Do you hate Britain so much that you think Boris Johnson is the best person to lead it? Do you have such low expectations of your country that you believe Priti Patel is the best qualified person to be Home Secretary? Or Dominic Raab Foreign Secretary? Or, for that matter, do you truly think Britain is well served having someone like Matt Hancock employed as Health Secretary, Gavin Williamson as Secretary of State for Education, or Grant Shapps in charge of transport?
Can you honestly say that Robert Jenrick is a reliable and trustworthy Secretary of State for Housing, that Oliver Dowden deserves to be in charge of culture or that Michael Gove is best placed to serve as Minister for the Cabinet Office, Chanceller of the Duchy of Lancaster? Can you honestly say you even know what the fuck the Minister for the Cabinet Office, Chanceller of the Duchy of Lancaster even fucking means? And on the subject of bullshit job titles for cronies does anyone have any idea what the Lord President of the Council, Leader of the House of Commons Jacob Rees-Mogg actually does except pontificate vaguely and sanctimoniously on subjects he has neither experience of nor expertise in?
Of course you don't think they're the best people. Most likely you think they're among the worst but, in some cases, you may equivocate. You may throw out the tired old canard that 'they're only doing their best' (they're absolutely not), that 'nobody else could handle this any better' (demonstrably untrue as even the most cursory perusal of the Covid-19 death statistics proves), or you may prefer to make up untruths about Keir Starmer or pretend Jeremy Corbyn is still in charge of the Labour party and have a moan about that. In that you'll at least be joined by some of the more regressive elements of the leftist movement. Those who prefer to be pure in opposition rather than to ever to get down to the hard work of governing and, this is key, occasionally making difficult compromises.
In a recent debate with a friend as to whether the Johnson administration was wantonly cruel or simply incompetent we agreed the best adjective to describe them would be the one that meets those two somewhere in the middle:- negligent. Johnson and his cabinet of cronies and toadies don't want your parents or grandparents to die. They aren't doing anything to try to make that happen. But, on the other hand, they're certainly not doing much to try to stop it from happening.
They simply don't care if they die or not. They don't care about others at all. They care only about their own survival and their own power and for that to continue they have to convince us of the lie that (a) they're doing their best at a difficult time and (b) they're not to blame and we are. Both of those premises is half true. Sure, it's a difficult time and sure, the public are at fault. But they're not at fault for flaunting Covid rules (apart from the very small minority of people who are), they're at fault for voting in, with a huge majority, a shamelessly amoral, bullying, and lying government. The experiment with government by kakistocracy is, predictably, fast becoming a disaster and as we move, slowly yet inexorably, into a second stage of lockdown that is abundantly clear to all but those who seek to absolve their own blame for voting this shower of shit in in the first place.
As the first lockdown eased and people understandably visited families and friends again, went back to work, and (urged on by the government's own Eat Out To Help Out scheme) headed out to restaurants and pubs to both help out the economy and to get their social lives back. People appreciated being able to do this and though many of us were at different stages of returning to normality, and virtually nobody started acting is if we were completely in the clear, we all understood that we needed to be cautious, we needed to take care, and that the chances of a second wave of some sort were highly likely.
We did our bit and we needed the government to do their bit. If not why do we even have a government? We needed them to develop a working (working, not world beating) track and trace system, we needed them to do as they said they would and follow the science, we needed them to tell the truth, and we needed them to build bridges instead of create divisions.
They did none of those things. Instead they pissed away the summer months limbering up for various culture wars, refusing to appear on Newsnight - the national broadcaster's most important and insightful (not to say least partial) news programme, and telling people like the fictional Fatima who heads up this piece that she should forget her dreams of following her passion and go to work 'in cyber'. Get a real job you feckless idlers and pull your heads out of the clouds.
Nevermind that the cultural sector contributes over £200,000,000,000 to the UK economy (more than 10% of it), the Johnson administration don't like musicians, artists, actors, and ballet dancers for one simple reason. Many of them don't support Johnson and speak out often about just how much they don't. As we've seen this week when Johnson threatened withdrawal of support to regional mayors who didn't sing from the same hymn sheet as him, this is a prime minister who values loyalty above all else. A thin skinned, very little, man who won't even entertain the idea of a person, no matter how talented, telling him he's wrong - as he almost always is - on everything.
