Apologies for the lack of posts over the last couple of days but I have been gripped by a profound sense of gloom, an icy melancholy at the state of the world that has made the prospect of posting seem largely futile.
On the other hand, it was precisely my desire to highlight these limitless follies that lead me to start the Daily Brute in the first place – that and the fact that it is entirely free.
So perhaps I should attempt to articulate what it is that has sparked my sense of bleakness.
That a change, one very much for the worse, has overtaken public life is incontestable. It may not have happened exclusively since 1997. But it has certainly accelerated dramatically since then.
Its most obvious manifestation has been a grossly bloated public sector, which, as it has expanded, has become simultaneously more expensive, more inefficient and more intrusive. It is at the heart of the absurdities of health and safety, the complete uselessness of the police, the collapse of the NHS and education, the utter lack of any coherent transport policy, the utter failure to control immigration and the grotesque swindle that we are all at imminent risk of global warming. Simultaneously, politicians at both national and local level, in addition to paying themselves ever more generously, regulate ever more ferociously, with the inevitable result that the above processes accelerate relentlessly.
In the meantime, the government seems to have decided that as it has lied so often and for so long, it may as well make this official policy. Iraq, cash for honours, donorgate are three clear examples. But there is a fourth, in many ways the most depressing of all: the European Constitution/Treaty.
It is an act of astounding conceit and dishonesty on the part of the government that, having explicitly promised a referendum on the Constitution, it should now, amid a cacophony of irrelevant gabble about 'red lines', break that promise on the transparently untrue ground that the Treaty is not the Constitution. This is a lie, pure and simple. Further, everyone knows it. Yet still the government gets away with this outrageous deceit, calculating entirely cynically that if it ploughs ahead regardless we will all just shrug our shoulders and chalk it up as yet another act of Euro-deception.
It seems worth adding that the Bottler's decision not to sign the Treaty personally, claiming a patently bogus 'diary clash', is an exact measure of his self-proclaimed 'moral compass', an instrument so flawed as to be wholly worthless.
The question is, why do we put up with it? Why do we allow them to get away with this relentless lying?
I wish I knew the answer. We seem all too ready to allow what is unquestionably the nastiest government Britain has ever known, a hideous collection of grasping mediocrities, to push us around more or less at will.
Depressing or what?
3 comments:
Agreed with all of that. The cold weather makes it seem worse, hence particularly easy to be totally abjectly gloomy in past few days.
It ain't just the weather, though that scarcely helps. It is a proper sense that we are being royally and regularly fucked.
The solution.
Small English parliament.
Abolish political parties.
Home rule for England.
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