Cold Cuts

You still here? I thought I'd cleared out these cobwebs months ago. After all the terrifying viral nightmare is over, right? Everything's tickety boo and we're back to just moaning at minor Tory malfeasance, right?

Right?

If only.

Who would have thought, two years ago during Pandemic Christmas, that we'd be facing crippling fuel and food prices while freezing to death in an early cold snap. Yet here we are, proving once again that, under the Tories, things can get much worse. 

Three Prime Minsiters later and Britain is collapsing. No matter the brand of lipstick on this pig, that's the truth. Fortunately, while you sit in abject misery afraid to do the most normal everyday thing and turn the heating on, there is some royal turbulence to distract. Bread and circuses to remind you that you can't afford bread, and that the circus is just a Tory farrago of incompetence and malfeasance. This isn't a government anymore, it's a racket.

They have refused everything they could do to help people. Now, when the weather is at it's worst (for now), people are struggling. I am certainly people, and I am certainly struggling. As with the heatwave, I find I just can't cope with these extremes of weather. It's not even as if we've never had arctic spells before. As a kid this would have been magical: somewhere between the Box of Delights and the planet Hoth. A world of rural adventure as a child, when you are immortal. Skidding around on frozen ice. Now I can't even sit indoors without feeling the cold. It gets into your bones and festers. You can't root it out. There is no scalpel or shovel into the soul.

People should be rioting over this. In fact they should be rioting over the fact the government has intervened to ensure the RMT maintains their dispute by inserting a demand neither side involved wanted. They know that driverless trains are a redline, and so drove a wedge. But nothing will be done because our society is so addled by a partisan hack media. Apathy rains and so we all sit in the damned cold. In short: people should be rioting. 

Fortunately the unions are stepping up. Hopefully actions, which, in the coming week, are almost daily, will coalesce into something that can take a life of its own. A general strike. We cannot afford to let the media, and their tory masters, divide us. This is an obvious tactic, relying on two ideas: that there is a limited pool of resources (ie wages) and so if the Unions get their way, everyone else loses out. Secondly increases in wages cause inflation. This is false and is obvious given that the rampant inflation we are currently experiencing has nothing to do with wages because no one has seen their wage increase (despite many successful direct actions).

To the first point: again it's rubbish. We are one of the richest economies on earth. Corporations, energy companies especially, have made out like bandits these last few years. The resources are there. More importantly they are generated, not by a vanguard of entrepreneurs blazing trails, but by the workers themselves. Those currently getting screwed over and smeared. Don't fall for these lies.

Yet despite the heat of industrial action, this is a cold winter. Who knows how long this cold spell will last. All I know is we can't go on like this. I will have the heating on. I'll be damned if I'm going to be scared into submission by Tory malfeasance. I would encourage others to do likewise, if they can, they can't cut all of us off. Never mind the don't pay campaigns that petered out, the same consequence might well happen just by virtue of cold circumstance.