the brilliantly leaping gazelle

Tag: politics

May 6, 2025

34:63 presents “Graham Linehan”

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I saw in ‘The Guardian’ the other day that ‘More than 400 actors and film industry professionals have signed an open letter pledging “solidarity” with the trans, non-binary and intersex communities who have been affected by the recent supreme court ruling.’

Of course they did.

Why is it a such a uniquely actorly thing to do, to imagine that just because their success in one field of human endeavour has afforded them some measure of celebrity, it somehow confers upon them some kind of greater a moral authority, one that the rest of us should take heed of?  

The letter is quoted as saying,“We must now urgently work to ensure that our trans, non-binary, and intersex colleagues, collaborators and audiences are protected from discrimination and harassment in all areas of the industry – whether on set, in a production office, or at a cinema.”

A few things immediately spring to mind.

The first is that actors are by quite a wide margin the one group of people I’d expect to show solidarity with trans-women, for the simple reason that their entire working life is essentially pretending to be someone else. So the idea that by simply by saying they’re someone else, they they become that someone else, isn’t that outlandish to them as it might be to a say, a mechanic.

Additionally actors – pronounced as if John Gielgud was hamming up the word for all it was worth – are on a ceaseless quest for validation, and not just from themselves either. Those big awards ceremonies are nothing more than a giant narcissism circus with frocks and because the media fawn all over them – to be granted a red carpet interview or some other content clickbait – it perpetuates their sense of overblown entitlement.

Actors are forever banging on about the research they do before embarking on a role, often living the life of the character they are going to play, sometimes even undergoing bodily modification to better achieve ‘authenticity’. 

Robert de Niro is a good example of this – for his portrayal of Jake la Motta in ‘Raging Bull’, he trained for, and then fought in three professional matches. He then gained over 60 pounds – nearly 9 stones – to play the ageing La Motta. To better play Travis Bickle in ‘Taxi Driver’, he drove a taxi around New York for two weeks. We know this because de Niro himself told everyone. It’s become a benchmark for other actors to emulate.  Thankfully, he has ever played a serial killer.

Actors just love going all ‘method’, often staying in character for the duration of a films shoot, even when the cameras aren’t rolling, because of some ridiculous idea of ‘honesty’, ‘of needing to fully embrace the character’. How is this anything other than a very diluted version of a trans woman and his ‘lived reality’?    

So whilst the letter loftily proclaims ‘We believe the ruling undermines the lived reality and threatens the safety of trans, non-binary, and intersex people living in the UK.’, it ignores the ‘lived reality’ of actual women, their safety, their rights and freedoms. They can just shut up and quit their yapping about single-sex spaces. Female rights are all well and good, it seems, right up until men with delusions are adversely affected by women not wanting to share those rights. Then the rights of the majority of the UK population must be eroded to satisfy the nonsense of a minority of a minority. 

That is the key here. This isn’t some great civil rights movement, similar to the ones fought by African Americas in in 1960’s or by lesbians and gays in Britain in the 1980’s.Those battles were about gaining the rights enjoyed by everyone else, not about taking rights by reducing other peoples. 

But then actors enjoy a privileged position in an increasingly celebrity obsessed world. And just like the trans activists who expect their every whim to be unquestioningly granted, and get more than a bit stroppy when they’re not, so too actors imagine that their concerns should be everyone concerns.

Conversely, actors are only too happy to criticise others  who don’t share their same ‘moral’ worldview, feeling it not only their right but their duty to tell us how they feel and therefore, we should take heed of this and act accordingly. Robert de Niro was one of the many US actors who very vocally gushed glowing tributes to Mr Magoo when he retired from the 2024 presidential campaign and with nary a heartbeat transferred their support to Kabbalah Vibe.

Did her campaign the world of good did that. 

So frequently are actors given to this method of visible virtue are they that one can’t help but wonder if She Who Must Not Be Named has a point when she suggests that it is more to do with career prospects than anything else that motivates them to sign these sort of things.

