‘Honest politics and Tory politics are contradictions in terms. Lying is a necessary part of a Tory’s political equipment, for it is essential for him to conceal his political intentions from the people. This is partly the reason for his success in keeping power.’
The founder of the NHS, and a chief builder of the post WW11 Welfare State, Nye Bevan, in 1944.
All these years later, after a period in which over 75% of the time has seen Tories in government (add New Labour’s Tory-Lite era, and it’s been an era of near as dammit total right wing dominance!), his words seem more apt than ever.
I hate Toryism, Conservatism*, Capitalism, and their rabid pooches, aka the right-wing media.
[* Small ‘c’ conservatism is fine. I’m all for preserving what is good. Ironically large ‘C’ Conservatism, far from conserving what is good, takes a wrecking ball to it.]
It is my firm and unshakeable belief, based on the evidence of just over fifty years on this planet, that the Tories have presided over (masterminded is just plain wrong, in such instances) a sustained campaign, not just of thievery – the ‘plunder of the commons’ that has always been the m.o. of any rapine ruling elite – but vulgarisation.
This is what passes for culture in Toryland.
Toryism not only takes from the many to enrich the few, it also seeks to destroy the very soul of any cultures not wholly compliant with or supportive of their base greediness. Modern mainstream TV and the commercial Muzak Industry are typical exemplars.
Some of the many other ways in which all of this is apparent are: the growing ubiquity of gambling, the wall to wall encroachment of advertising,* the disintegration – dismemberment is a more accurate term – of public institutions (be they councils, schools, the BBC or NHS), and the shifting of care off government shoulders on to those of the charity sector.
[* Sadly adturds.co.uk has stopped. That was always a good place to have a laugh about how ghastly contemporary ad culture has become.]
Scary. Ironically, I am myself a Lloyds customer.*
[* Orwellian times, indeed, when a soul-less parasitic money making machine spends millions (whose money are they spending on this, I wonder?) lying to its victims, er, sorry, customers, to persuade them they are our friends. Appalling!]
Descartes ‘I think, therefore I am’ has been replaced by ‘I shop, therefore I am’. Even healthcare has its own dedicated lottery. And of course more and more people are ever more reliant on charity, because our government clearly doesn’t give a f*ck.
Most government policies are nakedly self-interested. That’s the whole raison d’etre for Brexit; escape EU control, deregulate, and pillage.
And if it’s not brazen greediness, it’s pandering to their Daily Mail reading zombie supporters. Examples of this range from their attitude towards immigration and refugees, to protests, the homeless, and the recent introduction of ‘antisocial behaviour’ legislation to stop the recreational use of laughing gas.
Good God, Steve Bell is terrific.
Regarding Tory pandering to the gammonry, it’s blatantly clear they don’t care one jot about expert opinion – from the laughing gas ban to their ‘plans’ re energy and the environment – or the fact that their moronically myopic policies are far more likely to damage more lives than they’ll benefit.
It’s not just that no cost to the plebs is too great. It’s that naked self-serving egotism, elitism and greed are so central, so fundamental, to the Tory outlook (I nearly said mindset), that no cost to the masses will ever be enough.
With record numbers of millionaires alongside record levels of food bank usage, and declining life expectancy amongst the poorer, the sheer existence of billionaires, whose wealth is beyond obscene, shows us that ‘western man’, so to speak – at least in the ruling elites of the UK (and US) we’ve been subjected to since the ‘80s – is a morally bankrupt species.
And it’s a horrifically all pervasive and highly corrosive form of chemical cultural warfare that has long been being waged, not just via the murderous eugenics by neglect of things like ‘austerity’, but in allowing mainstream media to be nothing more than another opportunity for rapine commerce, dumbing everything down such that nowadays celebrities frequently take obvious pride in being pigsh*t ignorant. Even a modicum of intelligence is something to sneered at and derided.*
[* ‘This is the first period in my life where ignorance is something to be proud of’ said Mary Beard, in relation to Trump vs Hilary Clinton. For the hoi polloi this translates to celebrities on game shows revelling in their own vacuity.]
One of the biggest ironies in amongst all of this is that it’s Capitalism with a rod of iron for the lower orders, but Socialism for the best off. That’s what Tories and their ‘neo-liberal’ allies have done time and again: nationalise loss, and privatise profit.
Bail out the fat cats with public money, and let Tory MPs charge £10K a day for their privateering, whilst denying the sick and elderly due care, because ‘we can’t afford’ £7K per annum for those oldies, who worked all their lives propping up the ‘trickle down’ empire of their betters.
