What is government for? What is the primary reason for its existence? I remember my mate Shep once saying that it's chief aim should be to care for the people of the country. To make sure they have roofs over their heads, to make sure they have food on their plates, and to make sure they're safe from harm. All the other stuff is, or should be, secondary to meeting these primary needs.
Meet them and government is free, entitled - even, to look at the bigger picture, implement lasting change to regional and national infrastructures, and even, if it so desires, opt out of hugely beneficial trading blocs. The trouble is this government, the kakistocracy overseen by Boris Fucking Johnson, has, quite spectacularly failed to meet any of those three key performance indicators.
Homelessness is rising to levels not seen since the era of Thatcher, possibly higher, and, unlike the first wave of coronavirus, homeless people are not being sheltered during the second so called lockdown. With the weather starting to worsen it doesn't taken a superforecaster to work out the likely endgame there.
As regards to protecting the public, the likelihood of a no deal Brexit would be cavalier enough but a mishandling of the Covid pandemic that has resulted, as I write, in 50,928 deaths (the fifth highest in the world - behind only the USA, Brazil, India, and Mexico - all of whom have considerably larger populations) is evidence as stark as you like that Boris Johnson, Michael Gove, Matt Hancock, and the soon to go Dominic Cummings have been lethally negligent in their work.
Is Cummings' departure, and that of Lee Cain - who nobody had even heard of a week ago and yet suddenly many are experts on, a handy distraction from a Covid death toll that has gone above five hundred in the UK three days in a row now - and looks likely to rise further - or are the rats deserting a ship that's sinking under the weight of its own lies and incompetence and soon to be fatally scuppered by a woeful, and wilful, Brexit.
Maybe Cummings and Cain have looked towards America, seen the joyful events unfolding as Trump becomes, in his own words, the stone cold loser in the most important election in decades, possibly ever, and seen that the writing is on the wall for populism. Populism has been found out. Joe Biden's speech was one of hope, respect, dignity, empathy, and compassion and in Kamala Harris the United States of America has elected the first female and the first woman of colour to the second highest office in the country. At long last.
They won't be progressive enough for everyone, and they'll certainly do things we all disagree with, but that's what progress means. Getting better. It doesn't mean starting with perfection or ideological purity. It means working together, with those who support you and those who don't, to make society better for all. Trump will soon be gone, tweeting away from Mar-a-Lago or even kicked off Twitter and sent to Parler like Katie Hopkins, but Biden, Harris, and everyone who wants a better and fairer world must be mindful that the confused and vile ideology of Trumpism lives on.
It's a mindset in which everything is a zero sum game. There has to be losers so that there can be winners and victory is always measured in wealth, power, and material assets. Never in happiness, kindness, friendship, or love. It's a small mindset beloved of small people who are unable to plot a route to their own happiness and instead try to drag everyone down to their level like crabs in a bucket.
When Trump leaves the White House, it saddens me to consider this, the UK will remain a bastion of Trumpism. With Johnson in power, the era of cronyism, culture wars, and deadly chumocracy will look more isolated from the rest of the world than even before. Britain will be weaker and with less allies and it will be the doing of the likes of Johnson, Gove, and the professional rage harvester Nigel Farage.
When I saw the American political commentator Van Jones crying on television, saying "it's easier to be a dad, to tell your kids truth matters" when Trump's lies finally saw him ousted, I wanted to cry too. Tears of joy. I wanted to dance in the streets, hug all my friends, and buy them drinks - which, due to Covid restrictions, I was not allowed to. It almost seemed unfair but the fireworks that erupted into the sky though nominally marking Guy Fawkes Night seemed to ring out just as clearly in their condemnation of Trump.
Either way they celebrated the end of a person who endangered democracy. Us Brits can celebrate properly when we remove our own deadly populist clown Boris Johnson and though we may have to wait nearly four years before we can do so we must be sure not to forget the lies, not to forget the negligence, and not to forget the cronyism. Not to forget the avoidable astronomical death toll that Boris Johnson has presided over.
Without his bully buddy, the stone cold loser Donald Trump, by his side Johnson looks exposed and the loss of his SPADs further accentuates that. Though Johnson himself has half-heartedly congratulated Biden on winning the US election, in a tweet that had Donald Trump's name feintly written and removed in the background - hey, these guys are pros, some of his outriders have taken a somewhat different tack.
Scott Benton, the recently elected Conservative MP for Blackpool South, has already complained that Joe Biden's respect for the Good Friday Agreement, a multilateral agreement that brought to an end a conflict that had claimed over 3,500 lives on the British Isles, makes him a bad president and a bad leader.
When Tory MPs are not complaining about people upholding peace agreements they're gleefully trying to starve poor children. Ben Bradley, the Conservative MP for Mansfield tweeted to say if the government were to provide children in his constituency with free school meals during the holidays they would sell them to buy crack and heroin.
I'd love to see Ben Bradley try to score some horse with a Tupperware box full of Dairy-Lea Lunchables, a packet of Teddy Pom-Bears, and a small plastic bottle of Robinson's Fruit Shoot but no matter how embarrassing that might be for all concerned it could hardly compete with the excruciating spectacle of Nicky Morgan (the woman who said she'd never serve in a Boris Johnson government but now not only serves in a Boris Johnson government but has been elevated to a life peer in the House of Lords by that administration for her fealty to it) on Question Time suggesting that the reason the government chose to go against the kind plan of the much loved footballer Marcus Rashford and refuse to extend the free school dinners scheme was because Labour's Deputy Leader Angela Rayner called Chris Clarkson, the prematurely ageing Tory MP for Heywood & Middleton, 'scum'.