Because I’ve yet to learn of a newsagent having her marriage collapse on her because of the constant harassment she was getting from other newsagents, the boycott of her shop by customers, refusal of suppliers to sell to her, for crisp, chocolate and sweet makers to publicly denounce her as someone they wanted no associate with, simply for expressing an opinion that others disagreed with.

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May 3, 2025

34:63 presents “Asterix”

I must confess to feeling slightly disappointed upon waking this morning to discover that the sky hadn’t fallen in. Because yesterday, the media were full of either grim pronouncements or jubilant celebrations about exactly what Reforms UK’s performance in Thursdays elections meant for the future of British politics.

Brexit, as it is for most things nowadays, was involved, being the catalyst that lay behind this wholly predictable, and indeed, widely predicted drubbing. Indeed, in all the coverage I’ve read, what is striking is just how much opinions are shaped by Brexit. In a tangential yet unremarked way, Brexit was but a symptom of a greater, more fundamental problem confronting democracy, not just in the UK, but elsewhere. One that moreover, has the capacity to fatally undermine it by using its own inherent flaws to achieve this, voter turnout, or more accurately, voter absence.

In all of the mayoral elections contested on Thursday, not one of them had a voter turnout of more than 34% and neither of the ones that elected Reform UK mayors managed even 30%. Why no media attention is being given to this problem is beyond me, especially as a little over a year ago the dangers were revealed to exist. 

Remember George Galloway’s campaign in the Rochdale by-election last year? Where he made it clear from the outset that he was targeting the Muslim community in Rochdale – 30% of its population – and instead of focusing on local or even national issues, but rather on Israel/Gaza? It was an act of effectively strategic masterstroke, resulting him getting 40% of all the votes cast, which sounds impressive, until you realise only 39.7% of voters actually bothered to. And then suddenly that 40% seems even less impressive, especially when you realise that that once impressive 40% translates into 12,335 actual votes.

This trick – targeting a specific community and focusing on an issue not directly related to their daily lives – was repeated a few months later at the 2024 general election. Whilst George Galloway wasn’t re-elected, five candidates were, all pandering to concerns of a minority but crucially, a minority who turned out to vote. Together with Jeremy Corblimey, they formed the Independent  Alliance and their ranks could easily have been increased to nine, because three candidates,  standing on a similar platform were narrowly defeated.

It isn’t that surprising that Labour is so quiet on this issue – low voter turnout – because it suited them very well at the 2024 general election. Despite the fact there was a load of guff in some of the media about how constituency boundary changes and the need for voter I.D would work against Labour, like so much political speculation, that didn’t happen. Voter turnout  was about 60%, and despite Labour getting a lower share of that, 34%, somehow they got 412 seats or 63% of them. 

Some awfully clever people have worked out that the you take into account the number that did vote for them, the number that didn’t and the number of people who could have voted but chose not to, combine all of that and only 20% of the UK electorate did so. Of course the media are predicting all manner of things, because that’s what the media do. Political forecasting is as good at predicting the future as reading tea-leaves, checking ones horoscope or listening to a clairvoyant.

Its much easier than them questioning why this keeps happening, why political parties have consistently failed to engage with voters the way seem all to happy to do with lobbyists. And by not doing this, they’re not only perpetuating the problem, they’re failing to do their job. Nearly as much as the politicians.

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May 2, 2025

34:63 presents “Mari Wilson.”

As with all things, the devil is in the detail, and there is a lot of detail for Farrago to dwell on, following the overnight constituency, local council and mayoral elections. It is now Friday afternoon and more grim tidings are expected to be heading Plonkers way. But the results are just as troubling for Farrago, albeit in a different way, one replete with potentially longer term damage. 

First of all, a quick shufti at the actual results. The Reform UK candidate, Sarah Poitin, won the Runcorn and Helsby by-election by six votes, overturning a majority that rights, shouldn’t have been vulnerable. However, as stunning – and widely predicted –  as her victory undoubtedly was, she only got 38.7% of the votes cast and only 42.6% of the voters actually bothered to vote. And even that was lower than the turnout less than a year ago. at the general election.It’s not like there hadn’t been any publicity, media interest and speculation about it or anything.

