What are you doing while the world burns?

Boris Johnson is reputed to compare himself to Britain’s World War II leader, Winston Churchill, a showman with genuine political foresight whose rhetoric thrilled a nation into active resistance: “we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender”.

A narcissist who thrives on attention, Johnson probably won’t be upset by some of the hilarious parodies now in circulation:

Johnson and Trump are both corruptly democratically elected dictators and share personal characteristics. There are two differences, balancing each other out. The first is personal. Trump is stupid and instinctive, Johnson is intelligent and calculating. The second is circumstantial. Trump rules a super power, Johnson is the figurehead of a declining power that has done the “stupidest thing any nation has ever done” (Bloomberg) in choosing Brexit, making its own people poorer and its global influence impotent.

Johnson did not believe in Brexit in 2016, and we may safely assume he doesn’t believe in it now. He doesn’t care. He believes in himself. It is not a coincidence that humans are being led by megalomaniac lying narcissists at the beginning of the end of the world. Even if we didn’t vote for them ourselves, we didn’t fight hard enough to stop them.

So we are all accountable.

We have got to fight harder. Or have we? What do you want to do? People have always adapted, haven’t they? Survival of the fittest and all that? Is that what you want? Is that the sensible thing to do?

Johnson’s absence lotus-eating while Trump plays WWIII games with world peace and the Australian burns has been called cowardice. That jibe would cut most of us to the quick. Not Johnson. Not Trump. Their narcissism gives them armour for self-preservation that the average person doesn’t have.

They don’t care. That’s why they are successful, that is why they were elected by people in flight from the horrors of reality, overfed on lies and false promises, bored by facts, obsessed by structured reality shows, who wanted leaders in their own image to reassure themselves that they are good. They don’t care that it’s a lie. That’s where we are in evolution. The age of denial before extinction.

It’s not going to happen in your lifetime? So you don’t care? I hold you to account. I hold myself to account, too, but I would rather scream alone in the dark than break bread with any collaborator.

We are witnessing the slow agonizing death of our world, and most people don’t care. So they follow leaders who make not caring look aspirational.

Look! Be a PM or President with a subjugated trophy women at your side! Look! Tax havens! Free use of millionaires’ villas on sleazy sex islands! Look!

Look!

Look!

Look!

Sofa by Ekhi-Guinea

We still have a choice. We either continue to self-medicate or we get off the sofa and fight.
If we are financially able, we must give money to those who need it more.
If we are physically able, we must resist and protest.

Goodbye, bloggers

The Rotten State

 

Balthasar van der Ast, Basket of Fruits, 1625 Oil on wood, Staatliche Museen, Berlin. Image: WGA

via Scorched Earth

Hope & Glory Martin Hübscher Photography ©19 October 2019

The Fifth Horseman

Madness in Washington, madness in Westminster, are manifestations of the same “damaged and defective” world disorder. In America and Britain, a moral paralysis is afflicting people with the power to effect a cure.

Trump is a deadly distraction for the British, who loudly denounce him while being blind to their own Brexit faults. They don’t want their country to decline from global power to Trump’s patsy, and ultimately Putin’s, but they are not doing anything to stop it.

Republicans should “defend their country rather than the damaged and defective man who is now its president” James Fallows, The Atlantic

Tory Brexiteers are saying,
“The loss of hundreds of thousands of jobs will be worth it to regain our country’s sovereignty”
Anna Soubry, reporting extremists’ conversations in the House of Commons, 16 July, 2018.

A TRUMP CARD(IGAN)
Punch cartoon depicting Lord Cardigan leading the Charge of the Light Brigade at the Battle of Balaclava, 1854.
Yet another over-privileged nut-case with inherited wealth and delusions of sovereignty leads everyone else into disaster.

Brexit is as damaged and defective as Trump. The links between Trump and British right-wing Brexiteers are now in the public domain, yet still the powerful drug Denial sedates the electorate, duped by a coup d’etat into believing that unnecessary self-harm is a democratic imperative.