These entitled right wing parasites have been rubbing their hands with glee at Covid: more chances to steal from the public. And even better still, they can sit back and enjoy the ‘culling of elderly dependents.’ Hitler called such folk – the human cattle elites so happily consign to poverty, suffering and death – ‘useless eaters’. Our current day capitalo-fascists are cut from the same cloth as Nazis. That’s not hyperbole.
Nye Bevan, founder of the NHS was absolutely right when he said that Tories are ‘lower than vermin.’
FOOTNOTE(s)
A Guardian headline I saw recently seems apt for recording here: ‘In the post-Brexit wreckage, just one Tory strategy remains: the theatre of cruelty.’ The article (which I didn’t read in full, btw) appears to take issue with the current Tory efforts to deflect the public’s attention from their catastrophic misrule by kicking the helpless in the teeth. Nothing new there. Yet the Gammonry will fall for it. Again.
On a different yet related line… Quora seems like a cesspool of mainly right-wing dumb-shittery. But I did see one post, click-baitingly titled along the lines ‘Is the Left responsible for the decline of the UK’*, which was actually quite good. In it, someone going under the name Sage, says, quite rightly:
‘The British class system and anti intellectualism (my italics) are major reasons for Britain’s decline in the 20th century.
Take the example of Frank Whittle. He published a paper in 1929 outlining the design of the jet engine. No one took him or his idea seriously because he had not been to a public school (curiously this means a private, fee-paying school in the U.K.) and had been a mere RAF apprentice. Even when he produced a working prototype many years later, no one listened. (“Not our kind of chap…a bit of a one-off boffin”).
Eventually, when it was clear that the Germans had two flying jet planes about to enter service, the Ministry for Aircraft Production got the message and invested in Whittle’s idea. However they basically swindled Whittle out of his invention. The British post war aircraft industry could have been world beater but the Americans weren’t hampered in the same way. They didn’t mind Whittle one bit, and saw only his genius.’
Must read this!
I have a book I have yet to read, pictured above, about the intellectual lives of the British working classes. Must get around to reading that. Oh, and then there’s also The Plunder of The Commons to be read as well.
* What a preposterous idea! In a virtual one-party Tory state for the best part of 75 years, in which for Labour to get in they had to become ‘Tory-lite’ (under Blair) (before going beyond Tory, under ‘Broon’), such ideas are beyond risible. Out of reach even of satire.
Akin to the infamous oxymoronic (or rather just plain moronic) ‘left wing economic establishment’, such ‘ideas’ display so stunning a degree of obduracy to facts and intelligence one would have to conclude the Tories relentless dumbing-down had succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. So much so that in a moment of mental or philosophical acid reflux they themselves are swallowing their own bile, and believing in it.
Bell, brilliant as evert.
The most corrosive form of Tory Rot really set in and bit deep with Thatcher. An appalling excuse for a human being, whose two key achievements, in the words of Reuters were that ‘she crushed the unions and privatised large swathes of industry.’
A farce far worse than any black comedy.If only this had been true!
Thatcher’s legacy, again, acc. to Reuters: ‘The woman who became known simply as “Maggie” transferred big chunks of the economy from state hands into private ownership.’ That’s Plunder of The Commons, right there.
Brilliant! Smell the sulphurous stench of Modern Toryism. Spot on, as ever.
To my mind, the short answer to the question posed in the title of this post is a short and resounding yes!
However, apparently much of the science says otherwise: ‘Fundamentally, the idea of a general addictive personality is a myth. Research finds no universal character traits that are common to all addicted people.’ [1]
Anyway, I’ve suddenly collapsed into a near vegetative state of depression, over the last few months. Some of the reasons are perennial (lack of money), others more singular (least said, soonest mended).
Amidst all of this, I’ve relapsed into few behaviours (I’m sounding like an amateur naturist, er… naturalist, now) that seem, outwardly, very aulde. One of the common denominators to all these behaviours, is addiction.
And some of the things that characterise the kind of addiction I’m talking about: firstly they compel one to act in ways one knows are foolish and high risk, and two, there’s a kind of hollow joylessness to whatever the indulgence might me.
On that latter point, it has to be said that things aren’t really as cut and dried as that idea might imply. Pleasure can be and is taken in the addictive behaviours. But there’s an underlying sense, sometimes even when unquestionably enjoying the addictive behaviour, that one is acting foolishly.
Why should it be this way? And what makes certain things so compelling that they hijack one’s better judgement? This post isn’t an attempt to really answer such questions. In truth it’s more the sudden realisation that I’ve got some possible addiction ‘issues’ I need to acknowledge and work on.
Looking at all the textual images in this post, which I pulled from the Google image search results for ‘addictive personality’, they almost all apply. Perhaps unsurprisingly?
