Cartoon Politics?

 

 

 

 

For what now seems like the last twenty-something years of my life, a political organization, formerly known as The Conservative Party, has been putting on a mind-bendingly boring charade of Right Wing Cosplay to try and influence the miniscule audience of voters who will elect one of two cyphers who will replace the last lying narcissist to hold the role of Prime Minister, who in his turn replaced the previous vicious (yet vacuous) semi-alive failure in the role, who in her turn replaced the toff-boy coward who walked away (whistling) from his responsibilities.  So, the cyphers do not have to do a lot to fit right in with the bar of competence set at a Mariana Trench level of profundity.

     Truss, the ex-Remainer, ex-Lib Dem, and born-again Thatcher act and Unicorn Brexiteer is using the Johnson tried and trusted technique of blatant lying and blaming everything on everyone – apart from her semi-articulate self, while talking up increasingly far right policies (on the hoof) to try and get the old, white, knuckle-draggers of the Home Counties to vote for her.  She is risible and contemptible and is, let us remind ourselves, the favourite (sic.) to gain the keys to Number 10.

     Her perky, richer than Croesus, “I have no working class friends” opponent is also spewing nonsense, trying to balance (and failing) the need to appeal to a Conservative Membership that he must regard with little less than loathing, while attempting to voice policies that make at least some nod towards the fact that the UK is facing crises of an existential nature.

     Not, of course that you would get a sense of that by listening or reading about the various quasi-Surrealistic “hustings” of party members as they question these “candidates” who have to try and pretend that they are offering something new and exciting to combat the difficulties that they themselves have been creating for the last decade.

     The level of unreality is so palpable that I am sure that the majority of people trying to make sense of the “Noddy in Toyland” level of political acumen on display have truly forgotten that we have had a Conservative Government (I use the term in its loosest possible sense) since 2010.  Two thousand and bloody ten!  And they are acting as if Cameron, May, Johnson are all “resets” and therefore nothing can be blamed on the future Prime Minister, as they will have had nothing to do with previous administrations, apart from being slavishly voting MPs and actual Ministers in the actual government!

     As a Welshman, albeit living in Catalonia, I can take some comfort from the fact that the Conservatives do NOT have a majority in Wales and that we do not have the political dregs in power.  But the UK is governed from London and the monetary allocations are decided in Westminster and England has by far the largest population in the constituent countries of the UK so, although government is partially devolved, England is still calling the tunes – or rather the tiny percentage of the population that makes up the membership of the Conservative and Unionist Party is.

     So, as prices and inflation go up (and up!) and wages go down (unless you are in The City) we have weeks more of the farce that is the election of our next Prime Minister.  Embarrassments playing with props from the political Dressing Up Box, vividly illustrating just how far below the ludicrous our country has sunk.

     Perhaps the most depressing element in this whole charade of political game playing was summed by the Daily Mail who (seriously) averred that Johnson had bucked the trend of the political truism that, “All political careers end in failure.”  That is a rewriting of reality on a par with the everyday life of Trump, where there is an unlimited number of “alternative facts” to fit in with whatever deranged rearrangement of life unscrupulous right-wing demagogues demand the ever credulous to accept rather than believe the evidence of their own eyes.

     Another truism is, “This too will pass” – however good or bad things are, they will change.  Wars will end.  Things will resolve themselves.  But it doesn’t mean that things will be better when those “things” have “settled down”.  You can look at history through statistics, but statistics are human stories and have human consequences.  The removal of the twenty-five-pound uplift to Universal Credit is a story of human misery and political viciousness.  Real people suffered; it is not just an “economic detail.”

 

This is a bitter way to start again to add to my neglected blog, perhaps tomorrow I will be mellower and allow myself the luxury of hope!

Happy Christmas?

 

 

Today marks the real institutionalisation of the pandemic.  I had to show my Covid Certificate or Passport to get into the swimming pool.

     There was the usual failure of the technology when it turned out that the image of my scrambled digital thingy on my mobile phone (you can tell that I have forgotten what they are called) was too small to be read by the mobile phone app that was being used to check entry.  For some reason the phone did not allow me to expand the image to make things easier for the desk staff, but eventually I was allowed in.

