Kakistocracy XLVI:Howzat!

Howzat! A couple of weeks back, at the second Ashes test held at Lord's, England's Jonny Bairstow was stumped by Australia's Alex Carey when he came out of his crease before the umpire had announced the over had come to an end. He was out and though what Carey did was well within the rules of the game (and many England players have done the same in the past) there was a big furore about whether or not Carey's actions were in the "spirit" of the game.

We can, and some will, debate the spirit of the game until the cows, or the Ashes, come home but what simply isn't cricket is the fact that Rishi Sunak, the Prime Minister, weighed in with his own opinions on the matter. The same Rishi Sunak who didn't even bother to comment, let alone vote, on the Boris Johnson case. Johnson, as I wrote about last time, had ingloriously resigned rather then face a vote on his future.

Big Dog may have left the house but, as big dogs tend to, he's left a massive stinky shit on the floor and it seems the likes of Sunak, Suella Braverman, Jeremy Hunt, Kemi Badenoch, Johnny Mercer, and Michael Gove don't have the slightest intention of clearing it up. In fact they intend to smear the shit in the face of the nation.

One of the chief shit spreaders is the utterly egregious Nadine Dorries. Writing in the Daily Mail (instead of doing the job she's been elected to do), Dorries (who still hasn't resigned despite promising to do so with "immediate affect" over a month ago) complains about a "shocking report" about how our NHS has "some of the worst health outcomes" among wealthy nations. She goes on to complain that the government has failed the NHS. Yet at no point in the article does she mention she's IN THE FUCKING GOVERNMENT and has been for thirteen years.

She also complains that many doctors and nurses, once trained up, move to Australia to get work and says they should be forced to serve a certain number of years before being allowed to do this. This is the same Nadine Dorries who, while receiving tax payers money for being an MP, went to Australia to eat ostrich anus on I'm A Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here.

Dorries, along with six other MPs (Jacob Rees-Mogg, Priti Patel, Brendan Clarke-Smith, Mark Jenkinson, Andrea Jenkyns, and Michael Fabricant) and three Tory peers (Zac Goldsmith - who has since resigned from his ministerial position citing Sunak's "apathy" towards climate change, Lord Cruddas, and Lord Greenhalgh) were named by the privileges committee of trying to undermine the inquiry into Boris Johnson (most recently seen peformatively snoring when asked about the alarmingly high number of male MPs accused of sexually assaulting women and young men, Daniel Korski, the Tory candidate for London mayor, has had to drop out of the contest after being accused of groping the TV producer Daisy Goodwin.) and Partygate and, by extension, of conspiring to undermine democracy itself. They should all be removed from their positions. The peers, most definitely, should be removed from the House of Lords.

Dorries and Rees-Mogg were particularly pernicious examples as they used their television shows, on TalkTV and GB News, to launch vociferous attacks on the democratic process and to do so knowing full well that the committee were unable to respond because the investigation was ongoing. 

As is the Covid enquiry which recently heard from Matt Hancock who told the enquiry that "the doctrine of the UK was to plan for the consequences of a disaster. Can we buy enough body bags? Where are we going to bury the dead? And that was completely wrong" before going on to add the preparations for Covid were "woefully inadequate". It sounds like Matt Hancock is not very happy with whoever was Health Secretary during the time of the pandemic.

But, of course, it was Matt Hancock who was Health Secretary at the time of the pandemic (the Health Secretary who said he was putting a 'protective ring' around care homes who now says he had no idea how many care homes there were in the UK) just as Nadine Dorries was in the government she says failed the NHS. What is it with these people? Do they really take us to be that stupid? I suspect they do. After all, a country that gives Boris Johnson an eighty seat majority in a General Election is a country with a very large number of stupid, or ignorant, people in it. You can't blame them for taking us as fools when we've acted so foolishly.

But I think we're wising up and I think the Tory scum aren't reading the room as well as they used to. Following a court ruling that sending immigrants to Rwanda would be unlawful, the Home Secretary Suella Braverman claimed that this would be "disappointing for a majority of British people". Bollocks. As if she's spoken to the majority of British people. It's probably disappointing for the large minority of people who, quite remarkably, support the shower of shit that calls itself a government but the rest of us are kinder, more thoughtful, than that and we don't want cruel, hostile, and - let's not forget - totally unworkable policies put in place by nasty pieces of work like Braverman.  

In Exeter, in front of a majority Tory voting Question Time audience, Fiona Bruce asked people who supported the Rwanda policy to put their hands up. Not a single hand went up. Not one single hand. Even the Brexit editor of the Daily Telegraph, Dia Chakravarty, said the policy was never going to work, never ever had a chance of working, because it was a terrible policy. She suggested, probably correctly, that Sunak was happy with that. It was performative politics. There was no real policy in the first place.

Obviously, on the back of this some of the Tory headbangers have started to, again, make noises about leaving the ECHR (European Convention on Human Rights). It's worth remembering that the UK is a founder member of that organisation, that it is signed up to by 47 countries and not one single country has ever left it. If the UK were to leave it they would join Belarus (who never joined) and Russia (who were kicked out for invading Ukraine). Great company there.

There was a particularly nasty case of performative politics enacted by the Immigration Minister Robert Jenrick in the last week when he ordered that murals of Mickey Mouse and Baloo the bear from The Jungle Book be painted over at an asylum centre for children in Kent because they're "too welcoming". What a total and utter cunt. Or, as Alex Brooker had it on The Last Leg, "what a fucking weasel".

They're supposed to be welcoming. These people are children, some as young as nine years old, many orphans. They're scared, they're terrified and, as Brooker pointed out, that's the reason that they have murals of Tom and Jerry or Winnie the Pooh in children's hospitals etc; To try to give kids who are going through more difficult things than most adults will ever suffer some comfort, some hope.

Jenrick, a vile smug piece of shit with not a single redeeming quality, wants to take comfort and hope from immigrant children but, of course, the Tory party don't stop there. They want to, and do, take food from the mouths of many already living here. As it stands, there are 11,000,000 (ELEVEN MILLION) people facing food insecurity across the UK (14% of all adults). This is far worse than even "Project Fear" predicted post-Brexit. People interviewed on Newsnight spoke about cutting down to one meal a day, about losing five stone, about not being able to have their grandchildren come and stay with them anymore because they can't afford to feed them.

What's Sunak's answer to all this chaos and the ever deepening cost of living, for which read distribution of wealth, crisis? He asks us to hold our nerve. That's easy for him to say with his estimated wealth of £730,000,000 but the rest of us can't just hold our nerve and hope for the best. We need to take positive action to rid us of the problem and the problem is, above anything else, this awful Conservative party and its cruel, corrupt, and criminal politics. Someone bowl these fuckers out. Rishi Sunak, take your cricket bat back to the pavilion and take the rest of your shitty team with you. Howzat.