Englishness.

From Shakespeare's Hamlet.

If you ask some people, they'll tell you this isn't the issue...

What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty!

Nor this...

In form and moving how express and admirable!

This neither...

In action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god!

They'll tell you this is the issue.

Man delights not me.

So, the worst of all possible combinations then.

At this point, I’m not convinced there’s a right way to resolve the situation we’re in. If we’d have acted sooner, more decisively and for longer with proper support and enacted a working test, trace and isolate system, then things would most likely be, if not peachy, a good deal peachier than they are. But shoulda woulda coulda ain’t gonna do a whole lot about the now. Not that I think it’s okay, what happened; taking the opportunity to give out contracts to donors and friends – which has proven to be most lucrative, while they were crying out for PPE and then attempting to gaslight half a nation by claiming there never was a shortage.

But what’s going on now is a little difficult to fathom. Basically treating it like flu, even though it’s not flu. Claiming we’ll just have to live with it and a whole load of people will just have to die, because, you know, Costa’s been low on profits for a while. Which is obviously worse.

Well, ok, but better to try that when we have more of us vaccinated yes? Because you know, this is a virus that mutates as it spreads. So just letting it go nuts on a partially vaccinated population means a good chance of more variants that the vaccines are not effective against that are more deadly to more people and are more transmissible. It’s already happening; hello delta variant. Then there’s the mounting evidence that surviving it isn’t just a case of ‘that’s it, well done, off you go’; it affects the brain and the body in ways that won’t be clear for a long time, not forgetting long covid, which is present in all age groups, children included. No other country in the world is trying this experiment of just giving up and letting the population just get infected and see what happens, and it seems to be baffling the international community (I admit I laughed when CNN compared our PM to Lord Farquaad). It is entirely unsurprising that the new health secretary is a mega fan of Ayn Rand, and I don’t see why we should be happy for them to take this risk with the lives of people they are entrusted to safeguard. Of course, they’ve left us with little alternative other than to forever go on the lock-down/reopen/lock-down/reopen carousel. Might it just have been a bit better to have held on until the vaccine roll out was complete, or near as dammit? It’s weird how anti-lockdown folk tend to also be anti-vaccine folk. So what, your preferred option is for as many people to die as possible? Why?

Being sick of experts unfortunately doesn’t stop them usually being right. Ignoring expertise has led to the most bonkers strategy to deal with the virus; to leave the EU in the most nonsensical manner imaginable and I’ve no doubt that scientific expertise will continue to be ignored regarding climate change.

Like some kind of Sunnydale-on-Sea (it genuinely does look like a hellmouth), we’ve actually managed to literally set the ocean on fire, and we’ve allowed a small town in Canada to literally burn down to the ground (note the ridiculous journalistic standards on that article that still make no mention whatsoever linking the temperatures and wildfires with climate change – the media are fully complicit in this being as bad as it is), but we still won’t move away from our dependence on fossil fuels with the urgency that was required decades ago. The response to this, and the growing protest movement from Extinction Rebellion? Change the law so the right to protest is rendered powerless and, according to the recently-passed bill, noisy protests can carry a 10 year jail term. So you can now be jailed for longer for, say, pulling down the statue of a slave trader than for rape. Well, they shouldn’t have inconvenienced people trying to grab a Costa should they? (Granted, the change in the law is likely also in response to Black Lives Matter in addition to Extinction Rebellion, but you know what? Black lives do matter, and they are still largely treated as though they don’t, or at least that they matter less, and until that changes and there is some kind of proper social justice, there are going to be those protesting about it.) Those in power call themselves libertarians? When they want to jail you for a decade for disagreeing with the endless corruption and incompetence that is leading to the actual end of our civilisation as we know it and the death and forced migration of billions of people (not as far away into the future as you would like to think)? I don’t think that word ‘libertarian’ means what they think it means.

