Just Line Up the People, Whose Lives They've Abused
A year ago today, if somebody had asked me for an opinion on local, national or international politics, I’d have struggled. I have views on various issues that relate to politics and some that fall entirely under that banner, but I have never sought any knowledge of this country’s political system or the people within it, because I find it to be almost impenetrable. If you try to look into Governmental matters you don’t find facts and occurrences, you find press releases. It doesn’t seem to be about things that are actually happening, more just who said what and how misrepresented it could possibly be. I realize that’s hugely over simplistic, but it was more or less how I viewed anything that could involve me having to vote, about a year ago.
I’m not entirely sure what it was about the 2010 elections that got everybody interested. It might have been the x-factor politics of the televised debates or the slightly overwhelming Conservative campaign posters. I think though, that for a lot of people and certainly most people my age, it was the undefined but nevertheless very strong sense, that this time around, you were going to be interested in the results. I had never been old enough to vote in a general election before, but didn’t particularly want to either, as a choice between several parties I don’t like seems pretty pointless. In that election though, people seemed to sense it might matter, that there was a chance we were collectively about to do something stupid, in frustration at the financial crisis. I believed for maybe a few weeks, that people hadn’t been convinced by the ridiculous press propaganda and that dreadful though they were, Labour would stay in place and something worse wouldn’t come along.
I didn’t vote for Labour. I voted for Lib Dems, I’ve always found them the least horrifying of the leading parties and this time around they had Nick Clegg at the helm, who briefly appeared to be a human being. I remember reading a statement from David Cameron in The Sun, saying “Nick Clegg is not the answer”, and thinking it couldn’t have been a clearer sign, he was a threat. Ironically it turned out Nick Clegg was exactly the answer, to putting a Conservative Government in power without them actually being elected.
I don’t know what I thought was going to happen, to be fair, but I really didn’t think the most popular party would be the Conservatives, even if they didn’t get enough votes to lead. For a while I was just pissed of at the country, anyone at all, country wide, even if I know and/or like them, who voted Conservative, they ought to be ashamed of themselves. It’s a very stubborn and inflexible view, but I can think of no other reason at all, to vote Conservative, apart from stupidity or selfishness, now, or at any other time. Yes the country was in a financial crisis, no, Gordon Brown didn’t cause a global recession. Labour led this country into an illegal and unjustifiable war, I have nothing positive to say about the previous Government at all, especially as Tony Blair has more or less back pedalled over his better moves in his autobiography. War leader he was, but he also introduced some brave and positive policies, such as the Hunting Act. He had now decided that not the war, but laws such as that one, were his great mistake, but that it was the fault of the left wing proletariat lobby in forcing action where it wasn’t needed. My dislike or intense hatred for the Conservative party, does not indicate any very positive feelings towards Labour in general, or anything less than contempt for the Blair/Brown Government.
The Conservatives though, who on earth thought that was the answer and where, exactly, were the millions of anti-Tory campaigners on voting day? As far as I could see, watching the UK on election night, Birmingham and the surrounding areas stayed Lib/Lab, Scotland stayed uniformly red, a few isolated constituencies elsewhere went for red or yellow. Then someone got a fat ass blue marker pen and vandalised the rest of the map with it. Proud though I am of Birmingham, what the hell went wrong with everyone else?! What did you think, that because Labour were shit the Conservatives had turned into a different party? There aren’t that many rich people in the country, who on earth, of average income and intelligence, thought voting Conservative was a good idea?!
