Weekender: Back to Where It All Began

So it's decided. Another national lockdown (see postscript). Except it isn't, yet; the details are pending. It's likely going to be softer than the previously, relatively soft (compared to other countries) approach. I imagine schools will remain open because parents are workers. It's gone six thirty in the evening the PM is late in the PM for the press conference everyone needs to hear. It's like his very DNA is shit.

The bottom line is that they have again catastrophically dithered. Just like in March when it's very likely they could have saved lives had they followed the science. At this point the scientific advisers - whatever you may think of their politics - have been reduced to jesters in the Corona Court of the Dimwit King. There for the amusement of Dominic Cummings and his media mates. Which epidemiologist said the bad words this week? Oh wow, let's instead look to Doctor Fringe from Loonpants university with his 'unique' take that neatly confirms all our biases. 

Cue screaming from the right wing media. Howling from Hitchens, his acolytes, and the Curtain Twitchers listening to Talk(shit) Radio/Gammon FM. None of whom cite credible evidence. Again it's just a desperate plea to the notion capital will save us. This just in: it won't. It can't. Perhaps there is something to the 5g conspiracy theory because I've never heard so much bullshit broadcast through a telephone in all my life.

How long will this lockdown last? I imagine much of November. They are certainly going to operate under the assumption that we can be open for business at Christmas. See you then for round three, when we do all of this again. How much more of this can people tolerate? An already divided society has become the chess board for the stupidest people in the country. Playing our lives like pawns while shovelling money into private pockets like they were furiously trying to speed up a steam train.

I hope to god there isn't another run on the shops. Surely, you'd hope, people will have learnt their lesson the last time. But no one's that naive, not even yours truly. I've just started going again to the Big Boy Tesco, in town. Riding the bus! Like a grown up! I guess that's not going to be possible, leaving me at the mercy of Tesco. I remember visiting them before, at the start of the lockdown, it stank of disinfectant and the shelves were half empty such that it made the lighting within harsher. 

I guess there's no point worrying about what you can't control. If only that's how anxiety actually worked.

What this crisis has shown is that you can't hide the truth in a virus. This is a pandemic, it doesn't play by the rules of capitalism and state. You can't get away with venal business as usual; even if the public are blind (willingly or through duplicity) the virus isn't. Like the Terminator it can't be reasoned with and it will absolutely not stop until you need assistance to breathe (social distance Sarah!). The point being: Boris can't hide his laziness, irresponsibility, and ruling class attitudes. He is exposed. Now he must go.

Problem is, who does that leave? Keir fucking Starmer? Oh dear!

PS: Good job I didn't upload this earlier. It turns out, as I type, Johnson the Wonderclown is to grace us with a press conference outlining a lockdown for a month over November. Apparently schools and probably Wetherspoons will be exempt. You can bet this will go down like a lead balloon. 

Honestly he's acting like a highly strung rockstar, delaying the press conference endlessly. Does he think he's Axl Rose ffs? People just want to know what's going one. No doubt he will use this to blame people for not doing the right thing and how it's all our fault, despite him deliberately ignoring the scientists for six months. Still what can be gained raking over old coals - we shouldn't forget though, and certainly not forgive, much as the Tories would like us to do. I don't think this will end well. 

In fact I don't think it will ever end; what happens in December when he, inevitably, flings the doors wide open again and repeats the same mistakes he made in the Summer? This is now the second time he's left it too late, now, as then, we're all stuck paying the bill. Bullingdon all over again; smashing up the place and leaving everyone else to clear up his mess. Eton fucking mess. That's what these places breed. End this.

PPS: I'm not waiting for this idiot to grace us with a press conference, I'm uploading.

Starving To Live 4: Skeletons In The Closet

 According to the Guardian half a million people in the last week had Covid. I don't see how lockdown is avoidable at this point, in the twilight of this crappy year. It also turns out that, despite his best efforts to show us how great a leader he might be, Rish Sunak's insipid 'Eat Out to Help Out' scheme (only a banker could be so uninspired) has actually made things worse. I find that hilarious in a dark way. Dark are the ways we have left to us unfortunately. We're doing worse than the predictions suggested.

I say we, I mean this government. They seem intent on just adding more tiers, rather than initiate a full lockdown. Perhaps because they know doing so would end them. Maybe that's a bit premature, certainly the push back would be tremendous. Sadly in practice I just don't see it making much difference, the good will is spent. The blood is spent. People are tired and exhausted. We do not have leadership, just corruption. Endless, boring, tedious, tiring, corruption. It never ends.

Fortunately Boris, aided by his dullard girlfriend, have publicly praised the NHS. That's the same they've been trying to sell off for the last ten years. I don't care they saved his worthless stupid life. He doesn't get to say this. These are empty words from a liar and a crook, in Minecraft!

