EU referendum postscript

So, yesterday Britain went to the polls to vote on whether we wanted to be in or out of the European Union.

The campaign on both sides was pretty woeful, Boris appears to have taken the job as leader of the Brexit campaign in order to bluff the population out of voting Brexit, a fact that most of the media has ignored. I have never seen Boris make so many errors as he did during the campaign, which leads me to believe that he took it on as a favour to Cameron.

Meanwhile the Remain campaign, headed by David Cameron himself, was just as lazy and complacent as their assumption that we in Scotland would be too lazy to consider running our own country.

Hilariously, England and Wales have voted out, and everyone else plus London and the richer cities have voted to remain in.  Boris probably had about fifteen minutes to write his speech this morning.

Nobody appears to have planned for a vote to exit, and nobody seems to be able to imagine the UK without the EU.  Younger voters have been tweeting all day about the selfish old codgers who supposedly ruined their futures by voting to leave the EU. They have been trained to find someone to hate in response to news that they do not like.  Who should it be this week?  The fat, the old, the smoker, the drinker, the ehead, the junkie.  Whatever floats your boat, it is no fun to actually look at the truth, and it probably takes more than 30 seconds.

There do not seem to be many people willing to discuss it that actually remember what the UK was like before we joined in the first place.  In 1975, there was weeks of discussion over whether it was a good idea, huge resistance to doing it, and a large number of people and industries have suffered in order to benefit a few large companies and extremely rich people. These same younger voters know nothing of Britain’s fishing industry, eating British produce when it was in season, or actually being able to get work when you were looking for it instead of endless temporary work whilst you wait to get a job that you are actually trained for.  I am by no means suggesting that Britain was paradise, but it was certainly easier for my older siblings, who all benefited from the pre-EU economy, to find gainful and permanent employment than it was for me. Marks and Spencers, for another example, used to sell classic styling made in Britain.  We generated domestic income by promoting things ACTUALLY MADE HERE, and people had work.

Driving around Scotland, you can see traces of the industries that have been destroyed since then, by a combination of Westminster policy, EU rulings, and the ability to easily move jobs thanks to a more advanced system which meant that company owners no longer needed to care if they were destroying an entire region by removing thousands of jobs.  Kilmarnock made carpets, Port Glasgow had shipping services, Rothesay was the holiday destination for railway workers.  All over Scotland you can marvel at the astonishing amounts of money we once had to build incredibly beautiful buildings, and the people now housed in cardboard blocks of flats, who once earned a decent living and spent money, sustaining everybody around them as they did so.

Whilst the porridge wogs are, of course, of no importance to the English and Welsh voters who have now decided to revive the old UK, (they hate everyone with equal venom)  they have now noticed similar desertification of their own areas, and they are angry with Westminster.  Scottish people are just whingers, of course, but these proud English have expressed their anger by demanding that Britain exit what is seen to be a controlling EU, which somehow manages to induce the Conservative Government that these same people voted for, to create policies which kill the disabled through neglect and welfare punishment, invite an underclass of immigrants to undercut the fake minimum wage, and – shock horror – reduce their local services.

Does anyone seriously think that their favoured Conservative Government is more trustworthy with human rights, the environment, TTIP, TISA, CETA and promoting a healthy economy which benefits everyone within Britain?  No, I do not think they do.  I think they are more like my neighbour, who does not want Scottish independence in case he has to do some additional paperwork and refuses to understand that people are dying BECAUSE HE VOTED TORY.  I think they have, like the young, been trained to hate, and they have chosen the traditional English way out – it is Johnny Foreigner’s fault.

With my economics hat on, I forsee interesting times.  I do not forsee a return to ‘Buy British’ or the heyday they seem to think they will return to, but a country that allows you to make a living and allows the fishing boats to fish their own waters would be nice, so it is not the end of the world.  The pound going down is not so bad either, since it will create a demand for the goods nobody sees the point in making any more.

It may also interest the disappointed youth to know that nobody was prevented from going on holiday before we joined the EU.

Motivation and Privilege

Was discussing the election of the London Mayor with Twisty.  Personally, I think London elected the best of a bad bunch, despite Sadiq Khan’s lack of popularity with Scottish Asians.  (he came up here and lied to them at the time of the referendum) Time will tell how well he does, but there is no reason to suspect that his allegedly questionable contacts will interfere with his job.  Zac Goldsmith, whilst very high profile, does not appear to really understand, or for that matter need to understand, the nature of the job, having conducted a campaign based on the fact that he is not Muslim, but is pansexual.

