Liz Cheney is a hard-right, anti-abortion rights, climate change denier, who supported disgraced Presidential failure Trump over 90% of the time in voting, but . . .
And at that point I shudder to a halt, thinking to myself that surely I cannot be about to make some sort of concession to a person whose entire set of political beliefs are anathema to me? Surely that ‘but’ can only be a prelude to something like the apologists’ addendum to the characters of murdering dictators like, “he was good with children” or “he liked dogs” (and I make no excuses for the inclusion of the masculine pronoun as Lucretia Borgias are few and far between) Why would I bother to find an extenuating circumstance for me to express even a modicum of fellow feeling with a political monster? But (!) we do share a common loathing: a detestation of the Traitor Trump.
Anyway, back to ultra-right-wing Liz. She has just lost her Republican nomination to retain her Congressional seat for the witlessly red state of Wyoming, where she has lost out to a Trump supported piece of political slime that believes (Does she? Really?) the Big Lie of electoral fraud in the last presidential election. Cheney has been an “outspoken critic” (the phrase has been used enough to become a recognized tag for the woman herself) of the Trump Monster and has been especially effective in her membership of the committee looking into the traitorous armed insurrection and invasion of the Capitol. And it has cost her.
No matter in her concession speech that she raised the political career of the Republican (“Who knew?” - Trump) President Lincoln whose way to the White House was anything but easy as a way of threatening a presidential (?) come back, she lost the Republican nomination in a state where her family is political royalty and where the democrats haven’t a hope in hell (or “Trump in 2024” as that demonic morass is known) of taking power- the last time they had the vote was almost half a century ago!
Trump (or his supporters version of him) is living proof that the bigger the lie the more you can be believed as long as you are all-in to the palpable untruth. Conway’s “alternative facts” are now the living truth, and reality is a pale imitation, easy to dismiss.
We live in a world where IDS, Rees-Mogg, Davies, Lord (!) Snow, and other assorted freaks are not only taken seriously but are actually allowed near the levers of government. Such trash rules and limits our lives.
The equivalent of the American ‘Big Election Lie’ in Britain is of course Brexit. To hear the proven liar Truss say that she was fundamentally “undecided” when she was an enthusiastic Remainer, and was terribly concerned about the future disruption from Brexit, but, “as it didn’t happen” (sic.) she has changed her mind. This is ignoring the facts and reality worthy of Trump. Just like the shallow Conservative MP for Dover who denied the long, long lines of vehicles waiting to enter Europe had anything to do with the changing of rules because of Brexit, the concept of Brexit being magic-unicorn-positive has become an article of faith for this generation of Conservatives, completely divorced from the various crises that Brexit has precipitated and exacerbated.
So what role does what one might call ‘real’ politics – a politics that is motivated by coherent ideology that is based on statistics and a concern for the whole of society?
Both Spain and Britain are glaringly unequal societies where the disparity between those who have the most and those who have the least is the most pronounced.
The powerful elite are protected by supine governments and a corrupt press. People are used to a certain standard of living. If I think back to my childhood in the 1950s then you can list the things that we did not have that would be regarded as part of normal life now, and the absence of those things would rightly regarded as some sort of poverty: television, telephone, automatic washing machine, microwave, fridge, freezer, the list goes on – most young people (and we older ones too) would go mad if they had to go back and live in the 1950s. For me, simply the allowing of smoking anywhere and everywhere would be truly nauseating: on busses, trains, trolley busses (a happy Cardiff memory!) cinemas, restaurants, shops, and pubs, everywhere!
People expect to be able to watch stuff on their televisions, to use the Internet and to use their mobile phones, to live a life surrounded by the electrical impedimenta of every day life. This winter, unless something radical is done, people are going to experience the most dramatic diminution in their spending power for well over a generation. They will not be happy – especially as they see the richest and most well protected in society being insulated from the hardships that they will experience.
In 1848 (The Year of Revolutions) the one major country in Europe that did not have a revolution was Britain. It has been argued that the ruling class made enough concessions to keep things just about from bubbling over and managed to retain their wealth while letting the vast majority of those who had been exploited to think that the concessions they had gained was enough, something they could live with.
We are now getting to the stage where the cry of “Eat the rich!” is moving from fantasy to reality – the sort of reality where things actually happen. When lies are tested by hunger and death, the bloody truth must prevail!
