Representative

This is the Palace of Westminster.

It's where Parliament sits, when it does. That's where the laws of the country get settled. There's more to it than that in the grand scheme of things, but for a basic overview, that will probably suffice.

The people in the two houses of Parliament - the House of Commons and the House of Lords - are really, really not like you and me.

No, I'm not going to repeat some weird antisemitic conspiracy theory involving shape changing animals and mind control. I'm going to prove it with two of my favourite tools: Statistics and Anecdotes.

Lets start with the stats, shall we?

The average age of a person in the UK - as of 2020 - is 40.5 years of age. There's approximately 99 men per every 100 women, leading to women making up 50.25% of the population. Around about 87% of the UK is white, and 60% identifies as Christian of whatever denomination. (The next highest religious choice is None, which sits at around 26%.) The average household income annually is £29,800 - though we're going to see a graph about that later that might pique some interest. 7% of the children in the UK attend private schools (the cost of attendance of these schools is on average around £17,200 a year), and around 50% of those who leave compulsory schooling in the UK attend higher education afterwards (which costs approximately £18,000 a year, unless you went between 1962 and 1998, in which case it was free).

(Those statistics were pulled by a variety of sources, including IPSOS-MORI, the Office of National Statistics, and a dozen others; feel free to have a quick check around to check my maths if you feel I've flubbed them somewhere. If I'm wrong I'm not too proud to admit it.)

Let's take a look at the House of Commons.

The average age of an MP is 50 years - Mhairi Black of Renfrewshire is the youngest current MP at 22. Women make up 32.5% of the Commons, 211 of them versus 437 men. 92% of MPs are white. There's no religious data kept on MPs, though 2% of them are Muslim, compared to 5% of the population of the country. Their average household income is skewed by the fact that they are paid over £70,000 a year, plus expenses, plus pay for cabinet positions; though perhaps an inference to the income of the households they came from can be provided by the next statistic. 29% of MPs were educated in private schools - 45% of the Conservative party, significantly ess for other parties - and 89% of them are University graduates, with a full 23% of them holding a degree from Oxford or Cambridge. Due to their average age, this means that most of them attended University during the years when it was free to do so.

(These stats were almost all provided by the House of Commons itself.)

These are the people we vote for, with our weird old voting system that is long out of date and seriously needs renewal.

When something is described as a Representative Democracy, it means that citizens Democratically select people to Represent them in the political arena; but it seems that the people that get picked don't actually represent the population of this country, in several ways.

For example the Isle of Wight is represented by one Bob Seely, who isn't from here, doesn't spend much time here, and doesn't really respond to any letters sent to him by his constituents, so, you know.

Is this, perhaps, why decisions are often made that don't seem to be the best for the average person in this country? It might explain why our current political establishment has precious little empathy for anyone of an average income or a less than ideal life situation. The phrase "Out Of Touch" used to mean that individuals didn't understand the basic needs and pressures of life, before it got co-opted by people to try and undermine actual experts.

Statistics don't always tell the full story, admittedly. As promised, here's a little graph of the average household income in the UK; and you can see where the average is, and that is definitely not where the highest point of the graph sits.

Looks like the average gets shunted up quite a lot by those folks up near the other end, hmm? Which happens to include MPs, on their £70,000 a year.

But that's only one side of our government. The OTHER side is composed of the House of Lords, which is... a bit different.

The average age in the House of Lords is 70 years old - more than one of them were born in the 1920s. 27.6% of peers are women. The House of Lords is 94% white. Religion is actually weirdly statistically skewed in the Lords due to the fact that the Church of England gets to have 26 Bishops sit in the chamber just by virtue of being the apparent state religion. They're called the Lords Spiritual. That doesn't mean there can't be MORE Bishops - the rest have to earn their place the usual way. (By being nice to the government.) The Peers of the House of Lords do not receive a salary; they can claim £305 per day in expenses (or a reduced rate of £150 per day). Here come the big deviations; approximately 57% attended private school. 90% of them attended University, in a similar proportion to the House of Commons.

And, of course, we don't elect them. They get chosen; and often they are chosen by whoever is in government at the time. A recent example of this being news was when Jon Bercow, former Speaker of the House and well-known for annoying the current Tory party by insisting they not be disrespectful in the Commons, was snubbed for a peerage - despite almost every single former Speaker of the House being offered one in the past. Theresa May's husband, Boris Johnson's brother and Ian Botham the Cricketer were all offered seats, mind. Can't think why.

This does mean that governments can, effectively, try and seed a legacy of Lords that will be friendly to their cause later on down the road; loading the metaphorical deck with individuals that will vote the same way they do, or the same way that the party in general likes to vote.

And that's entirely putting aside the influence of government advisors, who are utterly unaccountable.

What does this mean for you and me? Well, it means that those that make the decisions are often fairly far removed from the decisions that they end up making. Humans tend to naturally have selective empathy that they reserve for those that are more like them than not, which is why the Prime Minister burned a £50 in front of a homeless man, amongst other charming little anecdotes.

Note, I am not forgiving them - because learning to have empathy and to think about how things affect others is a big part of being a decent human being. Deliberately not doing so is ignorant at best and malicious at worst.

It says a lot that the standardised uniform of the House of Commons used to include a black silk top hat. In fact, there's a whole anecdote (I TOLD YOU) about one man who brought his working class ethic into the Commons.

Keir Hardie was a gent. He helped form the Labour Party as it exists today. He stood for progressive taxes, women being allowed to vote, the abolition of the House of Lords and free education for all. This is a genuine campaign poster for when he ran for Parliament in 1892.

Notice how he is not wearing a top hat. Keir Hardie entered the Chamber wearing the cloth deerstalker hat, a normal working man's suit and a red tie, and caused a significant uproar by doing so. He faced many accusations of undermining the reputation of the House, by "wearing the cloth cap" of the working class.

Think about that, for a moment, as you take in the things that the man was campaigning for. An eight-hour work day - he wanted to bring us DOWN to an eight-hour work day. With the single exception of temperance reform (the temperance movement was a whole other thing), we can get behind that entire list, and frankly, laws have been put in place to cover almost all of it.

Things have improved somewhat since then, obviously. Most people don't wear hats into the Chamber these days; and while there is still an expectation of a certain level of decorum, and traditional behaviours undertaken by all in the House, we've got a far clearer idea of what is actually disrespectful these days.

