“I’m tellin y’all, it’s a sabotage”
.Sometimes, actually it’s more like often, or mostly, although really it’s all the bloody time, I find it hard to begin a post like this about the latest boghole of sucking despair this medieval touring troupe of armpit-bubo enthusiasts (some naïve jobsworths still call them Her Majesty’s Government of the United Kingdom and Northern Ireland, but I’m not into kinky roleplay) have dropped us all into. It’s not because there’s nothing to write about, or because it’s too complicated to explain, because neither of those things are true. They’re always shitting more beds than a coprophiliac let loose in Ikea and the reasoning is always garishly simple; they’re nasty, greedy bullies with used sickbags for souls and very demanding donors to keep fat and happy. No, it’s because they’re doing so much damage, all at once to so many areas of national life, and they’re not even trying to hide it beyond a gossamer thin weave of blatant lies and sneery trolling, so it’s hard to know where to begin, where to stop, what to include, what to leave out.
Frankly I shouldn’t have to do this. The multi-billion-pound News industry operating out of this country should be having an absolute field day exposing Tory maleficence. The reporters and journalists who work within it should be staging daily (hourly) knife fights from which only the strongest and most ambitious emerge with the right to publish the latest scoop on Government lies and corruption. Journalism schools should be hiring armed security teams to mine the perimeter and man sniper-posts just to keep their students from being kidnapped in their hundreds to crew all of the prime-time documentaries being made right now detailing the Conservative Party’s rapid descent into authoritarian fascism and performative ethno-nationalism. My quota of goggle-eyed howling should be reduced to a few curt “Fucking bastard shit got nailed!” links and the odd paragraph where I explain the difference between ‘skinnydipping’ and ‘Skinning and Dipping’ in the context of British Judicial tradition and treason trials.
That’s what should be happening. But it’s not. Because the Tory Party is a tool of the same wealthy and corrupt bastards who own our Infotainment industry and telling the truth about how badly this country is being dry-fucked by them is not a Narrative they have any intention of running with. On the contrary, don’t you know that everything is awesome? England are in a major International Football Final for the first time since 1966 and they might not lose! Wimbledon upon us and while we definitely won’t win we’ve found a pretty
Sino-RumanianBritish girl to clap madly for! Somewhere, right now, horses are racing and the Queen is getting just a little bit richer than she was yesterday. The sun is (sometimes) out, summer is here, and the time is right for spend, spend, spend. To hell with the little matter of a global pandemic, because Daddy wants a suite on the brand-new superyacht and all y’all are paying for it.So, what’s happening that has so ground my gears? Haven’t you heard? Covid is dead, baby. Dead and gone. Flobalob took on that sneaky foreign interloper with the shining sword of Vaccination and he lopped its dreadlocked head clean off in one swell foop. Huzzah! Now that The Vaccine (that Johnson personally milks from his own pendulous breasts each morning before breaking yet another Peloton record and satisfying not one, not two, but three giggling handmaids with his manly proportions [steady on, Ed] has categorically broken the link between the Virus and any symptoms worse than a mild cold or a minor STD, the time has very definitely come for the British People to receive the gift of Freedom from their fearless Leader’s chamois-smooth hands and march forth in serried lines towards the bright, cloudless dawn of a Post-Viral age to eat, drink and basically live it large for what remains of this most summery summer of all summers.
Yeah. Right. Hit the brakes there, sparky, and pass me my biggest stitch-ripper, ‘cos we got some real major unpicking to before this heap of cock-cough goes out of those doors.
