Politics
The General Election mass debate (arf arf) has now invaded the three remaining areas of my life: work, play, home. This wouldn't annoy me half as much if I actually had the vote.
Conservatives - Lifting high the blue torch of Liberty, with which we shall burn all the Kikes, fags and negros.
I'm sure the Conservatives are lovely people really, and that they're only thinking of the people of Britain, along with all the world's puppies and kittens. I may even be able to enjoy a friendly chat over a spot of afternoon tea with some of them. But for some reason (which my parents have either overlooked, or know some magical secret to counter it), I can't completely trust the weedy, comfy-slipper wearing, Daily Mail-reading cousin of right-wing totalitarianism.
And I can't seem to forget the way they've lied, dodged and weaved their way through the whole bloody election campaign. "Violent crime has gone up by eight million per cent" - only because the legal definition of violent crime has been changed, and that every single offence is now counted, rather than individual offenders as before. "We're going to pay back council tax highway robbery to pensioners" - but a few months after you do that, you'll be waiting to snare it back again with taxes. And there WILL be taxes, or there'll be another recession; you can't boost public services by cutting their funds. You can't. Since a nation depends on public services to keep the population in good working order, things will collapse pretty quickly without them, and unless the Tories have a secret plantation of money trees that they've been keeping under wraps (so THAT'S why those GM farms were so well guarded. The sneaky basta'ds...), there is no way diverting funds from those services is going to achieve anything other than disaster. They boast that they'll cut government expenditure by sacking thousands of civil servants. Ok, British beurocracy is an irritating threat to the sanity of the nation, but every government tries to pillorise its workers for doing their jobs. Civil servants don't change when a new party comes in; only their work orders do. To blame civil servants for a government's failings is ridiculous, especially when you consider how utterly dependent the government is on them, and when every government has proved to us the sad truth that for every senior public servant martyred, there's at least one utterly incompetent minister that keeps their job.
"We'll scrap student top-up fees"... Yes, in favour of limiting the number of students who actually go to university in the first place. "Cleaner hospitals, lower taxes, peace, land, bread...".
The Tories are playing on people's fears: that somehow, the British identity is going to be lost, and we'll all be swamped by Europeans, crowding our revered streets with pavement cafes and drinking lukewarm cappuccino whilst smoking dirty French cigarettes and guffawing about how smug they are that they've finally crushed Old Britania. (Oh for fucks sake... Wake up. People never gave a fuck about patriotism until they thought things were in danger of changing - and I think if they bothered to read a history book, Britain - and England in particular - has ALWAYS been changing. Without change we'd all be sitting around in mud huts pointing up at the sky and summoning spirits to try to blast the big metal 747 birds out of the sky to see if they make good eating). And the reason they're using those tactics is because they FUCKED UP. After their previous escapades, they had no chance that the majority would willingly trust them over Labour on their own terms and policies, so they had to discredit the opposition. And there's nothing wrong with that in politics, if you've ACTUALLY GOT SOMETHING BETTER THAN THE OTHERS TO OFFER. And to be honest, pseudo-socialist as it sounds, I don't think they have. In eighteen years of Tory leadership, Britain saw recession, mass unemployment and enough cuts to expenditure to make Jack the Ripper sick. Cuts to policing, cuts to healthcare, cuts to education, cuts cuts cuts cuts and Thatcherite ego-centricity. (There, who says Theatre Studies taught me nothing? The Drama Studio - mystical land where socialist propaganda slips unchecked into our fragile little minds...).