Right.

So how do we change this? How do we make the House of Commons more like the majority of the country, and thus more representative, and more likely to work in the interests of most of us? And, it follows, more likely to promote Lords that agree with that agenda?

Unfortunately, we have to vote.

We have to get involved at a local level. I know that in some areas, that is harder than others. That some places are seen as safe seats for the incumbents. But without the work being put in, nothing will change. We need to attack political apathy wherever we find it. It is said that if voting changed anything they would ban it - but if it didn't change anything, why would they spend millions of pounds and a huge amount of effort trying to sway the process one way or another?

And we need to make that push now. We need to do it while the government is showing us who it really is - not in three years, when it can start to hide all its fuckups. Now.

Because representation matters, but so does action.

Thank you for reading. Support your humble author via Patreon or Kofi, or follow social media on the right. See you next week.

Trojan Horses

I am sure I have talked about this topic, or topics similar to it, before - so I am going to keep this one brief, and just say the stuff I've been thinking about recently. Warning. This will begin educationally and end rantily.

Tony Blair became the leader of the Labour Party in 1994 by virtue of dead man's boots. The internal leadership election pit him against such champions of the people as John Prescott and Margaret Beckett, and he - rather understandably - mopped the floor with them.

He stepped into the leadership of an opposition party staring down a 15-year streak of Tory governance. The Iron Lady, Margaret Thatcher, had been Prime Minister for eleven straight years - she was followed by John Major. While my hatred of Thatcher's politics is a thing of legend, the hatchet job that was done to her was at least as worthy of scorn. Either way, between the two of them, the country had slid to the Right in a very definite way.

And so, cogs begin to turn. There was a way to gain power.

The attitude of the country was one of fiscal conservatism, a general distrust of Europe after Black Wednesday and discussion of the single currency, and a discontentedness with earnings in general. The glory days of the late Eighties were gone - the dream of everyone putting on shoulder pads and hairspray and earning an absolute killing in the City had become just that, a dream. (Of course, a lot of people were still making a killing. It just wasn't a very accessible club any more.)

This, of course, meant that the Left would feel disillusioned too - and why wouldn't they?

So rather than bringing Muhammad to the mountain, New Labour brought the mountain to Muhammad. They took the old-fashioned Labour party that an entire generation had only known as opposition and "sexed them up". They became new, trendy - and decidedly leaning toward the Centre on the outside...with the odd schizophrenic Right-wing leaning here and there.

Something to appeal to everyone. And sure enough, they took a searing amount of the vote in the 1997 General Election, absolutely crushing John Major. A significant amount of that is, probably, down to personality. John Major tried to do a good job, and was in my opinion one of the best Conservative PMs we have had in the past fifty years. Let's face it. He was boring - and Tony Blair played some guitar and stood around talking with Noel Gallagher.

They came into power, and leaned just a little more left than the Tories had...

...and then went back the other way...

...and honestly the parliamentary Labour party has never really recovered.

They've stopped being the Left. They are an opposition from just a little further Left than the Tories - but that isn't hard, I mean all you have to do is not fine homeless people for the audacity of not having a home. They're not Left-wingers. They've forgotten how to BE Left-wingers, because being Centrist Blairites has given them everything they've ever wanted: money. The villifaction of the Left and the poor and the needy worked out well for a party that had abandoned all three, albeit to a lesser extent than Thatcher and her mob of milk-thieves did.

Smash-cut to today, wherein Peter Mandelson - yes, that Peter Mandelson, the one who pushed through a bunch of anti-privacy laws after having dinner with the CEO of Geffen Records on his million-pound yacht - creeps forth from his fucking crypt to state, flatly, that he'll do everything in his power to bring down the current Labour leader, who has been elected twice so far and may need a third election just so this shower of middle-ground tossers actually shut up.

Now I understand why the Liberal Democrats made the deal with the devil that they did. They shook hands with the Conservatives and compromised against their natures, and it gave them that whiff of power - and for five years they held those seats, though not without attractive a significant amount of abuse (sometimes more than the Tories, which is a bit odd).

Labour just made the deal first. They made it back in 1997. They stuck the knife in their old principles. They didn't sign a deal with anyone or shake anyone's hands - they became the devils themselves. Three years after John Smith's death - the previous Labour leader before old Tony got in - they turned the party into something that would have made Smith spin in his grave. Can one imagine how Harold Wilson - who died two years before New Labour's victory - would have reacted to his party's heel turn?

Being in opposition is more than just making witty remarks about your opponent. It is more than just doing things the press will like you for. Being in opposition means OPPOSING. It means that in a time of enforced harmful austerity and deliberate malicious treatment of the British people, trying to emulate the people doing it - only perhaps with a little less cackling mwahaha - isn't effective. "They're all as bad as each other," some cry, and - you know what, at times, I look at significant proportions of the Labour party and I understand where that perspective comes from.

I don't believe Jeremy Corbyn has made 100% correct choices in his role. I am not sure his move regarding Brexit was the best one, though I am not so ignorant as to the parliamentary process as to believe it was as simple as it is held up to be.

But for fuck's sake, Mandelson hates him. That alone should be enough to make you want him in charge. The Murdoch press rips on him at every chance they get, as do the New BBC (same as New Labour, lean to the right for a greater market share). He is labelled as unelectable, in an ouroborean fashion, because he is labelled as unelectable. If you strip away people who say that or "I just don't really like him very much", then you are left with an actual, valid fucking leader of a Left-wing political party.

Even if you're afraid of the big scary S-word.

If I am really lucky, by the time the next election comes around, the Labour party will be the Labour party again. Not New Labour II - Labour. Harold Wilson's kind of Labour. Labour that recognises the wounds inflicted by the current administration and actually does something about it, rather than sparking massive internecine conflicts because the leader isn't your kind of Centrist.

We don't need a fucking Centrist.

We need an opposition party.

Saturday Morning Villainry

If you were born when I was born, and watched as many cartoons as I did, then you are probably well acquainted with villainry of a specific sort.

Cast your eyes over this little bevvy of bastards (original artwork here: http://batkong40.deviantart.com/art/80-s-Animated-Villians-557990209 )

We all know who THESE folks are, surely.