What’s basically happening right now in Tory Britain is the same thing that happened last year around this time. With the summer holidays almost upon us and a long period of Covid-gloom to shake off, Johnson’s cabal of conscienceless child-killers are strapping on their biggest clown shoes and tooting the stripey horn for reopening everything so money can start flowing back into the coffers of their Party donors. A year ago the Murdoch-operated bankerbot Rishi Sunak, Goldman Sachs alumni and Chancellor of the Exchequer, stood at a podium and told everyone that their Government had defeated Covid and were now going to remove all of those bothersome restrictions they’d never wanted to impose in the first place, so that Britain’s population of ambulatory credit-cards could flood back onto public transport, jam themselves into crowded workplaces, and generally enjoy the freedom to ‘Eat Out to Help Out’ with their £10 publicly-funded voucher as the Good Lord intended. As a direct result of this delusional announcement hundreds of thousands of people were infected with the virus, tens of thousands died, a nice environment was constructed in which to cook-up specialist variants for export, and the UK enjoyed truly world-beating status around the top of all the You Fucked Up Covid leaderboards. Now they’re at it again, except this time with extra sprinkles and 110% more disinterest in the human cost of their decisions.
You may remember last week when Johnson’s deeply compromised whipping-boy of a Health Secretary Matt ‘Grannykiller’ Hancock was
sackedforced to resign byJohnson / shame / the threat of angelic justicepanic amongst Tory backbench MPs after Murdoch’s Sun tabloid (Liverpool’s most popular loo-roll alternative) published video footage of him re-enacting school disco face-gobbles of the ‘80s with a Private Health Industry lobbyist he’d given a publicly-funded job to in violation of the same Covid restrictions he was telling everyone else to follow, or else. Well, leaving aside the inherently icky matter of Hancock’s intimate transgressions, and the quite important questions of who leaked that video and how it came to be taken, the current whispergossip is that Hancock was actually a thumb in the dyke where dropping restrictions were concerned, and his removal was orchestrated in order to open up the Health Secretary role for someone much more willing to play the favoured tunes of the UK’s own version of the Freedumb Caucus.Enter Sajid Javid, another Big Finance loanee to the domestic political theatre, this time via the disaster-capitalist school of Deutche Bank, though clearly his genetic matrix was cooked up in the clone-nurseries of the Sontaran Empire. A hardcore libertarian fuckwit and a yet another disciple of Randian theology (Northern Conservative Reformed Temple of the Holy Dollar and the Divine Resurrection of 2008) Javid took a whole fifty seconds to effortlessly master the entirety of his new Health brief (Fuck Up – Sell Off) before bounding into the nearest press conference, non-ironically assuming a wide-straddle power stance like he’s not a neutered Reek to the corporate Boltons of this world, and informing the witless sheeple who were now under his all-seeing yoke that he’d had enough of their weak-willed collaboration with the non-dividend producing Virus. The time had come for Britons to reject cultural-Marxist claptrap like ‘social distancing’, ‘exponential rate of infection’ and ‘viral mutation’ in favour of the iron hard truth that Work Makes Free and only snowflake cowards with the lazy bodies of workshy untermensch don’t understand that the paramount duty of every capable prole-drone in these Sceptred Isles is to enthusiastically assist in wringing every possible drop of profitability from their worthless half-lives until they finally see death as a gracious boon for which they will not be personally charged (though their work-kin, of course, will be).
Light restrictions that only a few days ago were common-sense obstacles placed in the way of the Virus are being scrapped left, right and centre. No mask mandates, no social distancing, no restrictions on occupancy, all gone. Enacted instantly and in the face of loud opposition from every independent scientific expert in the five closest solar systems the signal rang out loud and clear, in what I can only assume to be an homage to that great humanitarian thinker and results-based visionary Don Rumsfeld, sweep it all up, things connected and otherwise. Get back to the office (ground rents, bay-bee!), get back on the buses and the trains (fare gouging, hell yeah), get into those eateries and pubs and clubs and bistros and restaurants and anywhere else that money could change hands. Like a cut-scene we weren’t expecting we were suddenly living in a different country than the day before, one where everyone was double-spike vaccinated and therefore somehow immune to the Virus. It truly was our Independence Day.
