The State of this Nation

Basic foodstuffs have gone up by fifty per cent, though luxury goods have remained fairly static. Energy and fuel costs are skyrocketing. Food banks are beyond normalized, they're a feature of every city and most towns. Some villages. Benefits have been slashed successively, while unemployment is the lowest its been for forty years, and people still can't afford to live. Airports are a howling chaos because they sacked all their staff during the pandemic, and aren't employing anyone else, so the remaining staff - exhausted, overworked and abused - will quit, and people won't want to fly anyway, if it means cancelled flights, endless queues, and general misery*. The police are investigating 25% fewer crimes than they were six years ago, and hospital waiting lists are at an all time high. The government still thinks it can cherry pick "the brightest and the best" foreign "talent", by offering short-term employment visas to people who meet a ludicrously narrow criteria, while the fruit rots on the trees and bushes of Kent because there's nobody to pick it. The Prime Minister's response to being found guilty of presiding over a culture of crapulence, and of personally breaching political ethics, is to attempt to redraft ministerial code, so he never has to resign. In the past week his party has done a massive u-turn on a windfall tax they said they wouldn't do, and vowed to bring back imperial measurements that no one under fifty remembers. He's also bringing back a picture of a crown on a pint pot which the EU banished (the EU did no such thing - they didn't fuck about with our imperial measurements either, but that didn't stop froth-lipped government mouthpiece the Daily Mail claiming they did. Because, who cares about the truth when you can print a retraction on page 14 in a 2pt font under a feature about Meghan Markle thinking she's too good to pick up litter after the Chelsea Flower Show, even though that's definitely what the Queen would want her to do, probably. There. Arse covered).   

                                         

The Tories have been in power for 12 years. This is what they've done to the country. They simply don't care. They'll wreck the joint for short term gains, and be insulated by wealth and privilege when the really nasty days come. And they're coming, coming for the likes of me and you (mainly me). 

Where I live, the second largest political party are refusing to play nice with other political parties because the Brexit they voted for has implications for their not being treated the same as all the other parts of the union though, in fact, they're fine with that when its about abortion or archaic licensing laws. They like to tell people what to do but they don't like it being done to them, so they're constitutionally sulking.     

Elsewhere in Europe, a big country is killing the people of a smaller country because it can. That's all you need to know about that particular war. It needs no further insight. The UK's response has been to be relaxed about coming second to them in Eurovision. We'll give them that one. Even though it was like the time "Common People" was kept off the number one spot by Robson and Jerome. ** It was reported today that Ukraine have sold their Eurovision trophy to buy drones which is, however you look at it, desperately sad. 

I mean, I haven't always been paying attention. I was a feckless idiot pretty much all my life. What I mainly thought about was how cool my hair looked and where the next drink was coming from.  Even so, this is the worst I can remember it being. In the miserable eighties at least there was a sense that there was an opposition to the government, and the notion that however misguided and evil the Tories were, they actually believed in what they were doing. Boris Johnson stands for nothing beyond Boris Johnson, and not always even that. His cabinet is a gallery of subhuman grotesques, like a pantheon of idiot Gods, each exemplifying a specific trait: cruelty, ignorance, indifference, etc. Nadine Dorries is like no politician I've ever seen: scornful, huffy, bored, willfully ignorant, and continually bruising for an argument she will lose, because she hasn't read the brief again. I cannot believe the country is being run by this bolus of wankers, people unqualified to be on your pub quiz team. Jacob Rees Mogg gets his every last would-be clever thought from The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations. He has no inner life, he really is the boy most likely to be black balled from the Drones club for being a bit of a thicky. Boris Johnson is in power, and looks likely to be in power for the foreseeable because there is no one else. He has surrounded himself by a Bash Street Kids where every one is Smiffy. 

I mean, this is just for me, this little blog. No one reads it - I'm my own echo chamber. This is a howl into the on-coming storm. I have no answers, or hope or anything cool like that, ha ha ha. The Labour Party aren't going to sort anything out. They're ineffectual Tory lightweights and, even if they weren't, so much damage has been done, and so much more will be done by these fucking wreckers, I'm not sure what's salvageable. Nadine Dorries dismantling Channel 4 because the news made her look like the half wit she is. That's what we're up again - bullying toddler psychos destroying the country. 

It's over, man. Game-over, man.   

Still, you never know...

Maybe it's going to be alright. 

*Actually, this is not true of the great British public who seem to believe they have a God given right to trample over precisely the same foreign lands they voted to have nothing to do with. But I'm not going to be bothering an airport any time soon.      

**In fact, it's probably the opposite of this.