Which means a few things, none of them good for her glittering parliamentary career, which may or may not happen or for Reform UK’s positioning of itself as a viable electoral proposition. Firstly, with a majority that is the very definition of ‘by the skin of their teeth’, and with such a low turnout to boot,  a better result for her would’ve been to have lost by six instead. Because you can bet that the local Labour Party will scrutinise her parliamentary attendance record, forensically examine her expenses claims, flood her constituency surgery with labyrinthine constituent problems, all designed to portray her as bad MP at the next election. They’ll also be all over her social media content – especially in her youthful postings – for any damaging content, and trying to unearth anything in her past that might be used against her. So basically what every political party handed such opportunity would do.

The situation in Greater Lincolnshire, where Dame Angela Jenkins became Reform UK’s first mayor, is if anything, potentially even worse. Yes, she’s a former Conservative MP so she knows how the game is played and yes, as mayor of newly formed super council, essentially overseeing three smaller councils each represented two senior councillors each, – given as how all of whom are Conservative,- this in theory doesn’t pose as much of a problem as if they were Labour.  I didn’t know this, but prior to last night, over 65% of Reform UK’s local councillors were defectors from the Conservatives. But be that as it may, Ange got her gold chain with a vote share of 42.2% – good -, a majority of nearly 40,000 – double good -, on a voter turnout of, er, 29.9%.  

So her election has succeeded in highlighting the flaws in our voting system and nothing else. As the mayor of a new super council, she needs the support of six others to ratify any policies she wants to introduce. They in turn are at the mercy of local officials, in town halls and council departments to make those policies real. And successful implementation of her policies will, even if they succeed in permeating down through the layers in bureaucracy, rely on council staff and contractors, who might be instinctively opposed to Reform UK. They won’t want her mayoralty to become a shining example of good governance should Farrago enter No.10.

And this is why the greater the electoral success that Reform UK has, the greater the threat to Reform UK has of suffering irreperable reputational damage. It can only present themselves as the change Britain needs for so long. At some point, they’ll have to deliver that change, and whilst bemoaning the structural unfairness of the first-past-the-post voting system chimes with people who care about such things, if potholes are left unrepaired, schools face staff shortages, or social care is pared back even further,  nobody will much care.

They won’t care that central government has cut the councils budget, but they will care the their council tax bill goes up or that they have to buy a residents parking permit. They won’t care that the council is barely meeting its statutory obligations but they will care when those statuary obligations are perceived to be applied discriminatorily. They won’t care when council run things that they never use are closed, but they will care when things that they do use close. Then they’ll care, then they’ll care a lot. 

And it won’t just be Farrago regretting getting the thing he always wanted.

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April 30, 2025

34:63 presents “The Corporal Jones guide to politics.”

In recent days there has been a lot of speculation in the press concerning what exactly Plonker will do in order to nullify the threat of a Reform UK rout of Labour at the upcoming local elections tomorrow.  They have pretty much conceded the by-election in Runcorn and Helsby, which voting also place tomorrow, which on paper they should win, given as how the former MP Mike Amesbury won it with a majority of nearly 15,000 at the General Election barely a year ago. 

But then having a by-election forced upon you because the sitting MP had to resign after recieving a 10-week suspended prison sentence after pleading guilty to punching a constituent last year, is not a good look. But neither is it a good look for a politician to carefully finesse his public image so that him saying little about actual policy in the general election campaign – so that everyone can fill in their own hopes onto him – works only so far. Which in his case, turned out – to no-ones surprise – to be until he was elected and soon thereafter revealed himself to be as slippery as most other politicians.  

Anything less than a resounding victory for Labour- an increased majority, an increased voter turnout from the general election and the other parties being thoroughly rejected by the electorate – will be a defeat. It remains to be see if its a crushing one or not. The local elections pose more of a threat, because most people will vote based on how competent or not they judge central government to be. Sad but true. Its politics. Just like when in February Local Government Secretary Angela Ratner announced that local elections in East Sussex, West Sussex, Essex, Thurrock, Hampshire, the Isle of Wight, Norfolk, Suffolk and Surrey would be delayed for one year to allow major reorganisations to take place. It may well be true, maybe there’s a compelling rationale behind her decision. But in order to prevent the taint of political chicanery being levelled and gaining traction, making the announcement less than three months before they’re happening, again, isn’t a good look.