And real fucking life!

(Or just minecraft :D)

Wither Jeremy Corbyn? What a year for it all to end. He's been an MP for three decades and possibly more. Yet, in the gutter of civilisation, under the sentinel gaze of the cruellest Tory government he's known, he's thrown to the wolves. By his own party. 

They've not expelled him yet. Perhaps this is worse. A bit like the legend of the Samurai handed a wooden sword and denied the right of ritual suicide. Denied that honour. He won't leave though; they'll have to throw him out. Not that they care about his constituents of course. His crime was, it seems, agreeing with the outcome of the report. Don't speak your mind, that's the real crime in a political party. You can threaten to stab your leader in the front. You can call him all the names under the sun. But you can't rock the boat. Isn't that sad.

Of course the Tories are laughing like giddy hyenas over this. Further removing from them the spotlight on their own indiscretions. I don't say this to justify Labour's failings, but if you're going to take the issue of racism in politics seriously - and you should - then ought you not investigate all political parties? Wouldn't you welcome your own party being investigated? After all, as the authoritarians say: if you've nothing to hide...

That Tory closet is full of skeletons we know that. Just look at dopey thug Ben Bradley's twitter feed this last week or two. His response to the proposition that we should ensure kids don't starve is to double down on racist stereotypes by invoking cultural marxism. A spectre invented to smear Jews, calling them a rotten influence in society. There are no reds under the bed, Ben, just your bigotry, and that's going in the closet as well.

Interlude: How To Destroy Good People

So Jeremy Corbyn got suspended from the party. The spectacle of his demise is reminscent of the medieval barbarism from the likes of Game of Thrones. Bloody vengeance as spectacle. A soap opera of personal destruction. The excoriation of a fundamentally decent mild mannered guy. Someone who helps his community. It's an ungainly sickening spectacle. It happened under Her Majesty's Opposition to the silent pixelated cheers of the assembled right wing media no doubt.

I haven't the energy to get into the specifics of why. Apparently it's because his comments in response to the EHRC report were deemed to reduce or trivialise the problem of antisemitism. I don't really think that's proven. Maybe he should have kept his trap shut, probably would have achieved little more than a stay of execution. We know that the biggest factor throughout all of this is the desire to get rid of him. No one did anything about the few, unacceptable, cases of antisemitism (always unacceptable) in the party before his leadership and the problem won't disappear afterwards. This is because these views have a political dimension that isn't being addressed. It certainly won't be under Starmer.

Ultimately he's not long for this world, politically speaking. Corbyn, that is. They want shot of him. No questions. What that means is a further rightward shift in the British body politic. While many radicals will shed no tears of the death of the Labour party, this is really nothing to cheer on. I want this sytem and the rotten parties within, all of it, gone. This whole machine serves only Moloch, it certainly doesn't serve the working class. But if Labour lurches to the right, as seems to be the current trajectory, all that does is embolden the right, including the media, whose headlines this morning are predictably horrendous.

This situation doesn't benefit the working class. It just weakens the left. That may not mean much given how weak the Labour party is, but anything that reduces the strength of the left in the current climate, under a crazy yet ascendant Tory government (I dread to think what the poll results are today). That just means there's no opposition. Unfortunately, that is the course Starmer has chosen to chart. 

I'm not saying people should remain in the party. Labour is a dead duck, had been for years. This is just one more, if oversized, nail in the coffin. It's a scalp taken by Starmer for his capitalist masters. That is all the Labour party is now, a husk willing to appease the likes of Murdoch and the British capitalist class - who themselves don't want Brexit. That is one of Labour's most egregious mistakes: refusing to understand or accept why people voted Brexit. Even though us leaving under the Tories, which is what the vote really meant, it is arrogant and dismissive to just call people who believed the lies they were fed by a wealthy elite, and who wanted, justifiably, to stick it to the ruling class. The problem is that Labour failed to channel that anger, in fact it had fed it during it's time in office under Blair. 

It could have been different, but the vote last December was, in hindsight, inevitable. Unfortunately Corbyn allowed that to happen. He wasn't, ironically, ruthless enough. He should have removed the Blairites; the troublemakers and the 'front' stabbers, to paraphrase Jess Phillips. Can you imagine the response if he'd said, in respect of, for example, Lucianna Berger, he'd stab her in the front (in the context of betrayal, to be clear)? My god!

But that's the reality. All of this existential crisis was aired in the bloodsports arena of a hostile media, surrounded by bad faith actors who wanted him gone. Many of whom included his own party members!