I’d say that for me there are two or three chief drivers when it comes to most of my addictions: pleasure, relaxation and escape. And the leaning into these behaviours is exacerbated in times of high stress – such as presently – by the desire to reduce or mitigate it.
I like to use my blog as a somewhat candid journal. But it’s neither an outright confessional, nor the best place to air dirty laundry that might best be addressed professionally.
On this last topic, however, I feel I’m being let down in a pretty big way, by the alphabet soup of acronym-heavy mental-health organisations I’ve been alerted to. It’s all pillar to post Groundhog Day assessments, and nary any actual support!
Whisky…
Having inferred above that here is not the place to go into the gory details of specific addictions, I will use one relatively innocuous seeming but actually very insidious example, namely spending.
My re-formulation of Descartes famous dictum, for our times, runs thus ‘I spend therefore I am’. One of histories’ greatest dictators, the unholy axis of capitalism and materialism, has marched into and annexed almost every conceivable aspect of modern life.
And I will often attempt to spend my way out of obscurity and depression with anything from a Gregg’s pizza slice to a book, CD, clothes or shoes.
Be prepared to be shocked and amazed as Count Arthur channels the spirits (not the ones he keeps in his dunks cabinet, mind). Mind-blowing psychic powers! Just be sure to have a tissue handy, in case nan’s pesky parrot threatens to mess on your sailor suit!
Disturbingly hilarious!
Learn all about Clean Queerpatra, and the sarsosagoose of Gordon Rameses. Just be careful the camels don’t get your potted meat sarnies.
And just in nut-case you wrongly surprise that The Count is some kind of Stegosaurus Rex, here’s proof he can move with the rimes:
And, far from resting on his impervious laurels (hardy millennials that they indubitabubbly are), he’s continued to hone his ventrilaquastick, er, ventricle-elastic… um, sod it, the art of squeaking with you mouth shut. Don’t believe me? Let The Count and his little red-hatted friend testifry:
It’s an incredibly rare occasion that I’m aware of snooker events before they occur. As I become more of an ardent fan of the sport – a veritable green baize junkie? – perhaps this first will become more of a norm?
Anyway, whilst catching up on my FB news feed (Paul O’Grady has died, aged 67!), I learned that the next snooker World Championship ‘takes place from 15 April to 1 May at the Crucible Theatre in Sheffield.’
It seems, according to the article that informed me of this, that this year we’ll see an influx of geriatric male stars – Hendry, White and Doherty, specifically – and several female contestants.
Could be interesting. But I’m glad that for once I’m aware of the event before and not after it’s started (or, at best previously, whilst it’s on). In the meantime my quest for the classic matches of yesteryear continues.
I kind of fancy going really old school, and watching a ‘Hirricane’ Huggins match, or maybe even that Davis vs. Taylor black ball one… Hmmm!?
‘Oozing class’, ‘a marvellous match… a Crucible classic’, ‘one of the best matches we have ever seen’. So sayeth the pundits, of this match. And i’sooth, it’s all true. ‘Twas absolutely fab!
Trump opened up a blistering and dominant 12-5 lead, only to have Williams, ‘the Welsh potting machine’, come roaring back at him. Some sublime snooker from both of them took us to the brink.
At 16-15 in Williams’ favour, the humbly eccentric former boxer looked poised to deliver one of the greatest sporting comebacks ever. But Trump dug in, or went to the well as they say, and took it to 16-16.
A standing ovation prior to frame 33.
The decider was a terrific frame, by far the longest of the match, clocking in at about 45-50 minutes. Both players had chances. And in the end there was a long safety duel, as Williams tried to beat the ‘astronomical odds’; he needed three or four snookers (and he laid a good few more than that).
But in the end, Trump triumphed by potting the blue. What an epically exhausting but exhilarating match. One for the ages.
Anything pleasurable is a form of therapy right now. Model making and little toy soldiers are, on and off, areas of hobbying that I have enjoyed.
I have a ’mini-military’ blog called AQOS (link!). But I’ve kind of petered out posting on there. Partly ‘cause of tech and software issues, and partly just going completely off the boil on that front.
I’m thinking I might concentrate all my blogging in the one place, here. But I’m at a loss how to manage or incorporate the various strands.
Watching this terrific little series again. What fun! as Miranda’s mum liked to say. Saxondale really tickles my funny-bone. And laughter is great medicine when you’re wrestling with a St. Bernard’s sized black-eyed dog.
The ageing quite clever and quite articulate ex-roadie turned pest controller is a great creation. Struggling with anger issues, and having to deal with the excruciating Vicky (Morwena Banks) to get jobs.
