Saturday 14 December 2019

Mordor, We Vote

I think it's a pretty clever title...for a horrific outcome.

I had tried to anticipate the worst. Hope for the best, gird your loins for the worst. But no mental simulation can substitute for the nightmare of the reality.

It's now bargain basement hard brexit hard right Britain. Whatever greatness we have enjoyed has evaporated in a thatch-haired wiff waff of smoke. We are alone in a cage; gilded no longer it is a rusty prison. Cold and damp under the cosh of a jailer that profits from our internment. Thirty years of my forty six have I lived under these bastards; now in their true form. We see the Tory heart at last. Exposed and evil.

Where did it all go wrong?

The wailing centrists are clamouring for the flayed skin of a fundamentally decent man, ravaged by a highly partisan media. They'll get it too, the only problem is they want it now.

I don't think he was leadership material for the simple reason that he is not built, being a fundamentally decent man, for the type of scrutiny he faced. No charity was afforded and certinly no benefit of the doubt. If he did not perform to their script he was cast down - and cast down he was: architect of antisemitism and master of the gulags.

Yet Labour's policies are popular. They aren't the issue. Certainly the messaging could have been clearer, but that points back to the media as they are the medium controlling the means of transmitting that information. Instead we have a partisan media facilitating a campaign of lies unwilling to scrutinise the Tories.

Brexit is the factor. Labour voters turned away from their own interests because they felt Labour had betrayed their one shot at true democracy. Their voice was being extinguished and so a message had to be sent. "If you won't deliver, then we'll vote for those that will."

The tragedy is that this, too, is a lie. The Tories will not deliver it. A hard brexit is now a certainty, but that will be a slowly unfolding calamity. The 'deal' isn't, it's the beginning. The genesis of a long painful process that the Tories lied about. Trade deals take years, perhaps even decades. We haven't even begun despite thre years of lies and falsehoods perpetrated on a working class that have been divided and let down by the political class (including Labour) - and face being betrayed again as the coming period will truly reveal the Nasty Party in all its dark glory.

This is a terrible result. We have the spectre of serious division in our communities. Racists and bigots have won the vote. In Hastings the newly minted Tory was exposed during a hustings advocating the exploitation of working people with learning disabilities. Disgusting. Another was elected despite also being exposed for his pig ignorance on both payday loans and poverty. Just borrow money from a loan shark! These are those that trade on economic responsibility. This is nothing of the kind; in fact it is the financial crisis in a cold microcosm. Get yourself into crippling debt. Is this deliberate, one wonders? Is this the form Universal Credit will mutate into in the coming period: a serious of loans that the poor canot possibly repay. Charity no more.

Whatever is coming, you can be sure it will be bad. I fear the working class will be turned against each other as they have been for the past decade. Blame foreigners, blame students, blame the old, blame the young, blame the bloke you think is unemployed but owns an xbox probably, the woman with the disability scooter (the lazy cow!). On it goes. That is a symptom of fascism; a manifestation of late stage capitalism. A manipulated working class lacking in vital class consciousness, that we must provide, turning inward. Jingoism 'national pride' in lieu of an understanding of their own exploitation. The tragedy is that in trying to impart that knowledge (and I claim no expertise here) one will be cast down as either a lefty snowflake socialist or an arrogant elitist.

Unfortunately Corbyn seems to have been hit with both by those who have, sadly, smashed themselves in the face of their own class interests with the most expensive hammer they could find (no doubt given at a huge APR by a friendly Tory loan shark).

Good luck Britain!

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