But this government seems to be constantly bedevilled by events, responding to them, and being in constant firefighting mode, rather than shaping them and exuding calm. The postponement of the aforementioned is but one example of this. Another is sudden flurry of headlines this week suggesting that Plonker will take a stronger line on immigration in order to try and mitigate the threat from Reform UK.  Its not because of something as old fashioned as its the right thing to do and that doing such – reducing the numbers of people being granted asylum – might have a beneficial effect on already overstretched public services. That Plonker seems unwilling to grasp this obvious political calculation is one reason why Reform UK is polling so well and why all Plonker has are desperate last minute throws of the dice. His default position on immigration is to label anyone who thinks that immigration needs tougher action as racist or bigoted or far right extremists, effectively attempting to shut down any sensible discussion on this topic.

But as Reforms growing threat, and Labours craven reaction to it amply demonstrate, while such a strategy might work in posh metropolitan circles, out in the wild, out where most of the electorate live, out where the very real consequences of immigration are being felt, that strategy isn’t working. 

Don’t be thinking I’m in any way a fan of Farrago. I think he’s nothing more than a snake oil salesman, all smarm and the kind of bluster that most people mistake as plain speaking. Like a lot of people flirting with Reform UK, its only because of the lack of any other viable political alternative And like a lot of people who are considering voting Reform UK, my values and principles, my fundamental conception of what the state should do – and what it shouldn’t – and what obligations the state owed to the citizen – and vice-versa – haven’t really changed. Its the political parties who have changed out of all recognition. 

Despite the many horrors that the Grocers Daughter visited on the UK, she at least had ideological underpinnings to them. There was a logic, twisted and serving the interests of a minority, yes, but a logic.  The most socialist thing about Plonker is his first name, and the only thing he stands for is a piss.

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April 21, 2025

34:63 presents ‘Emotional inflation.’

In my last post I referred to Eddie Izzard as Eddie Izzard.  I’d  ‘deadnamed’ him – the notion that referring to someone by their birth name, as opposed to using a name that better suited their new identity – is as akin a ‘hate crime’ But I think I’m on safe ground here. According to his wikipedia page, he does’t much care. 

Others do, though, and that’s a problem because we now live in an age where how someone feels about something can be land one in hot water. Non-Crime Hate Incidents (NCHI’s) have been in the news recently because of the arrest last year of Daily Telegraph journalist Alison Pearson over a tweet she sent a couple of years earlier in which she mistook some British Pakistani protesters for pro-Hamas protesters and railed against ‘Jew haters’. That Pearson promptly deleted it soon after posting apparently made no difference.

Someone saw that tweet – and for reasons best known to them, waited two years before complaining to the police – and in so doing, set in motion the sort of over-reaction that I thought only happened in former Communist states. It took the combined investigative abilities of three different police forces, including one of them setting up a ‘gold group’– normally reserved for major or terrorist crimes – before concluding that no crime had taken place.

Introduced in 2014, more than 130,000 NCHI’s have been issued. And if you don’t remember a a huge debate about them raging in the press, interminable parliamentary wrangling, all manner of public protest, don’t worry. It was’t like you weren’t paying attention. There wasn’t anything to pay attention to. Because as befits something as nebulous as a NCHI, its very passage into British law is opaque at best and Kafkaesque at worst.

As a result of his inquiry into the murder of Stephen Lawrence,  Sir William MacPherson recommended that the that Police should record both hate crimes and non-criminal “hate incidents”. Exactly how something that is a non crime somehow requires the police to get involved is beyond me. But nonetheless, the result was that without any sort of anything, eventually in 2014, the College of Policing released its Hate Crime Operational Guidance that encouraged reporting non-crime hate incidents. As far as I can make out that’s basically what happened. The police decided it would be handy thing to have should they need it and everyone just went along with it. It was only in 2023 it got any sort of parliamentary attention and that was only limited as to how NCHI’s were recorded and stored, rather than their possible effect on free speech or potential for misuse.

