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.

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.