Though the disastrous handling of coronavirus has been the most deadly strategy of Johnson's error strewn and calamitous stewardship of the country we shouldn't forget the upcoming disaster of no deal Brexit, something Johnson promised/lied on many many occasions couldn't happen and something we're now awaiting. As a huge lorry park is built in Kent and ideas for passports for lorry drivers entering that county is mooted by our maladministration we can laugh at petitions to have it named The Nigel Farage Lorry Park (though Farage's Garage has a better ring to it) in honour of the man who did the most to make it happen (to misquote Field of Dreams:- "if you build it, they will come") we should share a thought for how wise it is to potentially disrupt the delivery of vital medication at the height of the worst global pandemic for over a century.
Covid will kill many more people and it will further erode our economy but with Brexit, especially a no deal Brexit on its side, we can be assured that we will feel the pain of Covid deeper and for longer than most other countries except those others who have burdened themselves with similarly populist, divisive, hateful, and lying leaders. Step forward Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil, Narendra Modi of India, and the most bigly of them all - Donald Trump of the USA.
In China there's a saying that goes "same same but different" and that fits for this group of spoilers and cultural vandals. We know, and read, enough about Trump, Modi has encouraged religious violence in a country that can ill afford to risk it, and Bolsonaro's denial of the risks of coronavirus has risked the health of his nation as sure as his greenlighting of the deforestation of the Amazon hastens a future climate crisis that will make Covid-19 look like a fun day out at Alton Towers.
Johnson's own populism is, when first encountered, a strange beast. A difficult one to get your head around. It's a strange kind of authoritarianism he exerts. In some ways, he seems incredibly liberal, lax even - negligently so. But in other ways, in binding the strings behind the major institutions that operate within Britain and keep it a decent liberal society, he is bordering on oligarchic levels of control. The threat, for that's what it is, to kneecap the BBC is something you'd expect from a dictatorship not a democracy. Or at least a mock-democracy like, for example, Russia.
Putin poisons his real rivals and inserts puppets as pretend rivals, puppets who essentially support him but act as opponents to give the impression of democracy. Johnson's not resorted to poisoning yet, though arranging to have journalists beaten up is not below him, but with the announcement of minor actor and dreadful singer Laurence Fox and his new Reclaim 'culture war' party the Tories are already in the position of funding a supposed opponent.
Recently, threats to install former Daily Mail editor Paul Dacre as the head of Ofcom and the former Spectator and Daily Telegraph editor as chairman of the BBC were made. Dacre has long campaigned against the BBC and its 'cultural Marxism' and Moore has boasted that he never watches television and believes the license fee should be abolished. Moore, also, once employed Boris Johnson as a 'journalist' (where his forte was fabricating stories and quotes) and recently received a peerage from Johnson's government making him Baron Moore of Etchingham and, under his stewardship, our cultural programming would be exactly that - a barren moor.
Moore ruled himself out of taking the BBC job amid rumours of demands that the wages for the position should be trebled to accommodate him but whether or not Moore or Dacre take up these jobs is not important. What's important is that the government are seen flexing their muscles, putting the frighteners on the BBC and threatening the corporation's impartiality - something that is already under serious question by many.
People complain, long and often, about Laura Kuennsberg and her supposed bias towards Boris Johnson and the Conservative Party (though over one hundred Tories wrote to the BBC to complain she wasn't being nice enough to him) but programmes like Newsnight and Panorama still regularly speak truth to power and without them we dumb down the populace even further and make them eager consumers of yet more government lies and propaganda. To undermine the BBC and replace it with a state mouthpiece similar to that of North Korea is not for the benefit of anyone living in the country and entirely to the benefit of those that are running it. When Hugh Grant tweets "coffin. nail. UK" he's exaggerating. But not much.