Somewhere in the multiverse there is a reality where Murdoch, Koch, Rothmere et al don’t have the kind of influence they have here and we don’t have such a significant portion of the population that are so enamoured with populism, nationalism and jingoism, or so happy to get apoplectic about whatever culture war nonsense is used to distract them that they are happy, to borrow from Christopher Nolan, to watch the world burn so long as they can be mean about a princess from another country with brown skin. A reality where the statement given by an expert that has spent their entire life studying a subject isn’t given the same weight as some fool that’s read something online and now thinks he knows more.

I want to go to that reality.

Occasional feature: Ending with a song loosely related to the post (or more like a lyric I can take out of context and loosely relate to the post):

Dirty Pretty Things: Bloodthirsty Bastards: “Bloodthirsty bastards making plans for no one/but themselves.”

Ugh.

Getting fed up of it now. Acting illegally. Bigging up a deal to increase corporation tax while at the same time trying to sort a loophole for your mates in the city. Mates that are still funding the destruction of us all. An opposition that appears to do literally nothing to oppose. And yet, what gets focused on? Vilifying black footballers that would like it if people stopped showering them with racist abuse. Vilifying a group of students that didn’t want a picture of the queen up. I mean, I had a picture of a queen up when I was at Uni, but it was the queen known as Buffy Summers, not Liz Windsor. More non-news. More culture war bullshit to distract from the endless corruption.

And people continue to lap it up.

As I said: ugh.

It's bad to do good.

That seems to be the message I’ve been getting recently. Not sure I understand it myself. To be a human rights lawyer. To point out that systemic racial inequality is a thing, no matter how much some of us like to insist it isn’t. To suggest that maybe we try to acknowledge that life is easier if you’re white and that Black lives do matter, to be told only that all lives matter, as if you were ever trying to suggest anything different. Obviously all lives matter. Including the lives of the people drowning in the Channel. It seems the people that like to declare, frothing at the mouth, that all lives matter also suggest we deliberately sink boats and drown people, with no acknowledgement of the cognitive dissonance required to hold both of these points of view at the same time.

But to be a lawyer defending the rights of humans in a difficult position with no other way to get help, in accordance with the laws of this very country that seems so hostile to people from other countries at the moment, more than I ever remember, is seemingly a bad thing. They’re merely do-gooders. Doing good is apparently worthy of contempt nowadays.

And we appear to have adopted that perception from over the water, where the (outgoing, hopefully) administration declares that Nazis can be ‘very fine people’ but ‘Antifa’ are a terrorist organisation. Antifa isn’t an organisation all, but merely stands for people who are anti-fascist. That’s right. If you oppose fascism you are an enemy of the state in the good old freedom-loving U S of A. With luck, their entire system of democracy and free and fair elections will survive the current sustained attack on it and will soon re-confirm that opposing fascism is a good thing. And then hopefully members of our own government won’t contemptuously label them do-gooders.

I don’t get why we think that doing nothing but clapping health workers and nurses is all that is necessary. Pay people risking (and often giving) their lives to help as many people as they can. Provide them with the equipment they need, by acquiring it using transparent procurement processes, rather than giving the money, uncontested, to a company that happens to have a mate or their other half on the board. This is the dictionary definition of corruption and still almost nobody gives a shit.

We get instead ludicrous statements like nobody could have predicted the current mess without a crystal ball from people in control of the country’s response who really should know better. Well I guess I for one must have had a crystal ball when I called the resurgence back in this very blog in June – and that’s without retroactively changing it like a certain supposed brains behind the power did.