Except, of course, that was a movie about incompetent aliens, while this is real life and we’re just ruled by them. The country isn’t fully vaccinated. In fact, the rate of vaccination is slowing and falling behind those evil Eurotrash schemers (cue – blackout on those comparison figures now, yeah?) and with the Johnson-Modi Variant (Delta my arse) proving quite virulent enough to infect even the 60+% of the population who have had both jabs, what we’re looking at over the next few months of gung-ho Party Time are the absolutely perfect conditions for the creation of one or more vaccine-resistant mutations. No restrictions + semi-vaccinated population + time = Variant Factory. They know this. They’ve been told this. They just don’t give a fuck. There were 60,000 mostly maskless people stuffed into Wembley stadium to see ENGLAND’S HARRY KANE and ten other people overcome Denmark’s brave attempt to lose to Italy. How many of them do we think are going to be playing host to naughty Mister Covid right now? Scotland’s Tartan Army took hundreds and hundreds of cases back across The Wall when they left London last month, so I should think it’s a goodly number. Wimbledon’s strawberries and cream diet and transient population of Good Bloodlines certainly won’t prove to be a deterrent to infection (I hear that Middleton girl may have been around some presumably asymptomatic variant-vector when she visited Centre Court and has had to go into isolation, and she’s the white Princess) so we’ve got that to factor in as well. They are deliberately stripping away any defences the population has at a time when the spread of the JM variant is shooting up faster than late-90’s Downey Jr and fucking boasting about it. Get ready for 100,000 cases a day, Javid tells us, like each one is a brilliant financial trade he’s personally negotiated, and just to make sure all vectors are levered wide open, let’s put a stop to closing school bubbles when cases are confirmed, shall we? How are we ever going to achieve ‘herd immunity’ if we won’t let the kids take part in spreading the C-love? And while we’re at it, about those onerous child labour laws…
Sigh. What a fucking marmalade.
Why? Why would they do something so long-term destructive? Well, speaking just for myself, I don’t think they’ve got much of an interest in the long-term. That’s something that can be massaged into shape by friendly media coverage and multi-million pound PR campaigns, or if you’re totally mercenary you can just take a step back into the private sector and reap your rewards for voting to funnel as much public money as possible into the bank accounts of the people and organisations now employing you. Fuck it, it’s not their problem. What *is* a problem is the short term. The Tories just lost one very safe seat in a bye-election to the Liberal Democrats (a safe repository for Tory protest votes since forever) and failed to take another seat from Labour in a Red Wall Leave voting constituency (which they’d been forecasted to take with ease) despite having a Russian-funded faux-left candidate splitting the Labour vote. Plus, Johnson’s favoured candidate failed to oust Covid-sceptic Graham Brady from his post of Chairman of the 1922 Committee (basically the Club for Backbench Tory MPs where leadership challenges are arranged) in a defeat seen as a warning of discontent in Flobalob’s performance. It seems Tory MPs fear that the ongoing drip-drip-drip of scandal and corruption is hurting Johnson’s electability argument, and though the main Opposition Party’s lurch to the right has rendered it about as much of a threat to the Tories as any other well-trained sub-gimp, he clearly fears that his own personal grip on Number 10 is steadily slipping away from him. Sharks, they are circling.
More to the point. September is when Parliament has to vote again on the Covid Emergency laws that give the Government so much leeway to outlaw protest and – yum-yum – hand out multi-billion contracts to party donors without oversight or culpability. If the nutters on the Covid Recovery Group (who map almost perfectly onto the European Research Group of Brextremist Ultras who made Theresa May’s premiership such a well-earned misery) decide to repeat their Brexit shenanigans and abstain or even vote against re-enactment of the Covid laws, Johnson would (possibly/probably) have to rely on Labour votes to get it through. Not a look he wants to be wearing after Brexit, Media hand-jobs and Labour’s self-harming right-wing handed him an 80-seat majority back in 2019. Installing Javid to cry “Hail Sontar!” and let rip the Dogs of More (Covid) gives that bunch what they want and lets him tout ‘Freedom Day’ as an expression of national will, while always giving him leeway to place all the blame for what is bound to happen on Javid and his ‘too-enthusiastic’ push for ‘normality’.