Who cares if he is pansexual?  He seems to, but I am not sure anybody else does.  I wondered why he always seems so terribly young, given that he is not much younger than me?  Twisty asserts that this is because he has never had to work for anything, has effortlessly become a high profile Conservative, and with £400 million, does not really need to work at all.  At this point I started to mentally question this hypothesis. Parental achievement can be demotivating, since you are unlikely to top the heroic feats of your forbears. At least instead of destroying businesses like his father, Zac has chosen to serve people, albeit as a Conservative MP.

Stella McCartney did not have to be a particularly good designer to get backing.  This is true.  She would always have had a great deal of support due to her contacts and surname.  Lulu Guinness the handbag maker also had a very easy time.  I recall an article about her stylishness before her first handbag was even on sale.  Now she presents a ‘cheap’ product at £300 on Kelly Hoppen’s shopping channel, and it actually sells.  According to Twisty, I should feel resentful of this, that people with moderate talent have an easy route to fame and a living via their name and wealthy family.

The flip side of this is that Zac, Stella, and Lulu would find it extremely difficult to get a job in Gregg’s the bakery, should they ever require it, as it would be assumed that they would find taking orders, fulfilling people’s lunch requirements, and cleaning up after themselves extremely menial.  I can tell you this, because as an apparently ‘middle class’ Glaswegian graduate (with a bog standard school education, rather than private education social network like my comparatively mediocre brother)  I was turned down for hundreds of jobs I would have not only have been able to do well, but would have worked extremely hard at, as is my usual wont.  At least with their names, these people have a decent opportunity to shine, or bomb, in front of the entire population, instead of a low key continuous failure to be acknowledged as with my own experience.

In 2008 or so, my friend in London spoke in hushed terms of how the middle classes were suffering in London from a similar malaise.  Graduates were not getting jobs, based upon the lack of availability, and were expected to feel shame at their own failure, rather than coming out in public and asking where the knowledge economy actually is?  The over-supply of graduates has been going on for some time.  It is not only a class issue, but an issue of an economy which is sustaining itself via putting people in a state of debt misery for life. Then you see the SNP being attacked for not producing more working class graduates.  Those working class non-graduates are probably earning more than you, is the real reason. Glasgow has the most highly qualified bar staff in Europe.

So when the issue of motivation and privilege came up yet again, as it frequently does with Twisty, who has had an unfortunate life for reasons other than opportunity, as he has enjoyed far more opportunity than I have, I felt rather put out, on behalf of people who are either fortunate by birth, or fortunate by actually being given a chance. It is not always safe to assume that the fortunate few are incapable of learning how to fill an unexpected niche, and they are not always as clueless as you might assume.

One of the most offensive experiences I ever had was at an interview with a married and well kept company director, who asked me whether ‘I paddled my own canoe.’  I was not only paddling my own canoe at the time, despite people like her not giving me a chance for employment, I was also paddling my parents’ canoe, and maintaining my scum siblings undeserved inheritance as I am still doing.  You get tired of paying for everyone else’s bullshit, whether financially or by sheer hard labour with no chance for a life of your own. This does not mean you target people with a better life deal than you, however, with mean spirited joy in their problems.

There are thousands, if not millions of people of all social classes who have no understanding of how fortunate they are.  Fortunate to have the opportunity to work, to have families, to go out when they want to, to sit and watch TV instead of bothering to improve themselves.  They tend to say things like ‘you make your own luck’ and ‘pull your socks up.’ Similar to Twisty, they feel quite free to object to people more fortunate than themselves. I trust they will not be requiring any help for reasons of sickness or circumstance any time soon, because frankly they do not deserve any.

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For regular readers – 50 is the magic base number for youtube now, you get about the same number of random hits on 50 videos from an unknown that you used to get on 1.  Just so you know to divide your work into small chunks rather than relying on one under-tagged video. Obviously, Ina is at a disadvantage since she has no face, and in the event anyone ever wishes to meet her, I guess I will have to invest in an actual disguise. I will post the link to relevant playlists once they are all up and sorted into manageable chunks. I am planning to do some sketch writing at some point, so the channel will develop as the project wears on.

I am about halfway with the  blog transfer to youtube.  Most, but not all of the videos are going up, I do not see any reason to repeat some of the more impulsive entries, and as with the free books of posts I put out earlier in the year, I will be classifying them according to topic, as I seem to have settled into a number of themes. It has certainly been an enlightening year or so of finding out what my weaknesses are.

It does not look as if the Conservatives giggling away at this

Trickle-down lies

have really understood anything. I am well aware that some key Conservatives read it, and am duly gratified.

It astonishes me that our current Chancellor and Prime Minister seem to have learned nothing from the history of their own party.  They do not understand British politics, they do not understand what popular Conservative policy is, and they do not understand that their decision making is going to lose them the next election.  To an old school Labourite no less!  The depths of stupidity are astounding!

