a massive con. Only Johnson could think of putting such a huge lie on an object so associated with solid, work-a-day reliability – a red bus.

Not so long ago – amidst the howls of the Right-wing claiming left-wing bias by our so called public broadcaster the BBC – we had a chairman who was appointed by Tories and who had previously been a Tory donor and also an advisor to both Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak. The said Richard Sharp was only forced to resign when it emerged he was further mired in muck in an attempt to fix a mate’s loan for Johnson.

Watch any other party or other politically involved person who is not a Tory and see how they are minutely examined, probed for explanation, eviscerated if every i is not dotted every t not crossed.

But we have to find something to counter-act this dangerously unequal playing field.

When a Tory stands up in front of the media and lies about the mess the country is in (even though we are all living it) or tells us, yet again, they ‘have a plan’ to fix the, e.g. waterways of England, polluted by private companies that have simply sloshed away profits over the decades; when they tell us poverty is down when we know it’s not, when they tell us they are ‘investing’ in the NHS and the NHS is on its knees and literally no one is going to get the kind of response to their cancer awarded to Charles recently, when they lie and lie and lie about how state school kids were abandoned during covid - what do we do?

For once this is not one of my rhetorical questions.

I don’t know.

But we need to work something out because the shameless liars have razed the social structure of Britain to the ground along with much of the physical infrastructure and they have tainted all government administration with their slurry.

They are successfully blaming their mess on the least vocal, least powerful, poorest and most vulnerable people in society – and often – without challenge – claiming that somehow it’s the fault of other political parties. And they are getting away with it…

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For lighter reading do check out My BOOKS

Plus if you google Amanda Baker Edinburgh letters you may come across some of my editor letters - too many to put links to.

11,500 dead children in Gaza. Three of the four nations of the so called ‘United’ Kingdom want a ceasefire. Westminster MUST call for one…(488)

The Welsh Parliament (by majority though without the Labour leader) called for a ceasefire early in the conflict as did Humza Yousaf the First Minister of Scotland. 

Now that Stormont has resumed, the newly minted First Minister of Ireland made room in her inaugural speech to call for a ceasefire and express sympathy for the incalculable and unimaginable suffering of the people of Gaza. 

As the number of dead teens, children and babies heads for 12k – can it be sustainable that the 'United' Kingdom's position remains one of not calling for a ceasefire when 3 of the 4 nations have openly, formally called for cessation of the slaughter? 

For a list of the names (those known) of the dead children of Gaza – look here THEIR NAMES …

WOHOOO - IT'S BANDCAMP FRIDAY AGAIN - (Fri 2nd Feb)...

 ... so check out my two-part lyrical environmental poetry story (audio version) - yes it's STILL there, just click on the title below.

Casey & the Surfmen

Since 2020 bandcamp friday has enhanced support for us artists- you can find the info HERE

Let’s play the ‘What If We Had’ game… (487)

I’ve written many times in many posts on this old bloggy about the way the hard won, post-war rights of ordinary people in Britain have been eroded by successive governments since 1979. It’s almost as if those who have historically had everything couldn’t even stand to see ordinary families have the basics. Good education - a reliable, free health service - good policing and decent housing.

The tired pitch is always budget restraints. It beats out like a dull thud on a broken drum. But oddly there is always money for the things they want. So – early in this election year let’s play the ‘What If We Had’ game…

To kick off I might start with;

What if we had the £30billion (according to The Resolution Foundation) lost to the UK economy when Truss’s catastrophic and right-wing dogma driven autumn budget spooked the markets in 2022

You get the idea – so play along…

What if we had the extra £6 billion for the underselling of the Post Office (JP Morgan said it was worth 10bn the government flogged it for just over 4bn)

What if we had even the £1billion Theresa May paid to the DUP in order to bribe them to help her stay in power.

What if (London) had the £53 million (£43 of public money) Boris Johnson wasted on his vanity Garden Bridge project.

What if we had the £240+ million spent on the useless/corrupt/unworkable Rwanda scheme.

What if we had the £22billion allocated to the useless Test and Trace scheme during covid.

What if we had the £60million profits made by peer of the realm Michelle Mone through covid profiteering sanctioned by Matt Hancock.

What if we had the £140 billion (according to Cambridge Econonometrics – Jan 2024) lost to the UK economy since Brexit.

And so on...

And remember – Osborne’s horrific austerity and the misery it has caused ordinary working people was justified because of the 2007/08 crash – or banking crisis. ‘Banking crisis’ is another political euphemism for the greed and mismanagement of fiscal bodies. The loss to the UK economy is almost incalculable but you bet it’s the poor who are paying and not greedy bankers or the ministers whose weak policies enabled them.