The maniacal Megatron, leader of the Decepticons. Mumm-Ra the Ever Living, sworn enemy of the Thundercats. Skeletor, perpetual thorn in Eternia's side. Cobra Commander, GI Joe's constant nemesis. Shredder, leader of the Foot Clan, whom the Turtles battle at every turn.

All indisputable bad guys of the most epic quality. All, as Don John from Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing would put it, "Plain Dealing Villains". You know what they are about the moment you clap eyes on them.

They were so ridiculous, weren't they?

I mean as we all grow up and become adults we know that no villain looks like this. Nobody deliberately bedecks themselves with the trappings of mwahaha evil and does what these people do. I mean some of their truly most incredible plans include erecting a pyramid of blackness around the earth to block out the sun, unleashing a mostly uncontrollable iron titan to raze Eternia to the ground, and Megatron's biggest and weirdest plans are just erratic in the extreme. Hypnotising twenty-somethings in nightclubs for unknown reasons, convincing the world that the Autobots are evil by very dubious means (THIS ACTUALLY WORKED), and drilling to the core of the planet are all means by which the gladiator from Kaon thought he could secure victory.

They aren't the only crooks, obviously. I mean just name a cartoon. Captain Planet fought a whole host of bad guys who randomly polluted things as if that would benefit them in any way. I mean some of them weren't even making any money. They were just deliberately fucking up the rainforest for no apparent reason. Doc Terror and Hacker from Centurions were similar - they just acted douchey as if that would get them more likes on Instagram.

But then we all grew up. We started looking for nuanced antagonists. Sometimes, we found them. If we look at Alien we find a dual antagonist - the instinct-driven inhuman xenomorph, incapable of good or bad, simply doing that which it does, and the faceless corporation so determined to exploit aforementioned xenomorph that it is willing to give up the lives of its employees to secure the dangerous creature for profitable ends.

We started seeing bad guys in the regular world, with motives that were understandable that we could almost sympathise with (and in a few places, actually could sympathise with totally). We found Roy Batty and his quest for more life; we found the competing forces of nature and industry; we found antagonists of every stripe, some more like us than we liked, some more like those four-colour bad guys that we had grown up with. A whole spectrum of supervillains.

We start seeing them in real life, too. We see the faces of Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Ed Gein, Charles Manson. We realise that evil still lives, still exists in the world beyond the cartoons that we watched with our cereal on a Saturday morning. We realise that the antics of Megatron - a huge, mighty, despicable tyrant - are still more bearable and tolerable than those of, say, Luis Garavito. (If you don't know who he is - look him up - his nickname is La Bestia.)

...and then we have the current leaders of the United Kingdom and the United States.

Now every time I see the Cheeto holding up a piece of paper, another executive order, another bill, I get nervous. Because the first few made you think - well sure, it can't keep up this pace the entire time he's in power, can it? He can't keep signing these bills, which are clearly pretty shit for most of the population. Like every single thing this guy does seems to be something that Cobra Commander would do if he was in charge. Every single thing.

A selection of those bills that have been signed include trashing the Affordable Care Act (yes, he literally got rid of affordable healthcare, it means what it sounds like), promising to build the big fucking wall that won't stop drugs or people entering the US, making women's lives harder the entire world over, send federal authorities into every city that don't do what he says, fuck with the lives of immigrants from the Middle East (but not those countries he has business or military deals with), and force through pipelines that are mostly (if not universally) considered a bad idea.

Meanwhile, the Wicked Witch of Westminster is engaging in similar shennanigans, promising a trashing of trade deals and making vague threats of engineering better ones (usually with people like the Cheeto), cutting funds to objectively good things (The NHS and renewable energy), promising to spend billions on nuclear weapons that don't work, and indicating a willingness to deploy troops we can't afford to properly equip into countries we won't accept innocent refugees from.

...see, that's not evil like real world evil. That's not subtle. That's not the kind of thing a taut drama is written about, like Frost/Nixon or like the extra-judiciary murders conducted by Mossad in Munich.

This is Saturday Morning Evil.

How do we fight this? We aren't Optimus Prime, we aren't Lion-O or He-Man or G.I. Joe or the Turtles. If we show up and just kick people's asses, we are the ones who go to jail - or worse, get shouted down by well-meaning people on our side (just look at the response to the neo-Nazi chappy getting punched or how people felt about Shia LeBoeuf not turning the other cheek to another alt-right Nazi prick).

It's had to believe that people actually voted for this.

...well most people didn't, it does bear mention. Just less than 20% of the population of the United States voted for the Cheeto. Just over 17% of the population of the UK voted for the Tory party, who then changed out their leader for the Wicked Witch of Westminster without public consultation or similar.

I don't think that one in five counts as a mandate.

So what do we do about it? As Theoden says in The Two Towers: "What can men do against such reckless hate?"

...well I have to be honest, I am not strictly sure. But we have to make sure this shit doesn't happen again. I've often spoken out about resisting these bastards. Now it seems those words have come home to roost. Enough people have started to realise that this right-wing fuck-em-all approach is just going to get innocent people hurt and killed. If they haven't realised this, then they haven't been paying attention.

I've been experiencing fatigue in this department. There is only so often you can preach what you think is common sense, that you can tie the facts together to come up with a course of action or a method of resistance, and have little to show for it. Almost all the people who read my blog either agree with my particular line of thinking or just don't care very much - and I have no idea how to get my ideas TO the people that matter, TO the people who can be convinced by argument. Because I have faith that there are people that vote Tory, there are people that vote Republican, who are at their heart good people that are making a bad choice.

Everyone makes a bad decision, sometimes - none of us can look back at our lives and claim a golden streak - but some of those decisions only result in personal misery. Some of them compound with a great many other bad decisions.

And those decisions sometimes lead to these two cartoon villains being in charge of previously proud nations.

This sounds like a generalisation. It probably comes across as one. I know, love, value and respect people who don't vote like me, and don't think like me. We can still get on if we don't see eye to eye on this topic. And I don't think that everyone that wears a Labour badge is a saint, or that every Democrat is in it to help the world. It just so happens that the current antagonists of this season of Human Life are, well...jesus. They're like poster children for the worst of the worst.

But what can I do?