Even Jeremy Clarkson, nobody's idea of a bleeding heart liberal or social justice warrior, said he'd rather drive his 'Lambo' off a cliff than see Moore as head of the BBC. It's an appointment that would make as much sense as employing Gary Glitter as your babysitter.
Johnson is appointing members of his own fan club, highly unqualified and morally bankrupt ones at that, to hugely influential positions of power and paying them, enormously handsomely, with our, taxpayer's, money to do his bidding for him. This is a trick straight out of the Trump playbook as many of Johnson's tricks are. The trick is easy to see, it's hiding in plain sight, but there are still plenty of people, idiots, in this country who can't see the sleight of hand this dodgy and discredited stage magician employs.
Other ideas mooted, seemingly with the final solution being to reduce the UK to a one party state though as likely to reduce the UK to a one nation state, include barring schools from teaching any line of thought that doesn't support a capitalist agenda. As if the idea of thinking that life is about anything other than amassing large amounts of money and then stockpiling it like a greedy dragon is somehow morally abhorrent. Are these people that grew up being taught and believing that life is simply a huge game of Monopoly and the winner is the person who dies with most money in the bank?
What happened to love, friendship, spending quality time with your family? I'm yet to attend a funeral where everyone gathered to discuss and celebrate the healthy state of the deceased's bank balance. In fact most of the funerals I've attended, and sadly there have been too many, have been made bearable by the presence of friends and family and the most touching moments have often come in the form of poetry recitals and, even more so, music. When Rishi Sunak suggests struggling musicians should retrain and get new jobs (in 'cyber' or in Tesco it matters not) he's showing us what an ideal Toryworld looks like. One without music, one without theatre, and one without art.
Football can continue but only as a business, not as a passion. Our situation moves on from being an endless culture war into a war against culture itself. Owen Jones recently wrote a brilliant article about how the Tories have been taking lessons from Viktor Orban, the hard right authoritarian leader of Hungary. Orban, and his ruling Fidesz party, have rewritten the school curriculum so that it promotes their brand of nationalism, they've gagged teachers who have spoken out about this, and they've curtailed state media from reporting negatively about it.
Jones goes on to make the very real point that these culture wars are "a means of stigmatising the struggle of
minorities for rights and acceptance", they're a tactic "to distract from the Tories’
catastrophic handling of the pandemic", and they also, helpfully for the Tories, "force Labour on to
political ground that polarises its natural supporters" and while that's all worrying and troublesome enough that's not where culture wars, division, and authoritarian regimes tend to end up. That place is even more frightening and there are warnings in 20c European history that nobody should even need reminding about.
When you think about it Boris Johnson's, Michael Gove's, Priti Patel's, and Gavin Williamson's complete incompetence in doing the job and total negligence in even caring about that is almost a relief. Or it would be were it not so serious and life threatening to many. The handling of the pandemic hasn't improved. It's got worse. Sixteen thousand positive Covid results disappeared because of a faulty Excel spreadsheet and the mayors of Manchester, Liverpool, Newcastle, Nottingham, and Sheffield have all spoken out to say they received no contact whatsoever from central government regarding serious new lockdown restrictions that have been placed on those cities.
In the words of Keir Starmer:- "It was an act of gross irresponsibility for anonymous Government sources to tell a few newspapers on Thursday about plans to impose further restrictions on millions of people. They did so without any detail, without any consultation and without any statement from the Prime Minister."
The Welsh first minister Mark Drakeford reports a similar scenario and goes as far as saying Johnson's disastrous stewardship of the UK is strengthening the case for Welsh independence. In Scotland, a second referendum would no doubt be won by the SNP and the end of the UK would be certain. As long as Johnson and the Tories stay in power the end of the UK is certain. It's no surprise that Johnson should punish voters in Scotland for not voting for him in sufficient numbers but he's even showing contempt for his new 'red wall' voters.
It's no surprise. He treats everyone with contempt. His wives, his lovers, his children, his MPs, his political foes, and, ultimately, the nation, its health, and its economy. His lies about Covid-19 and the government reaction have undoubtedly hugely increased the UK death toll and his lies about Brexit will do the same for the economy and the nation's mental health.
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