Yesterday was inevitable, but it won't be the end. There will likely be more scalps, but can you imagine what message it will send to the BAME community if they suspend or even expel Diane Abbot? How many others will follow? Inevitably Labour is intent on becoming a spiritless husk; a drab appeasing entity only fit to serve the interests of the ruling class. I fully support leaving, but there must be an alternative, not a vacuum that will be filled, with equal inevitability, by the far right. The working class must now organise as never before, it's eyes have been increasingly opened during this period. Many must surely now see the truth of capitalism and its crisis prone nature and how its adherents care naughty for them. Labour aren't going to change, reform is undesirable and impossible, 

Fight now. Starmer is no friend of ours. He just appears competent in the face of such a chaotic dishevelled array of Tory corruption and blunder. But that's a smokescreen; a mirage obscuring the truth. He is a weak insipid leader with no vision and certainly no thirst for change and socialism. 

Starving To Live 3: O Corona All Ye Faithful!

 Deaths have now crested 300 a day. We're on course for half a million infections a month the way things have been this last month or so. Yet where is the action? Bristol has been put into Tier 1 and a half, or "1+". What on earth does this even mean? Why are our politicians so incapable of addressing this? Three tiers were bad enough, clearly a system that wasn't working, so now we have half tiers? Apparently it means the city gets some money for local tracing and can organise Covid Marshals. Good luck with that, you can imagine how popular they are going to be! Not!

We are at the end of October (no need to check). Two months until Christmas. I have to believe it will be the death knell of this government if they allow this to continue over the Christmas period. We can't have O Corona All Ye Faithful; mince pies while grandma dies. Imagine the public mood when hundreds are dying during the Queen's speech! Is the levity appropriate? We will never have seen the like quite possible since the war. This is dark and uncharted territory, dead in winter's grasp. Beat the reaper!

But can the government institute a lockdown over Christmas? Clearly that's preferable and, clearly also, it now seems inevitable. The longer the leave it the more likely that will take place over Christmas. They've got November, basically. They've left themselves no breathing room at all. Yet another bloody bookmark in the biography of misery that is 2020. All written with our blood and their pen.

A Christmas lockdown will of course be met with the sternest resistance. Shops will be crying out for a retail break; just the sort that happens over Christmas. They will want rampant consumerism, and I've no doubt there's enough people willing to oblige. More than willing! If they can't, this country could explode - they will have a very difficult time enforcing people staying away from traditional family get together. Turkeys may well be the only ones getting a breather this year!

This is a godawful mess, and it's one entirely of the government's making. We must never let that be forgotten, certainly not in the next few years when the Covid free Waterstones shelves will be littered with books written by money grubbers and politicians, seeking to salve their conciseness, following this deadly debcale. For now all we have is all we have.

Starving To Live 2: Poverty Isn't A Choice

So Marcus Rashford is shaming the government by calling out their intransigence in the wake of pandemic inspired child poverty. Their response, voiced by Clown Bojo, is to say what a terrific job he's doing...of calling them out! 

Meanwhile, in response, they do nothing. 

Is this gaslighting? Yes, it is.

Today I went into town, again, this is starting to become a dangerous habit! I ended up spending a tenner more on food than I would have liked. Now, this is a small thing (for me) but it is pertinent. I can afford this so I'm not complaining. However those in the cohort affected by the Tories' selfishness don't have that flexibility and this is beyond Tory understanding. This issue is more complex precisely because of that. Poor people constantly have to micromanage what little they have with no margin of error. I struggled, so to speak, because I wanted to buy the cheap beef I normally buy for the week. However it was out of stock - probably because other, perhaps poorer, people also want to be thrifty. They can't be blamed for that. Had that been me, after spending £7 to travel to the shop, I could well have been screwed. Fortunately I can afford a less cheap alternative. 

It's an inconvenience for me. For someone that needs things like free school meal vouchers, that could have been disastrous. That money spent to travel is committed. They don't get a refund with which to try again in the food lottery that only the poor are forced to endure. The bus service aren't going to show any sympathy if the shelves are empty. You go without and get what you can and hope next week is different. Maybe you can find a better time to shop, maybe you can't, if you've got kids. You have no way of knowing what's in stock. Shopping online might well be a better choice but sadly even that has a minimum cost that makes it difficult for people in poverty.

That's what poverty is like. It is exhausting, tiring; a constant calculation and measurement of means and methods. There is no respite. Maybe you'll get lucky in the shops one week, but how much can you carry? You have no flexibility to plan in advance and you're screwed if you don't. Do poor people have vast freezer space to store all the stuff they might be able to carry (along with pushing pushchairs and dragging stroppy kids around the shops). 

It's become far too easy for the great and the good, especially half brained poverty pimps or the virtuous thrift merchants beloved of TV (how to cook for less, how to clean your house with elbow grease, how to graduate from the school of hard knocks). It is an endless trial forced on people in liue of simply recognising the nature of life in the working class and the iniquities of capitalism. No one is at fault for being poor. They have no choice in the economic whirlwinds that surround them. But some people think it's OK to berate and lecture, presumably to assuage their own shortcomings. Feelings that would disappear if they acknowledged the simple reality: we are the working class, we have to sell our selves to live, that is wrong. People living in poverty work a damn sight harder than any of these self aggrandising twitter moralising narcissists. Remember that.

