Cancel Mental BBC Lockdown Brexit

A bit of a long mish-mash today that's been building up and I may have touched on some issues before..

I've made fleeting reference to Cancel Culture before and how it was invented by the right (for right, you can read aristocracy, if you will - one and the same in days of yore) and used by them for centuries to silence and oppress minorities. Examples include: 

• 1290 - Jews? Not here - chuck them out because we owe them money. Cancelled!
• 17th & 18th centuries -Slavery - an entire race cancelled.
• 18th century - Empire - your nation is hereby cancelled. 
• Till 1918 - Votes - You can't vote unless you own a property of a certain value, you poor people are cancelled. 
• Till 1928 - Votes for women - can't have them making silly, fluffy decisions. Cancelled!
• 2020 - Scrutiny of legislation - sorry, can't have that, I'm proroguing Parliament illegally and cancelling it. 

Now Priti Patel wants to row back on legislation against hate speech under the guise of Freedom of Speech, on which I have written many times, and in the battle against Wokeness. Priti and her neoliberal sponsors need to be very careful in this - what's good for the goose is good for the gander. We will soon all be able to go back to the good old days when bigots and racists could abuse whomsoever they wanted with no consequences. I wonder what she thinks about a man from Texas who allegedly participated in the deadly 6 January Capitol riots being charged with threatening to assassinate Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez after posting death threats online. Obviously, in her mind, this is nothing more than Free Speech, very dangerous Free Speech.

Woke means alert to social justice, especially racism. Patel, and the government she serves, know this and want to gaslight people to wage a war against it and turn ignorance of our past and incivility into a civic virtue. That speaks volumes about this current, despicable, incompetent, elitist, populist rabble that is in charge. Are we following Trumpism? It's a rhetorical question which doesn't really need an answer, unless you've had your head up your backside for the last 4 years.

On a related issue, the government's own trade advisors are telling companies to open up offices in the EU to avoid Brexit costs. We've gone down the rabbit hole. Nigel Farage has said; "This is a big moment for our country, a giant leap forward." Giant leap forward? More like the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution crossed with 1984. One line in 1984 epitomises our current situation; “The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”

Fishing: The industry was promised that a Brexit deal would mean reclaiming our waters, but fishermen can't sell the fish they catch to the continent because of extra border checks and delays, so fish rots before it can get to the other side. The government has had to come up with a £23m compensation package for angry fishing crews. The problem is systemic.

Exports: UK businesses exporting to the EU have had to confront a mass of new charges and paperwork, causing delays to shipments. Couriers are imposing a Brexit charge to cover the cost of extra form-filling and separate fees apply for pre-paying the costs of import charges and inspections on the other side of the Channel. UK exports to the EU are 40% down on normal levels. HMRC has said that British businesses will face £7.5bn of extra customs costs, based on pre-Brexit trade volumes. That's more than our entire net contribution to the EU on one area alone. This is systemic.

Imports: The average cost of moving a lorryload of goods to the UK from Germany was 26% higher in the first week of 2021 than in the third quarter of last year, according to the haulage industry. This is because companies transporting items into the UK face added checks and delays, and those that then collect goods to take back get stuck on this side as well. Many hauliers are deciding not to bother coming to the UK, and some European companies are halting exports to Britain  This is systemic.

VAT: UK exporters and importers are now having to face VAT charges that did not apply when the UK was in the Single Market. Exporters are finding that their customers abroad are being told by couriers that they have to pay VAT up front before they receive their goods. Customers are refusing to pay. Exporters on the Continent are also facing VAT issues as they try to sell into the UK. This is systemic.

Tours and concerts: Last week a group of musicians shone a light on what it will mean for them and their tours to EU countries. Elton John, Simon Rattle, Ed Sheeran and the Sex Pistols were among those who said Boris Johnson's Brexit deal would make Europe inaccessible for UK-based musicians because of visa rules. Even Roger Daltrey, the doyen of Brexiteers, is a bit pissed off - I'm so happy.

In Parliament, an amendment to protect the NHS from future trade talks in the UK Trade Bill was voted down. An amendment to veto trade with countries that have known genocide activities was voted down. An amendment to maintain trade and environmental standards was voted down. MPs even voted to deprive themselves of the right to scrutinise and approve future trade deals. That's called the tyranny of the majority and the first step toward totalitarianism; it's in and of itself is an opposition to democracy.

To diverge for a second; the two inherent dangers arising from democracy are the abovementioned tyranny of the majority and a systemic short termism. Proponents of the first-past-the-post system maintain that a huge majority enables a government to get things done, but they may be to the detriment of the country, especially if based on ideology.

