“What’s the point?”–a conclusion to skate around when one confronts the state of the Great British identity

Is there a war on liberalism in Great Britain? With mentions of Jeremy Corbyn, or socialism, come what seems to be inevitable sneering and jeering and “lefty liberal” mockery. And it feels like the right hand is spiting the left but forgetting we’re all a part of the same body. It also feels like we’ve been here before and we’re just going around in circles. But then we are, aren’t we? Politics is transparently cyclical and without the great leveller that was the world wars will the “lefties” will have their voices heard? It seems unlikely. Voices of honesty and integrity are bland, it is only the grandstanders and the spinners that take the soapbox and only the sensational that get the headlines. The power of change is left in the hands of the many millions of non-voters, the third of Brits who are apathetic to their own lives, let alone the lives of others, and if they’re not voting now they’re not going to for the unspectacular Jeremy. Or at least that’s the fear. It is not a fear of left-wing defeat, but a fear that reality–truth, is not going to be outed. Without truth we’re just ice skating on jelly and hedonistically splaying apart our country. No one can react, grow or solve when the ground we’re building on isn’t understood. And as for change: proportional representation is never going to happen, it’s not going to be a thing, the Green Party will not be heard, JC will split their 2015 success and the environment will disappear further from the front-pages. The chinese will build their nuclear bonfires and George Osbourne will sell our integrity to whoever finds a way of finally botoxing away the distant bemusement that he can’t seem to hide from his face.

And it’s not new, it’s Thatcher, and its voices of the seventies that I hoped wouldn’t resurface. It’s emphasis placed on businessmen and women; cash-flow over humanity. It’s pretty fucking disgusting and it keeps leading to a question: what’s the point?

Conservative Party Conference 2014 NHS tax GP availability

David Cameron

Why the hell don’t David Cameron and the Conservatives say look – enough is enough – you want to see your GP? We need to increase tax. I honestly don’t give a shit about a couple of hundred pounds a year if it means I can see my GP and I can feel happy that my fellow Brits aren’t suffering living below the breadline!!! #benefits #tax #cooperation #initogether #CPC14 #NHS

Pile of money

Mark Simmonds MP quits: 150k family income not enough to feed his sense of socio-political entitlement

Tory MP for Boston and Skegness, Lincolnshire and Foreign Office, Africa minister Mark Simmonds has declared he has quit (but won’t stand down until the 2015 election). The minister earning £89,435 who pays his wife £25,000 of public money and has a rental allowance of £27,875 plus 3x £2,500 for his children and who has received £500,000 in expenses all of which are paid by taxpayers is quitting as minister and stepping down at the next general election. His reasons are noble – in summary – that he cannot install his family in a location close enough to his work to allow him to be a good father and husband. In reality he is claiming that he is entitled to more than the aforementioned. That he is entitled to things that ‘hard working families’ trying to keep afloat in the capital are not. Another irony?

Here’s his voting patterns on benefits: 1.

  • Voted moderately for reducing housing benefit for social tenants deemed to have excess bedrooms (which Labour describe as the “bedroom tax”)
  • Voted moderately against raising welfare benefits at least in line with prices
  • Voted very strongly against paying higher benefits over longer periods for those unable to work due to illness or disability
  • Voted very strongly for making local councils responsible for helping those in financial need afford their council tax and reducing the amount spent on such support
  • Voted moderately for a reduction in spending on welfare benefits
  • Voted strongly against spending public money to create guaranteed jobs for young people who have spent a long time unemployed

He obviously feels he is entitled to more than me and probably more than you. That for some reason, the taxpayers should stump up more money to allow him to take his (presumably rather comfortable) lifestyle into London (and presumably that’s as a second home).

And they ask why the UK electorate are disillusioned with modern politicians.

[1] How Mark Simmonds voted on Welfare and Benefits

Photo of Parliament (UK)

Matt Hancock proving politicians ignore the writing on the wall

Matt Hancock MP, of the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, is demonstrating his street cred by being involved in the Barclays LifeSkills promotional campaign. This was also attended by Fabrice Muamba who famously suffered a cardiac arrest on the football pitch. Unfortunately for Matt Hancock, Tory MP, some of the graffiti he had posed in front of, at the oh so trendy and currently massively hip place to hang about (Southbank skate park), suggested one should “sack Cameron!”.

This is such a delicious and ironic example of the rhetoric being laid out, thoughtlessly, whilst politicians do not even bother to read the true writing on the wall. Even when it is writing that they are deliberately posing in front of.

See the image in the original source: Total Politics article on ‘Is this MP sending a subliminal message to the PM?’