Album Diaries 4

George Osborne’s cuts on benefits come in to force. The man who along with Cameron was ousted from the right pushed through cuts on the most vulnerable in society that will now devastate the people who currently rely on food banks to feed themselves and their families. That’s pretty much peak Conservative Party. It only gets worse from here for poor, disabled people and widows. Not exactly first on everyone’s list of who owes the government money but everyone isn’t the previous chancellor of the exchequer. And they’ve just been ousted from the right. And the Conservative Party are polling well amongst prospective British voters. What is the matter. What has the world done to the British public that their is such support for degrading and starving the poor from even the poor themselves. What a chip on the shoulder and how heavy the weight of this will weigh for years to come on the people either cheering for this or who have managed to convince themselves that this is awful but necessary. Suicides up amongst disabled people forced to try and work, punished into further poverty by a system that is rewarded for their punishment. What is it about the left wing that you find so clumsy, or bleeding heart that you prefer to allow disabled, poor, old people to be driven to such distress that their preferred way out is suicide. A long term economic plan. A big train. Tax cuts for the richest people in the country. Sweetheart deals for companies that will almost certainly bail on the country when the cost of Brexit fails. Job creators. Landlords. Nuclear weapons. Fair to accuse me of talking the country down here but it’s hardly worse than breaking it down with political power. But we will continue to reduce the living standards of people in poverty. And there will be less places and people for them to turn to as life gets harder for everyone. Many people are active in resisting these cuts and have been since they were announced. But ideologically the Conservative Party are inclined to increase the wealth of rich people according to them because of a belief that wealth trickles down or that rich people create jobs when the reality is that successful businesses are often started by people who weren’t born rich and who have never had to work, relying on their inherited fortune or investment in properties and land but who were born much more modestly. And the reality is that everyone who is not rich is looked down upon and we are lied to constantly and vindictively that if only we worked harder or smarter then we would all be millionaires. We are told that it is our own fault that we were not born rich and that there’s something inherently better about the people who are that somehow makes it OK for poor, disabled or otherwise sick people to be discarded like they are somehow defective. And one of the reasons for this, I think is because everyone even the wealthiest rely on poor people for the life that they’re living. All of us depend on poor working people for the work that they do which were they to stop working altogether much of society would fall to pieces. And so the message from the Conservative Party for reasons known only to themselves and their consciences is work harder. Work smarter. And you will be just like the celebrities that you see on TV and on the internet. One of these days that messaging is going to lose it’s power. At least this is what I hope because things are getting worse and they are already as bad as they could be. At the moment if there was an election called nobody would win. There would be a huge transfer of seats at both ends of the Brexit divide and both of the current strongest parties would lose out significantly. What happens after that I think is that we’ll have two substantial blocks of parties and maybe some independent mps and both sides will negotiate amongst themselves to form the next government. If this goes well we’ll avoid the worst thing that could possibly happen to this country but that doesn’t mean things will be great. The Liberal Democrats surely cannot go back into a coalition with the Conservative Party. Surely not. But time will tell. They have positioned themselves firmly in opposition to Brexit BUT it’s not inconceivable that under the guise of once again moderating the Conservative Party’s approach to governing, in particular around the exiting of the EU, they would consider taking an offer to go back into power once again in the minority and with promises that they will break immediately because they will be outvoted. Surely this cannot happen and the Liberal Democrats, the Labour Party, the SNP, the Green Party and any other centre or left wing parties or independents will stand together, perhaps with some co-ordination to prevent a UKIP and Conservative Party coalition from finishing what they’ve started. Surely. Or maybe we’ll all be convinced that everything will be fine if we get rid of some more migrants, or we cuts pay for nurses and teachers, or we just close down schools and hospitals to pay for George Osborne’s friends and admirers to pay less tax, to pay no tax maybe. Maybe we’ll decide that Nigel Farage knows what’s best for us and we’ll go to war with Spain and help Trump build a wall and fire from warships at asylum seekers in the Mediterranean and help Saudi Arabia kill civilians in Yemen and cover for America the next time a hospital and all of its patients are bombed to demoralise fundamentalist terrorists in Syria. What is the reason to feel good about any of this current situation we find ourselves in that the Brexiteers are so fucking happy about right now. What is your problem.