And any one of us could end up in poverty; after all who would have thought, this time last year, where we would end up in 2020?

Starving To Live 1: The Same Old Poor Bashing

Are my days now to be filled with me tweeting angrily to idiots that think starving kids is acceptable, or who think baked beans on toast is a good meal? Never mind for a growing child hungry in school? It seems in recent times the spectre of the deserving/undeserving poor has been dug up again.

In fact, Twitter has turned into a mass middle class cookbook. The ruling class, and it's hapless adherents, are telling people they don't need more (they do), reducing everything to a simple matter of "budget better". The press wheels out, from time to time, unwitting stooges: working class 'heroes' who having found some means to be thrifty reinforces this narrative. Look! You don't need base money, that's not for you anyway; here's Jane the Mum from Luton and her shopping list from Lidldialdildl. She can afford to feed her kids on a pittance. SO CAN YOU!

Except her (excuse the gender assumptions) shopping list isn't that wholesome. It's cheap quality cardboard rubbish. Do you really think the quality of stuff from those places is adequate?

The popular refrain then is "oh you think we should be feeding the poor Roast Faberge eggs then". One extreme to the other. Not at all, that is just more class based nonsense, this time in reverse (the assumption that the ruling class eat ridiculous food). I simply want everyone to have access to their natural birthright as citizens of this good earth: the food that grows from it, produced ethically, free from as much bullshit as possible. Not much to ask surely.

That's not to denigrate these working class heroes like Jane (again forgive the gender assumption). They are doing what they've been raised to do: be thrifty. That's the lot of the poor. Spend wisely, it's a virtue. Don't get ideas above your station. These people are then courted by the right wing media who use them against the rest of the working class. It's sad, but again what is needed in the recipe book is mother's own class consciousness!

It's so sad that this narrative has to return, again and again. It's a class war zombie. It returns in periods of crisis to keep the poor down. Anything to dissuade from what might be construed as revolutionary thinking. Unfortunately (for the ruling class at least) I don't think that's going to be enough this time. The furore around the school meal crisis has found purchase. Something is, perhaps, shifting. The government will almost certainly reverse its decision - as much about playing politics and managing its image than anything else. I feel this is inevitable, as inevitable as there will be a second lockdown, something that will almost certainly undo any good will they think they might generate from such a climb down.

Weekender Post +1 Hour of Covid

The clocks go back. To the 1980's, or the 1880's, or even the 1918's; who can tell? We've got the unemployment of the first, the social attitudes of the second, and the virus of the last. What a time to be alive, barely.

There's talk, from the beleaguered Dr Fauci, that a vaccine may be ready by December. But the sting in the tail is in how long it will take to distribute. The more infectious the disease and the more people infected, the greater the requirement to provide herd immunity.

We have poisoned ourselves.

Every day now, across the world it seems, the virus is breaking new, grim, records. It is surging. It is clear: capitalism has no answer to this crisis. We must change course else our leaders will kill us. Every day, in Britain, reinforces the notion that we are in for a carnage laden Christmas. I take no pleasure in saying that but by all accounts deaths could be in the several hundreds/day by December. Can you imagine what Christmas will be like if we get that bad - or worse? There is no way, surely even for this horrific government, to do nothing. Yet each day they leave it, we get one day closer to that time. 

I fear they are playing with fire. This isn't something Johnson can just bury his head in the sane about. He can't just pick up and have a nice holiday. I don't even think resignation would be possible - at least for the sake of his awful party. What does even his emince grise think? Does Dominic Cummings even care? It's hard to imagine!

And yet...

People are out in the streets. They are shopping. They are drinking in pubs, eating in restaurants. I saw it last night. Gosh these are strange times; I went for a walk down a regular route only this time in the evening for the first time in seven months. Such a simple thing, yet made strange. Past the pubs, seeing people inside, orderly yet convivial, past the newly opened restaurant I was sure was doomed to failure, again busy. 

It makes me oddly sad to see that restaurant. I can't help thinking they will go bust by the end of the year. I don't want that to happen and I don't bear them ill will; I don't even know them. But to open a restaurant at this time? I guess they were committed even before this started. I hope I'm wrong. 

I hope I'm wrong about a lot of things. We are in it now, the summer has ended. The clocks have reverted to where we are at the start of this crisis, much as society has. All that was achieved has been curelly wasted, reset thanks to the governmental obsession with profit. It is almost as if there was never a summer. Only, now, a bleak winter.

Oh well, happy days!