I can’t help but feel negative today. Over the last 12 hours it has become quite clear to me what kind of a society we are now living in. That we are just four weeks away from a General Election makes this realisation all the more terrifying and well….frankly….depressing.
Social media is as good an indicator as any of the way the land lies politically. Certainly better than YouGov polls, which as Dave Gorman once memorably demonstrated show that one or both of Ant and Dec are more right wing than Hitler. If they are, they would fit right in on my Twitter timeline. I never knew I associated with so many me-first Disciples of Rupert who really couldn’t give even half a shit about the effects of austerity or the future of the NHS.
It all started last night when one of my followers began ripping into Jeremy Corbyn’s maths skills, claiming that the Labour leader could not afford to make good on the promises he looks set to make in the party’s manifesto. He claimed that Corbyn’s plan to fully fund schools, the NHS and to scrap tuition fees is ‘a lie’. But it isn’t really that people don’t believe that Labour can pull these things off that really gets under my skin, it is the fact that people don’t want seem to want it to happen. They actually don’t support fully funded schools, the NHS, or the abolition of unfair tuition fees which, by the way, did not exist when most of these fuckwits who are in power now started their slimy climb up the political ladder.
Another pulled me up on my assertion that Tories want the disabled to die (which they do if their plans to cut funding for the most vulnerable are anything to go by) by claiming that we don’t have a problem with tax evasion in this country. Justifying this he informed me that the top 1% of earners already pay 30% of all tax, as if this somehow justified the evasion of tax by others. I pointed this out, along with the fact that far more money is lost to this country through tax evasion than it is through benefit fraud and yet we still continue to blame the poor through austerity and the privatisation of services and he kind of seemed to agree with me. But then he reverted to the default right wing position of blaming it all on ‘yerp’ and that nasty EU that’s busy ganging up on us right now.
Nostalgic isolationism at its finest. Let’s get our country back and while we’re at it, let’s watch as the north of the country is left to gently sail away from the power base in the south until it becomes part of fucking Iceland. Nothing good that has happened in this country in recent years from greater disability access to improved human rights and regeneration of northern cities would have happened outside the EU under a Tory government and you can expect it to stop if and when Evil Theresa manages to negotiate a deal for us to leave. But never mind all that, at least Tarquin won’t have to give up a larger share of his £387billion fortune which he has worked so hard to earn ever since his fucking daddy left it to him.
More and more now there is an acceptance of all of this and that consequently, we should no longer expect a free health service. One Tweeter made a comparison between the NHS and dentistry, for which we all now pay apparently without complaint. Excuse me? I don’t know what placid, stiff upper lip types this guy lives among but personally I don’t know anyone who doesn’t think that the amount charged for dentistry these days is anything but an absolute disgrace. We accept it because we have to, it’s done now and once that happens it is very difficult to go back. But the idea that we never question it is beyond berserk. Also, you cannot really compare it to the NHS in any case. Dentistry is important but it is very rarely a matter of life and death. If the NHS is privatised you are faced with the very real prospect of people dying because they can’t afford the treatments or medication they need. It will be a society in which the wealthy will survive and prosper and the poor will wither and die. Tory ideology is that this is fine because I’m alright Jack. I don’t need to worry about being unable to fund my own health insurance so screw those that do. There isn’t a more depressing thought than that as far as I can see. It makes my head hurt.
Of course there is a possibility that this is scaremongering, and that the NHS will still continue to operate as it does now, free at the point of access. Yet with parts of the service having already been auctioned off to the highest bidder and with the Tory manifesto making very clear indications that it will not continue to fund the health service can we really afford to bet on the chance that they are bluffing? That’s a gamble even Joey Barton would shy away from. The awful truth is that Tory ideology involves governing as little as possible, and instead selling everything off to be run by the highest bidder. When that happens, the customer is the one who pays the highest price and some are inevitably unable to keep up and literally die off. I can’t have that on my conscience even if I have more than enough money to get by in that kind of system. I don't vote out of self-interest like an increasing, alarming number of people seem to these days.
Thatcherism has eroded any sense of community, of caring about the fate of others that we had. It’s every one for him or herself now and if you can’t keep up you get branded a lazy good for nothing while the rich cream ever increasing amounts off the top. Society has changed, capitalism is here to stay which is why there is such a seething media outcry against Corbyn’s left wing ideas. The BBC, Sky News and several of the best-selling newspapers are all in the government’s pocket because under their rule they will be allowed to keep doing what they do, fleecing the public for peddling their pungent, often preposterous shit. Anyone left wing is now laughed out of town as a dreamer and a bleeding heart. Caring for others has become taboo in the race to get more, more, more for your fucking fat self.
I am disgusted. You can probably tell.
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