Don't misunderstand me, I'm hardly a fan of Blair. He made promises, he broke them, and that sucks. If you expect a politician to keep all of their promises you're a gullible fool, but if you don't expect them to keep ANY of them you wouldn't have voted for them in the first place. And I stand by the revoltingly judicial but fair belief that he should be held accountable for taking us into the war in Iraq. Yes, innocent civilians were being brutalised. Yes, it was a dispicable and unjust totalitarian regime. But innocent Iraqi civilians were being brutalised since before the first Gulf War. Zimbabwe is under and unjust totalitarian regime, but you don't see the knights in gleaming red, white and blue armour rushing to oust Mugabe. I'm not going to drone on about the great Al Quaeda/Sadaam non-existent link, nor about the strategic way American forces and British side-kicks stormed through oil-rich Afghanistan before heading into Iraq, or that they plan to exit through similarly bountiful Iran, in the interests of the American seek and destroy tactics, because frankly all that has been done to death. However, I think I can say without being shot down for communist sympathies that Mr Blair wouldn't have sailed into the fray of his own accord, and that all sources seem to indicate that it's only after he went to visit Bush Rambo on his Texas ranch that the decision to take us into the war was finalised. "Peer pressure" wasn't a good enough excuse for Sadaam's cronies. It shouldn't be enough for those of Bush, and our government shouldn't be allowed to just sweep it under the carpet. We were lied to about the offensive capabilities of Iraq. All that Forty-Minutes bullshit was just that: bullshit. British soldiers died. American soldiers died. Iraqi soldiers died. Iraqi civilians died. And all over some WMDs that were never found, because they never existed. They were messing with human life. It shouldn't have been up to the opposition to justify why it wasn't right to go to war in Iraq; it should have been their job to justify why it WAS, and to take the consequences when that was found out to be a load of hairy bollocks. So Blair can take the heat for that like everyone should have to, and while he's at it, he can explain why Britain is still the third largest exporter of arms in the world, choosing to barter its wares to poorer nations on the verge of war with each other, like India and Pakistan (maybe so we can charge in to the rescue there?), and of course to our number one customer, proud human rights abuser and the spiritual homeland of Al Quaeda - Saudi Arabia. (It's worth noting that a government-hosted arms fair took place on September the 11th. Most events stopped as a token guesture of respect for the Twin Towers victims. Not the fair. I guess they were all too busy counting the notes and dancing around the arms fair maypole to notice).
Ok, I lied about not going to ramble. But it's one of the few things I feel passionately about to slate with any confidence, so do forgive me.
However, my main beef with the Conservatives has to be their stance on immigration. I'm not saying it's intrinsically racist: I'm sure that their new policies will apply to white migrants as well as ethnic. It's absolutely true that people who migrate to this country to sit on their arses and leech off our economy should be flicked soundly on the nose and sent away, maybe to somewhere like Wisconsin as a penance. But it's also true that most immigrants don't fall into this catagory; the majority of lazy arse-scratching couch potatoes are born and bred here on British soil, since Labour did such a fantastic job of creating a benefit state that thousands of people only have to carry out the backbreaking labour of filling out a few forms to have their ways paid. Free accomodation, education, health and social care for sod all, plus "living allowances", i.e. fags and beer money. So stop blaming the immigrants, Howard. People come to this country to get the opportunity to work, which are opportunities they usually don't get in their home countries. They don't steal jobs from hardworking Brits, since recorded job opportunities (which migrants filled on the basis that hardly no British-born citizens actually applied) have shown that on the whole, the British are a bunch of lazy slobs. Migrant workers aren't coming here to take what they can get, thumb their noses at us and then disappear into some remote South London council flat never to be seen of again. It's zenophobic paranoia like that that's fuelled so much negative politics in the past I can't believe we still fall for it. Maybe the Tories will start putting up posters depicting the immigrant as an overfed, piglike creature swilling from the British trough with a Star of David, whoops, I mean Arabic/Asian/Eastern European passport adorned about their person.
Another thing that makes me uncomfortable about this annual limit they want to set is that the line between immigrant and asylum seeker gets blurred and stepped over too much. It's all very well to say that the party would "take in genuine refugees from the United Nations - rather than simply accepting those who are smuggled in", but they also want to instigate mandatory health screening.
1. Your average Granny Smith opens the paper, sees a picture of immigrants being screened and thinks "Oh my! We have to SCREEN them now? They must be rife with disease! I mean honestly, look at the scruffy state of that beard. Probably crawling with lice. I don't want them infesting my neighbourhood school with Arabic face-eater beetle-worms, or to end up draining the NHS which the wise and wonderful government just shorted the funding to - keep them out, I say!" And I think I've already covered the zenophobia angle.