There is other terminology designed to make simply being good seem worthy of contempt out there as well. Stating on a public platform that maybe we should try to make sure children don’t go hungry is merely ‘virtue signalling’. As if the people accusing you of ‘signalling your virtue’ cannot possibly conceive of a thought that isn’t entirely selfish and just a case of simply expressing that it would be better if children don’t go hungry. And the argument that it’s because parents should be responsible for their children’s wellbeing and that they shouldn’t have had children if they couldn’t afford to look after them seems to assert that somehow one must know all possible futures before deciding if they can afford to procreate. Which is just silly. And taking this argument to its logical extreme, maybe you have a parent that is an addict. Maybe they don’t feed their kids because they’re feeding their habit. Maybe they’ve found a way to exchange school meal vouchers for hard drugs. In what possible reality is the appropriate response to allow the child to bear the brunt of that neglect? To just let the child go hungry and accept that as some kind of just punishment for the parent? Costs a lot less to feed kids than it does to pay companies to fail to produce protective equipment for nurses. But hey, one is business, the other is disgusting virtue signalling. How can we justify reducing the percentage of our GDP we spend on overseas aid using the excuse that we need to help people in our own country, and then when the need to help people in our own country arises, we just…don’t?

One more: woke. To be woke, is to be a subject of ridicule. Define for me exactly what is meant by being woke. Put simply, it’s to be made aware of the struggles of other groups of people that don’t benefit from the privilege that you enjoy. It’s to be made aware of the danger they often find themselves in. It is to be woken up to the fact that as bad as you think you have it, there are entire demographics that have it worse, and have always had it worse, and without your acknowledgement and without you resolving to take steps to change it, will always have it worse. Usually the people that resist this acknowledgement are striving to keep the status quo where their privilege allows them to keep their eyes turned away from the difficulties faced by others. Difficulties they could help with, if they would only open their eyes and see.

I guess I’m just going to have to become public enemy number 1, because I can’t see a time when I will ever be proud of not caring about others, no matter how much that becomes the cool thing to do.

On statues and history.

I appreciate that destruction of public monuments is considered a bad thing. A worse thing, in my own humble opinion, is deliberately misunderstanding a point or a situation to allow you to argue for maintaining an untenable status quo.

Statues are erected to celebrate people, erected by people that admire them. Statues are not 3D history lessons. That’s why there’s a statue of Jim Henson (pictured below), and not a statue of Hitler or Jimmy Saville. I don’t think we’re in danger of forgetting about them though are we? Arguing that pulling down the statue of Edward Colston is erasing the more troubling aspects of our history is inaccurate. I had no idea who Edward Colston was until his statue was pulled down and dumped in the water, and I’m willing to bet that almost none of you did either.

The man traded people as if they were goods and was responsible for the deaths of thousands of them. That’s mass murder. Whatever else he might have done, it will not erase that stain. There are many, many more suitable ways to ensure this unpleasant part of our history isn’t lost than maintaining a statue in devotion to him. Teaching it as part of history in schools, colleges and universities would be one. A museum would be another. Frankly the idea that he should be immortalised in statue form can get in the bin. Or the Bristol Channel, either’s fine.

Just try to imagine. Centuries of it, going back as far as you can imagine. First not being treated as though you’re even human. All these years later and you’re still treated as second class citizens. Frequently denied even basic courtesy, all the while those that continue to oppress you complaining it isn’t fair when someone gives you a job or a promotion. It’s insidious and it’s hidden in plain view everywhere. It is 100% true that to the privileged, equality feels like oppression. I don’t blame the protestors at all for dragging Colston’s murdering ass down.

Perhaps it would have been better, or more acceptable to campaign for the removal of the statue? I agree, and it turns out that it seems they’ve been trying for years, but were refused. Even the request to change the wording on it was vetoed. A bit like when kneeling during the National Anthem in the states was met with outrage, so when real anger came out following yet more needless deaths it was all ‘Why can’t you protest peacefully and respectfully?’ Being civil didn’t work.

Perhaps, if universities weren’t reducing their history departments through lack of funding, teaching the public about people like Edward Colston wouldn’t be the job of tributes in the form of statues. Maybe if they taught some of the less pleasant parts of our history, like the looting of Africa, or the Opium Wars, and stop pretending our history starts and stops with WWI and WWII, we wouldn’t grow up with a vastly inflated sense of our own importance and vote to do silly things like leave the EU. We like to think we’re big damn heroes since the ‘40s, but we were still torturing people in Kenya for not wanting to be under British rule in the '50s. I understand a significant amount of this cutting back of history in education was accomplished under the previous Labour government, which while not as awful as the Iraq war, was still a crappy thing to do, if you think I’m dividing this along party lines.

