My full-time teaching career started with my going for interview in Kettering, a town in Northamptonshire of which I had not previously heard. (As I was an aspiring English teacher, I do hope you appreciated my not ending the last sentence with a preposition.) Anyway, I got the job in what was then Kettering Boys’ Grammar School, but which had become Kettering Boys’ School by the time I took up my post. I spent a year and a bit there learning my craft and finding out that full-time teaching was a truly demanding job.
I had long moved back to Cardiff when the Northampton that I knew went, I’m tempted to say pear-shaped, but that image is not grotesque enough for what actually happened to the political landscape.
This link will take you to a lucid explanation of the appalling mismanagement of the council resulting in its bankruptcy: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-northamptonshire-56488909
In the recent elections, the electorate of the two new political entities that were formed from the rubble of what had been destroyed by the past administrations, saw fit to vote majorities to the Conservatives – the party which caused all the trouble in the first place. The electorate have AGAIN voted for people who callously and viciously made their lives much, much worse through criminal mismanagement of public funds.
Why?
That plaintive question has been echoing through my mind as I have considered the decisions the electorate have made not only in Britain but also here in Spain.
We have recently had elections for the council in Madrid and the electorate here have voted (in a record turnout) for a council which will be made up of PP and Vox. The first of those, PP, is the most corrupt political party in Western Europe – and that is not my prejudice speaking, just type in “PP in Spain corruption” and you will find a shockingly wide breadth of coverage of what is almost comical illegal behaviour.
If you want to be more specific then you could search for “PP Corruption in Madrid” and you might come across something like, https://elpais.com/ccaa/2018/09/30/madrid/1538326069_865164.html
Where, even if you don’t understand Spanish, it doesn’t take much to make out what the headline “La década viciosa de Madrid” might mean, and you will be able to see some of the unsavoury characters who have defiled the city over the last ten years.
And people voted for them! Again!
In a 71% turnout, 44.7% voted for PP! The other party that the corrupt and corrupting PP will govern with is Vox. Vox is usually described as a “far right” party, but it is simpler and more realistic to consider them as Franco supporting fascists. Their pronouncements and policies are repugnant. They are rabble rousing scum. And they have pledged to support PP “to keep the left out”. If you add the 9.1% of the electorate who voted for Vox to the 44.7% who voted for PP, you have a clear majority of the voters choosing right wingers and fascists to form their government of choice!
By way of comparison, in the Catalan parliament out of 41 representatives, only 2 members of PP were elected!
Catalonia truly is another country!
Meanwhile in Britain, the third-rate incompetents, bullies and liars who comprise the ‘government’ of Johnson, the liar-in-chief, are gifted with gains. Hartlepool, which has been a Labour voting constituency since its inception votes Conservative. Admittedly, it was an area which overwhelmingly voted for Brexit and presumably, the voters have seen or heard nothing negative enough with the lies of Johnson, and the criminal mishandling of the Covid response, or the Brexit train-crash of financial and social disaster to make them doubt the positivity of voting for a shameless narcissist and his corrupt crew!
If Johnson had been watching European politics (as if!) then he would probably be considering a snap General Election. The Zombie leader of the PPs in Madrid has shown just how much an electorate can ignore when they are asked to put their cross next to a party which is corrupt, selfish, criminal, menial, duplicitous, mendacious, uncaring, and all the other insulting adjectives that come to mind in describing your typical Conservative, no matter whether it be in Spain on in the UK.
God help us all!
Tomorrow is Toni’s birthday. The Family will be arriving in instalments and we should have a good celebration. Perhaps then I will be in a more mellow mood and my writing might reflect that.
We’ll see!