2. It gives the government an excuse to refuse entry to Britain or to keep tabs on immigrants once they get in.
3. What happens if you get a HIV positive asylum seeker? Does he get turned away at the door? "Sorry, I know you've got HIV and you're being brutalised in your country, where you can't get treatment either, but we can't let you in, you might go on a zombie rampage to infect the British pure. Sorry. Back on the boat for you, you young scallywag. NEXT."
This legislations proposal also fails to remember the hefty proportion of immigrants illegally smuggled into the country against their own will. I can't pretend to know much about this particular issue apart from some basic knowledge on the sex slave trade I cobbled together from news articles and late night channel 4 documentaries (most of which were made for conjunction with a box of Kleenex, and NOT because they're touching and tragic, so maybe they're not the best examples of wisdom to use).
So ok, we need control on lazy immigrants, but only in the way that we need control over laziness overall. If you're not suitably disabled, and you don't try to find work, then fuck you. You were born into a British society. Considering the rest of the world, it means we were all born with silver spoons in our mouths. It doesn't matter how rich some bastard up the street is - the point is that at the moment, anyone can achieve something. I'm not a liberal ideologist - I know Britain isn't some hippy utopian dream. There's a certain degree of inequality everywhere. But those things we bitch about can be changed, because we have the forum to do that if we ever got off our arses and used it. There are people who would fucking kill to be here, let alone skip a few borders and stow away in a claustrophobic tank on the back of a lorry on a ferry. If you're going to bitch about immigrants and patriotism, the least you can do is get up off your lazy arse and act on it by not putting your country to shame. If someone's prepared to do your job for less money and you don't up the ante, you don't deserve to keep it. It's not like you're hauling fucking coal and oil in Kazahkstan. If these people have wounded our economy, and these people put the blame onto largely blameless immigrants, then these people are scum. If the Tories win, instigate these changes and refugees sometimes get caught in the protective dragnets and extradited back to persecution, these people are scum. It sounds blindly ideological, but I'd rather let in foreign scum and protect foreign innocents than tar them all with the same brush. People are good or bad. Not one bit of that is determined by the colour of their skin, their mother tongue or how many weird customs they have. I'm afraid of sending good people away because of the bad. So if that makes me a communist hippy, hand me the Manifesto, light up the joint and put Jerry Garcia on.
I've been ranting for so long now that I've easily been sitting here a couple of hours, and if anyone bothered to read this through to the end, you probably want that twenty-odd minutes of your life back. So I'll summarise and run away before you can beat me with pretention sticks or come up with cruel comebacks to the points I made:
I may not support Labour. I may not want to join the EU. I do not want the Euro. I think political correctness is a sham that plays on the fear of not being liberal enough. I think we should rebuild Hadrian's wall, a good hundred feet taller than it ever was so that the Scottish National Party will need very tall ladders to be heard over the top of it. I believe in supporting British industry. I think people care too much about Royal politics, when in fact it affects the running of the country less than reality TV does. And I think reality TV should be banished to a new, special channel, with the exception of those shows of genuine psychological interest. I think that pop farces should also be deported to this channel, to be replaced with genuine talent shows, which encourage originality and spotlight the individual geniuses, not those who can accurately sing a Britney Spears or Justin Timberlake song note-perfectly. Repetitive, annoying and practically Jurassic soap operas should be replaced by high quality drama and political satire at prime time viewing hours, to coax our population into making the most of our freedoms by making sophisticated anti-party dinner-party talk at every opportunity, and that such soaps should also be sent to the "special" channel. It shall be the Idiots, Numbskulls and Nuisances' Interests Television network, but so it will fit neatly into a Radio Times channel column, it shall affectionately be dubbed: INNITV.
So I'm hardly an unbiased person, and I'm hardly the best of people at times. But I can pretend to have common sense. I'd rather take Labour's slow but dependable recovery and improvement of the country over the Conservative's promised quick fix and another recession.