     Last night on the television there was a piece on the long lines of people in the centre of Barcelona who had just realized that their access to bars, restaurants and gyms was going to be ended if they could not produce a valid covid certificate, and so they were desperately queuing to get their jabs.  I suppose that one should think, “Better late than never”, but one can’t quite rid oneself of the bone deep irritation that one feels when thinking about the sheer inconsideration of people who can’t give a hoot for the general good until it impacts on them directly.

     In the armed forces, I remember reading from years ago (and had it confirmed by my Dad) if you suffered from sun burn, it was considered an offence as the ‘injury’ was ‘self-inflicted’.  I feel very much the same from those people now clogging up precious hospital beds, where the vast majority of Covid patients in ICUs are unvaccinated!

     I don’t remember the same degree of vaccine avoidance about other fatal diseases and feel that the political edge given to Covid vaccine reluctance is one left over from the disastrous ‘presidency’ of Trump. 

     His macho idiocy and cavalier attitude towards disease prevention is directly responsible for deaths.  For anyone else you would ask yourself how the hell he manages to sleep at night knowing the damage he has done to families and to institutions – but with such a sociopathic narcissist like himself, where he is the centre of his own sick universe, he is able to redefine responsibility and ignore so-called collateral damage.

     In Catalonia, I take the requirement to show that you are vaccinated to be a clear sign that our government is taking things seriously. 

     Yes, there are contradictions contained in what we understand to be the new rules for socialising and, as things stand at the moment, I will be able to go to my next opera in the Liceu with almost full capacity.  I assume that we will be asked to show a Covid certificate for entry there too, but I have yet to be informed by the House, and the performance is only a week or so away.

     I do understand that, as a retired person, I can afford to take a fairly purist attitude towards restrictions: I do not have to commute, my financial wellbeing is not connected (directly) to the health of any one firm or place of work in the UK, I can afford to be complacent, in so far as my pension is from the government and not from any public company.  Yes, the ability of governments to pay their pensioners is directly dependent on the wealth of the country providing them, and the restrictions on people being able to work has lessened the tax money that the government can spend, but we are still protected in a more direct way than a self-employed actor, or waiter, or salesperson.

     Christmas is the time when some industries make a chunk of their earnings: the Panto season in theatres is essential to the health of the theatre for the coming year; restaurants look to party bookings during this period as a guaranteed source of income to see them through the leaner times in the year.  All computation about what will and will not happen financially has been thrown into disarray by the pandemic.  Nothing is certain.  Rules change on a weekly basis.  Long term confidence is something of a dream.

     Those lucky enough to be on a combination of full, state, and professional pensions are assured of a fixed payment each month.  For the majority of the working population the pandemic has shown how privileged this financial state is as what previously had been thought to be guaranteed proved itself to be not as firmly grounded as hoped.

     I do understand that keeping the economy going is of essential importance, pensions are, after all, paid by the contributions of those still working – but there is also the question of the health and safety of the nation to be taken into consideration too.

     In the UK at the moment, there are wildly differing approaches depending on who you listen to in Government about what you can consider doing this Christmas.  John Crace (the Guardian Political Sketch Writer, and well worth reading) is fond of using the image of Schrodinger’s Cat to illustrate some of the contradictory attitude of government.  Johnson seems to have abdicated responsibility for giving clear advice about what to do this Christmas apart from saying that Christmas Parties should not be cancelled, but he still harps on about personal responsibility where what he is doing is off-loading the burden of accountability on to some sort of mythical inner logician that we all have inside us, that will allow him to claim that any increase in deaths because of faulty precautions taken will be the responsibility of those who die and not the person who has the title of Prime Minister and who should be leading us.

     The corruption, lies, deaths, incompetence, bullying, hypocrisy, and cowardice of this twelve-year-old government makes the “Thirteen years of Tory misrule” proclaimed by Wilson in 1964 look positively prim by comparison!

     Here in Catalonia, we have a government where the equivalent of the Conservatives has little power, but there is a limit to what can be done when the parties we do have are squabbling amongst themselves and hardly living up to the names of the political sections they are supposed to represent.

