Tag Archives: politics

One for the road

There are plenty of candidates for the title of most persecuted race in human history.

People in Africa and elsewhere sold and bought, dragged across oceans to toil and die at the whim of the wealthy. Jews, victimised for centuries, massacred in their millions, only to find even that’s not enough to stop future generations’ monstrous graffiti. Palestinians, for balance. The elderly, stuffed into wrinkle barns and used by their government as offensive linemen against a pandemic. Gingers, pilloried from playground to playground.

But above them all: motorists.

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Liztopia

We’re still a couple of weeks from the result of the most heinous beauty contest since Simon Weston versus that lad from the Goonies. But try as we might to psychokinesis John Major back into the job, Lord have mercy on us all, we know who we’re ending up with.

Yes it’s Liz Truss, the most fatuous leader of a nation since Ukraine elected an actual stand-up comedian, and that went really well as we’ve seen. Liz has been pledging and promising all the things the electorate want to hear, the electorate in this case being a couple of hundred thousand blue rinse racists and red-faced landowners who smile wistfully at the thought of Liz nuking new ‘foe’ France as the best way to stop all these filthy Albanians coming up the beach.

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And so do dreams of greatness dwindle

In the darker recesses of 2021, I once found myself on Twitter. I know. It’s been a hard year for us all.

I don’t know how I came to be looking at the feed of a man whose surname’s a mashup of two giant US companies I wouldn’t touch with a Zimbabwean dollar, but so it was I happened upon Dr Simon Ubsdell. I think it was around the time there was some slapstick fishing dispute in the Channel Islands. Thus:

‘Now Jersey. Eventually the Royal Navy will be tasked with defending a small boulder somewhere in the Thames Estuary. And so do dreams of greatness dwindle.’

Whether the country of my birth and current last known location deserves the word ‘Great’ is one of the principal dividing lines of our society. The perceived loss of greatness is an outrage to many, including Dr Ubsdell by the sounds of it.

Not to me. Who the hell needs greatness anyway?

Continue reading And so do dreams of greatness dwindle

A beach at Dieppe

I know I told you I had a yacht and a big cock, and it turns out it’s an inflatable canoe and three inches on a warm day, but picture the sunny uplands.

Think of the carbon emissions we’ll save circling around Teddington Lock not the Bay of Biscay. Given I also can’t get it up, there’s no threat of making babies that’ll blame solar panels for causing Covids 37 to 43 and feed Twirl wrappers to dolphins. The fact that you weren’t thinking of the climate crisis all along says more about your priorities than mine to be honest.

I can say absolutely anything I want, and when the truth doesn’t quite marry up don’t think for a moment I’ll act contrite. This is the Age of Fuckallaccountability.

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Sunset on the Whittington Riviera

Truly, I feel for you. Your job, family and life in general teeter on the rim of a slop bucket of decisions made by a government so erratic it makes Jair Bolsonaro look like Jacinda Ardern. Old Aunt Doris, may her Covid-riddled cadaver rest in peace, left everything to the bloody cat shelter just as your pot to piss in sprung a mortgage-sized leak. And as if things couldn’t get any worse they’re threatening to make you go back to work, ending the laziest and therefore greatest few months of your adult life.

Still, you’ve got your health. So quit fucking moaning.

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The path of a 355

This one’s serious then, is it?

Serious enough for politicians to admit that a few people might have to work from home for a while. The devastating effect this’ll have on the boss class – oh fuck, if they don’t need to be here to do these jobs, what’s the point of me? – was conveyed in the twitchy demeanour of Britain’s buffoon in chief, flanked by the experts he’s so recently branded as bogeymen. If staring about a podium wildly for help is ever a paying position, he’ll be fine, even as everyone who does a non-computer job is handed their last meagre pay slip and told to make it last because paper doesn’t grow on trees.

Before boffins had had the chance to give it the catchy sci-fi name Covid-19, red-top comics read by builders had planted ‘coronavirus’ into simple minds and that’s what we’re stuck with. How many of us are stuck with it, God only knows.

I heard some figures yesterday: the absolute worst scenario for people in the UK getting this virus is 80%. It kills roughly one in every hundred people who get it. Given the UK’s population of nearly 67 million, that would mean that the top projection of deaths from this is a bit over half a million.

A proper cull!

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The afterwank

When I was young, back when this was all fields, I vowed that I would never be one of those people who stopped caring about things.

Old people would tell us we really couldn’t change a damn thing, but we knew our generation was different. We walked down streets wearing wristbands that said ‘Make Poverty History’ and just knew we’d save the world. All we needed was a few people richer than us to give up their money first, then we’d maybe start chipping in too, once the student loans were paid off and we’d had a nice holiday and a couple of kids, and obviously they’ll need money for a house and to be honest these people should probably be helping themselves before they come to us for handouts but the point is we cared.

Old people just gave up, but we’d never do that. And I can honestly say I have the same politics as I did in 2005. I don’t squint warily at brown people and my investment portfolio stretches no further than the two cans of Guinness I left unswallowed in the fridge last night. I want more than anything to leave, but the last thing I want is to Leave.

And yet, with the tragic inevitability of the toast landing jam-side-down, the old people were right.

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Grit and flair

At last count, the population of Venezuela was 32,157,182. I’ve taken this from a site that claims to have ‘live’ statistics, as bespectacled men roam South American hospitals impatiently tapping pens against clipboards to the sound of perineal tearing.

That’s a lot of people. Think of the huge range of talents there must be. Massive potential for growth and betterment. Imagine what a country that size could achieve if it made the most of its latent expertise.

Today, Nicolas Maduro has declared he’s the only one out of the lot of them with the stature and smarts to lead his country beyond its next election. As a result, he’s banned opposition parties from standing. All of them. Anyone who’s not him.

He’s a man in power. And if you think we’re giving that up any time soon you’ve a rude one coming.

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Playgrounds

Well, he’s at it again, only this time he’s only pissed off a community. Makes a change from pissing off an entire country. A while back, Trump, for some unknown reason, decided to tweet out about the LGBT community not being allowed to join the army anymore. Perhaps a man in a dress stole his ball and won’t give it back, who knows. And with his usual vacuous flourish he’s now signed an ‘executive order’ about it.

It’s not that he singled out the LGBT community. We should be used to people like him singling out communities by now. It is not even what he said really, that certain people can’t join the army. OK, it’s a total dick move, but it’s your army – if you want to reduce recruitment on the brink of WW3, that’s your call, I guess.

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