This was an election broadcast by Kayleigh L Hamilton, because she doesn't have the vote, and thought she might as well poison the electorate.
Conservatives - Lifting high the blue torch of Liberty, with which we shall burn all the Kikes, fags and negros.
I'm sure the Conservatives are lovely people really, and that they're only thinking of the people of Britain, along with all the world's puppies and kittens. I may even be able to enjoy a friendly chat over a spot of afternoon tea with some of them. But for some reason (which my parents have either overlooked, or know some magical secret to counter it), I can't completely trust the weedy, comfy-slipper wearing, Daily Mail-reading cousin of right-wing totalitarianism.
And I can't seem to forget the way they've lied, dodged and weaved their way through the whole bloody election campaign. "Violent crime has gone up by eight million per cent" - only because the legal definition of violent crime has been changed, and that every single offence is now counted, rather than individual offenders as before. "We're going to pay back council tax highway robbery to pensioners" - but a few months after you do that, you'll be waiting to snare it back again with taxes. And there WILL be taxes, or there'll be another recession; you can't boost public services by cutting their funds. You can't. Since a nation depends on public services to keep the population in good working order, things will collapse pretty quickly without them, and unless the Tories have a secret plantation of money trees that they've been keeping under wraps (so THAT'S why those GM farms were so well guarded. The sneaky basta'ds...), there is no way diverting funds from those services is going to achieve anything other than disaster. They boast that they'll cut government expenditure by sacking thousands of civil servants. Ok, British beurocracy is an irritating threat to the sanity of the nation, but every government tries to pillorise its workers for doing their jobs. Civil servants don't change when a new party comes in; only their work orders do. To blame civil servants for a government's failings is ridiculous, especially when you consider how utterly dependent the government is on them, and when every government has proved to us the sad truth that for every senior public servant martyred, there's at least one utterly incompetent minister that keeps their job.
"We'll scrap student top-up fees"... Yes, in favour of limiting the number of students who actually go to university in the first place. "Cleaner hospitals, lower taxes, peace, land, bread...".
The Tories are playing on people's fears: that somehow, the British identity is going to be lost, and we'll all be swamped by Europeans, crowding our revered streets with pavement cafes and drinking lukewarm cappuccino whilst smoking dirty French cigarettes and guffawing about how smug they are that they've finally crushed Old Britania. (Oh for fucks sake... Wake up. People never gave a fuck about patriotism until they thought things were in danger of changing - and I think if they bothered to read a history book, Britain - and England in particular - has ALWAYS been changing. Without change we'd all be sitting around in mud huts pointing up at the sky and summoning spirits to try to blast the big metal 747 birds out of the sky to see if they make good eating). And the reason they're using those tactics is because they FUCKED UP. After their previous escapades, they had no chance that the majority would willingly trust them over Labour on their own terms and policies, so they had to discredit the opposition. And there's nothing wrong with that in politics, if you've ACTUALLY GOT SOMETHING BETTER THAN THE OTHERS TO OFFER. And to be honest, pseudo-socialist as it sounds, I don't think they have. In eighteen years of Tory leadership, Britain saw recession, mass unemployment and enough cuts to expenditure to make Jack the Ripper sick. Cuts to policing, cuts to healthcare, cuts to education, cuts cuts cuts cuts and Thatcherite ego-centricity. (There, who says Theatre Studies taught me nothing? The Drama Studio - mystical land where socialist propaganda slips unchecked into our fragile little minds...).
