It’s a valid political opinion. Whether anyone pays attention is a different matter.
This has hardly been the most eventful December — not a single photo in the month so far has been taken further than 30 miles from home — but this will change soon enough. Today is also day 4,500 of the blog, a nice round number: I have done one of my periodic updates of the stats, a page which if nothing else, proves quite how anal I am.
The third protest in a month, if we count the poster statement. Not hard to work out the basic focus of this one. I was just passing, not expressing a particular opinion, but I do notice that in BBC reports of the atrocities presently unfolding in the Middle East, Israelis ‘are killed’ whereas Palestinians just ‘die’. As much as anything else that helps explain why some people are pissed off.
The Conservative Party can’t even do incompetence competently — and by now, they have had lots of chances to practice it. Brilliantly, some idiot lets slip that the proposed high-speed rail link to Manchester is likely to be cancelled, in the very week that the party are holding its annual conference…. in Manchester. Frankly, I am so disillusioned about there being any prospect of genuine change in the trajectory not only of this country, but the human race, that I have largely stopped caring, but let’s at least document the existence of a political opposition to these clowns: unfortunately, sticking posters to lamp-posts seems to be the extent of it.
Protesting outside the offices of a company about to insure a large new oil pipeline in East Africa: this seems valid to me. But they were all so terribly polite about it. Walking past on my way to work I might have missed the whole thing entirely were it not for a voice through a microphone that said (I’m paraphrasing slightly): “*cough* I hope you can here us, Sir Someone, but please don’t insure that oil pipeline” and then went quiet again. And the office was on the other side of the road anyway, ‘guarded’ by three somewhat bored-looking policemen. Throwing oneself under the King’s horse this was not.
Manchester once again plays host to the Conservative Party’s annual Conference, and today was the day that the Party and its state police force graciously permitted the parallel annual Protest March. This was safely kettled somewhere to the right of Deansgate, as we look down it here. The whole city centre was cordoned off to cars, and eerily quiet, apart from the distant drums of the protestors. Ahead are Beetham Tower and the West Tower of Deansgate Square, the tallest habitable buildings in the UK outside London: monuments to a particular kind of property-driven capitalism that the Conservative Party fully epitomise. No one can be publicly seen to question it, to ask whether this is really the way that we want to structure the world. The waiting police vans make sure of that.
Well, I guess they have a point. Thanks to Lee (depicted two days ago) being vegan I have basically been vegetarian this week but that seems not to cut it for these people. I try, though.
Sums it up for me, in at least two different ways.
I am seeing out the day of the UK General Election, June 8th, in Siberia (honestly) so have applied for a postal vote. The ballot paper arrived today. Here it is.
I could leave my commentary there of course. But….. OK, just a few words. In my opinion the decision by David Cameron — a man who got the top job mainly because he went to the right school — to call the referendum on 23rd June last year was about the most ludicrously stupid political move made by a British politician in my lifetime. So moronic was it to do that without the slightest plan for what would happen if the vote was ‘Leave’ that Cameron sodded off not just from being Prime Minister but from the whole of public life within about a fortnight and hasn’t been seen since. In the aftermath of this raving idiocy, the increasingly right-wing lunatics he left behind are still scrabbling for power, and in order to fight what they defined as ‘instability’ (but the rest of the world considers ‘parliamentary democratic process’) they…. create more instability by calling this election. The ‘opposition’ parties could in fact have stopped this; then again they could have done many things differently over the last fifteen months, but for some reason have decided not to fulfil their mandate of keeping the autocrats in check. The result? I look at the ‘choice’ I’m offered, and decide to hold my nose and vote tactically for the first time in my life (readers who don’t know what ‘tactical voting’ is clearly live in an actual democracy, where all votes really do count, and not just a mock one, like we do here).
Four years ago today I began my final journey home after those four months in Australia and frankly the ‘Fuck Off Back To The South Pacific’ quotient has not been higher since. Those who voted Brexit and will vote Tory this time will reap what they sow, I just pray I can get out of their way before they drag me and my family down with them.
Sorry if you dislike all this political ranting, but tune in tomorrow when there’ll be some nice pictures of mountains and sunny weather.
I have applied for a postal vote because I’m not at home on 7th May, and it arrived today. Technically, I could vote right now. Do you think much will happen over the next 13 days which could make me change my mind? (Who knows, it might even be for the World Peace Through Song party.)
Awaiting me on my return from Norway yesterday were some author’s copies of my book, this being the one I wrote while on sabbatical between January and August last year, including my time in Australia. So here it is, finally, a physical object rather than just an abstract concept. If you’re into discussions of the political theory of information, you should buy it 🙂
Being 42 