The Cynical Long Game

 

 

 

 

 

There is a J G Ballad short story entitled, “The assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy considered as a downhill motor race” that you can read here:

https://evergreenreview.com/read/the-assassination-of-john-fitzgerald-kennedy-considered-as-a-downhill-motor-race/

where the title is perhaps more powerful than the actual story itself.  The rivalry between Johnson and Kennedy was well known and the reframing of the assassination as a race with winners (Johnson) and losers (Kennedy) is one that resonates.

 

   

 

 

That title and the competition that it suggests came back to me when I was momentarily able to supress the frothing fury and disgust that have been my overriding passions as I have been following the Surrealistic circus of None Of The Above trying to get 0.03% of the voting population to elect one or other of the wasters to be Prime Minister of a real country.

     Truss, with the characteristic malevolent disregard for conventional politics has gone all out for the Neanderthal Home Counties Conservative Vote and has thrown what The Guardian has described as “red-meat right-wing policies” to the ravening hordes of ageing, white, comfortable, English Conservatives who are going to elect her.  Her complete lack of effort to try and include the concerns of the rest of the country in her unseemly scramble for power have not held her back from assuming the mantle of The Unicorn and floating ill thought-out and plain wrong “solutions” that, while not working in what might be termed the real world, have all too much “reality” in the closed, petty world of her Conservative electorate. 

     She has shown no shame in pandering to the lowest possible denominator and has misled and downright lied to get her twisted message across.  Her only concern is power and its acquisition; all else is subsidiary.  And, let’s be fair, don’t knock it, it’s working.  Short of (I won’t say a miracle, because “Rish¡” is just as vile and unpalatable) a huge surprise, the shallow, cosplaying, Thatcher-lite cypher is going to be elected to head the Conservative Party and thus be the Prime Minister.

     Both sections of None Of The Above have been playing this election as a game.  Given the probable outcome you could say that Truss has been the more adroit politician but (ironically) at the expense of her wider political credibility.

     Rish¡ has in my view accepted that he is going to lose, but has decided to play the longer game by attacking Truss and her policies in a fairly trenchant way so that he can be seen as “the voice of reason” (or something!) when Truss assumes power and shows herself and her policies totally incapable of dealing with any and all of the problems facing her and her terrifying possible cabinet of the undead. 

      Sunak (I can’t stand his twee logo) is obviously prepared to wait for disaster (Please God!) in the next general election and then to shuffle modestly into the limelight and accept the heavy mantle of defeat by pushing Truss into the wilderness and leading the party forward in yet another “delete all and insert” periods pretending that the last years had nothing at all to do with him and that he is untouched by the crass failure of Truss because, look, he had warned about it all from the start!

     If a week is a long time in politics, then a couple of years (perhaps on the back benches) look like eons – but Sunak, with his untold millions, will be able to orchestrate his position, and build up his support so that by the time the electoral defeat (Please God!) has sunk in, he will be seen as the natural leader to guide the shaken party towards electability once again.

     Sunk has, sort of, made it clear that he would find it difficult to serve in a government led by Truss, but, out of power and out of the cabinet, it is very difficult to maintain a power base on the back benches without appearing to be disloyal.  And disloyalty is something the party cannot stand – unless, of course, you are dealing with a person who has always been serially disloyal, like Johnson - when Sunak’s resignation is seen as a “stab in the back” of a person that the 0,03% would still probably like to be “leading” them.

     Sunak is playing a dangerous personal game, dangerous in the sense that he could condemn himself to marginality in politics, and I’m not sure, having had a taste of power, that he would be prepared to sideline himself for years in the hope of eventual returns.

     What I sincerely hope is that the Conservative Party rips itself to pieces. 

     I am sick and tired of hearing that the Conservative Party is the most successfully resilient in Europe as it constantly re-invents itself to make itself appear to be electable time after time – while ruthlessly pursuing policies that keep the status quo and its wealthy supporters happy.  If only we could have a socialist government that acted with the same passion for the workers of the country rather than the less-than-1%ers!