Which isn't even harsh if you consider he'd just voted for, and argued for, taking food away from hungry children. It's straight out of the cry-bully's playbook. Be horrible to people below you and then complain, when it's pointed out, that you're the real victim. It's what controlling men in relationships do and it's what populist politicians do. Another newly elected Conservative MP, this rogues gallery feels endless, Selaine Saxby (North Devon) claimed that businesses stepping in to fill the void and donating free school meals should not ask for government assistance if they find themselves in trouble as they're clearly doing very well if they can afford to give stuff away.
This statement illustrates almost better than any the Tory mindset. A mindset, memorably described by Charlie Brooker as "an eternally irritating force for wrong that appeals exclusively to bigots, toffs, money-minded machine men, faded entertainers, and selfish, grasping simpletons who were born with part of their soul missing" and a mindset that thinks giving to charity is something people do because they have money to throw away and not because they actually care about, and for, their fellow man.
One Tory MP, Caroline Ansell (Eastbourne), at least had the moral fibre to resign from her job as a parliamentary private secretary at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs over the issue but one good apple, or even one bad apple once doing the right thing, doesn't mean that the whole tree is not rotten to the core and should be chopped down as soon as possible. Gary Sambrook, the Tory MP for Birmingham Northfield who voted against free school dinners and soon saw the wonderful piece of graffit this blog is named for appear in his 'honour', is entitled to eat as many big dinners as he likes but if his government can't find the magic money tree when it comes to providing for poverty stricken kids than it really shouldn't be picking fruit off that tree to subsidise Sambrook's pan fried salmon with courgette provencal or his slow cooked pork belly with pancetta and root vegetable spelt.
It certainly shouldn't be shaking that tree so hard that money falls out for Baroness Dido Harding and Tory donors but not for doctors and nurses at the frontline of the ongoing Covid crisis. But we shouldn't be surprised that this is the case. Tom Bower's recent biography of Boris Johnson, by most accounts fawning, laudatory, and way too apologetic towards its subject, Boris Johnson:The Gambler, tells of how when Johnson was editor of The Spectator "applications for employment bereft of nepotism or patronage were automatically binned".
That's dreadful, shameful, behaviour for the editor of a magazine. For the Prime Minister of an actual real country, and during the time of a pandemic, its consequences are more real. For tens of thousands of people the consequences of Boris Johnson's self-serving behaviour has been the loss of their life the loss of a loved one. While it's possible to feel sympathy for the young Boris Johnson watching his father, another 'character', punching his wife, and Johnson's mum, Charlotte so hard in the face he broke her nose we should certainly not, as Bower seems to suggest, excuse Johnson's own behaviour because his father was worse.
Being a chip off the old block when it comes to infidelity, finances, and morality (though at least not wife beating) is not an excuse. It doesn't cut it. It didn't cut it with Trump (who famously played out his own daddy issues to the detriment of his own country and the entire planet) and it doesn't cut it with Johnson.
It'll be years before I can celebrate Johnson's downfall (and, hopefully, pubs will be open then and I'll be able to do so with friends) but at least I could celebrate Trump's downfall with friends on WhatsApp and social media and with television shows like Have I Got News For You and The Last Leg. Despite my belief that this second lockdown is a lockdown in name only (schools, universities, and businesses continues as normal while almost all social life, anything that enriches the soul rather than the coffers is on standstill) and will only make the most minimal of dents in the grim Covid death tally there are reasons to be positive.
Although such is the impression Covid has made on the world and the way we see it even the word 'positive' has negative connotations now. The news from Pfizer/BioNtech, despite causing predictable backlash from anti-vaxxers and an ignorant colleague of mine who suggested she'd not really want to take a foreign vaccine - I work in Brexitland these days, has to be taken as good news though, and it pains me to agree with Matt Hancock on anything, we certainly shouldn't start acting as if we've got the silver bullet.
Other reasons for positivity in my life have, as ever, come within the sphere of personal relationships and cultural activities. Since I wrote my last Kakistoracy blog nearly a month ago I've been out for pizza with my nephew Daniel to celebrate his 22nd birthday (with my brother, sister-in-law, and younger nephew Alex), been for a curry at the Tadley Tandoori for Tina's 50th (with Neil, Shep, Adam, and Teresa), and been to the Among the Trees exhibition at the Hayward Gallery with Valia (followed by a debrief and lunch at The Old Thameside Inn). I've chatted to many other friends on the phone, on WhatsApp video calls, and on the still great fun Zoom quiz nights (thanks to Dad, Matt and Nat, and Ian for setting them) and I've attended an LFS talk about seances and a SELFS evening about the Gaelic god of wild beasts, Cernunnos (which I'll write about soon enough).
It's kept me sane, and making sure I walk at least ten thousand steps each day - usually back from work through the haunted memory landscape of Baughurst and Tadley - has helped me too, and though I still miss being able to pop in a book shop, stop for a cheeky pint on the way home, get together with large groups of friends for walks, and even just eat crisps, drink Coke, and read The Guardian on the bus or train like I used to I understand that this is the way things have to be for now, throughout Xmas, and into the new year. Maybe in the spring things will change. I don't know any more than any of the rest of you but America has shown us it is possible, gradually, to start pulling ourselves out of this mess of our own making.
Hope springs eternal. We don't need to follow America and we don't need to lead the world but we do need to, quite quickly, remove from power people who are doing so much to damage both our country and the people that live in it. I looked across the Atlantic last week and, for the first time in four years, I felt there was hope. In 2024 I want to be able to look at my own country and feel the same. Do you? Or are you happy with how things are?
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