The Tory party conference is taking place in Manchester, behind steel barriers and protected by snipers in case someone throws an egg. A young fogey delegate goaded the crowd with a photo of Margaret Thatcher, but what’s to be condemned is that someone rose to the goading by throwing an egg, and not that an over-privileged young man with all the empathetic skills of a sea slug goaded them in the first place. It is apparently expected and perfectly acceptable that middle class youth with gilded spoons up their arses should not empathise with people who have not enjoyed the same privileges in life. It’s unreasonable to condemn the fact that compassion has become a dirty word. This is the UK that we’re better together with.
According to Jeremy Hunt, whose name is rhyming slang, the removal of tax credits from the lowest paid workers will make people in the UK work harder like the Chinese or the Americans. In other words, on starvation wages in sweatshops with no holiday entitlement and without the protection of strong trades unions. The Tories are trying to rebrand themselves as the party of labour, which is a bit like Attila the Hun’s hordes which wrought destruction across a continent and sent off a chain reaction of refugee migrations rebranding themselves as a removal company.
George Osborne promised an unprecedented extension of powers to local authorities in England, claiming he’d give them control of business rates. But they’ll only be allowed to lower rates. If they want to raise business rates they’re going to have to ensure that the measure is supported by a majority of local businesses. The Tories have now actually given businesses a veto over representative democracy. Companies can overrule voters in this Britain that Scotland remains a part of. Yet this descent of the UK into a corporatocracy went unremarked because something far far worse happened. Someone threw an egg. Someone spat. Someone said a swerry wurd. The very horror. And they weren’t important or rich people either. It’s outrageous.
The lies and deception from the mouths of Tories who wouldn’t recognise morality if it splattered them with yolk is considered acceptable discourse, it’s not acceptable to throw an egg. In fact, egg throwing is so bad that it causes the political classes and the media to entirely overlook the reasons which brought the egg thrower to the point where they threw an egg.
Egg throwing is the curse of our times, and signals the imminent end of civilisation as we know it, because it’s wrong for people to get upset when the government forces them into penury while further enriching its wealthy friends. Meanwhile the right wing media gets angry at the response of the poor and the disabled to their living conditions, but not at the conditions that the disabled and the poor have to endure. But then these are the same people who claimed that the introduction of a 5p charge for a plastic shopping bag would create chaos. We are quite literally ruled by people which couldn’t punch their way out of a plastic bag. The same folk who tell us that Scotland, which managed to introduce a 5p charge on plastic bags without creating a cataclysm, needs them to look after us. Scotland introduced a 5p charge on plastic bags and is still in the rugby world cup.
But it’s the egg throwing. Egg throwing is worse than what’s happening in Syria. It’s worse than the US airforce bombing a hospital in Afghanistan. And it’s certainly worse than Job Centre staff being given quotas for the number of claimants they have to sanction each month. How dreadful that someone threw an egg, that someone else called out an insulting and hurtful name, and how much more worthy of condemnation that is than making someone live on the edge of starvation and stripping them of dignity and hope. This is the topsy turvy morality of Great Britishness. The worst possible crime is saying a rude word to a selfish pig sticker.
The recurring theme is that ordinary people have no right to protest. We’re all egg throwers because one person threw an egg. We’re all misogynists because one person called someone a whore. We’re all violent thugs because someone spat. Yet no one was killed, no one was injured, no one was driven to despair – it’s Tory policies that are doing that. If you call a Tory a rude name it becomes a justification for police snipers on a rooftop. Sticks and stones may break bones, but names will bring out snipers.
Bad names fade in the wind, but poverty passes down the generations. Children grow up learning there is nothing to hope for but a minimum wage and a lifetime of debt, and that’s just fine and dandy with the young fogeys in the ill fitting suits and with the braying laughs who think being poor is a reason to mock and belittle. Broken eggs on shirts come out in the wash, but the stain of deprivation marks lives for life. All these things are acceptable in modern go-ahead striving Britain of hardworking families and political cliches.
However calling out a rude word is beyond the steel pale that surrounds the Tory delegates who enjoy absolute power on the back of 24% of the popular vote. Imagine shouting out Tory scum eh. What a dreadful state of affairs, allowing the Tories of all people to claim victimhood status. Although in their case it’s not so much victimhood as victimgood, because it means that they can claim the moral high ground for their wanton cruelty, selfishness, materialism, and their substitution of money for morality.