I can keep talking. I can keep up the facts and the thinking. Because giving up doesn't help anyone. And if there's any one thing that being ill for this long has taught me, it is that victory isn't always something that happens in a single action. Sometimes, victory takes weeks, months and years. Sometimes it isn't about knowing what to do in this moment...Sometimes it is about doing the right thing for as long as it takes, and staying standing until you can't - or until you win.

That's the lesson to take from Saturday morning. The fight always continues, but the good guys can't afford to give up. So they just don't. They fight, until the fight is over.

So let's do that.

Money Talks

I'd like to conduct a mental exercise with your assistance.

Picture for me, if you will, a successful person holding an object of value. Imagine them in their home, and how that all looks.

Are we ready for the thought experiment?

Hands up if the person you imagined was wealthy, or had some obvious sign of being so - a suit or similar. Similarly, hands up if the object of value was an expensive one - and finally, hands up if the home would definitely rank on the pricey side.

I bet that's a few hands up. (Put em down again. You did it. Well done.)

Now you know my agenda, go ahead and look back at the request. I didn't mention money, not at all - though several of the words I used imply it.

We're paying attention to words at this point. The actual semantics of the situation. Now we can be careful about how we phrase things.

Who can remember a time when money didn't pretty much dictate our lives?

Not a lot of people who read this blog, that's for sure. There's a significant proportion of people alive in this day and age that live by subsistence farming and agriculture. Money probably doesn't come up for them very often - so I daresay it doesn't have the linguistic hooks dug into common parlance.

Here, though - here, today - most of the things we do have a coin involved somewhere. Work is so impressed on us, so central to our culture, that it is the default answer when someone asks us "What do you do?" - something I try and shake up whenever asked. "You mean for money or for fun?"

If we want to achieve almost anything, it is monetised - and if the act itself isn't, then the accessories and support services associated are. You can run for free, but these running shoes are £50 a pop. Lift weights? A branch will do - but unless you want splinters, join a gym, get the gloves, grab some dumbells.

To achieve things in this society - and to simply survive - we require money. It's difficult to do so otherwise. Some people do so, but they themselves will tell you how hard it is. Note that I do not mean living on benefits, as that is simply acquiring money from a different source (and is just as valid, if you are legally entitled to the money, you take it, it's yours). I mean literally not handling money at all. Often it results in criminality. This country has only just taken to heart the French idea to deliver unsold food - not even spoiled, just one day out of date - to places wherein the homeless and disadvantaged can access it.

Aspiration is often hitched to fiscal increase, too. If you want a better thing, it will cost you more - so you'd best get more money, hmm? And if the achievement doesn't require money or anything similar, then it is worth pointing out, because it is a difference, a change.

So when we talk about someone being successful, we assume that to mean wealthy - unless specified otherwise. Because what other universal handwave term for being well-off is there? Of course, in a world dictated by the flow of currency upward and upward, having more of it is a literal success.

Something being valuable is automatically assumed to mean expensive, too - because that is the de facto measurement of value. The thing is, the most valuable things to me are not the most expensive things I own, because there's levels of value. My most expensive possession is my laptop. Sure, I value it very highly - but not more than the silver chains my dad gave me, or the notebooks I have stuffed with old ideas, or the ticket stubs I still possess from the big five gigs of my life (Pearl Jam @ Hard Rock Calling 2010, Nine Inch Nails @ O2 2009, Counting Crows @ Brighton Arena 2009, Alter Bridge @ Portsmouth Guildhall 2008, Foo Fighters @ Wembley 2008), or the first CD I bought in America - also my favourite album of all time. Value is not monetary cost; however the cost is so important to us on a day-to-day basis that it becomes the standard assumed meaning.

The thing is, having money does not equate to having happiness or feeling satisfaction or security. It can contribute a whole hell of a lot, mind. If your income is very close to your expenditure, increasing that gap can only make life easier - there's less stress, less concern. We don't worry so much about having to take a week off, or missing the next pay raise, or the cost of bread increasing with little to no warning.

Of course it is also a truism that as income rises, so does expenditure. As we have more, so we take more. That's the nature of the beast - because again, in a society wherein the measure of success is money, that means that all goods that we may want have a cost, and the more desirable goods always cost more. Who doesn't want a slightly bigger fridge, a slightly nicer car, a slightly better laptop, a slightly larger house?

It all costs. We just accept that. To cover the costs we have to work, and we just accept that too. We earn so much less than the people who pretty much instituted this way of life, and we accept that also. It wasn't a shadowy conspiracy of a group of figures in a dark room. The people with the money just wanted to make more, and so they did. Because that's how it works. When you have it - you make more of it.

When you think about it like that...is it not surprising that whenever anyone suggests doing something that casually disregards the constant hunt for further funds, that it is treated with incredulity?

Traditionally, the Labour party in this country has been a left-wing worker's party. It was dragged more toward the centre-right in the late 90s by one Tony Blair. They did well, because after Margaret Thatcher's hatchet-job on the average blue-collar worker to line the pockets of the financiers, right-wing attitudes in this country had started to come to the fore - but the Tories still had the reputation of being nasty. So we can still be right-wing money-grubbers and also not be held up as evil? Sign me up!

The thing is, they took over the entire party. Tory-lites. Women and men whose view of the world was pretty much the same as their blue-tied brethren on the opposite benches, just with a nod to the poor and the sick. And don't get me wrong - having been on the receiving end of benefits and sickness support in both the Blair era and the subsequent ConDem/Tory era, that nod actually helped us out a lot.

Recently, the party voted for a new leader. That leader was Jeremy Corbyn, an old-fashioned left winger whose attitude is that we should really be helping people and doing the right thing regardless of income or profit.

For this, he was treated to a non-stop campaign of hate. People mocking him, calling him a communist (incorrect) and a socialist (they wouldn't know one if it hit them in the face), saying he was unelectable (despite being elected as party leader). There were threats of mass resignations, mass resignations, personal attacks, smear campaigns across the wide breadth of the media. The temptation of digging in and fighting back must have been great, but his line has always been the line of grace under fire. However much political capital he could have made from getting into verbal fisticuffs with all and sundry, he just got on with it.

All this came to a head in the most recent leadership re-election. A vote of no confidence was called. Those who wanted him gone were - as you'd expect - Blairite neo-Tory coatriders. Those who had profited from still being the right wing in an apparently left-wing party. Those comfortable in quiet opposition, which isn't really opposition when it comes down to it.

