the brilliantly leaping gazelle

The vote one casts is fundamentally, in my opinion, indicative of what sort of person you are, what sort of society you want to live in and what the rules that society has.

For me it has always been Labour. In my posts about the elections of 2015 and 2017 I began, as I did this time, trying to be even handed in my loathing of all the main parties. And because our elections have become more presidential in nature, more about the party leaders personalities than we’ve been used too, I’ve tried to disparage them equally. For Johnson and Swindle, Sturgone and Farrago it’s quite easy.

But underneath everything the media seek to portray him as, Corbinned is essentially a decent chap, one who, unlike Johnson, you’d be happy to let drive your daughter home after a party. And that was a friend who said that!

And at least Corbinned would never carry on like this,

Here’s something I’ve just spotted in The Guardian.

Boris Johnson ‘hides in a fridge’ to avoid Piers Morgan interview

Tory aide swears at Good Morning Britain producer who approached PM during pre-dawn visit to dairy

Boris Johnson retreated into a fridge as he sought to avoid a TV interview, amid rattled nerves at CCHQ over a narrowing in the opinion polls.

Firstly, when you come off the least likeable in anything involving Piers Morgan, then you’re know in trouble. Secondly, and more, importantly, it reveals Boris’s Johnson’s utter cowardice and total reluctance to subject himself to any scrutiny. And yet, bizarrely, he’s predicted to win a 28 seat majority.

One of the things that has really done my fucking nut in this whole election campaign is the Conservatives fixation upon Brexit, as if voters are going to ignore all of the very real challenges that they face in their day-to-day life. Issues such as housing, education, health, transport, immigration, employment and the funding of public services to name a few. But the inertia of parliament has meant that domestic issues which will have a far more profound and immediate effect on voters than Brexit have been ignored. Of course a bad Brexit deal will affect all of these issues because if the economy takes a hit, tax revenues will be firstly impacted and then there will be less for the government to spend.

However.

What a government spends our money on is a matter of choice. It can choose what spending to cut and what to increase, to withdraw altogether or to introduce new one’s? We are told, as a justification for cutting spending on public services, for example, that ‘difficult decisions’ and ‘hard choices’ have to be made. But who is it that bears the brunt of these ‘difficult decisions’? Who decides what are the choices to considered – and more importantly not considered – when deciding on these ‘hard choices’?

One area of government spending that is seemingly immune to austerity and government cuts is corporate welfare. Corporate welfare is exactly what you imagine it to be it is, although the sheer size of it might not. Estimated to be between£93 billions a year and £180 billions a year because getting an authoritative figure from the government isn’t as easy as say, finding how much housing benefit fraud there is. But means by which big and small businesses and corporations benefit massively from a myriad of state sponsored subsidies is of far more concern and therefore rarely discussed. Who is going to discuss it? Not the newspapers, which as I pointed out in a previous post, are owned by those who have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo.

You mean to say that tax credits are a way of the government subsidizing low pay from businesses? That can’t be right. Next your going to say that providing free nursery care for the under fives is subsidizing mothers to return to work more quickly benefits business. I mean, I know that your brain damaged and everything, but come on!

You don’t mean that the curriculum has been tailored in such a way as to provide more employable school leavers better able to meet the needs of business. Next you’ll be saying that the notion of graduates leaving university after completing Mickey Mouse courses with eye wateringly high levels of debt is a way of ensuring a more compliant workforce. No one questions any of this, its all taken as a given, the way things are. Like deference to the benefit scroungers in chief, or that having the right family, the right accent, right clothes, the right education, the right connections somehow gives you the right to govern

But hey, lets focus on Brexit and getting that done, because that’s the real issue here isn’t it.

Who’d have thought it? A proven liar and demonstrably unsuitable candidate for election to a parish council – not the chairperson mind, just a member – let alone PM, reveals himself to be the heartless bastard we all suspected he was, but now he’s conclusively provided us with the evidence which confirms it.

I refer to the incident yesterday where, as The Guardian reported.