     Politics seems to be becoming murkier by the month and adds nothing to the confidence with which we can look forward to Christmas and the next year.

     I fear that the imposition of Covid passports is just a step in the process of softening us up to accept far more stringent restrictions when the full import of the growth of the Omicron variant is clear.

     “Happy Christmas” is a fond hope, not a greeting.

Wither irony?

 

 

 

 

 

 

So, Johnson is flying back to London after COP26 in Glasgow by private plane.  With anyone else of even minimal political credibility this would be a crushing piece of destructive irony – after weeks spent mouthing platitudes about the need to reduce carbon footprints.  But with the charlatan Johnson, it is no more than par for the course for someone who can see no further than himself.

     Add to that the news that the disgraced Conservative MP who sexually harassed a member of his staff is to be allowed back into the Conservative party, and it all fits with the assumption that most Conservatives can do what the hell they like and will be subject to few lasting restraints or consequences. 

     Be grossly incompetent?  Bully your staff?  Lie to the House?  Lobby illegally?  Give your donors preferential public money deals?  Kill people through mismanagement?  No worries with the Conservative equivalent of a perpetual Get out of Jail card ever at the ready to smooth a path for those who have demonstrably done wrong.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

     A few days ago, I read a piece about Spike Milligan making the point that if anyone deserved the accolade of King of Satire, it must be him – but the piece also brought up the idea that the last few years have been so bizarre that so-called real life has produced actual event and characters that in their destructive absurdity defy satire.

     Donald Trump and his troupe of grotesques, you would think would be idea fodder for the sort of treatment that was meted out by the latex puppets in Spitting Image – but, when you look at the orange artificiality of Trump’s face and the wispy monstrosity of his hair, and how and what he says, how can any puppet do justice to the abomination that he exemplifies?  

 

 

 

 

 

     Watching Trump at one of his rallies forced you think that you were in a world where Dada, Surrealism and the Black Paintings of Goya were the motivating forces, rather than anything that could be recognized as “normality”.

     In a similar way the continuing car crash of Johnson’s so-called government of Britain would seem to demand that the cries for his instant dismissal and prosecution for wilful dissimulation and corporate manslaughter should by now have reached a crescendo – but still his corrupt and corrupting party had a healthy lead in the polls, and Johnson’s laughable “leadership” is still seen by a remarkable proportion of the population to be something in which they believe.

     And there, I think lies the crux of his popularity.  Facts and figures now mean nothing, or at least very little, to those who think that Brexit was a good idea and that the Conservatives have the interests of the whole of the country at heart.  The Conservative party is now a cult, and belief in Johnson is a core tenet of belief, something beyond mere reality.

     Every time I see Johnson in the newspaper or on the TV, I find that I am now experiencing the same feelings of revulsion that I had for a character like Saville.  Even at the height of his fame, when he was lauded by young and old, rich, and poor, the great and the lowly, I felt a repellence towards Saville.  He was not a person you would want to be near.  I am not, of course, suggesting that there is any similarity in the crimes that Johnson and Saville have committed, but the feeling that they are both wrong ‘uns is compelling.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The day after tomorrow I get my flu jab, and I hope a specific date for my booster Covid shot.  Although mask wearing is still happening in Spain, young people are more obviously not following the older population where mask wearing in crowded public space is usually the norm.

     I keep remembering the statements from health officials that “until everyone is vaccinated, we are all at risk”, and then I look at the statistics of how many children have been vaccinated and then hear of statistics from Africa and other parts of the world where a tiny proportion has had any sort of protection, and I think that the attitude of “we call all start travelling again in 2022” is blind optimism.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Today was the last day of my extended birthday.  I like to keep in a birthday mood for at least a week.  So, the excellent paella in the restaurant connected to my swimming pool was a fitting end to the jollifications.  Roll on my Name Day!

How to keep your sanity in world that is too right-wing for, well, sanity!

