Untitled, Xmas, Day Three...

Tonight I find myself still full of a foul winter cold - the first since pre-covid - and quite grumpy. I was going to reflect on the axis between belief & faith and agnostic & secular, prompted by a short comment by Trevor Phillips in the i's Opinion Matrix today, but I'll leave that one until my brain's cleared a bit. So, in lieu of that for tonight, here's the text of my email rant to the Lads this evening...

As always: the government screws things up, does fuck-all to even attempt to reverse the damage it's caused, then the hot polloi are asked politely to contribute a ‘modest’ sum per month on Direct Debit for whatever is the struggling cause du jour. Domestically, we now have the vast majority of the population struggling to hang on to any semblance of normal, civilized life, while they themselves are somehow expected to ‘volunteer’ their money and ‘free’ time to help other people in the self-same boat as themselves. Meanwhile, we are experiencing stupidly out of control cost of living increases, fuel rises and inflation, to the point where there seems no conceivable exit from it all. Add to it all the total evisceration of health and social services, transport networks and the most basic of infrastructure; water and sewerage, and we’ve somehow managed to plummet from ‘civilized’ to totally chaotic in less than a decade. All at the hands of the neoliberal fuckwits who see and promote themselves as ‘the masters of the universe’. The only crumb of hope in all of this is the current - growing - wave of industrial discontent and action that actually seems capable of unsettling, if not actually, urgently, unseating the woeful bunch of complacent rich bastards we’ve seen fit to elect and encourage.

As to solutions to all of this? They’re all there in plain sight and simply need grasping: re-nationalise the railways, gas, electricity and water; take the NHS back to where it should have stayed, and bring the social care system back within its remit. Introduce a fairer taxation system, limit corporate salaries and dividends, abolish the House of Lords and introduce a wealth limit on membership of parliament: rich people always look after their own, and have no place in a democratic system of government, they are inherently biassed and completely out of touch with reality. The list is large: much larger than this; hugely onerous and expensive to fund, but it’s not impossible to implement: the alternative reality is unthinkable for the vast number of the UK population, and at the same time, for business and capitalism itself. All told, without small and medium business, and fair wages for those who simply work for a living, the economy will tank: endless credit and borrowing to feed the maw of Amazon, et al., is not economically healthy or remotely wise. First things first: we need to get the Tories out of office and keep them out.

K

Postscript: Told you I was full of cold: I forgot to title this one...