LEMMINGS ON THE CLIFFS
The choice is … no choice. In three days the United Kingdom (and despite all the Murdoch and Cameron Sturgeonesque scaremongering, that’s still what it is) goes to the polls. Yet who goes there? A battered, confused and cowed electorate, labouring under the burden of five years of austerity. An electorate that knows full well the nature of the new Dark Age of inequality the Coalition has inflicted upon us. An electorate which should have been listening, digesting the arguments, rising in their millions to protect the NHS, sifting through the lies and hastily invented ‘statistics’.
However, it’s a fair guess that the GB Public prefers its attention to be diverted by The Voice, Strictly Come Dancing, Britain’s Got Talent and Celebrity Bake-Off. An electorate which still buys The Sunand the Daily Mail in their millions, believing every foul lie printed. The fact that their apparent inertia has led to a perilous stalemate in the opinion polls is of no interest. Change is not on the agenda. Progress is not on the agenda. Common sense and compassion have been blow-torched away by the City-financed corporate propaganda mill.
The peasants (as the Lords of Westminster still see us) have had their Masters’ beliefs rammed down their throats until they choke in obedient acceptance. Food banks? From a few dozen throughout the country in 2010 to over 1,000 today - and Cameron interprets this as an example of his original notion of ‘The Big Society’. Food banks, he imagines, are the positive result of his determination to remove the safety net of the Welfare State - look - people can care for themselves without benefits! Wonderful!
Iain Duncan Smith, the Nabob of Nastiness, says of food banks that their users are “People with dysfunctional lives, caught in drug addiction and family breakdown.” Conservative Peer, Baroness Anne Jenkin of Kennington, whose well-fed derriere graces the red benches for £300 per day, concludes that food bank users are simply “Poor people who do not know how to cook”.
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| Baroness Jenkin of Kennington |
Maybe she could give them some lessons.
Champion Ex-Education-wrecker Michael Gove thinks they are “Not best able to manage their finances” whilst a voice from the smelly depths of the Tory gutter, Edwina ‘Lady Salmonella’ Currie, pulls no punches - poor people who use food banks “Waste their money on tattoos and dog food.” Pour all this verbal slurry into a bucket and there we see, and smell, the essence of Tory thought. This alone, any rational person might think, would be enough to see that beleaguered poor and increasingly dispossessed mount a campaign of rage beyond the Medieval punishment of the Bedroom Tax, to take to the streets and man the barricades for change.
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| Edwina 'Hot' Currie: A woman who knows how to get a Prime Minister into bed and scramble eggs for publicity's sake. |
So here we stand in May 2015 on the edge of a tall cliff, not even whimpering like suicidal lemmings, but prepared to take that deadly leap onto the sharp rocks of the next five years of greed, unfairness and utter inequality. We have the most ridiculous and expensive Railway system in Europe. We have a youth problem of teenagers with no interest in politics or the ballot box. We have an education system in our universities which is rapidly returning to the pre-war world of academic privilege, where only the well-heeled can afford a degree, and an education secretary, Nicky Morgan, who actively campaigns against the Arts and Philosophy, because only Business and Science studies - those which ultimately lead to the Tory Holy Grail - profit - can have any credence in a world lubricated by money. Since 1979, everything we owned collectively by us as a People has been stolen by Mammon’s Buccaneers. Our postal service, telephones, gas, electricity, water, coal. The list goes on. All this theft was not only down to Thatcher and her gang; the burglars were aided and abetted by the avaricious duplicity of people like Tony Blair and the spineless surrender to the City of Gordon Brown. Great Britain Plc is a massive corporation run by pretend politicians, eager passengers on the Westminster Gravy Train who man the benches for as few hours as possible to allow for all those other money-spinners, the Law, PR agencies, Consultancies and directorships, all of which enhance their pitiful MP’s salary, which the slimy Malcolm Rifkind says he ‘could not live on’.
And now, today, joy of joys, the greatest gift of absolute diversion has arrived - Kate Middleton has a new baby! Concentrate, ye millions, on the innocent face of this pink newcomer, for verily, it will sweep everything else aside, and every time the spectre of enforced austerity looms, just gaze at the front page of the Express and Mail, and your life, even with food banks, will seem normal.
Will it seem ‘normal in May 2020? Will you all remember what Britain once was, what it could have been? No. We’ll be watching Embarrassing Bodies, the tenth series of Mrs. Brown’s Boys or a new version of Strictly. But Channel 4 won’t be making any more Benefits Street - because even TV can’t make a documentary about something which will have ceased to exist. Yet there’ll probably be another Royal baby - that pregnancy will already be planned, and with a little luck the birth will happen just in time for an election.