I realise that voting Lib Dems was in hindsight, a whopper of a mistake, however Lib Dems had been in power in my constituency for a lot of years and they’re very good, our MP is particularly good. That I voted for Nick Clegg in good faith was, I realize now, somewhat moronic. The thing about that is though that I was nineteen, voting for the first time, a student, watching with increasing dread as the country plunged into a state of Torymergency. I couldn’t vote Labour, in my mind then it was very simple, even if any other party would have done the same in their position; we’re at war because of them. I would never vote Conservative. So there was the other guy, leading the Lib Dems, whose manifesto made a reasonable amount of sense, saying he wanted to get rid of Trident, commit to being part of Europe and improve education standards. People told me at the time, I was buying into bullshit, that a privately educated, Oxbridge guy like Nick Clegg, was not going to be the peace loving bringer of real change. I wasn’t the only one who believed him in spite of that. I was very much part of a certain demographic though; Students. To say he comprehensively betrayed every young voter dumb enough to believe a word he said, would be an understatement. He took the group who supported him most and stabbed them all in the back. To stand on national television and say he would not apologise for raising University fees to implausible sums for the vast majority of the country, was a bit like visibly swivelling on David Cameron’s fist was flicking the V’s at every single one of us.
I will admit to an error in judgement there, a fairly drastic error in judgement, but given the chance to vote again I’d still have voted Lib Dems. The key to the Conservatives not winning the election, for those attempting to stop it happening, was tactical voting, asking people in every constituency to vote for either Labour or Lib Dems, depending on which of them needed the smallest swing. I would have stuck to the same vote for that reason. I would, however, have done it in the full knowledge that Nick Clegg is a gutless, useless twerp, who gave an entire generation of student aged voters a level of political cynicism they would not usually have gained for another twenty years. The idea was never for the Lib Dems to win, it was for the Conservatives to lose. To join with and prop up the Conservative Government we’re laughingly calling a Coalition, was a pretty questionable move to say they least. I would have been willing to believe they had little choice about that, they had to choose one or the other and Labour had so many less MP’s than Conservative. The problem came when in the forming of the Coalition, the Lib Dems and Mr Clegg especially, seemingly mislaid the Lib Dem manifesto and accidentally photocopied the Conservative one instead. The Lib Dems were pretty much unelectable already, it has nearly been a century since their last appearance as the Liberals which funnily enough, ended with the forming of a coalition Government.
For all that though, what the Lib Dems and their git of a leader are, is largely irrelevant. Those in power are David Cameron and his cohorts. Someone told me, prior to the election, that “the problem with people like” me, is that I have stuck fast to the dyed in the wool views of my upbringing and wouldn’t give the Conservative party a chance should they change their manifesto to be identical to Labour’s. I think it was meant to imply that my hatred of the Conservative party is based on ingrained prejudice and not reality. It was also suggested it was inverse snobbery, that I hated David Cameron because he was Eton educated and so on. The fact I didn’t vote for Labour tends to suggest the first part isn’t true, that being very much my upbringing, and that I did vote for a party led by Nick Clegg, would marginally disagree with the second part. Where I came unstuck, with the idea that Cameron’s Conservatives might be different to former incarnations, was that if I were a politician whose views were not in anyway aligned with Conservatism, and I as an Oxford man didn’t want to be viewed in that light, but did want to lead a political party with a difference…It strikes me that the very last thing in the world I’d do, would be to join the Conservative party.
There was a chance though, however small, that the guy had a point and that I hated him automatically, meaning he and his leadership might not be as bad as I expected. In that case I could only say I would have been delighted to have been proven wrong. My fear about the Conservative party taking control was that people were about to be hit with a sledgehammer of budget related cuts and taxes, and that the hammer end was going to fall on the most vulnerable people in society. That the poor, the old, the education aged and the sick, were going to be hit hard. I didn’t vote for them and I couldn’t have done it, but what you can always say for Labour is that be it nothing but lip service, they will make a gesture towards protecting the poor and with it, all of the most vulnerable. Also though, it's not a hatred of something imaginary, the Conservative party have historically been the party their to serve only the rich, to preserve feudal barbarism masquerading as tradition, to take no responsibility for the welfare of ordinary people and to always fall either on the wrong side or just about toeing the line, of every kind of bigotry imaginable. I haven't just arbitrarily decided they aren't quite bohemian enough for me, they are evidenced throughout our history as being horrific.
