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Friday, December 13, 2019

Rah

Capitalist democracy is essentially advertising; unregulated advertising is essentially lying and cheating. It is absurd to claim, as various hand-wringing liberal types have been claiming since ten o'clock last night, that the canaille have chosen to sell the NHS to Donald Trump. The Conservatives have been voted in because Johnson and his gang have promised to sort out Brexit and then get along with sorting out everything else. This sounds eminently reasonable to anyone who doesn't pay much attention to politics, being more concerned with such day-to-day problems as scraping a living and looking after vulnerable loved ones, which the Conservatives have spent the past decade so considerately exacerbating. The canaille would probably be quite happy to retain the NHS, but they have voted for its final destruction because the people who run Britain's political advertising regulation are essentially those who run the Johnson gang.

For the same reason, it is also absurd for the hand-wringers to claim that Labour's policies would totally have got a fair hearing under a less hopeless leader. Anyone making the slightest suggestion of taking from the rich to give to the poor, or refusing to wog-bomb wherever the chance presents itself, or keeping the planet more or less habitable, is liable to face exactly the same ridicule and misrepresentation that was meted out to Corbyn, and to the far more timid Miliband before him.

It remains to be seen whether the Johnson gang will try to maintain some sort of one-nation façade and throw some money around for a bit, or plump straight for the Singapore-on-Thames economy which powers the dank dreams of the Europhobes. The more optimistic electoral psychologists are already predicting that whatever happens will at least be "owned" by the Conservatives, as though the Johnson gang and their cheerleaders are going to step up manfully and take the blame for failing to inform their dupes that Brexit will be far from "done" once the withdrawal agreement is passed. Self-evidently, whatever delay and damage occurs will be the fault of the poor, the sick, the migrants, the Muslims, the citizens of nowhere, the pessimists, the Euro-wogs in Brussels, the last Labour government, and quite possibly the right kind of Jew.

Meanwhile, one must take what booby prizes one can. Much fun presumably awaits the Conservative and Unionist Party when its policies start breaking up the United Kingdom for real. The ridiculous little racist Zac Goldsmith lost his seat, as did the vicious Caroline Flint, albeit to a Conservative who presumably shares her principles. The ex-Deputy Conservatives helped their masters to win several seats, notably the greasy little opportunist Sam Gyimah who handed Kensington back to his fellow Grenfell-burners; but after a strikingly dishonest and inanely posturing campaign Jo Swinson became the latest Deputy Conservative leader to lose their seat. Doubtless a profitable career at Facebook awaits.

4 comments:

  1. I agree that no one would have been given a fair hearing. If this comes as a shock to labour supporters, try being a Scottish independence supporter, we've had a looooooonnnngggg time fighting against that sort of thing.

    I am one of those people that has always believed that Scottish independence would be the actual kick up the arse needed to motivate people in England to start tearing things back from the awful cabal that has been steadily taking more and more away from them. I still hope that is true, but have a little less hope after that result.

    Another little point, even if every single Scottish seat had gone to labour (with regard to the arse-kicking comment earlier, Scottish labour has been kicking its own elbows for years, they are now toxic in Scotland) or the libdems (accent-shifter Swinson gone, that shows how popular she was) we'd all still have ended up with Johnson and a hard-brexit.

    It's time for Scotland to go.

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  2. And to be clearer on that for any English readers that might have liked Corbyn to be PM, might see this, and care about what's happening in Scotland, I'll explain the toxic Scottish labour thing.

    1. When they had total control of Scotland they were corrupt and arrogant as f*ck
    2. People remember this.
    3. After Donald Dewar died they have been led by a series of progressively more incompetent people, to the point where the latest and current one, in his first speech as leader of Scottish labour actually said that they want to take Scottish water into public hands. He had obviously never taken the time to learn that Scottish water was never privatised, and in fact provides a much better service than what you get down south. His first f*cking speech.
    4. They now have a couple of half-hearted Corbynites at the top, a middle management and some/most councillors that are careerist, Blairite and unionist (and in that order). All of this whilst their membership is divided on the constitutional question. Some of them want more devolution, a lot of them actually want independence.
    5.They have sided and voted with the Tories on many things in Scotland as a simple "SNP bad" policy. This has been done whilst many of the things the SNP have done and are doing in Scotland were copied and presented as Labour policies in the Corbyn manifesto (I am not in the SNP, that is not the point here). It's a simple knee-jerk that they do. If the SNP said "we should all try being nice", Scottish Labour would respond with fury at such separatist nonsense. People are bored of this.
    6. They have even fucked up unionism so badly that the Tories have hoovered up the kind of votes that the tories took in north england.
    7. Any sort of young progressive activist who wants to get involved in things in Scotland, seeing the shambles outlined above, has decided to get involved in another party or organisation, so Scottish labour has an ever-decreasing talent pool.

    Sorry, but I just wanted to write this out. I hope it gives someone who didn't know it a clearer idea why labour, at the moment, is simply unthinkable in Scotland.

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  3. Thanks for that perspective - not one that floats up in our mainstream very often.

    Presumably the thinking (I use the word lossely) behind Labour's unionism is the sensible, moderate centrist idea that patriotism trumps all, incuding self-interest; but of course this becomes a bit complicated when there are two patriotisms around with one making better offers than the other.

    I suspect the main reaction to Scotland's leaving would be a sudden realisation that England won the war, not Britain after all; but perhaps I'm being uncharitable for once.

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  4. I would obviously prefer them to support independence, but the fact that they aren't isn't necessarily their problem.

    It is that they just try to out-tory the tories and the ulster unionists when screaming "no" all the time. Like the worst kind of entitled bully.

    They make no particularly principled stand on anything, and constantly vote against left-wing things put forward by the Scottish govt.

    They also promise all sorts of things that everyone knows are bullshit because in the devolved assembly that they actually do have control of in Wales, they are seen to do the opposite of what they say in Scotland.

    I'd also say that for the most vociferous ones, the thinking behind their unionism has more to do with career path than anything else.

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