And the threshold for something to be classed as NCHI is worrying low. All someone has to think is that because they possess a particular characteristic – their race, religion, sexuality disability or transgender identity – and that an incident occurred occurred wholly or partially because they perceive it to have been motivated by a prejudice because of that protected characteristic, then that’s enough. Even a third party a third party, who may have just have overheard or seen what it was – as in Alison Pearsons case – can report it.

This gives rise to what I call emotional inflation, the exaggeration of harm or to be more exact, the deliberate and maliciously inflated perception of their own feelings. Someone being a bit brusque or tetchy, terse or just a bit off with you doesn’t leave you feeling irked, miffed, vexed, or slightly irritated, possibly out of sorts for a few minutes or even in a bad mood. With NCHI’s these feelings transform into being triggered, anxious, threatened, fearful, distressed, certainly at risk of self harming, possibly suicidal and many other unprovable, yet sufficiently now conditions that help reinforce victimhood and prove that something needs to be done.

But in so doing, NCHI’s help create the very problem they ostensibly seek to solve. Because as soon as you elevate how someone feels about something above some else’s right to free speech, one legitimizes subjectivity, fosters a grievance culture and allows the law ever more power to police of personal actions. Because as we’ve see over the last few years, some trans-activists have become increasingly aware of the malicious potential that NCHI’s offer and have quite deliberately sought to amplify their feelings into something warranting police intervention. 

Why the police simply don’t tell them to ‘man up’ I’m not sure, but then they’re men that want to be women, aren’t they?

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April 19, 2025

33:64 presents ” Not so much ‘Where’s Wally?’, but more ‘Where’s Plonker?'”

Imagine if you can, the nightmare scenario in which the Supreme Court ruled that trans-women were women. Terrifying I know, but thankfully common sense prevailed, some semblance of normality was restored to the universe and we could all breathe that much easier as as a result.

But if it had ruled that reality was nothing more than a combination of wish fulfilment, dressing up and getting others to affirm your fantasy, then Plonker would never have been off the airwaves. You think him endlessly repeating that his dad was a toolmaker throughout the election campaign was irritating? He’d be banging on about how trans women were women, and that even though women can have penises there was nothing wrong with them using women’s toilets and that to suggest otherwise was now a matter for the police to investigate and for the courts to prosecute.

To no-one’s surprise however, because the verdict was the very worst outcome for this government, Plonker has been conspicuously absent from our screens. There have been no tributes praising the long battle that women have had to fight to get here, no glowing admiration for them overcoming the death threats, the career ending abuse, the violence and cancellations they endured. No admission that he, along with the vast majority of the political elite were wrong and that the work of correcting that wrong, of undoing the procedures and policies that were eroding the rights of biological women was starting immediately.

There was only absence. Missing was any comparable response to matching that followed last summers riots in Stockport. Then the full power of the state was unleashed. Then there was an urgency. Then there was a will, and the resources needed to make that will a very visible reality, to confront the threat to our society that some localised rioting and few ill-advised tweets presented. 

Has Plonker announced that all trans women prisoners have been returned to male prisons and are now housed in high security wings for their own protection? Has anyone told the NHS that single sex wards now need to operate on the basis of biological sex and that this needs to happen as swiftly as possible? Are the police now going to record crime statistics properly so we no longer have the abomination of a ‘female rapist’ being housed in a women’s prison? Will the be a directive issued whereby all schools should enforce single sex toilets, sex based segregation of sports and usher in a return to normality and to do this before schools return after Easter? Will these and the many, many other panderings’ to a dangerous nonsense be rectified quickly?

No, because successive governments’ have effectively ceded power to a lunatic cult and now this one has no idea as to how to get it back. 

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April 18, 2025

34:63 presents “The Supreme Court ruling was outrageous”

For many reasons, the unanimous verdict of the Supreme Court that women are biological women and that trans-women are not, was outrageous. Not outrageous because of the ruling itself, but because such a ruling was needed in the first place; that notionally sensible adults needed to be told by a court something that I knew to be true when I was four. 