What I absolutely did not see coming, was that my projection of how bad it would be, would fall short. I honestly can’t physically summon enough mortal disgust, to express in words just how bad this Government are. The cuts to school and university funding is bad, cuts to front-line services which Cameron swore blind wouldn’t happen, those are bad. Cuts to the NHS, all public services, the fact that they’re all indiscriminate and nonsensical, rather than ensure money is being saved in useful places and that services which are vital to the massive majority of people in the country are where the Government look to lessen the deficit, it’s all pretty poor. It’s when you get to specific examples, that it gets really sad.
To get into many details would take an even longer post than this, one, so I’ll stick to one example. The worst example for human empathy I’ve noticed, of all the cuts, are two to social services, which have occurred quietly and without any media attention being drawn to them at all. Mobility allowance and day care service for residential patients has been completely removed. It doesn't sound like a big deal. It’s one of those things you have to see the reality of, involving a real human being, to understand just how indefensible this is. The Government at this point must really be relying on people being so distracted by the economic crisis to get decisions like this to pass unchallenged. It means that residential care patients, people with mental and/or severe physical disabilities, who rely on the care of the state, can’t now leave their care homes as there's no support. As ever it comes down to money, if you can pay for private care that’s a different thing. Some residential patients have family who are able to take care of their needs on a limited basis for single days, but there are many, who don’t have any and those, thanks to new Government cuts, quite literally now have no way of getting out of their home. When exactly did it become acceptable, to treat people with disabilities like that? We now have no sense of responsibility for vulnerable adults in society at all, do we? It's dehumanizing, we are allowing human beings to be discounted, absolutely disregarded as having any kind of life importance or validity at all. It’s not a harsh but necessary cut, as our propaganda machine press are bleating, it’s a repugnant violation of human rights and common decency. I honestly don’t understand how we as a collective are accepting so many cuts of the same, brutal, greed driven crap.
Keeping within relative confines obviously, we’re a first world country which likes to think it’s free and democratic, so compared to somewhere like Saudi Arabia, our human rights probably aren’t too bad. Compared to any decent, honest, leadership though, with a passing notion that the days of feudalism and the black masses are actually gone by, we really are in a big vat of potentially bubonic plague infested shite. I will say for our freedom and democracy, that in May we all voted for a new Government, decided we didn’t want any of the leading parties to lead, so two of them now do, and we showed no will to have any of their manifesto’s put into practice, so now one of them is. It’s what I’d call a loose translation of freedom and democracy to say the least.
I’m not entirely sure what it was about the 2010 elections that got everybody interested. It might have been the x-factor politics of the televised debates or the slightly overwhelming Conservative campaign posters. I think though, that for a lot of people and certainly most people my age, it was the undefined but nevertheless very strong sense, that this time around, you were going to be interested in the results. I had never been old enough to vote in a general election before, but didn’t particularly want to either, as a choice between several parties I don’t like seems pretty pointless. In that election though, people seemed to sense it might matter, that there was a chance we were collectively about to do something stupid, in frustration at the financial crisis. I believed for maybe a few weeks, that people hadn’t been convinced by the ridiculous press propaganda and that dreadful though they were, Labour would stay in place and something worse wouldn’t come along.
I didn’t vote for Labour. I voted for Lib Dems, I’ve always found them the least horrifying of the leading parties and this time around they had Nick Clegg at the helm, who briefly appeared to be a human being. I remember reading a statement from David Cameron in The Sun, saying “Nick Clegg is not the answer”, and thinking it couldn’t have been a clearer sign, he was a threat. Ironically it turned out Nick Clegg was exactly the answer, to putting a Conservative Government in power without them actually being elected.
I don’t know what I thought was going to happen, to be fair, but I really didn’t think the most popular party would be the Conservatives, even if they didn’t get enough votes to lead. For a while I was just pissed of at the country, anyone at all, country wide, even if I know and/or like them, who voted Conservative, they ought to be ashamed of themselves. It’s a very stubborn and inflexible view, but I can think of no other reason at all, to vote Conservative, apart from stupidity or selfishness, now, or at any other time. Yes the country was in a financial crisis, no, Gordon Brown didn’t cause a global recession. Labour led this country into an illegal and unjustifiable war, I have nothing positive to say about the previous Government at all, especially as Tony Blair has more or less back pedalled over his better moves in his autobiography. War leader he was, but he also introduced some brave and positive policies, such as the Hunting Act. He had now decided that not the war, but laws such as that one, were his great mistake, but that it was the fault of the left wing proletariat lobby in forcing action where it wasn’t needed. My dislike or intense hatred for the Conservative party, does not indicate any very positive feelings towards Labour in general, or anything less than contempt for the Blair/Brown Government.