We in Scotland are of course, somewhat left of even popular conservative policy, but we still have conservative tendencies.  The difference is that our idea of nationalism is somewhat more hospitable and opportunity-based.  It does not take a gigantic leap of imagination to come up with the idea of evacuation in place of immigration in the case of thousands of refugee children, meaning that the idea of said children bringing extended families would not be relevant. Rural schools and kindly people alike would welcome the opportunity

Instead the nasty party has struck again.  From Maggie’s actually quite clever idea of ‘feeding the base of the pyramid’ with opportunity, to buy property and shares and actually become rather conservative at any level of income, we have apparently witnessed a Conservative government who do not appear to care whether they are popular or not.

They appear to believe that everyone has inherited wealth that we do not want to pay any tax on, have a ‘divine right’ to shaft anyone poorer than us, that nobody will notice if they actually kill a few thousand people in the form of withholding support when they need it, and that there are sufficient voters to ensure that they get to continue in their reign of terror long enough to get whatever backhand benefits from TTIP and TISA privatisation that they have invested in.

Perhaps the answer is that as long as Cameron and Osborne last this term, they will have secured their investments.  Perhaps the answer is that they are knuckle-draggingly stupid and think that people will actually support continuous cruelty towards large swathes of the population, British or otherwise.  Perhaps the answer is that the system is now so corrupt that we need not bother voting at all, because the numbers will still come in as Conservative whether they are or not.

Whatever the answer to this question is, this government is not competent, and they are not really British.  They represent a very small proportion of the population, who are complacent, arrogant, privileged to the point of being very spoilt, and who apparently sit in their English villages hating everybody else.  I remember an argument with Rachel Johnson some years ago.  Within two emails it became apparent that she has no idea how the other 90 percent live, and is unlikely to ever find out.  How did we end up with a government consisting of people just like her?

Gone are the notions of British conservatism, pride in the nation, pride in achievement and the sense that the British class machine actually worked very well.  In place of this we have a new, rather lazy, rather amoral failed and incorrect idea of a neo-Victoriana, which has no place for the poor, so we might as well just clean up the housing estates and kill them all by starvation, poor healthcare, or the death of opportunity for anyone that is not Conservative.  Gone is the colonialism and pride which gave us an empire. In its place, scrounging rich people who want to cream off the contracts and not bother to pay any tax, and who apparently imagine that they are supported in doing so by thousands of people just like them.

What happened to the importance of popularity in politics?  What happened to the idea that you voted for competent, decent people who cared about something other than their own wallets?  What happened to genuine achievement? Getting handouts from your rich mummies and daddies is not the same as actually doing something for your money. Money does not a true gentleman make.

Emulating Trump in the course of promoting an exit from the EU is not the Boris we are used to either.

If Philip Green’s murder of BHS to fill his pockets with yet more cash is an example of Conservative achievement, we don’t want it.  It is time to replace the figureheads, or get the Tories out before they do any more damage to suit themselves. Altogether we are seeing an attempt to shift from a cooperative society, to a very selfish idea that if you cannot make it, by fair means or foul, then you might as well just die because you lack money.

If the Conservative government does not change course right now, we will see riots in the streets, and with all your taxes in tax havens, you won’t be able to afford the increased levels of policing you will require to protect yourselves.  Suppressing the media will not make your mistakes go away.

Apparently some conservatives get through life so easily that they cannot actually use Google or read, so here are some handy links if you are  socially isolated, academically inept, and presumably cold as ice, and have not actually noticed what the public’s response to the nasty party’s recent scandals actually referred to. Saying that it is an issue about accounting practices does not make it so.

Thousands died after fit for work assessment

Over 4000 people have died soon after being found fit to work by jobcentre assessment

Ten thousand benefit claimants declared fit for work under Tory assessment have died

Harder fit for work tests connected to rise in number of suicides

Fit for work disability tests linked to increase in suicides

More than 2300 died after fit for work tests

Starving soldier died

Ian Mulholland- Sanctioned, Starved, Jailed

Famished woman fined £330 for stealing a mars bar after benefits stopped

Yes people can starve to death in benefit sanctions Britain

One in five benefit related deaths involved sanctions admits DWP

People starving to death in the UK – on David Cameron’s doorstep

Factcheck – is the government starving the poor?

Please get a sense of proportion and grow up. It is happening, just because nobody has slashed their wrists over your petunias, it does not mean it goes away.  The Tory Government has made the entire country guilty of murder by neglect. That is not good politics, and it certainly isn’t good economics.