In addition, there are a whole swathe of radical power-grabs on the docket that the Tory Party’s owner caste wants rammed through. The Police Bill will make protesting illegal and could see people sent to jail for 10 years for ‘damaging a memorial’, for which read toppling slaver’s statues. It also makes being homeless, a Traveller or a rough-sleeper a crime if the Police or landowners decide it is, which of course, they will. They’re changing the Official Secrets Act to make it a criminal offense to have any connection to the dispersal of any leaked information that the Government chooses to label ‘secret’, which pretty much makes it illegal for any journalist to publish information the Government doesn’t want the public to know about, doesn’t it? Oh, and our venomous Home Secretary, the vile Pritti “I once got sacked for secretly plotting to funnel UK aid money to the Israeli Security Forces” Patel wants it to be illegal for anyone to ‘assist’ with the arrival of a non-approved refugee or asylum seeker on UK soil, which yes, does include any volunteer Lifeboat crew foolish enough to pluck drowning children from stormy seas. She also wants to be able to dump asylum seekers in offshore concentration camps while her lawyers use public money to prosecute them for daring to pollute our sacred purity, which is pretty fringe behaviour for the daughter of Ugandan immigrants but is absolutely on brand for a Tory who was found guilty of breaking the Ministerial code by bullying staff to the tune of £370,000 in legal fees and damages but for some reason didn’t have to resign.
Ah, sod it, I’m just ranting now. The bottom line is these Nether-spawned vermin are trying to kill us all while simultaneously ensuring that anyone who does survive the Plague will probably be locked up for it, and I’m at a loss to see how they get stopped.
But still. The Football! I wonder if English ‘fans’ will maintain their high behavioural standards by booing the players for their non-violent protest against institutional racism and attacking Italian families on buses as they did some unforgivably foreign Danes after the last game. Bring on the meteor.
But not until it gets to penalties.
germy
germy
Another Scott
Thanks Tony! It really is astounding that the people there seemingly are willing to mostly just sit back and let BoJo and his minions do what they want.
:-/
Cheers,
Scott.
NotMax
“Other than that, how did you like the play, Mrs. Lincoln?”
:)
cintibud
Wow, sounds like a prequel to V for Vendetta
trollhattan
@germy:
Huh, interesting. Everybody’s a critic.
Do the swells at Goodwood need to be on the lookout for riot cops removing this?
smith
@Another Scott: Wow — charging people to get tested. Guaranteed to lower infection numbers. Why didn’t TFG think of that?
germy
@trollhattan:
It was a protest against Murdoch, the guy who tries to destroy every country he does business in.
Mary G
You’re way down the road to being a third world country ruled by corrupt fascists, Tony. I’m sorry.
This was shocking to me:
Blatantly dumping raw sewage into the ocean, yikes.
mrmoshpotato
Thank you for gracing us with such prose for free. I hope it’s cathartic for you, Tony Jay.
Chetan Murthy
I’ve been bit-by-bit more alarmed at the news about the Delta and Lambda variants. One might say that whereas we all speculated as to whether covid would mutate to become less (or more) deadly, it instead mutated to become more *contagious*. I read to day that some epidemiologist estimates that to reach herd immunity against Delta, we’ll need 95% vaccination rates ….. which is unachievable. And meanwhile, even if Delta doesn’t put vaccinated people in the hospital, it *does* infect them, and much more effectively than earlier variants.
At which point, we come back to Tony’s (accurate) prognostication that we’re [eta]
notin a race against time for the emergence of a vaccine-busting variant: it’ll happen sooner or later, and then we’re all back in our houses until a new round of vaccines is distributed.Ugh.
Tony Jay
In defence of those supporting the Tories and keeping them insulated from too many difficult questions about where all this is headed, consider that the option to Johnson and Co was a Party that wanted to redirect the spigot of public cash into things like rebuilding national infrastructure, higher wages for the hoi polloi and restoring the big monopolies to public ownership. Horrible, horrible socialistic stuff that would barely create a single multi-millionaire or entice a billionaire to fund a cushy thinktank position for the right kind of person.
If borderline fascist authoritarianism was the only alternative to that, who can blame them? /s
Raoul Paste
@cintibud: this is exactly what I was thinking
Chetan Murthy
@Tony Jay: Tony, how long does it take you to write something like this piece? I mean …. it’s gotta take a long time: every sentence is replete with zingers, and that doesn’t come without some application, one would think. Just curious.