The Conservatives though, who on earth thought that was the answer and where, exactly, were the millions of anti-Tory campaigners on voting day? As far as I could see, watching the UK on election night, Birmingham and the surrounding areas stayed Lib/Lab, Scotland stayed uniformly red, a few isolated constituencies elsewhere went for red or yellow. Then someone got a fat ass blue marker pen and vandalised the rest of the map with it. Proud though I am of Birmingham, what the hell went wrong with everyone else?! What did you think, that because Labour were shit the Conservatives had turned into a different party? There aren’t that many rich people in the country, who on earth, of average income and intelligence, thought voting Conservative was a good idea?!
I realise that voting Lib Dems was in hindsight, a whopper of a mistake, however Lib Dems had been in power in my constituency for a lot of years and they’re very good, our MP is particularly good. That I voted for Nick Clegg in good faith was, I realize now, somewhat moronic. The thing about that is though that I was nineteen, voting for the first time, a student, watching with increasing dread as the country plunged into a state of Torymergency. I couldn’t vote Labour, in my mind then it was very simple, even if any other party would have done the same in their position; we’re at war because of them. I would never vote Conservative. So there was the other guy, leading the Lib Dems, whose manifesto made a reasonable amount of sense, saying he wanted to get rid of Trident, commit to being part of Europe and improve education standards. People told me at the time, I was buying into bullshit, that a privately educated, Oxbridge guy like Nick Clegg, was not going to be the peace loving bringer of real change. I wasn’t the only one who believed him in spite of that. I was very much part of a certain demographic though; Students. To say he comprehensively betrayed every young voter dumb enough to believe a word he said, would be an understatement. He took the group who supported him most and stabbed them all in the back. To stand on national television and say he would not apologise for raising University fees to implausible sums for the vast majority of the country, was a bit like visibly swivelling on David Cameron’s fist was flicking the V’s at every single one of us.
I will admit to an error in judgement there, a fairly drastic error in judgement, but given the chance to vote again I’d still have voted Lib Dems. The key to the Conservatives not winning the election, for those attempting to stop it happening, was tactical voting, asking people in every constituency to vote for either Labour or Lib Dems, depending on which of them needed the smallest swing. I would have stuck to the same vote for that reason. I would, however, have done it in the full knowledge that Nick Clegg is a gutless, useless twerp, who gave an entire generation of student aged voters a level of political cynicism they would not usually have gained for another twenty years. The idea was never for the Lib Dems to win, it was for the Conservatives to lose. To join with and prop up the Conservative Government we’re laughingly calling a Coalition, was a pretty questionable move to say they least. I would have been willing to believe they had little choice about that, they had to choose one or the other and Labour had so many less MP’s than Conservative. The problem came when in the forming of the Coalition, the Lib Dems and Mr Clegg especially, seemingly mislaid the Lib Dem manifesto and accidentally photocopied the Conservative one instead. The Lib Dems were pretty much unelectable already, it has nearly been a century since their last appearance as the Liberals which funnily enough, ended with the forming of a coalition Government.