The BBC reports the facts outlined earlier and is accused, incredulously, of bias by an extremely biased government, backed up by the extremely biased Murdochs and Rothermeres of this land - and others, as they're generally tax exiles or dodgers (Murdoch hasn't paid any UK corporation tax since 1988). How one can claim the BBC is biased on the basis of one Facebook clip is beyond me - it's called cherry picking. When the far left is also accusing the BBC of right wing bias in its reporting on Corbyn, you know the truth lies somewhere in the middle. 

Why does the government put Covid briefings on BBC? Because most people watch the BBC it and trust it. Biased, right wing newspapers owned by offshore, tax avoiding millionaires are telling you the BBC is biased. Why? Because the BBC tells the truth. Great swathes of the media are so slavishly right wing that's it makes the BBC and the centre look left wing.

What I do take exception to is the BBC obsession with balance. If the weatherman comes on to tell you it's raining, and this is something you can verify by looking out of the window, there's no need to bring someone else in to tell you it's not, purely in the interests of balance. OK, that's a bit tongue-in-cheek, but you know what I mean.

Brexit is essentially an identity crisis - if you feel you are marginalised, you desperately need to hang on to something, and one's national identity could just be that. Brexit is England's version of Northern Ireland's Troubles, where a certain faction, that is being told by politicians that it's oppressed by the EU, desperately wants to gain succour from an identity, even if it's false. Historians are traditionally  the defenders of our history, not politicians.

In England's case it's a manufactured crisis of identity. Unscrupulous politicians have latched on to this and have channelled L'écuminati (a French portmanteau word I made up to simultaneously denote a cabal whose members froth at the mouth - essentially bigots, xenophobes and racists) into a self-destructive force that enables those with wealth to; a) weather the storm, and b) buy up the wreckage and reformat it in an environment with fewer workers' rights and a tax regime that favours wealthy tax dodgers. See the evidence and follow the money.

When will the electorate open its eyes? Probably never, when government panders to prejudice and ignorance and practises deceit and untruthfulness as a strategic objective and government policy.

Hang on - there's more. Modellers say we'd have had at least 470k deaths so far without the lockdowns. A fool appears on the news arguing that the lockdown will produce 2m unemployed. I can't see 2m unemployed producing that many deaths - which would you rather be - unemployed or dead? I can see that's a hard one for some. The alternative is to shield the 15m with pre-existing conditions - we can't even shield a care home, let alone 15m. On top of that, 'free ranging' would allow countless mutations (the greater the number of infections, the greater the chance of mutations), any of which could prove fatal to anyone or totally resistant to existing vaccines. 

Then there are those who believe lockdown is creating a mental health crisis. While there are undoubtedly some severe cases, feeling lonely or a bit down because you can't go out is not a diagnosable mental health condition. They should speak to someone like Natasha Devon, a campaigner for mental health charities and maintains lockdown skeptics are weaponising mental health and using it for their own anti-lockdown agenda, which is invariably something to do with profit.

Believe it or not, there were people in WWII who believed the Blackout infringed their rights. Oh, sorry, that link is to Full Fact, which is obviously left biased because it points out misinformation and lies.

One unexpected outcome of the lockdown is that, apparently, a lot of people have taken up art for the first time. Now there may well be a few gems produced, but the auction houses risk being overwhelmed with crappy Lockdown Art, as I think it will be called by posterity.

Is it left wing to believe in social justice, equal opportunities for all, regardless of age, gender, colour or sexual orientation, a fair taxation system, public services for the benefit of all, fair wages, compassion toward those less fortunate and truth? I thought it was just common decency and what civilization was all about. The main question one should ask is whether something, be it a policy or a strategy, is beneficial and good - not whether it leads to power or money or whether it benefits the few at the expense of the many.

There was a time when both main parties espoused these values and there was a hair's breadth between them. The only major difference was on the issue of nationalisation. These days the right has moved too far from the centre, for my liking, reflecting the source of their sponsorship. The left doesn't seem to have moved too far from the centre and is nowhere near as far left as it was in the days of Michael Foot and the antediluvian union bosses, despite its flirt with Corbynism.

Incidentally, the terms "left" and "right" appeared during the French Revolution of 1789, when members of the National Assembly divided into supporters of the king to the president's right and supporters of the revolution to his left.

There, rant over - till tomorrow and another blatant exhibition of incompetence by a government minister or our lying charlatan of a PM.