Violent Playground

So, what exactly does hands-off, low-tax small state government look like? Aside from the stupid rich people falling over themselves to get arrested for financial fraud of one sort or another, whilst drawing the kind of (publicly-funded) salaries that most of us can only dream about; what exactly is the essential characteristic of government, as currently defined by the Tory Party? Aside from the increasing industrial unrest occasioned by stagnant wages and shit working conditions, understaffing and underinvestment? Aside from a cost of living and energy crisis of practically biblical proportions, where huge numbers of people are being rescued from freezing homes by an already terminally over-stretched NHS, because they simply can't afford to heat their homes?

I'll tell you what it looks like. It looks like people running and hiding from the responsibilities they undertook when they took on the job of government. It looks like people who took on a vanity project for the kudos of pretending to be, and hopefully appearing to their electorate to be, as caring, responsible people. The problem is, of course, a complete lack of genuine commitment on their part, courtesy of their cosy insulation from reality, afforded by great, personal wealth. A total disconnection from the real world of "ordinary people" and their actual problems; despite their own obligations as politicians and custodians of the public good. It looks like people trying to paper over their inadequacies and corruption; their utter failure to tackle any of the issues of serious import to their electorate.

Take the article in last weekend's Observer about the parlous state of many of Britain's post-war-built school buildings. Most of them, built in that era, were designed by their architects to have a working life of thirty years or so. Very many are still in use today, some over seventy years on, and are in a ruinous condition, often perilously so, with the safety of their staff and students at severe risk. But this government has decided to suppress data regarding this from publication, effectively trying to sweep the problem under the carpet and away from public scrutiny. Just like Grenfell and so much else, this is a government that simply fails to act in a timely manner on anything; waiting, instead, until they are cattle-prodded into reaction by the forces they increasingly have little to no control of. Again, the "Oh, shit, the plebs have noticed..." moment. Choosing to hide. Choosing to deceive. Choosing to dissemble. Choosing to lie. Their choices. Their decisions. Acting only when pressed.

They take us for fools. They treat us as economic units in the increasingly discredited macroeconomic equations of their inhuman neoliberal philosophies. They, and the corporates that they control, fund, benefit from, and support, treat us as infants to be pacified and corralled into economic behavioural patterns that benefit their collective greed. But the cracks in their manic vision have rapidly grown into chasms of sheer insanity. They are actively involved in effectively strangling the golden goose that ultimately feeds the maw of their ambition and their bank accounts. Time is running out for them. Time to die...