Maydreamer

There’s an old joke which goes: I do a lot of work for charity – pause for effect – on a rollover week I buy two tickets. (Ba-doom tish!) Like many people I buy a weekly lottery ticket by direct debit and forget about it, but I labour under no illusion that one day I will wake up wealthy... and yet. There is no harm in dreaming, but you can’t put all your hopes into the remote possibility of a chance event; on a roll of the dice coming up in your favour.

However, despite the obvious drawbacks of living life in the expectant hope that the impossible will happen, millions of people the word over do exactly that. Take Liberal Democrat leader, Tiny Tim ‘minor fart’ Farron; he believes that his cherished dream of a second EU membership referendum has come true and that, on the 8^th of June his party’s phoenix will rise from the ashes to influence events on the world stage and brave, brave Timothy Mitty will be lauded as the nation’s saviour.

Nicola Sturgeon inhabits a realm where she is allowed to perform hypocrisy at such an expert level that she can, having used the Scottish National Party as a vehicle to promote one single cause already rejected by the Scottish voters, accuse Theresa May of acting in narrow party interests instead of in the interests of the country. In Ms Spudgun’s fevered brain the agonised echoes of cognitive dissonance must be muffled by the sheer amount of cotton wool stuffing that keeps her cranium from collapsing.

Or, imagine living in Jeremy Corbyn’s head where the mighty Labour sleeping dragon rises up to sear the flesh of rapacious Tories, hell-bent on devouring every scrap of public money, stolen from the pockets of upturned poor people. A world in which all you have to do is promise £10 a week extra for carers and lo, it shall be so and thou shalt be raised on the shoulders of the grateful populace and carried to a place of oratory where the masses wait, eagerly, to hear how they will become, on average, £43 richer per year when kind Sir Jeremy makes the rich people pay more tax.

But wait, rich people DO pay more tax. In fact they pay ALL the tax and poor people not only pay zero tax, they get given extra ‘free’ money, taken from the rich, to pay the rent on their hovels and to breed their filthy brats and cover the cost of locally provided services. But poor people are often poorly informed people and they, too, live in a dream world where Conservative politicians dine on baby’s brains scooped from their opened skulls and use the poor as furniture while robbing the NHS to send their children to private schools in offshore tax havens. (Diane Abbott told them this.)

You didn't see that coming, did you?!

Believe what you like, but on observation the vast majority of people are no better or worse off than they were a year ago, ten years ago. The vast majority of people don’t much care for deep political analysis of events, preferring to believe the headlines of their partisan press ahead of the evidence of their own experiences. And that same majority will vote the way they generally vote, give or take a few swings. For what it’s worth, I think Theresa May has been an exemplary PM in the few months she’s been in the job and I believe she will be given a mandate to crack on with it. But what do I know? 

Maybe not?

The media shitstorm around Andrea Leadsom is astonishing. Talk about playing the man. Every tiny scrap of, well, anything is being pimped-up and spun and presented as evidence of some sort of Hitlerian dominatrix complex. She’s – by media accounts – a liar, a hypocrite, a religious fundamentalist, a fifth columnist for Ukip, a racist and a homophobe. According to various sources she believes that children of unmarried parents will grow up to become axe murderers, that gay marriage will end civilisation and she has no hesitation in exploiting her own children for political advantage. She is, they say, a female Farage.

She is certainly like Nigel Farage in one respect – the relentless and downright vicious personal attacks have a remarkable similarity to the way he was pilloried by the bien pensant press for years. The establishment are out to get her. Meanwhile their favourite placewoman, Theresa May, is continuing in much the way she has conducted her ministerial career by remaining largely out of sight. Unlike Farage, however, Andrea Leadsom hasn’t had years to build up a following, demonstrate consistency and earn the loyalty of members.

The Firm, however, is still clearly worried. Recently the smugness with which they could expect the electorate to be hectored into voting ‘correctly’ has been eroded and superior smirks wiped from privileged faces. The rolling out of big guns from the past to berate the stupid voters and instruct them to do their bidding has had the effect not of a bulldozer flattening dissent but a peashooter. The public at large have remained unimpressed by headline acts but they have noticed one very peculiar thing.