The extreme right wing of both countries very skillfully manipulated voters into turning the tool of democracy against themselves by deploying “opaque” and “insidious” advertizing techniques. (George Monbiot, The Guardian)

Now the British are spooked by a second Referendum, which would actually be the third, on EU membership.

LINKS TO PETITIONS:
The People’s Vote
Final Say

You hear people say, “You can’t just keep on having votes until you get the result you want. It’s not democratic”.

That’s the very definition of democracy: you carry on voting in peaceful election after election throughout your life in the hope you’ll get the result you want before you die. It keeps us quiet. Our expectation of another chance to vote prevents civil war. Democracy, like State Religion, was adopted because it was convenient, not because it was natural or immutable.

If something is not working, if you see the State is sick, you call for a vote to change it. The British are notoriously bad at complaining. They get bad service and bad government as a result. The Poll Tax that sparked a people’s revolt was only one of the abominations against equality and liberty during the Tories’ eighteen-year reign at the end of the 20th century.

THE TRIUMPH OF POVERTY by Lucas Vorsterman. British Museum. Image: WGA

We’re already in the middle of a bloodless civil war, one with no end in sight, not now the over-privileged, rich, right-wing idealogues dreaming of tax havens and workers without rights have got their populist alliance.

Are you really content to just sit and watch while the world burns?

Sofa by Ekhi-Guinea

Or, like the majority of MPs, do you put your caste before your country, ideology before humanity, self-interest before national interest?

Or do you want to take action against what you know in your heart is wrong?

Excerpts from Anna Soubry’s speech in the House of Commons, advocating the benefits of frictionless trade and deploring the Prime Minister’s decision to accept the extreme right-wing Tory amendments to the customs bill:

“[Parliamentary Tory Brexiteers have said in private conversations] that the loss of hundreds of thousands of jobs will be worth it to regain our country’s sovereignty…

Nobody voted to be poorer.

Nobody voted leave on the basis that somebody with a gold-plated pension and inherited wealth would take their job away from them…

Members on the frontbench and across this place should be shaking their heads with shame – this is the stuff of complete madness…

And the only reason that the government has accepted these amendments is because it is frightened of somewhere in the region of 40 members of parliament – the hard, no deal Brexiteers, who should have been seen off a long time ago and should be seen off.

These are people who do not want a responsible Brexit, they want their version of Brexit – they don’t even represent the people who actually voted Leave. The consequences of this are grave…..”

She’s Conservative, blonde and was born in Lincolnshire. Listen to her low-pitched, emphatic voice, see the wagging finger of reproof, and you might think that She, not the legendary Ayesha of Rider Haggard’s late Victorian tales of misogynist imperialist adventure, but the Tories’ own sacred cow, the first great British champion of the European “single market without barriers – visible or invisible”* had been reborn:

ANNA SOUBRY SPEAKING IN THE HOUSE OF COMMONS

The world has turned upside down so many times, none of us know our arses from our elbows. Right-wing Brexiteer Edward Leigh MP, interrupting Anna Soubry’s speech to insult her, as is the arcane custom of our parliamentary representatives, unintentionally paid her the highest compliment:

“You’re no Margaret Thatcher”

That’s the best news in British politics for a generation.

*Margaret Thatcher, speaking at Lancaster House in 1988.

 

INFORMED CONSENT

“The public…need guarantees on NHS staffing, access to medicines and the safety of the NHS from any US-UK trade deal, before they can be satisfied that… Brexit will do no harm to our NHS and social care.”

Source: More United

These are the warnings shared by ten professional health organisations with all Members of Parliament about the impact of Brexit on the most unifying of our nation’s modern institutions, the one that heals more divides than football coming home, more than the monarchy, more than the Lottery, TV soap operas or Dad’s Army, the only one attending most of us from birth to death, the one that gives health to national identity:

• ending freedom of movement from the EU could deprive the NHS of essential staff
• any new customs checks or barriers for medicines and equipment could have very serious implications for care and push up costs, and
• any economic damage from Brexit would make it difficult to deliver an NHS funding boost

Nine MPs from six parties, including two GPs, a surgeon and two former Health Ministers, have united to ask the Prime Minister asking for urgent action to protect the NHS from Brexit:

“At its 70th birthday, the NHS faces – in Brexit – perhaps the greatest threat to its survival in its history.