He encounters a Top Gear presenter, his ex-roadie pal Deggsy, animal rights protestors who object to his pest control methods, and a plethora of other characters, from the occasional appearances of hapless shopping centre-salesmen (Tim Key), to regulars, like Vicky, Raymond, his girlfriend, Magz, and his anger management counsellor, Alistair (James Bachman).
Vicky, Raymond, and Tommy.
In a similar yet different way to Coogan’s sublime Alan Partridge, the whole attention to detail thing with Saxondale’s music-obsessed character is a real pleasure for those who, like me, share similar interests.
And, again, as with Partridge, we love him as much for his myriad foibles and failings, as for his ‘good qualities’ – be they his ‘Stang, ready wit, or ‘classic rock’ schtick – all the while squirming in embarrassment when he goes off on another misplaced tanned-genital rant.
The scenes with his daughter and her beau are great, as Saxondale battles with his responses – whether natural or conditioned – and piles mistaken assumptions on top of angry prejudices. And all the while Focus or Tull, and similar ‘70s sounds, pump up the irony of the disparity between an ageing rocker’s dreams and visions of himself, and the humdrum reality.
Vicky, perma-tanned denizen of a Stevenage industrial estate.
The rapport with Vicky, via whom he gets his pest control jobs, is truly and deeply and excruciatingly excellent. Indeed, all the relationships are really well observed, teetering between very broad humour, and finely nuanced observation.
There are just so many moments that resonate: the comfy old slippers, the lines of coke with Deggsy whilst lamenting the follies of the world, the inadvertent self-harm at the gym (and the hilarious drive home after), and the struggles with ageing.
These latter range from Saxondale’s quirky facial tics and odd snuffling noises, to his inability to hoist himself into a loft (as his young assistant Raymond does), the glasses scene with hooker, the need for Viagra, and limitations on sexual positions due to a body that’s gradually wearing out.
Another dimension to all this, besides the 70s rock thread, is the general cultural milieu, with Tommy quoting Zulu, and frequently harping on about everything from Isambard Kingdom Brunel to Barnes Wallis. A set of … eugh! tropes (spits and washes mouth out) that fit a certain demographic, to which I belong, like Cinders’ glass slippers.
It’s humour that cuts pretty close to the bone, for some of us viewers. And, I think, is all the funnier for it.
Tommy smoking a dolphin bong. Brilliant!
A fab scene from Tommy’s anger management group.
Several fab scenes from Tommy’s anger management group.
I love the scenes at the anger management group that Tommy attends, at the local library. His humour and sarcasm are tragicomic, and, as with much comedy (also very much so with Partridge) he says out loud what many might think, but either then think better of, or at least choose not to say out loud.
Teresa isn’t so keen. ‘It’s a boy’s thing’, she says. And maybe she’s right? Still, I love it!
We just finished what was probably one our quickest games of Scrabble a moment ago. And it marks a trio of triumphs for Teresa! Three times straight in a row, she’s beaten me.
We both love Scrabble, and mostly for the fun of finding the words, as opposed to winning or losing. Which makes it very relaxing and pleasurable.
That said, I think Teresa’s head has grown a bit since scoring her triple trouncing of yours truly.
Having yet another very rough episode of psychological weather. We were at my sister’s again this weekend. And for the first time my depression was so intense it confined me to the bedroom, and stopped me interacting much with family.
Fortunately Teresa was their to ‘carry the weight’. And dad, bless ‘im, also stepped in, bringing over lunch for everyone, and hanging with Sofi and Ali through a marathon game of (Spanish!) Monopoly!
Not the most exciting book cover!*
[* But a pretty amazing book, in terms of the actual content. Part of a series by i Fabre, of which I currently have three out of four.]
I’d taken a book on Picasso, an Airfix model (1/76 88mm gun and half-track!), and was mostly watching snooker, or sleeping/trying to sleep.
A 1967 tooling, marketed as a Vintage Classic!
Snooker is one of my chief therapies right now. It’s also something bordering, I suppose, on addiction or compulsion. I particularly love the longer games (19+ is a minimum, ideally, but 25-30+ frames? Even better!), like the semis and finals of the World Championship.
Over Friday and Saturday I watched the intense 2022 World Championship Final. O’Sullivan was beating Trump mercilessly, initially. Trump fought back. But ultimately, whilst it was a bit one-sided, with O’Sullivan dominant overall. Nevertheless, it was still a great match, and an interesting watch.
The end was pretty weird, esp’ so in our buttoned-up conservative British culture. When O’Sullivan clinched the deciding frame, equalling Stephen Hendry’s record of seven wins, he went over to Trump, locking him in a close embrace.
It was clear they were talking to each other, as well. It struck a lot of people, myself included, as rather awkward… almost sexual!? I think that’s a sign of how appallingly neutered our outward emotional lives are.
