Brexit Mayhem

I’ve never yet blogged here about UK politics, but the country is now at a historical turning point and that needs to be logged and dated. As for politics and the duplicitous minority party of Tory aliens who are behind the current debacle, I daren’t, in detail, get started because I’d never finish – from its lies, deception, the use of Goebbels-type propaganda, distraction techniques, secrecy, proven illegality, the deliberate and incendiary whipping-up of class, race and xenophobic rhetoric, corruption, constitutional mayhem, subversion of democracy, instituting a classic civil war scenario, to say nothing of the continuing destruction of the economic, business, social and cultural infrastructures of the country.

I’ve been in politics all my life, from being born into a Socialist household in the middle of WW2, through teaching politics and political theory to being active in the field, and have never seen anything so structurally damaging as what’s been happening since Cameron took office and what he did with his ‘party first’ Brexit referendum; and, believe me, I've seen some in my longish life, including the ruinous Thatcherite years. BoJ and the present glut of Tories in power might as well be on Mars, so divorced are they from the damage their ‘me first’ policies and ideology have caused. We are now rapidly descending into being a banana republic, though, this week, the would-be despot’s shtick has been lopped a little by the Supreme Court. Mind, if the branch is so rotten, there’s often a need to take an axe to the tree and destroy its root.

And now we have this oafish goon, Johnson, who refuses to apologise over his remarks about the murdered Jo Cox, murdered as a direct result of his, the ERG’s and Farage’s inflammatory rhetoric used in the Brexit referendum campaign, as well as refusing to apologise to people, Queen and Parliament over illegally proroguing Parliament. How anyone can say that there’s an intelligence that cares for ordinary people and their needs behind his buffoonish exterior, I can’t imagine. All we get is bluster, bullying and the dodging of questions, certainly no considered policy statements or even Brexit statements so far, together with which he’s shown that he hasn’t the common decency and manners of a plague-ridden rattus rattus, let alone a human being.

On top of that, he now has the temerity, after all the damage he and the Tories have done since 2010, to attempt to electioneer on the basis that he’s a supporter of the people and that any group or party opposing the Tories is to be seen as the inferior part of his ‘people v. the elite’ campaign - utterly spurious populist nonsense, of course. Tribune of the people? How dare he!

This is the bumptious boor who was born to privilege and has taken advantage of what that has offered throughout his corrupt and corrupting life. This was the crass fool who deliberately drove 21 MPs out of his own party, leaving the Tories as a minority government, but one that is now hard core ultra-right. This is the shyster who, backed by the psychopathic Cummings, tried to drive the prorogation railroad through Parliamentary procedure and the Constitution only for it to be stopped in its tracks by the Supreme Court’s ruling that his act was illegal. This is the political clown who has succeeded in uniting opposition parties to the extent that, to date, he hasn’t had one of his Parliamentary motions passed through the House since he took office. This is the little tin god who can't even get a presentable Brexit policy together and is making every effort not to have one. How any ordinary voter can still support the man and not see what he and the current Tory Party truly are – tyrannical, fascistic, without humanity or scruple – is beyond me as much as it’s beyond rationality and reality.

Worse, there's a deliberate madness to the rhetoric now being used. It's about BoJ/Cummings investing in it to the extent that there could be more murders and riots on the streets. They'd then exploit that to a) whip up more division in the country by using further rhetoric along the lines of "if you want the rioting, etc., to stop, get a no-Brexit deal through the HoC," as Cummings more or less blackmailingly indicated yesterday, and b) to invest even more in the monstrous pre-election gobshite of the 'people v. the elite' in order to influence the election's outcome.  What they're doing is attempting to create a violent reality in order to force through their aims; it's pure Goebbels-type psychological manipulation.

We saw these same tactics used 80-odd years ago by the Nazis in their sweep to power. It's terrifying to see them used now by hardline no-dealers. More terrifying is that too many ordinary people haven't seen through this and dismiss it as fear-mongering, then revert to emotion-laden opinion based on the lies and soundbites they've been fed. There's nothing that BoJ/Cummings won't stoop to in order to gain their ends.

And people still say that democracy hasn’t been hi-jacked and that the British people are not governed by a despotic system constituting PM and Cabinet? Yeah, right! In fact, it's about as far right as you can get short of outright Nazism.

More on this
 

Abutment

 

Peonies burst from the border,
red shot on the wind
flung up to a downing sky.

These are the flowers beside your bed.
They’ve been dropping since morning, the petals,
clotting the wood while your breathing slows. 

Arthur’s Seat

 

You climb. I slip whole.

The grass bloodies,

crows crack overhead.

It’s too late for more, you say.

The loch’s wide water

blackens behind us.

Time to go back.

Tracked over peaks

the last crow dips,

flicks into silence.

How it Ends

 

We exist beyond aching,

weak at the end

as a free hawk

drops into gravity,

resolving the hunter’s shot.

Faith travels no further 
than hope in the search 
for life in crabs that fall
from the relative branch:

strength turns lonely

when rowan roots withdraw
from the mountain.

Where is the absolute pulse 
in a lamb’s death in winter folds, 
through the heart that beats 
for what stays whole beyond 
the slicing burn in summer?

The night turns here:

the moon plays lucid.

I map uncertain stars,

count revolutions and rulers

while the world spins,

tips under my feet.