Its outrageous that this case need to be bought before the Supreme Court because Scottish Courts had upheld the delusion that trans women were women, and as such could be counted as such when attempting to redress sex inequality in public sector boardrooms.

There are so many parts of this trumpery moonshine that I find so outrageous that to detail them all would be exhausting. But for now, here are a couple. 

It’s outrageous the way in which the most of the broadcast media – the BBC, ITV and Channel Four – have treated the ruling as if it were a decision upon the merits of two equally valid yet opposing opinions and giving airtime to delusional men with nonsensical beliefs. The main evening news bulletins on each channel carried a piece about the ruling, the jubilant scenes outside the court before all of them seemed bizarrely fixated upon what it meant for trans women, as if they were the most affected group. Each bulletin devoted no more than fifteen minutes on it. 

There is essentially no difference between them and the newspapers of the 19th Century who defended fairy tale of creationists against the evidence of evolution. It’s also outrageous the way in which when belief in one delusion is proven to be a delusion, more delusions spring up to replace them, like a linguistic Hydra of overblown hysteria, and equally outrageous that the broadcast and print media act as enablers in legitimising such ridiculousness.

If one didn’t know any better, one might think that even as you read this marauding gangs of pitchfork wielding lesbians were rounding up chicks with dicks and sending them to extermination camps, rather than simply wanting women only spaces to be for women only. And for the rights of women not to be constantly be eroded by men, in the service of other men, who despite not wanting to be men, still expect to be treated differently to women.

Its also an outrageous notion of equality that negatively impacts the majority of the UK population at the expense of a minority of a minority. According to the 2021 census, women – the ones with vagina’s and not delusions – made up 51% of the UK population, whereas all transgender people – both trans-men and trans-women – and people who identify as non-binary made up 0.5% of it. 

Like I wrote, outrageous.

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November 30, 2024

34:63 presents “Simplifying parliamentary procedure using ‘Life of Brian'”

The juvenile in me can’t resist stating the obvious that House of Commons, in having voted to progress the assisted dying bill onto its next parliamentary stage really put the black into Black Friday. You know, because black is the colour most people associate with death, wear when mourning and at funerals. No other reason. I just felt the need to point that out, because of times we live in. I’m not sure what’s worse; either feeling that you have to explain it in case deliberately people misconstrue it for reasons of their own, or going ahead and doing it anyway, just to be on the safe side.

Anyway, the theme of this post isn’t to discuss the merits or otherwise of yesterdays vote, as long overdue as the outcome was welcome was. Its to make the rather obvious point that rather than showing parliament at its best, which seems to the prevailing opinion, pronounced upon by MP’s themselves and slavishly reported on and amplified by the media, it showed it at its worst, and as MP’s as the self-aggrandising blowhards I’ve always suspected most of them are.

Consider this. Yesterday the chamber was packed. There was barely enough standing room. The debate lasted hours. MP’s on both sides of the argument made impassioned, intelligent speeches. Lots of them admitted they had changed their minds after speaking to their constituents. Some even shared those stories. The mood was of calm solemnity, befitting the occasion. 

Now try and think back of the last time you can think of that happening. Difficult isn’t it? Those seemingly never ending Brexit votes don’t count. They were to calm and reason what death is to life. No, its only when a decision to go to war is being debated that the chamber is like it was yesterday. The one that sticks out in my mind was the debate on the eve of the Iraq war and that was in 2003!  Possibly there been a few more since, but only a handful, and a newborn baby’s hand at that.

Normally the chamber is hardly ever close to being full. Only for Prime Ministers Questions (PMQ’s) is it full and that’s only because MP’s hope that they’ll get the chance to ask the Prime Minister a question, which’ll hopefully get them on national or regional TV news and remind their constituents who they are. They can then put a clip of it on their website. PMQ’s lasts for half an hour once a week and as soon as it’s over MP’s vanish as fast as a virgin on prom night. So far from yesterdays debate showing Parliament at its best, it in fact showed what it could be, but very rarely is, the exception that proves the rule..