I’m an NHS doctor who works in the A&E department. I voted Leave in the EU referendum, but now I’ve joined the campaign for a people’s vote on the final terms of the Brexit deal.

“The consent given by the public for Brexit was not informed consent. In medicine – and surely to any reasonable person – consent which is not informed is considered invalid, and this mandates a vote on the Brexit deal.”

Source: Charles Gallaher The Independent

REMAINER OR LEAVER, YOUR NATION’S HEALTH NEEDS YOU TO DEMAND A PEOPLE’S VOTE ON THE FINAL BREXIT DEAL

Save our NHS and save our nation from self-harming by signing
the petition for a People’s Vote

 

Option 4

The Government’s own Department for Exiting the EU has concluded that the best option for the United Kingdom’s economy and people’s jobs
is to Remain.

Brexit is still legally reversible.

Over 300,000 people have now signed
the Petition for A People’s Vote on the Deal

There should be an Option to Remain

Over one million people have signed the Independent’s Petition for a Final Say

SIGN AND SHARE

We have to keep fighting to save our country if we are to look younger generations in the eye, if we are meet our own eyes in the mirror, if we are going to afford an honest, informed, healthy, happy way of life ever again.

If you don’t want a Bad Brexit, if you don’t want Any Brexit, sign and share.
Brexit is not inevitable. It can be reversed legally.
Stop the lies.

Let’s use democracy
as it was meant to be.

 

The Misgovernment of Britain

“THE UNCERTAINTY, MUDDLE AND DRIFT [OF BREXIT SHOWS] THAT VICTORIAN THEORIES OF GOVERNMENT SIMPLY DON’T DESCRIBE ANY LONGER THE REALITY OF HOW THE UK IS MISGOVERNED”
Tim O’Connor

“I live and practise in the United States, a parliamentary democracy where a written Constitution is supreme. The UK, though, has a system of contingent Parliamentary supremacy (with the Crown in Parliament – the Executive – dominant), and no written constitution.

One may prefer one model over the other. I prefer that of my adopted homeland, as it happens. But one may argue for either, and the UK’s has, in fairness, generally muddled along pretty well on precedent and incremental adjustment.

Until now, that is. In the last week or so, you back home have seen the UK Supreme Court deciding, obiter dicta, that it knows better than legislators what voters want; and Parliament ruled not to be supreme, but bound by an ad hoc referendum in a past Parliament.

Moreover, Parliament has ceded control to the Executive in making laws – the so-called ‘Henry VIII’ powers, agreed without discussion – and decided not to give itself a say over the Executive determining the UK’s standing in the world, instead freeing the Executive to act unfettered.

Oh, and as you may not have noticed, witnesses summoned to give evidence to Parliamentary select committee enquiries only come by their own discretion, and, like Arron Banks, can seemingly walk out when they feel like it.

So, which system is it? Parliamentary supremacy? Judicial control? Executive control? One popular vote nearly two years ago that seemingly now binds all future parliaments?

I honestly do not know. I doubt if anyone can say with true certainty. (Scots constitutional lawyers are meanwhile brawling, as if about the last bottle of full-sugar Irn-Bru, over a Sewel convention that nobody is even sure is broken.)

So far as I can tell, UK constitutional structures at the moment aren’t just mixed, they’re scrambled. Brexit is a universal solvent, and all the previous structures are crumbling and mingling within the struggle over it. And that cannot be a sustainable state of affairs.

Whatever ultimately happens with Brexit, the UK is going to have to clarify constitutional structures in a way it hasn’t done since the Irish Home Rule crisis. The uncertainty, muddle and drift, where nobody is truly sure who has what powers, under what limits, cannot continue.

The thing is, I’m uncertain, on the evidence of the mess that’s been allowed to develop today, that there is the requisite appetite or expertise to carry out the difficult constitutional exercise of picking one system, clarifying it and sticking with it. I am sure, though, that Victorian theories of government simply don’t describe any longer the reality of how the UK is misgoverned.”

