The Toad Works

 Reform have won a huge victory in the local council elections. I knew they would as, since Brexit, pretty much everything has been delivered into the hands of the angry people, and Reform is the angry people's party*. Britain is an angry island and the angry people are everywhere, being angry at all the things. Pot holes. The RNLI rescuing drowning people. The obituary of someone they've never heard of. People being neuro-diverse. Pronouns. Other people driving cars. Cellulite. Weight loss. Saying anything at all on social media. Vaping on buses. The death of the high street. The death of pubs. General Europeans. Trying to be fair. Responsibility. Being questioned about their opinions. Having their opinions questioned. Being required to have opinions beyond stuff they read off a beermat in Wetherspoons. 

It doesn't really matter, and it doesn't matter what it is. The way we live now, someone, somewhere is spitting venom at everything that's "good". Puppies? Duckling? Newborn infants? They all have their haters. Your happiness? That's a big, shiny, sexy nail to someone swinging a sledgehammer of hate. 

I despair of England, really. Farage is nothing. He's a nobody. Look at who he is: a public schoolboy who said a lot of racist things "for a laugh". A banker. That popular man-of-the-people legend, the banker. A man so loyal to his country that he was the only one in the room who didn't stand for the King of England's speech to the European Parliament, because he didn't agree with him on climate change. He's the grifting liar who took us out of Europe. He's a man who failed to become an M.P. seven times and when he was elected never turned up there. He hasn't done a single surgery in Clacton because he says he's "too scared." He's the rim-master general who paid to go and hang out near Donald Trump instead of meeting his constituents, because he has such an exhausting hard on for the gold-plated Ozymandias. He has no policies beyond hard line racism, the dismantling of the NHS, the defunding of the BBC, the cancelation of anything viewed as progressive or, the single syllable symbol of everything they hate, "WOKE!" Beyond that, nothing. When pressed on this, he becomes angry and defensive or he deflects or leans into whataboutery. When interviewed by a woman, he's likely to advise her to "Listen, love..." He's a bad suit, he's a set of tobacco stained teeth in a frog's gob. He's the premier, national bar bore. He receives "gifts" from foreign billionaires. He gets houses and no one is allowed to ask him who paid for them. When it comes to romantic partners, he's Alan Partridge: "What? BRITISH?" He's greedy, amoral, contemptuous, without any sense of decency, kindness, fairness or empathy. He's very bulldog English for a man named Farage. 

And he'll be the next Prime Minister. 

Or he won't. But if he takes bribes and manifests free houses and the press still won't go after him, I can't see what will take him down. Reform, the "party", are a cabal of pop-eyed, right-wing lunatics. They can't manage. There seems to be no vetting process. They can't stop being racist, sexist and homophobic on social media. They constantly fall out, bicker, bully, resign or get sacked. We've seen this. They don't want the responsibility of actually doing any work. They're in this to own the libs, and now they have done so on a national scale. This is their peak. Now they have to do work they're utterly unqualified for/ uninterested in doing. They've won the fight. The rest is just annoying admin. They will take us down with them. **

I said this to a friend of mine (she's from Derry) and she told me that it's not just the English. That everyone is like this. There's loads of racists in Italy, but we don't care because they have better clothes and good ice cream. Then she told me I shouldn't say anything "as it must be really upsetting for all the nice English people who didn't vote for Reform". That's the Irish for you. Even on the day my country cut off it's own feet, I'm not allowed to complain because there's nothing special about the bloody English. She then advised me to blame late stage capitalism. 

She's right, of course. But just for one day, late stage capitalism has, a face, a Bufonid face full of pub piano teeth. There's a pint in one hand and a fag in the other and drool all down the front of his blue Estate Agent suit. His Union Flag socks are on full display and, of course, they would be. That's his only manifesto: he has England under his foul smelling heel at last. 

I often think of going back to England. But I can't. 

It's not there. 

*It's not a Party. It's a company. 

** One of them has been sacked within six hours of being elected for historical holocaust denial. It begins.