That’s my first problem with all this. The second concerns what happens next. Because if you only based your conclusions on TV news footage from outside Parliament as the result of the vote filtered out, you’d be forgiven for thinking that by the end of next week there’d be disabled people in wheelchairs screaming as they were being propelled by unscrupulous relatives to death centres and it would all be perfectly legal. 

The problem with a properly functioning democracy is one of its inherent flaws; that unless the electorate knows how it functions – at least have a have a basic understanding of how it all works – it isn’t a properly functioning one. Not in my book anyway.

Whilst the bill passed the second reading in Parliament yesterday, there are still loads more stages for it to go through if it is ever to become law. Many MP’s appeared on TV stressing their unease about the bill as it is currently drafted, but were at pains to point out that they’d only voted for it to progress through its many Parliamentary stages precisely because they wanted the time to scrutinise it, to suggest amendments and have more debates. The haggle scene in ‘Life Of Brian’ is the clearest example of what all this means in practice; the earliest it’ll become a law that people can make use of is early 2026 at best.

And having a right to do something doesn’t mean you’ll actually ever do it, but that if you wanted to, you could. As far as I’m concerned, the sort of people who are wilfully misinterpreting what happened yesterday in parliament are not too dissimilar to anyone who detects an ‘ist’ at the start of this post. 

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November 29, 2024

34:63 presents “Is our democracy functioning or funct?”

It has been over two months since my last blog, and in that time an awful lot of awful has happened. All of which I have opinions on and some of which I’ll share. But not today.

It is the so called assisted dying bill that will be voted on today in the Parliament I want to discuss. Partly because it will assist more than just the staggering few people able to meet its ridiculous threshold. Partly because it is unutterably obscene that towards the end of the second decade of the 21st Century there is even a debate to be had about this. 

And also, far more importantly, for citizens not to have  the right to die, is the most blatant example of discrimination in Britain today. 

As I understand it, the bill allows that anyone with a terminal illness and has less than six months to live could apply to exercise the rights in it. To do so, they would need two doctors not only to confirm the terminal diagnosis but also confirm their mental capacity to make such a decision. And also to satisfy themselves that no coercion was at work and options regarding palliative care had been explained and rejected. Only then could a High Court judge give approval.  

Really? Just even getting a doctors appointment is enough of a challenge these days but then I suppose if one can afford to take a case to the High Court, going private isn’t a problem. And that’s my first problem with this whole farrago right there. The wholly unnecessary and ultimately self-serving bureaucracy involved. Because no matter what is decided in parliament today, one thing will be certain; the lawyers will be riding first class on the gravy train. 

It will certainly call in at judicial review.  Possibly taking the scenic route via legal challenges and interminable appeals. Then it might call in at the Supreme Court, before heading onward to Europe.  This isn’t the way a properly functioning democracy, one that is at ease with itself should conduct itself. 

But leaving all that aside, the most fundamental issue and one which I think has been overlooked when discussing this issue is age discrimination. Age discrimination that is predicated upon unfairly prioritising the needs of the unborn against those of the undead. One that places a greater value on the the right to life than on the right to die. 

There are no preventative checks that the state places upon being able to have a child, no suitability assessment, no background checks to establish previous criminal behaviour, and no evidence of one’s financial capacity to successfully embark on parenthood.

Why all the hoops and hurdles at one end and largesse we can ill afford at the other. It may seem that I’m contradicting myself or going off on a tangent here but the proposed changes that the assisted dying bill suggests are basically trivial. Around 350 terminally ill people take their own lives every year. That’s nowhere near enough.  We can’t afford the pensioners that are alive today – over 16% of the population – never mind tomorrow. 

According to the Office of Budget Responsibility, last year £142 billions were spent on various pensioner benefits. That’s 5.1% of national income or over 48% of the welfare budget, with absolute the certainty that this number is only getting higher. By 2060, nearly a quarter of the population will be over 65, meaning that the ratio of worker to pensioner will be 2:1.