Tim O’Connor, Attorney at Law

Lorenzetti The Effects of Bad Government 1337 -39, Sala della Pace (Hall of Peace) Siena.
Image: WGA

What, in our house?

More victims of the British government’s “hostile environment” for immigrants:

The couple had been living and working in the UK for more than a decade, but ran into difficulties when they applied to renew their visas. Both were ordered to report regularly to Eaton House, a Home Office centre in Hounslow. When they attended on 7 March, they were told they were to be forcibly removed from the UK that day and put on a plane to South Africa.

“An immigration official at the airport accused Nancy of faking her collapse to avoid being put on a plane,” her husband said. “He told Nancy that he would handcuff her hands and feet and make her walk to the plane like a penguin, and that he would put her onto the plane even if he had to carry her.”

Officials then decided to put the couple into detention instead.

“We were detained separately, but after we were released Nancy told me that a nurse at the detention centre told her she was too ill to be detained, but the nurse was overruled by a superior and she was held overnight,” said Fusi Motsamai.

The next morning both of them were released, but she collapsed and died of a pulmonary embolism five days later. The Guardian

Rule, Britannia! Britannia, rule the waves!
Britons never, never, never shall be slaves

Something has gone very wrong in our country, and like a terminally ill person in denial of their mortality, about half the British public aren’t admitting it. Such things don’t happen in Britain, they believe. It’s only other nations that commit atrocities, build concentration camps, persecute innocent people. “It wouldn’t happen here”. It is happening here.

“What, in our house?” enquired Lady Macbeth, on hearing of the murder of King Duncan, which she had just instigated.

Photograph by Window & Grove of Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth, based on the renowned 1888 production in which the great actress, and artist’s muse, starred with her partner, Henry Irving. Image: Wikipedia.

Britain’s hostile environment exists for all people of foreign birth who have considered this country their home, and paid their taxes, very often married and had children here. The people being threatened with deportation, held in detention, insulted by officials and deprived of urgent medical attention include Commonwealth citizens and EU Nationals, none of whom were told at the time they settled here that their right to remain was temporary.

Brexit means Brexit, and history will call it toxic.

Rule, Britannia! Britannia, rule the waves!
Britons never, never, never shall be slaves

The nations not so blest as thee
Must, in their turn, to tyrants fall,
While thou shalt flourish great and free:
The dread and envy of them all.

We have fallen to tyrants, because enough people keep electing them; we aren’t going to flourish, if we submit to Brexit; we’re not the dread and envy of anyone; we are despised and pitied.

Ambrogio Lorenzetti An Allegory of Bad Government Fresco 1338 -40. Palazzo Pubblico, Siena. Image: WGA
The demonically horned female personification of Tyranny sits in the centre, surrounded by yes-men.

Truth drips slowly, like blood through a transfusion filter.

Feed the Children – in modern Britain NOW

“Children are going hungry; yet the Tories are forcing through cuts to remove free school meals for children where the family income is more than £160 a week. When our society has already sunk this low, how can we possibly contemplate a Brexit that would leave the nation 8% poorer?” Christopher Oxford

The New Cosette © 2016 MHPhotography

“My children have grey skin, poor teeth, poor hair;
they are thinner.”

“Children are filling their pockets with food. In some establishments that would be called stealing.

 

We call it SURVIVAL.”

BBC News: CHILD POVERTY

 

 

Betrayal of the People

The BBC’s political independence from the British Government, theoretically enshrined in its Charter, is more tenuous than ever.

NHS Protest March relegated to a footnote by BBC

Global Britain, great and free

The nations, not so blest as thee,

Must in their turn, to tyrants fall,

While thou shalt flourish great and free,

The dread and envy of them all.

“Rule, Britannia! rule the waves:

“Britons never will be slaves.”

From ‘Rule Britannia!’ by James Thomson, 1740.

“Dread and envy” of other nations? Under Brexit? The first, maybe; the second, not so much….

P.S. China’s largest trading partner is…the EU