Today is the Day of the Constitution. And a Bank Holiday.
Horrifically, we get to see our “government” – the
worthless bunch of right wing self seeking members of the minority government
of the most corrupt party in Western Europe all standing together, smirking at
a population that did not vote for them to be the government but, due to the
ineptitude of the opposition political parties has allowed this ‘criminal’
bunch to stay in power, to force our President into exile, to imprison our
political leaders, to invoke 155 and all of this from a party with 9% support
in Catalonia that has assumed control of our country. And you have to say that vast sentence in one
breath to get the full effect!
And now on television, Ana Pastor the president of Congress,
is making a speech in which key words like “liberty”, “democracy”, “justice”,
“rights”, “tolerance”, “dialogue” are being used that, for this ‘government’
have a very specific meaning which does not even come close to anything that I
understand the words to mean.
Listening to the national Spanish government reminds
me of my time in a student strike in Swansea University when I was part of a
delegation which met with members of the governing body of the University. The Chair of the university Council that we
met was Ifor Davies, trade union supported Labour MP for Gower, and it became
clear that the words and concepts that I was using to put forward the student case
were also being owned by Ifor Davies, but it rapidly became clear that a common
vocabulary did not mean common beliefs.
There is nothing more frustrating to hear your words
used against you by someone who wilfully redefines their meaning poles away from
an understanding that should be common to you both.
But Ivor Davies was an established, institutional ‘Socialist’
in a safe Labour seat and he was never going to be on the side of radical
change, and it was my first ‘real life’ experience of, “the devil can cite
scripture for his purpose” approach to political debate. In spite of this happening decades ago, I
still find that approach hurtful and distasteful. And I hear it every day as soon as a member
of the Spanish National Minority Government opens its mouth.
I can’t even turn to the UK news to add a moment of
tranquillity as the Conservative Brexit convulsions continue to make my country
an international laughing stock. If I understood the extract of the news on
Radio 4 correctly the government has not undertaken a study of the financial
implications of Brexit on British Industry!
If that is correct, then the government and especially
the Minister for Brexit have been criminally incompetent; if they have done studies (surely, they must have) and they are deliberately
keeping yet more compromising information about the disaster that Brexit is
going to be from the general public then they should resign. En mass, and now!
Though, finding out that the minority Conservative government
is unprepared is par for the course given the generally clueless mess that the
Conservatives (“lower than vermin”) have made of the whole Brexit fiasco so
far.
I thought about that after the last Brexit disaster
but two (or was it three) when the unprepossessing leader of the troglodytic
DUP (the dim but intense girl you wouldn’t have wanted to have been put next to
in school) Arlene Foster phoned up the zombified misfiring robot that
masquerades as our Prime Minister and peremptorily informed her that she had to
stop talking to those nasty Europeans.
And the very next day the throwback Tories rose like the scum they are
and mouthed their inane platitudes.
It was seeing in The Guardian a photo montage of the
main Tory Brexiteers applauding the stance of Foster (Ian Duncan Smith,
Redwood, Lawson, Rees-Mogg etc) I was reminded of the line up of The Munsters
or The Addams Family, the same freakish look but without the family charm of
The Munsters or the moral clarity of The Addams Family.
Why is it that we have to tolerate these startling
failures (IDS for the state of social services and care of the disabled;
Redwood for his ‘singing’ of the Welsh National Anthem among other things;
Lawson for his singing as the pound
plunged; Rees-Mogg for existing) pontificating about an appalling situation
that they have consciously helped produce.
Based on what they have already done, what the hell do they know about
how to make the situation in the United Kingdom any better?
I need to watch a film or go to the opera again or
listen to music or read a book and convince myself that there is intellectual
life out there that is not tainted by political idiocy. And Trump is now moving the American Embassy
to Jerusalem! Each day brings more bad
news than can be easily consumed in a twenty-four hour period!
We must make the days longer!