P.S. Unless you’re just naturally a brilliant writer, I suppose. But even they (so one reads) *work* for every line.
trollhattan
@germy:
I get that, and was surprised at the similarity between the two pieces. Murdoch is like a competent Trump, to the dismay of about everybody.
Tony Jay
@Chetan Murthy:
This one, a couple of hours on Friday morning, on and off, but some of the longer ones can take me a few days to really drain the bile-ducts.
It’s therapy, more than anything. Keeping all this disbelieving anger inside would be very bad for my digestion. And I like digestion.
ETA – And to be honest, I don’t want to just be angry. I’d rather make people laugh while venting. Otherwise, aren’t I just making everyone feel worse?
trollhattan
@Mary G:
“Privatizing” public utilities just should not happen. Ugh.
Stockton, CA once turned their water system over to a UK-Colorado private joint venture with predictable results, then had to battle to wrest it back.
Then there’s PG&E, striving to keep shareholders happy by seeking a ginormous electricity rate hike just as fire season kicks off.
Tony Jay
@mrmoshpotato:
Mi ranto es su ranto,
I’d check my Spanglish with a native, but we kicked ’em all out the bloody country, didn’t we? #selfownballpunch
Geminid
@Tony Jay: Your informative contributions are much appreciated here. I have a question, though. I understand Britons do a lot of betting on everything including politics. Is there an over/under play on the PM’s future tenure?
Catherine D.
Lovely post! BTW, I recently heard Nish Kumar on a podcast describe Pritti Patel as every Asian kid’s least favorite auntie. Made me laugh – my ethnic group has those.
Tony Jay
@Geminid:
Honestly, I couldn’t tell you. I haven’t put a bet on anything since my Mum put 5p on a horse in the Grand National for me and the poor creature died of a cardiac arrest after crossing the finish line.
That said, I wouldn’t put any of my dead nag winnings on St Chubby of Chequers seeing out another year. He’s bleeding out under the deep blue water and when it happens, it’ll happen quickly.
Tony Jay
@Catherine D.:
There’s a reason the Tory Boys running the BBC put a bullet in the head of Kumar’s ‘The Mash Report‘, and it’s because of stuff like that.
Thou Shalt Not Mock The Masters.
smith
@Tony Jay: Wouldn’t any Tory successor be subject to the exact same imperatives and end up floundering the same way?
Tony Jay
@smith:
Yes, but in the meantime think of the opportunities for pleasing the very important people who can offer you multiple opportunities for making a lot of money doing very little after you move out of Number 10.
As for the serious problems created by decades of Tory rule and the disaster of Brexit… someone else’s problem, innit?
Catherine D.
@Tony Jay: Radio 4 comedies are still managing to slip a shiv in here and there.
smith
@Tony Jay: So basically your Wingnut Welfare system works pretty much the same way ours does.
Tony Jay
@Catherine D.:
Wait until the diktat about getting more ‘conservative comedy’ on the airwaves really starts squeezing out the faces that don’t fit. Nobody takes stuff like seriously until they realise the people holding the purse strings really mean it, and by then it’s too late.
Tony Jay
@smith:
The Proof of Concept provided by your version proved far too enticing for our nutters to ignore. All that job security, just for being a hateful prick? What a bargain!
Andrew
Should we worry about Britain turning into a European version of Venezuela?
smith
@Andrew: Or a European version of Alabama?
Catherine D.
@Tony Jay: Depressing, but true. Back to the days of pirate radio on boats!
ETA and podcasts.
Tony Jay
@Andrew:
It’s funny, because that’s exactly what the horrified Establishment insisted would happen if Johnson’s mob weren’t elected.
No, I’d worry more about us becoming a European version of one of the Deep Red States, Low regulation, low taxes on business, services privatised or cut to the bone, ideological hostility to the poor and ‘do gooders’, voting disenfranchisment as state policy, militarised Police to enforce racist laws and wall-to-wall propaganda to convince enough of the remaining voters that this is all necessary to make sure that they don’t lose what little they have left to ‘those people’.