When it became clear that it would be down to the party members to vote, another hatchet job was put in place - and this time, it was basically electoral fraud. People who joined up for the party in droves in order to show their support for the party leader were told that they wouldn't get a vote, for...no apparent reason, other than the fact that Owen Smith and his people had ascertained that those new members were signing up to support Jeremy Corbyn. It doesn't take a genius or a statitician to work out that this was a calculated attempt to undermine support for the man who had already been made leader once.

Out of 551,000 members of the party, only 285,000 got to vote - just over half. Can you imagine the outcry if 49% of a country weren't allowed to vote in a General Election because it was thought that they were going to vote a specific way? Can you imagine? (If you live in Florida you don't have to imagine. Thanks, Jeb.)

Even so - out of the 285,000 that got their vote, over 168,000 of them voted for the unelectable man. 59% of them. Then there were the supporters and affiliated voters, whose support for him ran at an even higher percentage.

It's only now that we can understand where the term unelectable comes from.

In a world where a successful person is one who earns a lot of money, and a valuable object is one that costs a lot of money, the one who understands both of these things to be inherently true is seen as more acceptable, more grounded than the one who does not. If we accept blindly that money should rule our lives, then the man who wants us to believe this to be true is our friend, and the man who wants us to question this belief is our foe.

In a world wherein our way of thinking is highly informed by money and worth being commensurate, the man telling us that there's more to life than just money has to be painted as a madman, a man without a grasp on reality. A hopeless man. A man that can never lead, can never expect to be followed. A man that is unelectable.

Now look around you.

Are you a failure because you aren't earning more? Because you aren't living in a mansion? Are you a failure because you aren't bedecked in jewels and driving a sports car? Are you a failure because you buy things at a discount rather than crates of expensive nasty-tasting champagne?

Or are you a success because you made it this far, rather than by how much is in your bank account? Are you successful for reasons other than a six-figure salary? Do the things you own have value that isn't connected to how much they cost you? Is your home your home, regardless of how much smaller it is than the homes of those that collect our taxes and make our decisions?

If the answer to any of those is yes, then you are already smarter than the prevailing attitude. The natural divergence of semantics based on who dictates what is good or bad hasn't changed you into a heartless machine, driven by greed. Because at the heart of it, nobody really believes it. Not really. It's just the way the world seems to be going, and is the way the world has been going since enterprising merchants started agreeing that this much maize was worth this much silver.

If we are to be higher beings than this, if we are to be better than simply biological machines to be used to make money for ourselves and others, then we need to look at the use of these terms. We need to apply them differently, to make specific examples. We need to find value in that which is inexpensive, success in that which is unmarketable, happiness in that which is free, and worth in that which is penniless.

That is how we elect a man who is unelectable.

What We Don't Learn

What do you remember from school that you don't really use today?

A lot of you will reach for mathematics. Trigonometry, pi to a certain value, so on. Some people will talk about language, verbs and nouns. Some will claim science as the burden. A bit of this, a bit of that.

What about the things in school that you weren't taught?

I vaguely touched upon this last May in this blog right here, but I think that - in the wake of the referendum that has rocked the country - it deserves revisiting.

Let us ponder, for a moment, some wisdom from the late great George Carlin:

"You might have noticed that I never complain about politicians. I leave that to others. And there's no shortage of volunteers; everyone complains about politicians. Everyone says they suck. But where do people think these politicians come from? They don't fall out of the sky; they don't pass through a membrane from a separate reality. They come from American homes, American families, American schools, American churches, and American businesses. And they're elected by American voters. This is what our system produces, folks. This is the best we can do. Let's face it, we have very little to work with. Garbage in, garbage out."

Let's think about that for a moment.

Democracy is built on the people of a nation being involved in the decision-making process of that nation. It does not require, by definition, those decisions to be informed - but let's consider that for a moment.

Stepping out of the standpoints of various political parties - it is literally better, for the entire nation (if not the entire world), if those decisions ARE informed. A country's effectiveness and capacity to do right by its citizens depends on its capacity to make good decisions. Thus, it's in the interest of a nation to ensure those citizens can make those decisions well.

How to do that? Well, in order to make decisions, people need to understand the consequences of those decisions. A basic understanding of government, of society, of economics. Expertise is not necessary - but then the same can be said for mathematics, and very few people leave school without an expected basic level of knowledge.

Yeah, you hated learning trigonometry, but you know how many £2 loaves of bread you can get for a tenner.

How many of us left school in the knowledge of what national debt is, how taxes are collected and spent, or what the difference is between left-wing and right-wing? How many people do you know that don't really understand communism, socialism, capitalism, neoliberalism (and how different it is to liberalism), fascism?

BoyInABand did a song about this:

Trigonometry is, admittedly, more important to me than most people - I like maths - but if I had to choose between learning trig and learning LITERALLY how this country is run, I am going to pick the latter.

Kids aren't allowed to vote. Why? Because they don't understand the enormity of what they are doing, they don't understand what is going on, they don't know how the world works yet. They don't know how to make good decisions about the future of this country.

But...what about if you're an adult and you have no clue?

Picture this - two individuals. A seventeen year old that has been reading about politics and economics since they were twelve, who has taken an interest in it at a local level as well as a global one, who has demonstrated his knowledge in talks and debates - and a forty year old who has literally only ever seen one room in their entire lives, who knows nothing of the outside world and doesn't care to.

If the forty year old can convince people that he's sane - hell, who is to say he ISN'T sane? - then he gets a vote. He knows literally nothing but he gets a vote based purely on how long he's been on this earth.

The seventeen year old doesn't get shit.

To look at what happened in the Referendum of 23rd June, a great many people expressed significant confusion or lack of knowledge on the run-up to the vote. Some expressed the same on the same day. Many continued to express confusion and lack of knowledge AFTER they had already cast their vote, not having realised quite what they had voted for or what any of it meant, so they went with their gut instinct.

Nobody needs to be told what propaganda can do. It has turned entire nations into charicatures, legitimised slaughter without precedent, started wars and pogroms - the list goes on.

Propaganda isn't always posters on walls that tell you to hate. Sometimes it is more subtle. It comes in the form of agendas being described as truths. It comes in the form of identifying pre-existing prejudices and inflaming them, earning sympathy. See, we hate the same thing. We are on the same side.