I understand why the bill only applies to the terminally ill with less than six months to live. That way it has more chance of being passed today, paving the way for more additions later. But assisted dying should be properly seen as an act of civic good, a practical way to put give back by giving up. Living to beyond 80 should be seen as an act of unspeakable selfishness. It baffles me why living to a ripe old age a good thing? Ripe soon turns to rotten. 

And I’m as guilty of age discrimination as it relates to assisted dying as anyone else in assuming that only the old might want to die.  What is so wonderful about life for a 45 year old now to make them think it’s only to get better? All that good weather we’ve been having lately?

If we had a properly functioning democracy this would have all been resolved years ago and the right to die would be a given. If we had politicians who dealt with the electorate as mature adults capable of thinking in the long term, whereas we got was a succession of career driven opportunists unable to look beyond the election cycle. But we don’t have a functioning democracy.  However I might yet be pleasantly surprised. The bill might pass. 

Then we’ll see exactly how democracy functions.

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March 22, 2024

Schrodinger’s cat meets democracy

The result of the recent Irish referendum was many things and I’ll leave it to those more knowledgeable in Irish politics to expound upon the issues it raises. Much has been made of the decision to even hold a referendum regarding changes to the constitution in the first place. There are many problems facing Ireland right now and holding a referendum on something that wasn’t one of them seemed as if it was an exercise in political virtue signalling. One which indicated how in touch with the values and language of now the political class were, by indicating how out of touch they were with the concerns of ordinary Irish citizens.

An example being that changes to the the wording of the constitution are not exactly on a par with proposed cull of 200,000 dairy cows – 10% of the total – in order to better meet the Irish governments goal of reducing agricultural emissions by 25% by 2030. And whilst tinkering with some of wording of the constitution looked good to people who are inordinately pre-occupied with looking good, it also had the added benefit of seemingly coming with no cost, whereas the cull is estimated to cost £600Million.

But come at a cost it did and whilst much was made of the seemingly low turnout – 44% as compared with 2018’s repeal of the abortion law which had 66.5% – even the most cursory of looks at voter turnout reveals just how low it actually was. In parts of the capital Dublin and at least four counties, turnout was estimated to be no higher than 12 per cent and although turnout was high in some places – 46% in other parts of Dublin – there was an overwhelmingly sense of voter apathy. This the nightmare scenario that awaits both main parties in the forthcoming UK election if they fail to engender anything even approaching a sense of it being anything other than the outcome being a foregone conclusion. The victory of George Galloway in Rochdale underlies the reality of this prediction.

As noted in a previous blog post, there were many things I found highly disagreeable about George Galloway’s campaign, but no matter how calculated one considers his campaign to have been, it was undeniably effective. Making it clear that he was targeting the Muslim community in Rochdale that made up 30% of its population and shifting the focus away from local or even national issues, but instead onto Israel/Gaza was an act of effective strategic masterstroke. It paid off, resulting him getting 40% of all the votes cast, which sounds impressive, until you realise only 39.7% of voters actually bothered to. And then suddenly that 40% seems even less impressive, especially when you realise that that once impressive 40% translates into 12,335 actual votes.

A pathetic inditement of our political apathy, made all the more pathetic when one realises there are 26 constituencies with a majority of less than 1000, each notionally at risk from a well co-ordinated and highly motivated grassroots campaign. Which is both a good and a bad thing for democracy. Good, because it allows people to become properly invested in participatory democracy in a meaningful, not theoretical way, and to decide for themselves what issues are important to them, not have them dictated by a party machine. That is also the bad thing, because as Galloway’s victory in Rochdale shows, the numbers needed to win were not big and therefore permits to a certain kind of activism, as factional as it is unrepresentative. Certainly nowhere near cohesive enough to engender solidity with other similar victors on a regional, never mind national stage.

That’s why to me, the results of the Irish referendum and Rochdale are one and the same, bringing in their wake the warning of voter disengagement with the entire political process. Of how that sense of disengagement, that apathy, could be turned on itself, be weaponised and ruthlessly exploited in the pursuit of a rigidly exclusionary agenda.

Think of those 12,335 votes and tell me I’m dreaming.

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