ITV News reporter Joe Pike asked Johnson about newspaper reports featuring Jack Williment-Barr, a four-year-old boy with suspected pneumonia, who was pictured being forced to sleep on a concrete floor in an overcrowded NHS hospital this weekend. “I haven’t had a chance to look at the photo,” Johnson said. Look at it now, said Pike, who had it up on his phone. At which point Johnson simply took the phone and stuffed it into his pocket

What has happened to reality? What can you say? Other than: may all would-be statesmen disport themselves with the casual larceny of a guy who knows if you don’t let the legal papers physically touch you, then they haven’t been served on you. For my money, the inclusion of the auto-satirical words “prime minister” at the end of Pike’s next sentence mark it out as a contender for quote of the campaign. Let’s see them in action: “You refuse to look at the photo, you’ve taken my phone, and put it in your pocket, prime minister.”

That wasn’t the worst bit though. When he did grudgingly look at the ‘photo, and remarked that it was an awful, one wasn’t sure if he was commenting on composition of the ‘photo, or the quality of the mobile ‘phones camera, or that a child was lying on a hospital floor. Quite why people imagine he’s imbued with normal human emotions defies comprehension. He’s a privileged posh boy, who rarely meets normal people – I mean people not in the same Westminster bubble or those that don’t inhabit the same rarerified social circle as him. It’s not so much that his moral compass is broken; more that he never had one in the first place. An immoral compass yes, but a moral one…

Writing of a skewed moral compass we think of Matt Hancock, the Health Secretary, who was dragged in an attempt at damage limitation at a hospital and with a conveniently prepped camera crew. When asked about the photo, he displayed all the required emotions his leader had lacked. But it was when he started bleating on about his children and how often he’d visited A&E departments because of their mishaps, then I started to get the fragrant aroma of bullshit. I mean, whenever any politician invokes their family in order to prove they’re just, you know, like you and me, well that’s never a good sign. But he got carried away; he began to bullshit the bullshit when he claimed that he depended on the NHS like any parent.

I thought why didn’t the reporter interrupt his bullshit and challenge him to give examples? Put him on the spot, ask him prove his assertion to be true. But he didn’t. When any politician claims they use the NHS, you can bet that it isn’t the same NHS we use; they drop their name, make staff aware of exactly who are and let their imagined importance do the rest. If they don’t have private health insurance that is. But given that he’s a privately educated then Oxford P.P.E graduate Conservative Minister who, before politics worked as an economist at the Bank of England what do you suppose the chances of that are.?

More or less than the chances of press being as soft on Jeremy Corbinned if he’d committed the same lack of basic human decency as Boris’s Johnson?

It must be that time again, that time when the closer election day gets, so the scare stories about Labours tax plans ramp up a gear, so it was with predictable inevitably that Daily Mail’ reports today that,

Billionaire Phones4U founder John Caudwell warns that ‘every wealthy person in the UK’ would LEAVE if Labour wins general election as he savages John McDonnell’s ‘frightening’ tax hikes

Would that be the same ‘Daily Mail’ owned by the billionaire Viscount Rothermere, who for tax reasons is a ‘nom dom’, essentially a device used to pay less tax?

It would!

As the regular reader of this blog will know only too well, my view of humanity’s extinction from this planet as both welcome and inevitable to say the least. I fail to see how any rational person can view the state of the planet – and it is in a fucking state – with anything other than a feeling of profound regret. Regret that when effective action to reverse man made climate change could’ve been taken, it wasn’t and now it’s too late.

No matter how one changes their diet, their method of transport or stops using single use plastic containers, one is still contributing to the problem by simply being alive. The single most effective act anyone could take – or not take – is to stop having babies, because the less babies there are, the less consumer’s they’ll grow up to be. Perhaps I’m missing something here, but it seems quite simple; less children now means less people tomorrow. Yet no political party is advocating that advocating for that, in fact quite the opposite if this story in yesterdays ‘Daily Mail’ is to be believed,

Boris’s Brexit baby boom! Prime Minister claims ‘romance will bloom across the whole nation’ once it leaves the EU but refuses to say whether he and Carrie Symonds will be among the prophesied new parents

I know we’re fucked  but this is simply taking the piss! But to be all grown up and serious this, to me at least, reveals the inherent contradiction of capitalism that dooms humanity. Namely, that the money to try and solve climate change comes from consumers consuming things that they need to pay tax on, and to earn the money needed to buy those things, they need to work, and by working they’re creating the very problem of consumerism. Even the Greens are promoting this fiction of a sustainable economy, that by a combination of environmental alchemy and nationalised positive thinking, the inevitable can somehow be avoided.

