simplysorro

While Cap’n Birdseye is handing out the lollipops and creating fiscal black holes, Theresa Maybe is smacking pensioners and dementioners to show fiscal responsibility. The former is reliant on gargantuan debt-accumulation (carrot), the latter a dominatrix-style reality-check (stick). Neither tactic is necessary. Both are in the casino. Corbyn is splashing the cash around hoping that tripling the national debt and  few rich idiots will raise billions to cover his losses; May is playing hardball because she’s far enough ahead to piss off a few people.

Why can’t there be a moderate voice of reason and compromise? We all know that social care, end-of-life care, education, policing, NHS, defence and the rest need paying for. Corbyn is a far left man, Theresa a pretty far right woman. Do we need either? When I cast my Lib Dem vote, Greg Clarke, Con. MP for Tunbridge Wells, Energy minister and Thunderbird,  won’t lose much sleep. His majority is huge (God alone knows why). Proportional representation seems as much of a pipe dream as ever so the centrists – that’s probably most of us  – are resigned,  in many places, to cast votes that don’t matter.

Having seen the Scottish slanging match t’other night and the border conflict issue brewing in Northern Ireland, we could do well to have a voice of sanity to help us all out. Step up Tim Farron! There’s so much noise around – the sucking of lollipops and the abrasive smacking of pensioner bank balances, that we need a Middle of the Road to sing Chirpy Chirpy Cheep-cheep. Apologies if the retro pop song link is lost on you.

I have decided to hold my breath during news and politics programmes for the next couple of weeks. I either pass out or get so lightheaded that the claims and counter-claims make me laugh. Along with serial non-answering of plain questions.

Jezza Corbyn’s supporters should immediately take up My Boy Lollipop, the 60s classic sung by Millie, as their battle-song. Its brilliant rhyming and scansion is perfect for his sucking-up message.

My boy lollipop,

You make my heart go giddy-uo

You set my world on fire (fi – ya)

You are my one desire (de-si-ya)

etc.

We should look no further than Ian Dury (and his Blockheads) for the battlesong of Mother Theresa’s acolytes.

Hit me with your rhythm stick, hit me, hit me.

Das ist gut, c’est fantastique, hit me, hit me, hit me.

Hit me with your rhythm stick,

It’s nice to be a lunatic,

Hit me, hit hit me, hit….me.

Will someone please triple lock me up I lose the …will to laugh…or perhaps live.

I’m already on truckloads of paracetamol to dull the pain of the biff-boff of electioneering. Biff – No more junk food adverts for obese kids watching BGT says Johnny Ashworth, the shadow to Jeremy Rhyming Slang. Boff – cap on energy bills chirps the blue Thunderbird Greg Clarke. Biff – bleed more out of those on over £80k says John McDonnell. Boff – net migration will come down to tens of thousands. The biffing and boffing mostly excludes the woefully underpowered Lib Dems and the indifferent SNP, whose leader – Jimmy Krankie – has temporarily recognised that her silence is golden.

Following the dispiriting Tory surge in council elections (why would local people vote for cuts and grammar schools?) and the mildly cheering news about the new French president, what are we to make of the state of Europe and the UK at the moment? Both in a good deal of bother, I’d say.

At home our main parties are grabbing soundbite-policies as short term foreplay to get the voters onside. Bugger the ideology, lets toss some tasty morsels to the common man and woman. Jezza and Theresa Maybe both claim to be champions of working people. Well Cap’n Birdseye still clings to the definition of the working man who was hacking at the colliery coalface in D.H. Lawrence’s time. Mother Theresa’s definition is closer to the truth but her motives are less honest than Jezza’s. At least he is an unreconstructed Commie sticking, mostly, to his guns. She sticks a damp finger in the air each day and decides what will win her the most votes.

Both have swallowed the idea that the 52% v 48% Brexit vote was a landslide. Tim Barren Farron is not the vibrant provocateur to take the pro-Euro fight to the main stage. Why, at this vital time in our history, have we been landed with a Liberal leader who doesn’t like gays? Where are Vince Cable and Nick Clegg when you need them? They have the integrity and the language to mount a proper Liberal response. They have done their time, I suppose – and got bloody noses for poking them in where the Tories didn’t want them.

The French are in more of a mess than we think. The mainstream parties like neither Macron nor Le Pen. A third of all who voted went to the far right. That beats UKIP into a cocked hat. There is a strange confusion about who represents what in Paris. The conservatives are called Les Republicans. Sarkozy’s people. Macron seems to float between Liberalisme (eg. supporter of free markets and right of centre) and Socialisme, which I think means socialist. It’s all Greek to me. Now there’s another basket case bubbling up again.

As I watch the painfully awkward gait of Mother Theresa, dressed uniquely in over-engineered dung-brown designer-PM gear, I do think, who are you? Who do you think you are? Jezza, who I trust just as little, is rather more of an open book. Why are these two the only options? Far right and far left. No one in the middle. Things fall apart the centre cannot hold. Here, France, USA. I can’t bear it. I’m switching off the telly until election day. Count the bare-faced lies between now and then. And more ad hominem arguments than you can shake a stick at. Pass me the paracetamol, I need to be strong and stable.

I was in retro mood yesterday and bought a CD by the Hollies. A lifetime ago they had a hit with Here I go Again. What’s the use/I’ll just give in/try as I may-and I do/ never win, never win/baby I never win. Well this could be a mantra for your favourite team, those unlucky in love, wannabe lottery-winners and Tim Henman.

