It’s been a good long while since I last graced these august premises with a doggerel dump on the state of British politics, and it’s not because there’s been a dearth of things taking place over here for me to get angry and rant about. Au contraire, Mes Amis, this is, after all, late-stage Tory Britain we’re talking about, where on any given Tuesday you can always peek your peepers above the parapet to witness at least half a dozen examples of something heartbreakingly awful being inflicted on society’s most vulnerable by immensely privileged garbage who have never had to suffer a moment’s insecurity in their cossetted, buttersmooth lives, all soundtracked by media vandals (who would themselves benefit immensely from being volleyed repeatedly in the wormsack by a drunken kangaroo) being allowed to bray something imbecilic and horrible about it through a publicly funded megaphone.
The problem that I’ve had recently is that the above is basically the sum total of what Britain’s national political culture consists of these days; it’s just one endless, out-of-focus conveyor belt of soul-crushingly banal atrocity winding its way past the dead eyes and distorted faces of a million haggard proles like a sushi-bar in a Marilyn Manson video, except the fish are all rotted black, half of the plates have puppies nailed to them, and the other courses seem to consist mainly of boneless mice squirming about in bowls of cracked glass. Who in their right mind would ever want to write about that?
Hello. Pleased to meet you.
You may or may not recall from previous ranting episodes that the Anglosphere’s (current) least favourite KulturKrieging Kick-back machine has been drowning in disaster since pretty much the moment it installed a Russian-owned ethical void as its leader. They may have coasted to Absolute Power on the back of intense Media fluffing and a grinding, half-decade long, bipartisan campaign to paint the only alternative as some kind of folk devil on a par with Hitler, Stalin or Gwyneth Paltrow, but from there on it’s been the very definition of Downfall. From the insanity of its Brexit policy to the inhumanity of its Covid response and everything in between, when it comes to fucking up the country in the most corrupt and incompetent way imaginable the Tory Party of Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson has gone above and beyond mere human rapacity to achieve something touching on the infernal. It’s been a tour de force of open larceny that I could compare to something like Alaric’s Visigoths sacking late-Imperial Rome, except that would be a grievous insult to both Alaric (who was by all accounts a popular and capable leader) and the Visigothic nation (who at least had the decency to move to Spain and invent tapas). It’s simply unparalleled.
This isn’t a Government, it’s an Occupation, and there ain’t no one coming from over there to liberate us because we did it to ourselves.
The laundry list of Tory shit-the-beds is so long it would tax the Magdalene Sisters, so I won’t even bother trying to detail all of them again. Suffice to say that on top of everything else there’s now a cost of living crisis eating away at the bank accounts of every non-millionaire in the UK, with energy bills, food bills, fuel bills, and every other bill you can think of accelerating to escape velocity so quickly it’s driven Elon Musk into a full-blown jealous breakdown, while at the same time the wages of everyone but the cutthroats of Pirate Capitalism Island lag in real terms and the much-touted promises of ‘levelling up’ funds for the most benighted (by consecutive Tory and Tory-lite regimes) areas have evaporated faster than a widow’s tears in a cremation oven. The only parts of the 2019 election manifesto that Tories haven’t abandoned are the ones cribbed from Labour’s offering, which says far more about the relative seriousness of each party’s policy ideas three years ago than anyone in the British Establishment is willing to admit.
And in all this race to the bottom of the barrel and beyond, the one constant is an echoing silence about a major driver in the UK’s plunge into failed state mode, namely Brexit. The national auto-asphyxiation episode masquerading as a policy debate that decided the 2019 Election and gave Flobalob the keys to the kingdom simply doesn’t get mentioned anymore in the world of capital N ‘News’.
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