To me its the same as a parent who says to their child who is dying in a hospital bed, “Don’t cry now, there’s nothing to worry about, you’ll be running about in no time. It’s amazing what the doctors can do nowadays”.  Bullshit, no matter how noble the motives behind it, is still bullshit. And as I’ll be dead soonish – but not too soon I hope – I won’t have to witness the anarchy that will ensue when societal norms break down and we become savages again. Or, as my partner says, “I hope I die before the meat runs out”. I think we all know how she feels.

I can’t be the only person to have thought that Boris’s Johnson’s often repeated campaign slogan to ‘Unleash the potential’ sounds worryingly like the title of a really dodgy porn film, can I?

Mind you, their last election slogan wasn’t any better ‘Strong and stable’ makes me think of a porn film set in a farmyard.

Mind you, I am brain damaged, so…

Love my brother as I do, one thing that really – and I mean really – annoys me about him is his belief that there is no such thing as a right wing or left wing press in this country. “I don’t know what you even mean by that,’ he will say, despite me citing evidence to support this. He could, of course, just be winding me up, knowing that the more he denies it, the more frustrated and irritated I’ll become.

As I repeatedly have pointed out to him we live in a country where just three companies dominate 83% of the newspaper market in the UK. Here is the report that says this. But it shouldn’t surprise you, as hopefully the reader of this blog might not know the specifics, but will be aware of the more general point and see it as fundamental to our democracy. The specifics are here. Because such a concentration of ownership by rich billionaires, who have only become billionaires in the first place by having a transactional approach to democracy, morals and ethics, are hardly not going to interfere in their newspapers editorial content. And they are certainly not going to allow their newspapers to run stories about a politician who if elected PM would implement policies detrimental to their business and financial interests.

Which is why the press give Jeremy Corbinned such a hard time while conversely acting as cheerleaders for Boris’s Johnson. He doesn’t pose a threat to them, because a proper socialist government would raise corporation tax, close tax loopholes and aggressively pursue tax owed. And hopefully name and shame the obscenely wealthy tax avoiders in the same way their newspapers name and shame those poor sods who do exactly the same thing, but are on the other end of the social spectrum.

Oops, silly me, there I was forgetting ‘there’s no such thing as society’, because we can trust everything Margaret Thatcher said can’t we?

My heart sank just now when I saw this headline in The Guardian,

Jewish Labour Movement no longer backs own party

Members ‘down tools’ in election campaign over party’s failure to quell antisemitism

and I’d been in such a good mood too, having just got up and feeling virtuous because I’d ordered things on my Christmas wish list from Amazon. Well not that virtuous as they don’t pay their tax, but you get the point. Anyway,

Labour party leader Jeremy Corbyn on the campaign trail in Carmarthen on Saturday. The Jewish Labour group says he is ‘not fit’ to be prime minister. 

Well that helps. That won’t be dominating the news agenda at all,that won’t let the Tories off the hook for all manner of ills. My list of them possibly differs from yours.

The Jewish Labour Movement has “downed tools” in the election campaign and declined to back the party it has supported for almost a century, because of Jeremy Corbyn’s refusal to stamp out antisemitism, the organisation’s chairman says.

With days to go before Thursday’s general election, Mike Katz, JLM’s chairman, says its members concluded “a while ago that Jeremy Corbyn is not fit to be prime minister” because his party was “failing its Jewish members and tolerating antisemitism”. Writing for the Observer, Katz adds: “The Jewish Labour Movement – a founding affiliate of the party, nearly a century ago – has for the first time effectively downed tools for the election, campaigning only for exceptional candidates who have been the best of allies to us in our fight against the party’s anti- Jewish racism.”

I mean they are aware, are they not, that there are bigger evils roaming this country, one’s that affect everyone regardless of religion? Wouldn’t they be wiser to focus instead on the radical programme of social justice that a Corbinned government will usher in and its transformative benefits for this country instead? And if they still felt that they could not support Corbinned could they not have have done so quietly? Instead of making an announcement timed, as far as I can see, to do as much harm to Labour so close to polling day, to give the right wing press yet more ammunition for anti-Corbin stories, but most of all, possibly help usher in a Tory government? In what universe is that a good thing?