After a period of time you get immune to it or at least sufficiently anaesthetised so the stuff that flows from the political front washes over you. I guess it’s the upshot of the lethargy you get after a prolonged shout at the radio………or is it just me? There’s every chance I’ve been labouring under the misapprehension that I was just one in a million who practised this activity………? Your silence is deafening; so, just me then. OK, well, after a bout of these lungular exercises, I get to a point where I think, “Oh, fuck it, no one’s listening anyhow. Nothing changes, nothing becomes better; I’ll be off and play with the train-set.” Then just when I’ve lost the will to convince, along comes William Hague, again, and I revisit the reasons why I write these things to cyber-space.
I suppose I was given something of a fillip when I read Howard Jacobson’s column in the Saturday ‘Independent’ last week. He was espousing a level of punishment for car-driving-stupidity that I wrote about in some great detail about two years ago. Admittedly my rant was about those toss-pot, wankers-with-the-tankers who front “Top Gear” and the lifestyle they inveigle us all to join which seems to revolve around cutting up cars, crashing cars, skidding cars around race-tracks and getting something called “A Stick” to drive them at regular intervals as fast as possible………oh, and involving the one thing that Britain leads the world in producing, air-head celebrities, in the highly innovative pastime of driving a saloon car round the same track as fast as possible (opportunity going begging for a brake expert to do some serious fluid tampering, methinks). Anyhow, Mr Jacobson had arrived at a level of punishments that, if he hadn’t read my Blog, then he’d either conversed with someone who had, or I’ve been the victim of telepathic robbery as our thought processes were remarkably similar; but just remember, you read it here first. Well, I thought, so my nocturnal and sporadic scribing is being read by someone, so I’ll continue on then.
So, there I am, channel-hopping, as you do at 22.30 when you’ve just got in from work, have sat down with a mug of tea and are desperately trying to find something, anything, that doesn’t have twenty-two gob-joys booting a pig’s scrotum around a sheet of grass, when I logged on to a discussion concerning a new film, “This Is England”. Don’t know a lot about it as it’s only just been released in t U.K., although there’s been a fair bit of Pre-Release Placement (nice bit of industry jargon for you there) over the last few days. What I can say? Well, from the chat they had with the film’s director on this programme the movie revolves around a Northern-English working town and its resident skinhead population during the late 1970’s early 1980’s. Anyone who knows about this time in our “Green and Pleasant Land” will know this was the time of the Falklands War, Margaret Thatcher and the union problems.
I have to admit that I’m not a big fan of “drama with gritty realism”. We get so much of it on English T.V. these days; soaps (Eastenders, Coronation Street, The Bill) and drama series (Shameless, Sugar Rush and countless other copies) that the palate gets jaded, provided, that is, you could be arsed to watch any of them in the first instance. Those who peddle these programmes will tell us this is real life (not it isn’t, you’re dramatising something from real life; making money off the backs of those who live it) that the great divide between rich and poor is still chasmic (yes, and the money you get from making these series' puts you in which bracket, exactly?) that there are constant and thriving pockets of depravation, brutality, child molestation, prostitution murder and mayhem (yes, I know there are, but I don’t need to be shown these things masking themselves under the cloak of ‘entertainment’. I can read about the real thing, every day, in the newspapers).
I figure the people involved in these programmes all slope off to their Highgate Hovels at the end of a gruelling days filming (gruelling as opposed to……what exactly? Mining for gold in South Africa……no…er……mining for coal in China……er…no…shovelling dung from the desert floor in order to get a fire started before you have to walk the six miles to the nearest well in order to cook the grubs you’ve just dug up which do a poor job of masquerading as this weeks’ “meat meal”…yeah, gruelling, right) and, like eating the testicles of your slain enemy to gain their power and masculinity, they garner their reputations off this dabbling in what they call “the cutting edge” of “gritty drama”…………………sorry, I digress, as usual.
So, there we are discussing this film and who should put in his twopenn’orth but our old mate, William Hague. When asked if he remembers those times (Thatcher, the 70’s and 80’s) he says something along the lines of, “Yes, they were times of great hardship" (not for Hague, Tahtcher and the rewst of her oily government, I'll betcha!) "and Margaret Thatcher was an unpopular leader" (you got that fucker right, Bill!) " but these things had to be changed; we had to improve things………” And that was the tinderbox for this latest tirade.
Only a politician, and probably only a Conservative politician, could brush over that period as “necessary”, try to tell us that what followed was “OK” and that what we have now is “better”. Here was a man allied to a leader who destroyed families, community and hope; a man allied to a government who gifted the Conservative Party business cronies the freedom to take over public companies, run them into the ground, asset-strip them, cut health and safety to the bone, put the public at risk then claim money back from the same government to put the faults they’d created right. A man allied to a government who’s members (forgive the pun) shagged everything that stood still long enough, robbed pension funds, ran insurance fiddles, lied, cheated and bribed their way through the daily business of government, polluted our environment to a degree never before witnessed (all the time making sure that the perpetrators of these deeds – the Conservative Party bank-rollers - went unpunished) and screwed the health service, the fire service, the ambulance service, the coast-guard and the agricultural industry for every cent it could get......... and do you know what, when he came out with this guff, NO-ONE on that panel discussing that film challenged him!!!!!…………
OK, so what’s the conclusion? What’s the message of hope? Well, I think it would be ideal if, two days before the next general election, Margaret Thatcher keels over ‘cos the dancing in the streets that’ll take place when this happens will put paid to ANY chance of a Conservative victory as, like William Hague did to me the other night, it’ll serve as a timely reminder to populace as to just what we unleash when we get any party that has a pedigree like the one mentioned above back into power………Bugger! I think I’ve just spotted the flaw in the plan; that’ll mean the Labour government will get in again……………fuck it!