Don't misunderstand me, I'm hardly a fan of Blair. He made promises, he broke them, and that sucks. If you expect a politician to keep all of their promises you're a gullible fool, but if you don't expect them to keep ANY of them you wouldn't have voted for them in the first place. And I stand by the revoltingly judicial but fair belief that he should be held accountable for taking us into the war in Iraq. Yes, innocent civilians were being brutalised. Yes, it was a dispicable and unjust totalitarian regime. But innocent Iraqi civilians were being brutalised since before the first Gulf War. Zimbabwe is under and unjust totalitarian regime, but you don't see the knights in gleaming red, white and blue armour rushing to oust Mugabe. I'm not going to drone on about the great Al Quaeda/Sadaam non-existent link, nor about the strategic way American forces and British side-kicks stormed through oil-rich Afghanistan before heading into Iraq, or that they plan to exit through similarly bountiful Iran, in the interests of the American seek and destroy tactics, because frankly all that has been done to death. However, I think I can say without being shot down for communist sympathies that Mr Blair wouldn't have sailed into the fray of his own accord, and that all sources seem to indicate that it's only after he went to visit Bush Rambo on his Texas ranch that the decision to take us into the war was finalised. "Peer pressure" wasn't a good enough excuse for Sadaam's cronies. It shouldn't be enough for those of Bush, and our government shouldn't be allowed to just sweep it under the carpet. We were lied to about the offensive capabilities of Iraq. All that Forty-Minutes bullshit was just that: bullshit. British soldiers died. American soldiers died. Iraqi soldiers died. Iraqi civilians died. And all over some WMDs that were never found, because they never existed. They were messing with human life. It shouldn't have been up to the opposition to justify why it wasn't right to go to war in Iraq; it should have been their job to justify why it WAS, and to take the consequences when that was found out to be a load of hairy bollocks. So Blair can take the heat for that like everyone should have to, and while he's at it, he can explain why Britain is still the third largest exporter of arms in the world, choosing to barter its wares to poorer nations on the verge of war with each other, like India and Pakistan (maybe so we can charge in to the rescue there?), and of course to our number one customer, proud human rights abuser and the spiritual homeland of Al Quaeda - Saudi Arabia. (It's worth noting that a government-hosted arms fair took place on September the 11th. Most events stopped as a token guesture of respect for the Twin Towers victims. Not the fair. I guess they were all too busy counting the notes and dancing around the arms fair maypole to notice).
Ok, I lied about not going to ramble. But it's one of the few things I feel passionately about to slate with any confidence, so do forgive me.
However, my main beef with the Conservatives has to be their stance on immigration. I'm not saying it's intrinsically racist: I'm sure that their new policies will apply to white migrants as well as ethnic. It's absolutely true that people who migrate to this country to sit on their arses and leech off our economy should be flicked soundly on the nose and sent away, maybe to somewhere like Wisconsin as a penance. But it's also true that most immigrants don't fall into this catagory; the majority of lazy arse-scratching couch potatoes are born and bred here on British soil, since Labour did such a fantastic job of creating a benefit state that thousands of people only have to carry out the backbreaking labour of filling out a few forms to have their ways paid. Free accomodation, education, health and social care for sod all, plus "living allowances", i.e. fags and beer money. So stop blaming the immigrants, Howard. People come to this country to get the opportunity to work, which are opportunities they usually don't get in their home countries. They don't steal jobs from hardworking Brits, since recorded job opportunities (which migrants filled on the basis that hardly no British-born citizens actually applied) have shown that on the whole, the British are a bunch of lazy slobs. Migrant workers aren't coming here to take what they can get, thumb their noses at us and then disappear into some remote South London council flat never to be seen of again. It's zenophobic paranoia like that that's fuelled so much negative politics in the past I can't believe we still fall for it. Maybe the Tories will start putting up posters depicting the immigrant as an overfed, piglike creature swilling from the British trough with a Star of David, whoops, I mean Arabic/Asian/Eastern European passport adorned about their person.
Another thing that makes me uncomfortable about this annual limit they want to set is that the line between immigrant and asylum seeker gets blurred and stepped over too much. It's all very well to say that the party would "take in genuine refugees from the United Nations - rather than simply accepting those who are smuggled in", but they also want to instigate mandatory health screening.
1. Your average Granny Smith opens the paper, sees a picture of immigrants being screened and thinks "Oh my! We have to SCREEN them now? They must be rife with disease! I mean honestly, look at the scruffy state of that beard. Probably crawling with lice. I don't want them infesting my neighbourhood school with Arabic face-eater beetle-worms, or to end up draining the NHS which the wise and wonderful government just shorted the funding to - keep them out, I say!" And I think I've already covered the zenophobia angle.