I daresay that one reason that there's no education of politics and civics in schools is because, when the party that forms the government suggests such a thing, the other shoots it down - because they are afraid that Party A will sway the education toward their agendas. And when Party B come into power, the same happens. I think this is one limiting factor, perhaps the main one.

Of course there is also George Carlin's perennial thought that the government wants to keep us dumb. That the entire process is an exercise designed to give us enough hands on reins to make us think we know where the horse is going, without any capability of guiding it, no knowledge of how to feed or shoe it, and not even necessarily knowing it is a horse.

I don't subscribe to this particular theory. Mostly because I don't believe in conspiracy theories. There's easier ways to keep people dumb than generally bumbling around in a bureaucracy. Besides, it isn't as if the information isn't out there. It really is. You just need to actually go looking for it, and that's hard to do if you don't vaguely know what to go looking for in the first place.

So if we accept that an enlightened society is a better society - as I previously asserted - then we have to accept that not teaching people about politics is strictly a choice dictated by partisan division. If WE can't teach them OUR lesson, then THEY can't teach them THEIR lesson.

The answer is, in this country at least, an independent entity. This entity would set the template and curriculum for political education. It would be run past the Education Secretary for approval. It would be run past the Shadow Education Secretary for approval. In the end - once a balance is struck between the two, and with the input of others (I suggest perhaps some highly regarded political and economic scholars) - the curriculum is rolled out.

It is depressing that it would take that much effort, just to allow political and civic education for our children. To think that the only way that an education in the way the world works can occur requires pandering and hand-wringing to the extant powers that be - truth be told, it makes me feel a little ill. If that is the only way? It is the only way.

We can't afford to have the democratic future of this country in the hands of people that don't understand the consequences of their votes. Who admittedly, after the fact, hold up their hands and say they didn't know. Knowing who is in who's pocket is a difficult thing and requires some study - but knowing who makes the decisions, and who stands to gain from each of them, can begin that process.

Knowing where we are taxed and how much - knowing where that tax money is spent - knowing how an economy works, and how an economy can get into debt - all of these things are things I somewhat take for granted, now. They are things that I set out to learn because not knowing was infuriating, and now the infuration takes root in knowing that I still have just as much sway over the democratic process as the theoretical man in the room.

It is my opinion, and has been my opinion for many years, that we need to be taught these lessons in schools. I value the other lessons - mathematics, sciences, english - but a knowledge of how the world works is important, too.

And if we are going to stop children from voting because they don't know - if we are going to stop those without sound mind voting because they literally cannot make an informed decision - then we need to start making sure that everyone that ISN'T one of those things IS capable of making an informed decision.

Or we're going to end up with a pound in the shitter and an economy steadily flatlining.

...awkward.

Why We Should Stay

On 23rd June we will vote on whether or not we should leave the European Union.

This is the source of some quite heated debate, frankly - and I am thrilled on one level that people are actually engaging in politics at all. That's a fantastic change. I asked for some quotes on my Facebook, some of which are presented below:

"either way it is the elite who win"

"In because our government wants to rewrite the human rights act, take away workers rights and dismantle the NHS."

"Out democracy over bureaucracy!!"

"To quote a Clash song...should I stay or should I go !!"

I will put my heart on my sleeve right now, for purpose of bias sweeping: I think we should stay, and this blog is in part to tell you why - but also an observation on the campaign on both sides.

I'm not going to touch the amount of waffle there is in the media. There's a hell of a lot. Nor am I going to really touch on the absolute shitstorm of somewhat inaccurate facts being thrown around as gospel both for and against - though I suspect in a couple of cases on the Stay side that is rather deliberate, such as in the case of the BBC.

Anyone who pays attention will notice that the BBC's somewhat left-centrist news has shifted to the right a hell of a lot in the past three years. Could this be because their previous head of news was forced out after some vague allegations, and replaced with a former News Corp employee? Given that they now often toe the same line as the Murdoch press, it's hard to imagine otherwise.

Pardon. I digress.

What I'm going to touch on is those apparently in favour of staying, and those apparently in favour of leaving.

A list of those who have expressed support for the stay campaign includes names such as basically the entire Labour and Green parties, several former Chancellors of the Exchequer (who have actual economic experience), and...

...well I never, David Cameron.

Why?

Anyone who knows Dodgy Dave must know that leaving the EU would be a huge feather in his cap. They've been decrying his party's actions for a long time. Their troublesome clinging to the Human Rights act and their awkward tenacity for worker's rights - it's kind of counter to policy.

So why is he voting to stay, when most of the rest of his party - the NEW Tories it bears mention, not the old school like John Major - are voting to leave? Notably Theresa May, Iain Duncan Smith, Boris Johnson?

It's simple: he knows full well he is one of the most hated men in the country, and has said himself that he won't run in the next election. He's the perfect sacrifice.

It's the only reason he would publically condone something his friends and allies - including Rupert Murdoch - actively condemn. Even more so than the people actually making the policies that are killing and disenfranchising British citizens, the country HATES David Cameron, and will - like Pavlov's dogs - instantly go against anything he stands for.

Think about it.

If we as a nation vote to stay in then it is a final victory for him, a high point for him to end his career on. "At least at the end I could stick to my principles," he may say, as he waves and leaves Downing Street. A legacy. In 20 years, when we're not looking down the barrel of yet another recession, someone might look back and stay - hey, if we weren't in the EU, we might have had some serious issues. Bravo, David Cameron. Bravo. Release biography, make millions, retire to life of consultancy.

On the other side of the coin - if we vote to leave, then his party gets what it wants. He can slip out of the door having been shown it after supporting the Stay campaign, and leave the party in the hands of one of those folks that supported Leave. He's done a solid for his chums, and they won't forget it. Bravo. Release biography, make millions, retire to life of consultancy.

He wins both ways.

He's not the only fifth column, either. I mentioned the BBC earlier? Well, with their steadily more obvious right-wing leanings and the degradation of their brand as a news service, their apparent support of Stay by scaremongering Leave is going to undermine the Stay campaign significantly.

Which is of course exactly what Rupert Murdoch - you know, the BBC's head of news' previous employer - would want. He has his hooks in our government, and they love it; the less interference from outsiders, the better. He can't make a phone call and make the EU do his bidding - but he CAN engender some scurrying around from Tory HQ.