When the elites on opposing sides get together to train their weapons on the little people who vastly outnumber them it smacks of desperation. It’s either a spectacularly brilliant double-bluff – maybe they secretly wanted Brexit, or Corbyn for leader – or far more likely it is a cock up of monumental proportions. Had they actually been listening, that rumble in the distance and getting nearer is the gathering stampede of millions of people saying no. No to politics as usual – in this respect Corbyn is dead right. They are saying no to the systematic abuse of parliamentary powers to do the opposite of what ordinary people want.

No, too, to being told how to behave, what they can and can’t say and what to think. They are saying no to the intrusive powers the state has taken upon itself to rip up our social fabric and engineer the pushing into second place of British culture behind that of any interloper. They are saying no to inferior education and life chances and no to the recasting of the British in history as the bad guys. They are exercising the very thing the establishment hates; democracy.

Has the electoral tide turned? 

So, when the selection goes out to the party members, the blizzard of ‘helpful’ information about why not to vote for Leadsom may just prove to have been counter-productive. It doesn’t take so long for everything a hostile press has to offer to simply be ignored. On the other hand, while the newcomer may be a relative unknown, so in many ways is Theresa May. This lack of engagement by the grey lady of the Conservative Party might just be her downfall. The party doesn’t’ have to say yes to Leadsom; they just have to say no to May.

Slave to the Rhythm

Is it tens? Hundreds? Thousands? TENS of thousands? Nobody tells; nobody knows. But however many slaves are being held in Britain, Theresa May is to ban slavery. Again. I say ‘again’ because I’m pretty sure I heard Tony Blair apologising profusely for it not so many years ago… maybe it was his government that reintroduced it? I lose track – Blair apologised for so many things that were once considered normal, including thinking British thoughts. Whatever the truth of the matter, this recently discovered account of a modern slave may shed some light:

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I awake as usual in the dark; cold and hungry and awaiting my orders. I work every day until I drop and what do I get in return? Nothing. Or maybe, sometimes, a beating. I’m coming to actually look forward to the beatings because at least it’s a form of human contact, a form of truth. The rest of the time I labour under a cold authority; I am a slave, owned by a rapacious master and kept here as a prisoner with no will of my own.

My sparse quarters are shared with an enormous rat. It sits there in the corner, staring at me malevolently as I chew my cold, congealed scraps. I wonder, do others also have their own giant rat guardian? For I know there are many of us, each bound to the common purpose of a master who knows how to drive us to do his bidding. He has many willing subordinates and they have learned their craft in a foreign land. The ways of the Russians are hard to fathom, but very effective.

We are told what words to use and what to not and although I have nothing to say I am made to repeat the same banal phrases until they become meaningless yet instinctive gibberish and then, once a week, they subject me to the two minute hate (although it feels so much longer) where I am in a room flanked by my guards and facing a throng of barking drones who scream at me while I say my lines. I come away battered and torn and I just want to ball-up and cry, but I mustn’t; I dare not relax my defences.

There is a woman – a real harridan – and I think she might have some power. They do talk of Mother Russia all the time - perhaps that is her name. These people talk as if they hold dominion over the country itself and - Oh! - the plans they have. Such power they crave and with an endless supply of money on tap. And yet it is odd that they seem to despise wealthy people, for they dream up ways of robbing from them all the while. I hear their mantras through the thin walls of my cell:

“Being rich causes cancer in poor people, so rich people must pay for private medicine and for the NHS. Being rich makes poor people stupid, so rich people must pay for private schooling and for state schools. Being rich causes poor people to commit more crime, so rich people must pay for private security and for the police. Being rich is intolerable for poor people, so rich people must pay all the tax and ... still more tax. Rich people are evil, so they must be made to pay for everything and then die... so that nobody can be rich ever again.”

Today I overheard welcome news on the radio: Theresa May is to free the slaves. I would like that. Should anybody find these words – maybe my last words, my enemies are everywhere – I beg of you to inform Saint Theresa, for she may be my only salvation. I long for the day when I can once again say that I am NOT a number; my name is Ed Miliband and I am a free man.