     I look forward to the political future of my country with absolute dread.  I have no confidence that my country (including the unemployed, the disabled, the low paid, the sick, the old and all the other groups that are marginalized in some way or other, the arts, culture, education, the Health Service etc etc etc) will be better with a Truss government. 

     The wrecking ball of the right wing is swinging, ready to destroy!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

     I am fond, almost on a daily basis, of bringing up the picture of Goya’s etching, The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters – but with the alien throwback Redwood poised to enter government at least one of those monsters can be given a recognizable face.  The only way is down!

 

 

The Worst Is Yet To Come!

 

 

 

 

Johnson’s “government” has been described as a zombie government because of their almost complete lack of interest in what is going on in the real world where the mass of the population is not taking one holiday after another as a way of forgetting about the various disasters and their pernicious legacy that twelve years of Tory misrule have inflicted on Britain.

     However, the metaphor applied to the non-existent phantom “government” of the liar Johnson is about to become reality as Trivial Truss has, according to newspaper reports, threatened to bring the “real” living dead into government by giving roles to such luminaries (in the same way that rotting meat becomes luminescent) as IDS and Redwood.  I was going to end that sentence with an exclamation mark, but after twelve years of the unthinkable becoming the ordinary it really doesn’t deserve it.

     BBC Wales never tired of showing a short clip of Redwood (they couldn’t find any real Welsh Conservatives of sufficient “presence” [sic.]) when he was Welsh Secretary, trying to sing the Welsh National Anthem.  You can see it here, with other delights of National Anthem disasters:

 

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/video/2015/sep/16/when-national-anthems-go-wrong-video

 

I am quite prepared to believe that the hapless Welsh Secretary was “ambushed” by the anthem, somebody (anybody) should have told him that the anthem was a possibility and given him a cheat sheet with the words written out phonetically.  I myself have had “a person of power” hiss at me, “Stand in front of me and sing!” when he didn’t know the words when on stage and the anthem was about to start!

     Redwood could have stood and, in spite of his habitual look of crazed alien mania, maintained a stoic stance of motionless respect but, no, the loon had to produce a performance that summed up his character, his policies and his standing in Wales and beyond!

     And now this relic from another age is seriously being considered for any position of power?  As a prominent member of the BFG (Brexit Fascists Group) aka the so-called European Research Group (where every word in their appellation is ironic or a downright lie) that in itself should preclude his admission to any responsibility more onerous than as a part-time Greeter in a failing Wal-Mart in an insalubrious district of downtown Sleezeville.  In government!  It would be a joke if it weren’t a serious possibility.

      I could go through the other putative Truss choices, but that would be far too depressing.  I will just allow one to stand for all.  Coffey is being considered for a “senior role” in the “new” (12 years of Tory Misrule So Far) government. God help us all.  I have yet to see a television interview with that person where she emerges as coherent, articulate and thoughtful.  Or indeed displaying any one of those elements.  If she is the best that we have got in the hundreds of Tory misruling MPs then we are at a depth where the term “scraping of the barrel” doesn’t give any impression of depth of shallowness that is being trawled!

 

Does anyone remember a time when the present Tory Party (TYofTM) hustings for the next leader of their discredited party was not going on?  The joke has long worn thin, and it is fairly obvious that the real title of the interminable race to confirm the downward spiral since Cameron (that titan of political acumen) should really be known as The Battle of None of the Above.  Who (even in the Conservative (TYofTM) Party actually wants either of the shameless unicorn chasers to win?

     It shows up the goldfish-like memory of Conservative (TYofTM) voters, that giving a straight choice between either of the None of the Above and the Tousled Twat, that they would prefer the lying criminal narcissist.  Says something about the lot of them.

 

 

Having spewed the bile from my body, I can report that the sun is shining, there is a cooling breeze from the fan, I have just had a refreshingly icy drink of tinto de verano and I am prepared to Do My Spanish Lesson!

Why do I listen to the news?

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!