In 2021 the OBR reported that the cost of the ‘necessary interventions’ i.e. to save banks – alone cost £33billion. So – yes – what if instead of justifying poverty and misery we had that £33 billion and some of the very rich who caused that crash had been made to sort through their off-shore accounts and pay something back…

On a minute scale – families supplementing their survival with visits to the now ubiquitous food-banks might wonder how they’d have spent some of the money used to fund Boris Johnson’s covid parities. A recent freedom of information request revealed the cost of alcohol for these illegal events. According to The Mirror – the covid party drinks bill was £7,897. A tiny amount in terms of the money successive Tory governments have squandered but possibly looks like a fortune to an ordinary family hit by the cost of living crisis.

So just remember – next time some Tory twonk  gazes into the middle distance and talks about more and more cuts to public services being painful but necessary and how they are ‘prepared to take the tough decisions’ it’s only the tough decisions as relate to people not like themselves…

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As always – for lighter reading do check out My BOOKS

Westminster & the habit of getting it wrong... (486)

The wrongness of the government at Westminster has been a theme for decades and simply escalated since Cameron. If you were to take a broad brush swipe at why, you could do worse than conclude it’s because those in charge live lives more vastly removed than ever from the majority of the population they are supposed to serve.

But there is something more rotten at the heart of government now.

If you are my age or (even) older and pay attention to the world around you – British politics as acted out at the heart of government has been almost a constant internal groan since Thatcher. An obsession with the rich has morphed into callous disregard for the poor. Xenophobia is the go-to when the peasants get pissed off and the clarion call of profit drowns out everything.

And now we reap the horrible rewards of the selfish, wrong-headed religion of privatisation – whether the Post Office Horizon scandal or the fuel poverty epidemic that rages while companies make profits you can barely calculate.

Maybe like me you are a regular train user and find that over-expensive fayres mean severely limiting the number of times you visit family and friends or that – when you do turn up at any given station – you feel you’ve won the lottery if the train is even running. If it’s on time it seems a near miracle and yet – train company bosses are also trousering bonuses that would be obscene even if the train service in the UK was not an utter disaster.

I could go on.

The illegal invasion of Iraq – so wrong, everyone apart from the old war criminal himself – seemed to know. Tony Blair also introduced tuition fees so that – unlike the slippery eel himself who was born with the proverbial silver spoon – many ordinary youngsters are suffocated by debt before their lives have got started.

Move on and we have ‘Call me Dave’ Cameron – Old Etonian – with all the odious habits that seem to go with his ilk – including a massive sense of entitlement and an idea that his tribe – rich Tories – mattered more than the country he was supposed to lead. In that mind set – in order to settle the internal wranglings of his petty, fractious party he served up Brexit. The rest –as they say – is history.

Cameron’s side kick the truly vile George Osborne gave us austerity XXL. Austerity plus failures of government oversight left us with – among other things – the horror of Grenfell.

Rock up Theresa May, who was happy to dole out a £billion to get the hideous DUP to support her failed leadership. They in turn now hold N Ireland to ransom in another casualty of Boris Johnson’s Brexit.

The odious liar and sexual incontinent chancer himself - Boris Johnson - lied and partied his way through Covid. Demeaning Parliament was his signature tune and illegally proroguing Parliament was his first deed when elected.

Then the unelected Truss spectacularly tanked the economy in her nano-second of premiership. And – now of course – we have Sunak, also unelected. The current PM looks like a pup that just shat on the carpet after chewing the furniture and peeing in the hall and still wants a biscuit.

Ministers include the con-man and terrible human joke Grant Shapps who, over the weekend verbalised that a newscaster should know more about the Royal Navy’s mishap than he. Shapps is current Defence Secretary.

Therese Coffey, as environment secretary, thought shit in the water system was not a problem and didn’t seem to know, when addressing Parliament recently, that Kigali is the capital of Rwanda!

And – oh boy – Rwanda… This bonkers Johnson diversion has somehow – via Priti Patel, the evil Suella Brevareman and the total twonk James Cleverly – become central to the Tory Party identity. Being cruel to migrants and wasting millions of pounds of public money now defines what is, not just The Nasty Party any more but the party of absolute fucking morons. The Numpty party. The Numskull party. The Nut-job party.

AND – on the most important issues of the day – the Westminster lot have been found wanting oh so badly. 

Like the invasion of Iraq, it seems those outside the bubble were able to see what those inside would not. Netanyahu’s slaughter in Gaza is Genocide (see last post). With the right-wing horrors he has sold his soul to in order to stay in power and out of prison – it was never going to be anything else. But Sunak and Starmer slavishly followed the US line – business as usual. And even now with 25k dead including at least 10k children, they are not calling for a full ceasefire.

I am sick and appalled but history will judge them more harshly.

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Remember – for lighter reading to check out My BOOKS