The same Tory HQ that will be making decisions on whether or not the BBC continues to exist - a BBC that is losing support daily in part down to its news direction; that old Thatcherite trick, to undermine while miming support, to allow failure, to declare unfit for purpose, and to monetise.

I don't believe in conspiracy theories. I believe the truth is right there if you look for it. It's not hidden in a huge web of deceipt and double-talk. All this that I have just told you is fairly simple, if you just look.

If we were to ever leave the EU, then it should be when our economy is strong, and we can easily weather the temporary hit that we are guaranteed to take in doing so. Negotiate from a position of strength. Right now - we don't have that strength. We like to think that we're the strong twenty-something that can leave any time they want and be just fine (which anyone living in this country will realise is just as much a fallacy, unless you have a REALLY good job). In truth, we're the frail old man, cantankerous and stubborn. We talk about how we can leave the nursing home any time we want, back in our day we did all this, we did all that, of course we'll be fine.

We think we're Dick Whittington. We're closer to Don Quixote - and if we keep going down the path of austerity, we'll end up as Weekend At Bernies.

Phase Two

Recently I have been reading the IDW run of the Transformers comics.

They're a marked improvement on any of the old comics, or the TV series, movies, anything really. The art style jumps around a bit over its ten-year-plus publication but that's fine, in all honesty. These are beings that change their forms on a regular basis. The best part? The story.

The story is wonderful. It adds depth to existing characters that were perhaps not so well developed - Skids and Wheelie getting full backstories. It gives a new angle to already developed characters - Prowl becoming an ultimate manipulator, Thundercracker an impassioned scientist. More than anything, it gives structure to the war between the Autobots and the Decepticons.

The Decepticons in particular have a very specific way in which they overtake worlds, a six-phase engagement strategy. It begins with Phase 1, which is infiltration and information-gathering, and proceeds all the way to Phase 6 - absolute world-shattering genocide.

Phase 2 is the particular phase of interest, to this blog; as it details misinformation, manipulation, and the usage of such methods to undermine the stability of the world in question.

It's through these campaigns that the Decepticons seek to bring war to a world without ever firing a shot. It is from the ashes of this war that the warmongers themselves make their own killing - they are seasoned by four million years of civil war, they know how to kill and they know how to win.

Taking a look at the current political landscape of this country, I believe we are in Tory Phase 2.

Have you noticed how, all of a sudden, there's a lot of shit-talking and shit-stirring going on?

Accusations of antisemitism. Members of a left-wing party being treated like terrorists. Doctors painted like greedy idle scumbags. Refugees and foreigners typecast as the traditional enemies of the rich.

The thing is, it works, doesn't it? I have no doubt that every single person who reads this blog knows at least one person who will claim with confidence any of the media spin stories that are profligate in the current climate. They won't question, they won't do anything of the sort. They'll just repeat Sun headlines, even the ones that contradict each other, with the same fervent and endless faith displayed in the Vatican.

It works, because these people either 1) believe the shit-storm stories over the actual circumstances of our country being torn apart and thus vote for those tearing it apart or 2) don't vote at all because they can't see the truth for the trees.

They're All The Same. We hear it all the time, despite there being a literal archive and catalogue of every way in which they are different. Name an MP and you can look up their voting record, in detail or in abstract. Find something you are passionate about and you can find which parties voted for, voted against, or abstained on. A good website for this is mySociety.

Do you see a doctor regularly? You can find out how your local MP or any other member of parliament voted for the NHS. Do you believe fitness and sports are important? You can see which parties voted to protect such things. Do you think the poor get an easy ride? You can see who agrees with you, and who voted to cut support for the elderly and disabled.

The difference between the Decepticons and Parliament is that Parliament has records. Decepticons can vanish in spaceships, whereas parliamentarians simply can't. What they do is a matter of historical record, and it is they who are accountable to us, not the other way around.

So while the public talk about whether or not a left-leaning politician has indeed made this or that comment about Hitler, we can find out the truth. We can find out what is being done to us, to our country, and we can find it out in real time.

All we need to do is put in two minute's effort.

All the Tories want us to do is not do that.

Don't give them the satisfaction.

The Panama Cabal

If you aren't sure what the Panama Papers are, haven't heard the name Mossack Fonseca or aren't sure why David Cameron is being questioned a lot about his taxes in the last few days, then I might suggest putting this blog down for a minute and taking a gander at whatever news site you think appropriate.

Was anyone actually surprised that this was happening?

Did anyone truly not suspect, at all, that there were companies set up exclusively to ensure that very rich people could dodge taxes in quasi-legal ways?

Nobody should be surprised. Surprised that there is actual paperwork and evidence, yes - but unless you're a buffoon, then you can't think it's never happened.

Isn't that fact in itself a damning indictment of this entire farce?

Nobody wants to pay taxes. Everyone wants to benefit from what those taxes pay for, of course. Everyone wants to eat the lobster, nobody wants to foot the bill. That's just the nature of humanity. We're greedy creatures at heart, and in a society and system that determines success by possessing both Things and Way-To-Get-Things, any means of getting Things without losing Way-To-Get-Things is going to be exploited to the maximum.

There is a bottom rate at the cost of living in any given country. A pure minimum, which is the basest essentials. Anything above and beyond this particular rate, well, here come the taxes. You go shopping, you pay tax. You rent or own, you pay tax. You contribute directly to the welfare of the entirety of society. At least - that is how it is meant to work.
Those on benefits - the people commonly painted as the bad guys whenever the boys from Eton roll out their media machine - spend damn near everything they receive in ways that make it back to the government via tax or otherwise bolster the economy. If what they buy isn't taxed, then it is paid to a shop or corporation that is in itself taxed based on its income. In a way, benefits are an almost guaranteed investment made by a government to itself.

The wealthier you are, though, the more opportunities there are for you to not contribute at all. Churches don't after all. Some companies just choose not to, and when asked about it, offer an insulting paltry sum as a way of indicating they've read the papers and know that people don't like them. Offshore accounts exist. They've existed for a long, long time, and they exist so that the rich can make their money and then keep it to themselves.

Why should anyone else benefit from their hard-earned cash after all? I mean, they earned it all fair and square, right? They earned it working hard just like all of us did, and so they shouldn't have to pay any of it to anyone -

- except for the fact that everyone else pays. The person that shined your shoes this morning pays. The taxi driver pays. The waiter pays, tip or not. The little people in your life all pay. They pay for things that you use, like roads and police and infrastructure and education. They pay and you don't.