England is doing a very good impression of a country which is divided and at odds with itself. Roads are closed by police barricades, armed officers perch on buildings aiming at the public. Still, at least we know now that it’s not supporters of Scottish independence who are uniquely prone to insults, slurs and egg throwing, and now the Scottish media will start praising the calm and rational manner in which Scotland’s constitutional debate is conducted. Won’t they? Or will they be too busy going to work on an egg.
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But this so-called democracy of ours long ago ruled out the right to vigorous protest.
It makes me laugh the way folks like the BBC are fawning all over the subject of the suffragettes at the moment and the way they fought for the vote when you and I know that if the Yes movement had come anywhere close to the sort of tactics used by these feisty women 100 years ago we’d have been rounded up and interned.
But apparently aspiring to allow women to have the vote is a noble cause whilst aspiring to run your own country is a smidgen off beating up your granny and stealing her pension (and the Tories have already managed the second part of that crime).
Hupokrinesthai
“aspiring to allow women to have the vote is a noble cause” – only through rose-tinted specs at 100 years’ remove. If the BBC had been around at the time, they would have been singing an entirely different song!
[…] Going to work on an egg […]
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re-blogged this excellent post Paul – with a few other bits and pieces. https://eurofree3.wordpress.com/2015/10/05/going-to-work-on-an-egg/
If they don’t realise it yet, I imagine Labour will eventually see that the devolution to the North and mayors etc is intended to result in Labour mayors (most northern places still being Labour strongholds of course) taking the blame for all local cuts etc and the Tories spinning any success to be their own work. Indeed, Osbourne apparently wants to take these Labour heartlands, though he’s pretending it’s be through positive politics when in reality it’d be through running them into the ground and blaming Labour.
Another great post. Thank you.
I hope that all decent people in Scotland are watching this terrible circus and determining to free their country from it. The ideology of greed.
Sadly, their red Tory chums are no better. They talk the talk but ultimately they always have and always will put their Party and their own ideological delusions before the needs of the people. They owned Scotland for years and used it for their cynical notion of ‘the greater good’.
A plague on both their houses.
People forget Paul.
They forget the riots of the eighties when the unions were crushed, they forget the iniquity of the the poll tax and the mass protests, the 4 million club, the queues at the buroo and the destruction of communities. Folk are telling their grand kids these days of the fear and the violence and Thatcher’s Britain. Its all seen through the frosted glass of time and distance. I’ve got a bad feeling about this and I’m not liking the general trend of drift one bit. Its deja vu all over again.
It won’t take much, just like the London riots a couple of years back. one incident and all hell will be let loose.People are angry, the media have them yanked in so many directions they don’t know who to be angry at. Refugees/immigrants, the poor/benefits scroungers, the disabled, Scots? All they know is that their rights and services are disappearing, putting food on the table is becoming harder, the rich of specific geographic locations within the UK are getting richer in the face of their hardship and frustration and anger is building a head of steam.
Removing ourselves from this system of government and cycle of abuse is an imperative at this point. Westminster, its establishment structure, the conservatives, will not ever change and her majesty’s opposition are no opposition whatsoever, not ideologically and certainly not literally. For the next several years they will be far too busy wrestling with their own ideological factions and I fear that the winner of that struggle will merely be the mirror image of those on the government benches and still Thatcher’s fondest political achievement.
We could have and should have been a full year down the road of settlement negotiations by this point. If people are smart, they will look upon this period as a break from an eventual and now more than ever, necessary process. The political union has had its final chance and proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that some animals do not change their spots and that some relationships are beyond redemption.
We should simply move on now.
I was struck by your phrase ‘cycle of abuse’.
The electorate in the UK voted for this!
It is beneath us. We, even no voters, are better than that.
Another great post by WGD.
That is precisely why I will never understand why my generation, according to statistics, voted No in the referendum, Mac. And I believe these to be correct, as going around the doors during the campaign, it was my age group, 60/80s, that were proving to be the most intransigent.
Despite the fact that they, like me, had lived through the Thatcher years, and witnessed the destruction of Scottish industry, and the attendant ills that that inevitably brought to Scottish society. And ever since these dark days, continued mismanagement of the Scottish economy by both the Conservatives, and Labour, at Westminster, compounded by the initial Lab/Lib coalition at Holyrood, some people here still haven’t seen, or are unwilling to admit, the improvements brought about since 2007 by an S.N.P Scottish Government.
However, the good news is that since we started canvassing in the last month for the 2016 Scottish elections, the support for both the S.N.P, and independence, seems to be growing, and I can only hope that this trend continues.