2. It gives the government an excuse to refuse entry to Britain or to keep tabs on immigrants once they get in.
3. What happens if you get a HIV positive asylum seeker? Does he get turned away at the door? "Sorry, I know you've got HIV and you're being brutalised in your country, where you can't get treatment either, but we can't let you in, you might go on a zombie rampage to infect the British pure. Sorry. Back on the boat for you, you young scallywag. NEXT."
This legislations proposal also fails to remember the hefty proportion of immigrants illegally smuggled into the country against their own will. I can't pretend to know much about this particular issue apart from some basic knowledge on the sex slave trade I cobbled together from news articles and late night channel 4 documentaries (most of which were made for conjunction with a box of Kleenex, and NOT because they're touching and tragic, so maybe they're not the best examples of wisdom to use).
So ok, we need control on lazy immigrants, but only in the way that we need control over laziness overall. If you're not suitably disabled, and you don't try to find work, then fuck you. You were born into a British society. Considering the rest of the world, it means we were all born with silver spoons in our mouths. It doesn't matter how rich some bastard up the street is - the point is that at the moment, anyone can achieve something. I'm not a liberal ideologist - I know Britain isn't some hippy utopian dream. There's a certain degree of inequality everywhere. But those things we bitch about can be changed, because we have the forum to do that if we ever got off our arses and used it. There are people who would fucking kill to be here, let alone skip a few borders and stow away in a claustrophobic tank on the back of a lorry on a ferry. If you're going to bitch about immigrants and patriotism, the least you can do is get up off your lazy arse and act on it by not putting your country to shame. If someone's prepared to do your job for less money and you don't up the ante, you don't deserve to keep it. It's not like you're hauling fucking coal and oil in Kazahkstan. If these people have wounded our economy, and these people put the blame onto largely blameless immigrants, then these people are scum. If the Tories win, instigate these changes and refugees sometimes get caught in the protective dragnets and extradited back to persecution, these people are scum. It sounds blindly ideological, but I'd rather let in foreign scum and protect foreign innocents than tar them all with the same brush. People are good or bad. Not one bit of that is determined by the colour of their skin, their mother tongue or how many weird customs they have. I'm afraid of sending good people away because of the bad. So if that makes me a communist hippy, hand me the Manifesto, light up the joint and put Jerry Garcia on.
I've been ranting for so long now that I've easily been sitting here a couple of hours, and if anyone bothered to read this through to the end, you probably want that twenty-odd minutes of your life back. So I'll summarise and run away before you can beat me with pretention sticks or come up with cruel comebacks to the points I made:
I may not support Labour. I may not want to join the EU. I do not want the Euro. I think political correctness is a sham that plays on the fear of not being liberal enough. I think we should rebuild Hadrian's wall, a good hundred feet taller than it ever was so that the Scottish National Party will need very tall ladders to be heard over the top of it. I believe in supporting British industry. I think people care too much about Royal politics, when in fact it affects the running of the country less than reality TV does. And I think reality TV should be banished to a new, special channel, with the exception of those shows of genuine psychological interest. I think that pop farces should also be deported to this channel, to be replaced with genuine talent shows, which encourage originality and spotlight the individual geniuses, not those who can accurately sing a Britney Spears or Justin Timberlake song note-perfectly. Repetitive, annoying and practically Jurassic soap operas should be replaced by high quality drama and political satire at prime time viewing hours, to coax our population into making the most of our freedoms by making sophisticated anti-party dinner-party talk at every opportunity, and that such soaps should also be sent to the "special" channel. It shall be the Idiots, Numbskulls and Nuisances' Interests Television network, but so it will fit neatly into a Radio Times channel column, it shall affectionately be dubbed: INNITV.
So I'm hardly an unbiased person, and I'm hardly the best of people at times. But I can pretend to have common sense. I'd rather take Labour's slow but dependable recovery and improvement of the country over the Conservative's promised quick fix and another recession.
This was an election broadcast by Kayleigh L Hamilton, because she doesn't have the vote, and thought she might as well poison the electorate.