 

 

 

 

For the past few years, when the political situations in Catalonia, Spain and the UK got too much to bear, I turned to the antics of Trump and the Republican party to demonstrate that there were depths that this side of the Atlantic had not yet plumbed.  Now that Trump is more of a distant malign emanation from the depths of swampy Florida rather than an ever-present daily horror show in the newspapers, one has to rely on the pathetic, yet entirely disgusting, cavorting (I can’t think of any other word to describe what should be a serious political party) of the Trumpian Republicans in Congress and the Senate to set against whatever depressing failures one sees around the political sites in Spain and the UK.

     I have realised that I simply can’t do it anymore, by which I mean reading about Republicans with the semi-detached amazement at the jaw-droppingly callous human distain that they display on a daily basis.  I can no longer pretend that the grotesque views that Republican espouse were a function of The Orange Small Handed Horror.  Whatever the Republican Party might have been in the past, what it is now is a morass of ante-diluvian viciousness: the anti-abortion, election “rigging”, voter suppression, homophobia, etc etc etc – all the tropes of the far right coming home to roost (if they ever left) in the comfortable prejudices of an apology for a political party.  What is happening today is that the repressive idiocies of the Republicans and the super-charged language of political hatred and contempt that they use against their opponents is all too present in the life of politics here in Europe.

     The ‘comical’ lies of Trump are more than matched by the serial mendacity of Johnson.  Johnson now is a flagrant liar because he makes no attempt to correct the record when he has been found out.  And still the Conservatives are ahead in the polls.  Why should a liar change his deceit when he doesn’t seem to be penalized for the lies he tells?

     England and the USA are cursed with a two-party system: Conservative and Labour; Republican and Democrat.  Where do the votes go for those voters who look with something approaching horror at the way that they right wing parties are heading? 

     In the USA, the rhetoric of the right means that even the mildest of the Democrats is branded as extreme left wing or “Socialist”, whereas here in Europe they would be seen as just left of centre.  Old fashioned Tories must shudder to see what the party has become under the “leadership” of the third-rate chancers who now control the Conservatives, but their escape route of the Lib Dems has long since been shown to be a wasted vote and they probably will never bring themselves to vote for Labour, even with that nice Mr Starmer as leader.

     The situation is different in Catalonia, where the national conservative part PP has a derisory following and the so-called “centre right” of C’s has also been rejected at the polls.  The “”Socialist”” party PSOE and a variety of Independence and left-wing parties hold sway here, but we have no government as the parties have found it impossible to work together to get some sort of coalition off the ground.  As the days go by with a government “in functions” the frustration of the voters becomes more and more palpable.

     In a way in which I have never felt so strongly before, governments are simply not working; justice is becoming a by-word for partisanship; inequality is becoming more and more pronounced; corruption is rampant and the ordinary voter is made to feel more and more irrelevant as the tiny percentage of the rich and the powerful continue to act with absolute impunity.

     The word “Democracy” has become devalued as politicians mouth the word but ignore the concept in the ways in which they behave.

     Biden is trying to make a difference.  In spite of the torrents of abuse that he has to take as he tries to redress some of the worst excesses of his predecessor’s reign of terror, he is a beacon of hope.  But what is going on in the red states of America in the almost comical attempts to gerrymander the political situation to benefit the right is a worry.  Biden does not have his full term to make a difference.  His majority in the Senate is on a knife edge and if that is taken away by Senate elections next year then we have seen previously that a hypocritical Republican Party will be much more than willing to sacrifice country to the demands of the Party and stymie any bipartisan legislation and wait for 2024 to Bring Back Trump to win again!

     The election in Madrid will be an indication here of how the political situation is working.  The leader of Madrid at the moment is an unprepossessing Zombie of PP who has made the most remarkable pronouncements in the lead up to the voting.  We have an extreme right-wing party which is openly Fascist and revers the late Fascist dictator Franco.  The level of political debate is debased.  Threats and counter threats depress.

     It is very difficult not to be depressed at the prospects for a positive outcome to the election in the febrile atmosphere where everything seems to be tainted by Covid.

     But I remain an optimist.  

   And as long as I stop reading about red-neck, red-state Republicans and concentrate on things like the medical personnel who have worked tirelessly to vaccinate and medicate, then I can always look forward to a communal recognition that unselfish caring is also positive self-regard.