For all that though, what the Lib Dems and their git of a leader are, is largely irrelevant. Those in power are David Cameron and his cohorts. Someone told me, prior to the election, that “the problem with people like” me, is that I have stuck fast to the dyed in the wool views of my upbringing and wouldn’t give the Conservative party a chance should they change their manifesto to be identical to Labour’s. I think it was meant to imply that my hatred of the Conservative party is based on ingrained prejudice and not reality. It was also suggested it was inverse snobbery, that I hated David Cameron because he was Eton educated and so on. The fact I didn’t vote for Labour tends to suggest the first part isn’t true, that being very much my upbringing, and that I did vote for a party led by Nick Clegg, would marginally disagree with the second part. Where I came unstuck, with the idea that Cameron’s Conservatives might be different to former incarnations, was that if I were a politician whose views were not in anyway aligned with Conservatism, and I as an Oxford man didn’t want to be viewed in that light, but did want to lead a political party with a difference…It strikes me that the very last thing in the world I’d do, would be to join the Conservative party.
There was a chance though, however small, that the guy had a point and that I hated him automatically, meaning he and his leadership might not be as bad as I expected. In that case I could only say I would have been delighted to have been proven wrong. My fear about the Conservative party taking control was that people were about to be hit with a sledgehammer of budget related cuts and taxes, and that the hammer end was going to fall on the most vulnerable people in society. That the poor, the old, the education aged and the sick, were going to be hit hard. I didn’t vote for them and I couldn’t have done it, but what you can always say for Labour is that be it nothing but lip service, they will make a gesture towards protecting the poor and with it, all of the most vulnerable. Also though, it's not a hatred of something imaginary, the Conservative party have historically been the party their to serve only the rich, to preserve feudal barbarism masquerading as tradition, to take no responsibility for the welfare of ordinary people and to always fall either on the wrong side or just about toeing the line, of every kind of bigotry imaginable. I haven't just arbitrarily decided they aren't quite bohemian enough for me, they are evidenced throughout our history as being horrific.
What I absolutely did not see coming, was that my projection of how bad it would be, would fall short. I honestly can’t physically summon enough mortal disgust, to express in words just how bad this Government are. The cuts to school and university funding is bad, cuts to front-line services which Cameron swore blind wouldn’t happen, those are bad. Cuts to the NHS, all public services, the fact that they’re all indiscriminate and nonsensical, rather than ensure money is being saved in useful places and that services which are vital to the massive majority of people in the country are where the Government look to lessen the deficit, it’s all pretty poor. It’s when you get to specific examples, that it gets really sad.
To get into many details would take an even longer post than this, one, so I’ll stick to one example. The worst example for human empathy I’ve noticed, of all the cuts, are two to social services, which have occurred quietly and without any media attention being drawn to them at all. Mobility allowance and day care service for residential patients has been completely removed. It doesn't sound like a big deal. It’s one of those things you have to see the reality of, involving a real human being, to understand just how indefensible this is. The Government at this point must really be relying on people being so distracted by the economic crisis to get decisions like this to pass unchallenged. It means that residential care patients, people with mental and/or severe physical disabilities, who rely on the care of the state, can’t now leave their care homes as there's no support. As ever it comes down to money, if you can pay for private care that’s a different thing. Some residential patients have family who are able to take care of their needs on a limited basis for single days, but there are many, who don’t have any and those, thanks to new Government cuts, quite literally now have no way of getting out of their home. When exactly did it become acceptable, to treat people with disabilities like that? We now have no sense of responsibility for vulnerable adults in society at all, do we? It's dehumanizing, we are allowing human beings to be discounted, absolutely disregarded as having any kind of life importance or validity at all. It’s not a harsh but necessary cut, as our propaganda machine press are bleating, it’s a repugnant violation of human rights and common decency. I honestly don’t understand how we as a collective are accepting so many cuts of the same, brutal, greed driven crap.
Keeping within relative confines obviously, we’re a first world country which likes to think it’s free and democratic, so compared to somewhere like Saudi Arabia, our human rights probably aren’t too bad. Compared to any decent, honest, leadership though, with a passing notion that the days of feudalism and the black masses are actually gone by, we really are in a big vat of potentially bubonic plague infested shite. I will say for our freedom and democracy, that in May we all voted for a new Government, decided we didn’t want any of the leading parties to lead, so two of them now do, and we showed no will to have any of their manifesto’s put into practice, so now one of them is. It’s what I’d call a loose translation of freedom and democracy to say the least.