You put your money in some account in some foreign nation that by virtue of paperwork means you don't have to pay tax on it, and in doing so, you become the freeloader. Even by HMRC's most conservative estimate in 2012, tax avoidance cost the public four times more than benefit fraud. There are bad apples in both barrels, but the tax barrel is worth a lot more, and those apples stink to high heaven.

And here comes the Panama Papers. Unmasking legions of wealthy individuals twisting the system to further line pockets already stuffed full while the rest of us continue to scrape by. There's been resignations and fall-downs already. Iceland's PM suffered a very public tearing-down.

So now, in this time of austerity, in this time of belts being tightened and people being told to make do with what they have, in this time of us all being in it together, we find out that not only is the Prime Minister deeply implicated in tax avoidance, but several other members of the government could be as well, including the Chancellor, who actually has stakes in a business that in itself doesn't pay tax.

What happens here, you ask?

...nothing.

Nothing, because we're good calves, and we'll just keep eating the grass and getting nice and fat.

In another era, this would have been a powder keg. Protests would have become riots and streets would have burned, and perhaps, rightly so. The anger at the government for hurting all of us so very deeply and in such a hypocritical fashion...it would be a fire so hot the asphalt would melt.

But no. Today everyone shrugs and murmurs about things that don't matter and just go on with their lives. It's easier for us that way. We can absolve guilt with such incredible ease, all the tools have been handed to us for generations. Before the baby boomers even knew who they were, the language and theory behind apathy and denial had set in.

So those that contribute will be painted as leeches, and those that steal will be painted as heroes, and we will just keep on eating it up until we're happy as pigs in shit.

You know what happens to pigs?

The people that own them butcher them for profit.

Time and again, you have been fucking warned.

Forgive the anger, but it's been a bad year.

Terrorist Sympathiser

I found out very recently that I am a terrorist sympathiser.

I am a terrorist sympathiser because I don't believe that a bombing campaign, or even a full-fledged all-arms military campaign, in Syria will actually get rid of Islamic State or reduce their ability to hurt us, which leads me to think that signing off on a bombing campaign is a bad idea.

I am a terrorist sympathiser because I don't believe that the Russian bombing campaign is achieving the goals we are being told it is, because the Russian air force is busy flattening targets identified by President Assad's loyalists. It's fairly likely, therefore, the Russian bombing campaign is busy killing everyone that isn't in Assad's camp - which includes the 70,000 on-the-ground fighters that our government has quoted as being the actual troops with which IS will be defeated.

I am a terrorist sympathiser because I don't believe that any other nation's bombing of targets in the region made anyone on Earth any safer, which is in part borne out by the fact that bombing has been occurring long before the terror attacks on Paris, the Lebanon and Iraq took place. In fact, it is perhaps up for debate that the bombing campaign conducted by the French air force may have led to Paris being targeted either directly or indirectly, having the opposite of the intended effect.

I am a terrorist sympathiser because the military situation as it stands is less like World War 2, with very clearly delineated battle lines and forces, and far more like the Vietnam War. Even with close eyes on the ground, we can guarantee that there will be civilian casualties. It is inconceivable that there won't be. Several nations are basically okay with this, and several people within this nation are likewise - I am not.

I am a terrorist sympathiser because every single time we interfere with the Middle East, we cause more problems than we solve. It's like a wound that we made, that we can't help but touch and scratch and toy with. The story repeats itself, constantly, over and over again. We arm and support the rebels, or we arm and support the establishment, and people die. More and more people die. Because everyone remembers that the Russians were the antagonists of Rambo 3, but everyone forgets that the good guys became the Taliban.

I am a terrorist sympathiser because every house we blow up, every school we implode, every building we collapse produces more people fleeing for their lives from a nation already riddled with war and death. Many of those people will try and come here. Shamefully, a significant amount of British citizens have shown themselves as finding this situation intolerable; they seem to be the same people who are very much in support of an action that would create yet more of those same refugees.

I am a terrorist sympathiser because the loadout of a single strike aircraft costs enough to house and feed a significant percentage of the homeless in this country. A single Storm Shadow missile costs almost £800,000. If we fire six Storm Shadow missiles, that is the cost of a brand new hospital, fully staffed and with all modern technology and equipment. At a time when the public infrastructure is (some might say deliberately) overtaxed and under-budgeted, it is sheer madness to literally throw away such sums of money on achieving - as mentioned before - very little.

I am a terrorist sympathiser because our Prime Minister is showing himself to be an insecure schoolboy, desperately trying to show off to his head-of-state peers, and is willing to risk lives to do so. He wants to prove he's just as tough and brave as all of his chums, and will bully his opposition and cajole them until they let him go along with his multi-million-pound ego trip. He is the one that labelled me a sympathiser, in fact; it's a label he has dished out to everyone not siding with him in today's debate. He claims that inaction is not a strategy, as do many others. I can name two dozen nations that have done nothing and not suffered terrorist attacks at the hands of IS. It seems to be quite an effective strategy.

Finally, I am a terrorist sympathiser because if the powers that be insist on using this kind of rhetoric to reinforce their power and control over the citizenry, then I cannot conscientiously align myself with them. The greatest threat to our way of life today is not a group of militants in a far-away country - nor is that greatest threat a group of individuals who have lived in their target country for a significant period of time, far away from the far-away country that it is proposed that we bomb.

The greatest threat to our way of life is people like David Cameron, who truly believe that the best way to govern a nation is to drive it into austerity - for whom the health and wealth of corporate entities is of greater importance than the population of the nation. IS will never control Europe; but significant parts of Europe are already under the control of people like David Cameron. A man who marries himself to toxic media empires and desperately finger-points and blusters to protect his friends in office, regardless of their evil and incompetence. A man whose political stance is that of doing harm to his citizens, over and over again - death by a thousand cuts.

If all of these beliefs, all of these logical processes make me a terrorist sympathiser, then I will wear that label, and I will wear it with a defiant pride. I will not be intimidated by those who use fear to try and achieve their political ends - David Cameron - into forsaking my morals and my conscience.

I am a terrorist sympathiser.

Just ask the terrorists.