Douglas and Alex
We have our friends in the media to thank for this. The propaganda arm of the establishment by any other name. In the normal course of events and with their own political affiliations, they are happy to knock lumps out of each others parties and MPs, but where a threat to the continued status quo is concerned? They come together with a vengeance to step on any attempt to disrupt their world. The SNP is such a threat and was recognised as such as far back as the early seventies.
The media all colluded in the ‘tartan tory’ myth and any and every opportunity was used to downplay the SNP as a movement or party with any real appeal or message over the years.
Likewise the media cushioned the body blows to their parties of choice over the same period, acted as their willing daily soap box. They made careers and destroyed them at a whim and the public, with no other source of information ate it all up. Only now, with free public access to a world of information and the evidence of the system’s failure right before their eyes are people beginning to understand the scale of the con that was pulled.
They were led to believe they were powerless and weak, told who to trust and who not to. Their money was literally stolen from them and for what in return? Waves of austerity? Their children taking flight to other countries in search of a better life? The deconstruction of their industries and communities?
The past eight years especially have been a rude wake up call for many as they became more aware of and more educated in their politics. The process is not yet complete, it takes time to shake generations of ingrained false narrative, but when it is?
I think you’ll see a far different result at next time of asking.
Aye. The media are our No.1 enemy, and this is what makes our task so onerous. If it was even a level playing field, which I have no objection to, then by now we would be an independent country. But we will get there. The day of reckoning is near.
That little twerp was staked out like a goat in a clearing with a tannoy amplifying its bleating just to make sure the hyenas could hear it, the smirk on “its” face after he was egged told it all
Reblogged this on mikeinkwazi.
Reading both Paul’s excellent as usual blog and the comments of Douglas Mac and Alex I felt somewhat in tune with what was being said. I have just come from another blog which is the National Left (Wales) which was saying about the number of calls made from the distribution centre of Sports Direct, serious calls, life threatening because people were so terrified of losing what is probably an awful job with poor pay. Most of the staff are agency and the things they can be penalised for are trivial but taken over a six month period can result in them losing the job.
Regardless of what the Tories think it will as Mac said only take a spark and then they will wonder what hit them.
I said on Munguin I think yesterday that I am sure the Aristocrats who would not take their share of Taxes and brought about the French Revolution felt very secure. England will explode long before we do and for that I am grateful.
I am now heading into my seventies, too quickly I may add, but I too despair of the fearties who seem to want to believe everything they were told. This includes the thirty somethings who have made it up the greasy ladder and were too frightened they would come down.
Who rules over us? Well, the Tories are one leg of the stool, with as Paul says, a miserable 24% of the electorate.
Next up the corporate world, who would outsource their grannies if it would save them a dime. Better if UKOK joined the Third World(not at the top, of course).
Then we have the * media*—- the *free press*—– essential to a democracy? Wall to wall uncriticle coverage of the Brit Nat conferances, not least here in Scotland, where apart from smears the SNP gets zero air time. The BBC now seems indistinguishable from the Times, Telegraph or any other Tory supporting London centric organ.
This is our present. If we don’t watch out, it is also our future.
Condescended to. Lied to. Our opinions manipulated. If we stay in the UK, we will be trained to hate Scots and Scotland. Hate foreigners, hate those worse off than we are.
Love wealth, consumerism, endless wars, the Donald.
It should also not be forgotten, that the eggsample which got the ball rolling, was against Generalissimo Murphy.
And we ALL know how that was spun.
An assault on freedom, democracy and the American way!
Jeremy Hunt hasn’t been listening to Obama’s recent speech on world trade, where he outlined the need for Chinese reform if they are to continue trading… raise wages to encourage an internal economy, reform industrial practice, allow the level of democracy the population is demanding- otherwise they are doomed to manipulating their economy from central government, messing up their trading relationships…. and corruption will thrive.
Appealing to generation Daily Express / Mail may doom the Tories to an ageing electorate, sitting in their incontinence pants, sinking into a lift chair, too fearful to go out. It will also encourage a policy that connects us to the rest of the world simply by joining in with whatever punch-up is going.
What a depressing bunch!
Great blog. One point re police snipers. This has been standard practice at conferences of governing parties for many years. Security was ramped up significantly following the Brighton bomb.
So, it isn’t correct to suggest that police snipers in Manchester are a new development and in some way a consequence of a Tory government. It is the police who decide on security based on intelligence and risk assessment.