The argument that without that statue and statues of other slavers, we’d all just forget that Britain was heavily involved in slavery is a false one. Nobody ever stopped to look at that statue of Edward Colston and thought, while looking up at him like a supplicant, ‘My, he was a terrible man, I’m glad this statue’s here so we can ruminate on some of the terrible things Britain got up to in the past. Well, moving on, what’s for lunch?’

Statues ain’t history, history is history, and as long as culture, honest media, libraries, museums and quality education exists, it won’t be forgotten if the statues are binned.

Fragile things.

It’s not always easy to imagine our world crumbling away before our eyes. It all seems so sturdy. Or rather, it did. It all seems a bit more fragile at the moment. When I was younger it all seemed so obvious. Racism is not a good thing. That seems obvious doesn’t it? And yet… And yet.

Whether you like to admit it or not, the primary reason we’re leaving the EU is racism. We’ve been fed the narrative that 'the other' is here to take everything we’ve got, and so we must build walls around ourselves to keep them out, not noticing for a moment that some poor folks coming over from Poland, Romania or wherever to pick fruit or work as hospital porters don’t actually take anything from us, and on balance provide more for the country in labour and taxes than they take out in benefits. And the ones feeding us this narrative are the ones in charge of the companies, newspapers and banks that divert billions that should be fed into our national coffers and hide it away offshore. But no, let’s all get angry at the fruit pickers because they speak more than one language.

But oh my is it ever worse in America. The place seems like a genuine hellscape at the moment. It’s never really been safe to be black over there, but a counterfeit $20? That’s something that requires having your neck kneeled on until you’re dead? The police force in America appear to be uncivil to murderous extremes. I’m not surprised at all that angry protests have sprung up everywhere, which has, of course, caused the police to go in hard to disperse, which has of course, caused the protests to turn violent, which allows right wing white political commentators and politicians to now blame black people, reinforcing the racist narrative.

The video evidence coming out of America at the moment showing excessive use of force against peaceful protests, stacks of bricks conveniently placed near protest sites and white fools destroying property and police cars while black protesters beg them to stop also shows that blame for the rioting cannot simply be laid at the door of black communities. You’ve got cops flashing ‘white power’ symbols, you’ve got journalists and FBI agents being arrested on the street because they’re black, you’ve got reporters being shot in the eye with rubber bullets indiscriminately, you’ve got children being pepper sprayed, you’ve got people being thrown to the ground and kicked even while doing what they are being told to do. All of it white the aggressor, black the oppressed.

Compare that to a week or two ago, where white folks protesting efforts being made to keep them alive (and oh boy both the UK and US in for a resurgence of The Virus), all angry, tooled up with guns and forcing their way into government buildings. You simply cannot look at those two extremes and tell me white people are not ridiculously privileged. Well, you can, but you’d be a liar and a racist. And possibly president.

It's almost as if a persistent pushing of the narrative that non-white people and journalists are somehow the enemy of the people and deserve to be treated violently has given the police cause to treat journalists and black people violently. Funny how that works, isn’t it?

And if you think having sympathy for journalists here doesn’t chime with me complaining about the press elsewhere, you and I both know there is a difference between a reporter on the ground trying to capture events as they happen and the billionaire offshore account holding owners of Fox News, The Daily Mail and The Telegraph.

Just stop killing black people, and stop treating them as less than people, and stop replying to #BlackLivesMatter with #AllLivesMatter because your deliberate misunderstanding of the problem just shows a severe lack of empathy. Because how can all lives matter when black lives are treated as though they don’t?

Occasional feature: Ending with a song loosely related to the post (or more like a lyric I can take out of context and loosely relate to the post):

Bruce Springsteen: American Skin (41 Shots): “It ain’t no secret, no secret my friend. You can get killed just for living in your American skin.”