Such a Thin Veneer...(of civilisation?)

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Oh dear, Bozza's at it again: opening his mouth and letting his tongue flap in the breeze to ill effect. This PM's stream of consciousness rambles mostly make little or no grammatical or semantic sense, usually comprising random snatches of sentences, odd noises and grunts. But occasionally we get Freudian slippage, revealing exactly what is on the Bear of Little Brain's mind at the time and revealing his true, inner motivations.

His latest gaffe - as usual recanted in haste, but not before it was laid bare to a public, ever-wearying of the man - was to do the full Gordon Gecko in a 'private' Zoom meeting with, I would imagine pretty astonished, backbenchers: one of whom must have dobbed him in - and to claim that the UK's Covid-19 vaccine rollout success has been afforded by 'greed' and capitalism. Not the scientists, NHS staff, the volunteers or the Armed Forces. No, no, no: it's been entirely due to the cupidity of people like himself.

The only input that greed and capitalism has made to the whole affair has been the siphoning off of billions of pounds of public funds to a select club of suchlike individuals and companies who have serially failed to perform to standards or expectations, without penalty; end of. What the outside world currently makes of this country is anyone's guess, but I suspect that we are not held in particularly high esteem as a shining example of the brotherhood of mankind.

The only positive spin one can put on this and their current attempts at controlling both the media and the populace through the introduction of ever more Draconian legislation is that their true, dyed-in-the-wool old-school Tory values are showing through that thin veneer of civility they hide behind. The confidence that their overwhelming parliamentary majority gave them at the start has grown into an over-confidence and arrogance that hopefully will ultimately be their undoing: although at what final cost to the rest of us, God only knows. At least in the movie, Gecko ends up doing time...

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