The curtain just went up on the final act of Britain as a great nation. It’s been Shakespearean, operatic, occasionally musical but it’s now descended into a farce far from funny. A farce that makes you cringe and laugh with discomfort and confusion at why the bit players keep hitting themselves in the face and stepping on rakes a la Sideshow Bob.
How do we even begin to unpack what happened in the early hours of this morning? It’s not been a proud decade for British politics; it’s hard to imagine now that it wasn’t all that long ago that we were furious at an MP for buying a ‘duck house’ on his expenses. And yet here we are now waking up to another 5 years of Conservative fuck-wittery with Boris Johnson at the helm. I was going to say ‘racist’ Boris Johnson or ‘homophobic’ Boris Johnson, but then I realised the list off potential negative prefaces was too long.
And they’re not the same Conservatives from 10 years ago either. The smarmy, polished smugness of the Cameron era is long gone, and with it the time when the creepy, darker personality of the party was hidden deeper in the back benches and sub-committees. This is an Conservative party of Priti Patel, the sort of person who would try to deport herself, Dominic Raab, a human throbbing vein resulting from years of excruciating anger management, Rees-Mogg, who might actually be Scrooge, and Mark Francois, the human embodiment of short-man syndrome.
These are people who are openly full of disdain for the people they represent. They have been proven to lie time and time and time again. They smirk in that way people do when they know they can tell falsehood after falsehood to accumulate more power and influence until they’re eventually disgraced and fall back into a 6 or 7 figure board role at a pharma or finance company.
But what of this shitshow of an election? How is it that Johnson could be disgraced so many times and still be viable? How can anybody vote for a man who has been proven to be racist, misogynist, homophobic and Islamophobic? A man who lied when he was asked about lying? Who looks at him and says: “oh yes, that’s who I want to lead my country”?
A full 88% of the adverts the Conservatives ran this election were found to be misleading. They even ran some weird, subversive sneak campaign on polling day with illegal posters slandering Jeremy Corbyn. Is there any way they could be more shameless?
Meanwhile Labour continued to present us with a leader who can’t even command the support of his parliamentary party, let alone have mass appeal. They spouted ultra-left wing policies seemingly with no interest in actually providing realistic opposition. Jeremy Corbyn actually performed better than I even thought he would and yet he still looked bored by his own bollocks. They completely failed to capitalise on an election that the Conservatives have spent ten years trying to hand them. They couldn’t organise making a pot of tea. They’d need a conference to ensure the workers got to vote on the type of tea and the temperature of the water. Then they’d need a tea break, and they would thus descend into an infinitely deep cycle of tea breaks until the heat-death of the universe.
And what of the Lib Dems? Exactly. What of them. Why, why did they think that a promise of undemocratically revoking article 50 would win voters? Why construct a cult of personality around a damp sponge? How the fuck was this ever suppose to battle an election?
The entire thing has been a gigantic and quite frankly impressive confidence trick pulled on the British populace. The Conservatives have persuaded the poorest in the country, those that have been at the very shittiest end of the Conservative austerity-stick, that they are the people who will make things better. These ones are the good Conservatives, not like the ones that de-funded their schools, their healthcare and their justice system, that took their public transport away and slashed social care, no these are the good ones, who’ll join you down the pub for a pint.
It’s genius, in its scope, it’s depth of cynical, destructive evil. A minority of those with the least to lose have the run of the place now. They’ve got free reign now to asset-strip what’s left of this sorry state.
This is exactly the same reason why I am so cynical about humanity’s ability to save itself from Climate Change. What this election has shown is that people do not want to act on facts and figures, they don’t want reality, it’s too harsh. They want warm and fuzzy from a bloated, drunken, posh man, lying to them that “it’ll all be okay”. They are willing to have their lives torn asunder, to make themselves poorer, to ignore the plight of those eating from food banks, sleeping in their cars or in tents under a bridge, in aid of billionaires making a bit more money. Perhaps people want the glimmer of hope that if they became a billionaire they too wouldn’t have to pay tax? Perhaps it’s worth it for that minute chance?
It’s hard not to think that ‘Great’ Britain is a bit fucked now. What’s really left for those who aren’t wealthy? It’s not like we’ve got a great climate or any natural resources!
I, like so many others, accept now that Brexit is a done deal, as is another 5 year term of horrendously damaging policy, and to be quite honest I’m done! Screw this noise, I’m out. If anybody in Europe fancies employing a well-educated engineer, my resume is at the ready!
What Just Happened? 