Plus much shitter television programs.
Brit in Chicago
@Tony Jay: But people in the deep red states here get some Federal goodies—Social Security, most obviously—and the states are to some extent constrained by Federal law. Nothing comparable in Brexitania.
Tony Jay
@Brit in Chicago:
Yeah, but no analogy is absolute.
HypersphericalCow
I was going to ask about ENGLAND specifically going to the finals, but you alluded to it; I can’t imagine that will make the UNION stronger.
ETA: they got so goddamn lucky with the Dane goalkeeper bouncing that penalty shot. You can’t plan for that.
Thor Heyerdahl
Damn after reading that, I almost need to light up a Benson & Hedges. Brilliant and cutting.
Steve in the ATL
@Chetan Murthy: IRL Tony Jay is John Cleese, Benny Hill, Graham Norton, and Father Ted
dimmsdale
@Tony Jay: What is so irremediably sad abut reading your posts, Tony, is the awareness of a growing culture of impunity, the simple fact of no consequences EVER for what used to be (and for some, still is) sociopathic behavior on the part of your (and our) ruling elites. Coupled with a “wild stallion suddenly freed from restraints” sense, on the part of our reigning sociopaths, that (as you point out) they don’t have to hide it anymore. In some ways the US is the canary in the coal mine to the UK–four years of Trump, and the utter lack of consequences to ALL the Trumpian malfeasance–tell Boris and Mogg and their ilk exactly what they need to know, to plot their own future conduct. From your dispatches, I gather that the UK press–far, FAR more than the supine US media, which is bad enough–actively advances the looting of public resources, and of public morals and decency, that Boris undertakes with brutal enthusiasm. There’s truly no bottom–and even here, where some semblance of rational, moral, decent governance has been re-established, our newly restored “bottom” still feels like a temporary and somewhat precarious thing. I wish you and your country a restoration of the same, somehow, hopefully while there’s still a country there to redeem. Thanks for your work.
The Pale Scot
@Chetan Murthy:
Writing is quick and can be quite easy, it’s the rewriting that wears you.
The difference between the right word and the wrong word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug
M. Twain
dimmsdale
@dimmsdale: Editing my comment above to add: your vision of Britain becoming like one of our red states feels tragically accurate. In particular, I’m sure Boris & Co. will find a way to turn one of your most prestigious and desirable exports–your TV programming–into sh*t, because, of COURSE they will. Whatever the UK variant of ‘critical race theory’ is going to be, it’s coming for your intellectual and artistic standards, as it is for ours too.
Tony Jay
@dimmsdale:
May I just say, before I go to bed, these are all great points well made and I hope I see you posting here more.
Brachiator
This is a wickedly accurate description of the guy.
Wasn’t he the former Chancellor, and praised for resigning rather than meekly rolling over for Boris Johnson and his former henchman Dominic Cummings?
Tony Jay
@Brachiator:
That’s the guy. What a peach, eh? What an absolute delight.
egorelick
I thought Starmer was a bit leftie compared to the whole Labor party if not as left as Corbyn? Also, didn’t Brexit defeat Labor in a way that it didn’t tear the Tories apart? Really enjoyed the update so you accomplished your goal at least for this reader.
Momentary
Tony is brilliant but I gotta say I wish he qualified his rants a bit to distinguish between Britain and England, because the view from Wales, Scotland and NI is not the same. Especially for a mostly American audience who might not know that, for example, the heinous Javid only has the power to dictate Covid restrictions or lack thereof for England, not for the other three countries who are not going to go along. And especially as BoJo is on a mission to make everyone think it’s all one country and roll back devolution, so please don’t go along with his frame!
Momentary
An analogy might be if the USA was made up of just Texas (England), New York (Scotland), Massachusetts (Wales), and New Hampshire (NI), and giant Texas was going double down Randian wingnut while small NY and MA man the barricades and try to preserve sanity and NH does the same whilst dealing with its gun nuts and trying to decide whether it’d be better off reunited with Quebec. Tortured analogy but better than just calling it all Britain IMHO.