the brilliantly leaping gazelle

Before I get into the nitty-gritty of election night coverage on the BBC – I mean come on, who watches shITV on election night – let me first say that their graphics department is always hi-jacked by someone armed with C.G.I skills and a large amount of acid.

That seems to me the only plausible explanation of the BBC’s coverage; namely that only a drug addled lunatic would think that we are incapable of processing any information if it isn’t presented in a way that resembles a collision involving Hieronymus Bosch, Jackson Pollack, a paint factory and a 1950’s science fiction film.

But before that we have to endure the farrago of lots of people talking earnestly about not very much at all. The first results trickle in between 11pm – 1am and until then we are treated to the spectacle of people discussing an insignificant amount of results yet imbuing them with a nationwide significance that they don’t deserve.

The bullshit-o-rama is in overdrive. There’ll be the old favourites; “It’s far too early to tell”, “we can’t read too much into this yet, but…”, “we never do well here, so it isn’t a surprise”, “ I would just like to pay tribute to X who has been a fine servant of the people and didn’t deserve this”, “I think the voters were not voting on local issues, I know the area well and that’s not the impression I got talking to people on the doorstep”, “I think we had difficulty getting our message across” And there’ll be lot of new bullshit for this one election only,  along the lines of, “The voters aren’t voting according to traditional tribal loyalties. Their lending their vote for this one time for parties that they hope can deliver the Brexit outcome they want”, “One thing is clear though, the real winner ultimately is democracy”  They’ll be loads more of this bollocks until 1am and then it goes fucking mad.(Actually, now I think about it,  this’d make a great drinking game.)

Results just pour in. Of course we’re all hoping for a Portaloo moment, however younger readers of this blog might not know what a Portaloo moment is. It was the incredibly life affirming moment in 1997 when Michael Portaloo, a Conservative cabinet minister, lost his supposedly safe seat and provided the abiding image of the impending momentous Labour landslide. Who can forget his incredibly smug face trying not to look crushed as people cheered loudly his defeat. That’s what we’ll all be hoping for, and when I write ‘we’ I mean me. Now its nearly 5pm so I’m sober – I’m not a hobo –  but I’ll be opening my first bottle of champagne at 10pm…

One thing that bothered me when I voted earlier and is still bothering me now, is the fact that I didn’t need my present my polling card – or indeed any proof that I was who I claimed to be – to vote. I just gave my name and address, they checked I was on some list and crossed me off it, handed me a ballot paper and that was it.

It seems that all this talk of Russian interference in our election is missing the glaringly obvious flaw in the whole voting process, that the greatest threat to the validity of the vote is the ease with which a vote can be obtained. I live in a ‘safe’ seat – inasmuch as any seat can be called safe at this topsy-turvy election – but were I living in a marginal, then a well orchestrated manipulation could skew the result.

Take Richmond Park, where Zac Goldsmith’s majority is only 45, for example. What would happen if a small number of people, who knew this flaw and his tiny majority, got up really early and posed as other people at multiple polling stations to vote against him? And what if that scenario were to be replayed at every marginal seat with a majority of less than 300? Might there then be legal challenge concerning the legitimacy of the election result? Darwin knows Gina Miller isn’t shy of involving the courts.

I’m not suggesting there is any fraud, well perhaps in the case of claims made by Boris’s Johnson about his deal there most certainly is, just that there exists the potential for it to occur.

I’ve just voted some minutes ago and it was with a bizare combination of reluctance and wishing to avoid feeling thoroughly ashamed. Reluctance because my MP has been the MP here since I moved here but is not someone I normally vote for. Thats because I live in a safe Labour seat, her majority being over 18,000 in 2017.

But then I thought what if enough Labour voters believed that as we live in a safe Labour seat they assumed enough Labour voters would vote Labour and didn’t bother to vote, resulting in a Conservative victory. Unlikely, yes, but this election has been dominated by one single issue, the like of which we’ll probably – hopefully – never see again. If it did happen and I’d spoiled my ballot paper as I did in the recent European elections, as a protest about the Supreme Court overturning the legitimate right of the PM, then I’d feel thoroughly ashamed.

Almost as resigned as I am to the fact we’ll never have a proper socialist government, because only fool or a charlatan would assert that any of Tony Blairs terms in office were socialist. Mind you, only a fool would believe it.

However, I’ve just done a massive technicolour yawn! I hope it isn’t my body telling me I shouldn’t have done it nor do I hope that is a bad omen. I did, after all sleep uneasily last night, a sense of foreboding keeping me awake. This is, after all the 12th day, of the 12th month and the full moon last night – the last one this decade – rose at 12.12am .

And tomorrow is Friday 13th, so…..

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…