You Ought To Be Ashamed!

Here's a fun if brief little anecdote. Today as I want a-walking I noticed some people knocking on doors. Turns out they were the local Conservative party. I think the MP, John "useless" Penrose, was with them. You'd think, as the anti-corruption champion (if not formerly), he'd be busy with other people. Of course not! That's just a title that means nothing.

So I confronted one of his underlings (he was busy on another doorstep at the time). 

"You with the Tory party? You ought to be ashamed of yourselves."

And so it went. Understandably this fellow was defensive, but that's as charitable as it goes. If you're going to be out canvassing on the tail end (hopefully) of a pandemic, the scale of which is on you, then you can damn well take some heat. Anyway it wasn't like I was right up in his grill throwing fists. This was a socially distanced dressing down.

He had nothing. 128 thousand dead. Brexit leaving the economy on its arse. Corruption and lies on top of ten years of austerity, and so on. No answer. He asked me who I voted for. I could have told him that I'm a proud socialist but there's no way he could have coped with that. I'm pretty sure he'd have invoked the 'spectre of Stalin', shook his head, and walked away. I told him his lot were in government, I wasn't going to let him distract or deflect. 

He tried appealing to the vaccine rollout. A poor argument given that the vaccine rollout is necessary because of the scale of the disaster they have caused. Like when confused American Christians energy from the rubble of their Tornado-stricken home and thank god they didn't die in the storm he, presumably, caused or allowed (as per their beliefs). Obviously a vaccine is necessary per se and obviously not all deaths are attributable (and people are still dying of covid) to the Tories, but the majority are as is the scale of it. We have one of the worst outcomes globally. So when you ask me about the vaccine...

I probably should have said that, but instead I said it was down to the NHS. That gnarly old socialist monolith. They have rolled this out. Everything the government has done, including retaining the services of Mrs Penrose, directly has been a failure (i'm talking about the private sector it has thrown money at). The government didn't create the vaccine either. All of the success, as far as it has been sso, that has come from vaccination has been in spite of this government. They don't take credit for it just because they are in charge. Matt Hancock knows no more about creating and distributing vaccines than I or Jeremy Corbyn do. But he is an expert in arrogance and lies.

Left with nothing my desperate interlocutor could only splutter.

"If we're so bad why do people keep voting for us then?"

This is a question that is going to require the kind of analysis that can't really come in a street exchange. Years of conditioning, essentially. People being told and taught by an all encompassing economic system, social model, and the culture that inculcates that there is no alternative. That's why I didn't engage with him on socialism. You can't unpack that in this context. People need to survive, they need an income because that's the system we're in, so invariably they accept its conditions while swallowing lies about any alternative. Despite everything collapsing all around them. Furthermore all of that is reinforced constantly by a willing media in whose interests the Tories serve: Robert Jenrick was quite happy to launder Richard 'dirty' Desmond's tax burden. Desmond is a Tory donor who owns the Express. 

I told the Tory apologist that the media supports what they do. He then retorted some nonsense about the BBC. Views on the BBC are simplistic and polarised; left wingers believe they are right wing and vice versa. However the former is more true when it comes to that aspect most pertinent. The political wing of the BBC. Its journalists are too close to government, they have to be, meanwhile presenters like Andrew Neil are/were right wing attack dogs. Political panels are subtly biased and left wing/alternative positions are rarely given air time. After all how many times was Farage given air time. Right wing lies are rarely challenged. 

It's not quite that simple though, the BBC is more than just politics which is why right wingers believe it's liberal lefty. This is because of the long standing cliche that the arts is the abode of the left wing. Of 'cultural Marxists' (an antisemitic trope he fortunately didn't bring up). Despite that right wingers, like Portillo or the awful Melanie Phillips, are happy to appear in its output.

At this point the exchange had run its course. His response to my claim that the BBC isn't left wing, which I didn't put forward with enough nuance anyway, was to call my mental health into question. 

"Keep taking the medication" he said walking off.

Says it all really. Tories happy to invoke bigotry, even soft bigotry, to avoid taking responsibility. Good job he didn't say anything about cultural Marxism.