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!