Politics across the globe is full of wannabes who dump principles for advancement. And with Europe in schism the opportunists who initiated the disaster  of our depature (you know – Boris the Spider, Pouty Gove, Farridge, Ian drunken Smurf, Liam ‘sly’ Fox et al) have been replaced by the opportunists who see the main chance to win their own personal lotteries. Across the Channel the immoderate voices of the far right battle with the revenge-seeking eurocrats who want to beat the misguided and disenfranchised of Lincolnshire and the Potteries to pulp. Let’s hope Le Pen isn’t mightier than the sword because neither prospect is welcome.

Over here little Jimmy Krankie in Scotland has seized her chance. What a joy Brexit has been for her. While we mortals are staring at isolationism, economic meltdown and losing our euro mates and the rest of the UK, she is grabbing her personal zeitgeist to get what she wanted when she was deputy to Alex Salmond : a place in history. A straight fight it is then, between Mother Theresa and the Krankie.

What other opportunists will emerge from the ashes of Brexit? Comparisons made with 1930s Germany may not be so far off the mark. But opportunists don’t always wear Fascist armbands. The rich get richer, empty vessels make more noise and vacuums are filled by those who are desperate for the spotlight. The rest of us hunker down and hope that all will be well. After a period of remoaning about the iniquity of it all we retreat into ourselves and let the opportunists get on with it. We shouldn’t but we do.

As the Brexit Bill passed through both chambers yesterday, I noted the heavy Labour support in the Commons. Corbyn’s opportunist game is to see the Tories, eventually, fall on their swords and hope to pick up the pieces. Scotland is a lost cause for Captain Birdseye, so he might as well concentrate of messing up England and Wales. Oh dear. Come on Tim Farron! Become an opportunist. You’ll get book deals and paid dinner invitations galore. And you might, just might put the UK back in a fairer, more outward-looking and moral place. Faint hope now perhaps, but I’m sure Timmy could take a course in opportunism. The Trumpet Major across the pond must have several running at his conditioning centres/universities.

I have broken my promise not to write about things Brexit-associated. My Remoaning wounds still need licking though. For the first time in my life I have thought of myself as something other than British/English. I am the son of an immigrant, a Dane who came over here after the war and married my Mum. My Dad was proud to keep his Danish passport but also loved Britain where he lived for the rest of his life. Were he alive, I suppose he would be feeling vulnerable, alienated and sick.

Oh, Here I go Again. Let’s change the track. He Ain’t Heavy, He’s my Brother. Now that’s a title that the opportunists just wouldn’t understand.

1. Why a 52/48 referendum close call (with 28% not voting) shows that Brexit means Brexit and the Will of the People is unequivocally in favour of death by a thousand cuts over the next many, many, many years.
2. Why a man on the tube today squeezed his spots and wiped the unpleasant seepage on the seat cushion.
3. Donald Trump.
4. UKIP.
5. Why a mistake on a card at an awards show is the first item on each national news channel.
6. Why school pupils need to manipulate complicated sine and cosine equations for GCSE but struggle with their times tables and can’t add 231 and 345 in their heads.
7. Why there is so much bellyaching about poor soccer refereeing decisions, yet the world’s richest game won’t use the technology available as all other high profile sports do.
8. Why Leicester players get a brilliant and nice man sacked and then start to try.
9. Why four people having a meal together in Pizza Express  (Trafalgar Square) sat in silence staring at their iPhones.
10. Opera.

That’s enough brain-ache for one day.

I don’t want to add to the general misery but…What struck me about Theresa Maybe’s speech was the plethora of ironies which smacked my face whichever way I turned. in her baggy tartan suit she chose to set out her Brexit vision in the very place, Lancaster House, that Mrs Thatcher famously praised the single market. Mother Theresa, a Remainer just a few short months ago, warmed to her ‘hard’ Brexit theme. Along with the other Brexit charlatans (Boris the Spider, Pouty Gove, Liam ‘sly’ Fox, Ian Drunken Smurf  and, of course, Farridge) she has convinced herself that 48% of the nation are now on her side and that the Europeans whom we are stabbing in the back, front and everywhere else we can think of, should lie down and purr as we stroke them with our terribly reasonable demands.

That disentanglement from the EU is dreadfully complicated, is clear. The implications have never been properly thought through and, certainly, many of the marginal majority who voted for Brexit, have not the remotest idea as to where Mother Theresa is taking us. How she has embraced Brexit, though! It has enabled her to get the top job and, as she sees it, enjoy a mandate for shoving our liberal-minded, centralist, outward-looking nation into a right-wing, protectionist, small-island haven for bigots.

The ironies just go on and on. Many of the laws emanating from Europe have protected or enhanced: jobs, conditions of employment, consumer rights, environmental issues,  health and safety…the list is endless. Our finance sector is far better regulated than once it was. Watch what happens when we cut ourselves adrift. The rich will get richer and the man and woman in the street will, slowly, have a number of rugs pulled from under their feet. The 20% fall in the pound, the escalation in petrol and grocery costs…just the start. And the money, the economics is far less important than the culture of inclusion, cooperation, open borders and open minds.

I notice that Pouty Gove has reinvented himself as the interviewing mate of the Donald and the Times is paying him £160,000 to write a few articles. Along with Boris the Spider, who still has the Gove dagger sticking out of his back, he hasn’t done too badly out of political opportunism. Nor has Farridge, of course, who will be quaffing the Trumpmeister’s champers on Friday. These guys are self-seeking, self-publicising opportunists. For them, it’s all ME,ME,ME.

The lack of credible voices of opposition using cogent, liberal, centre-ground moral rationality is distressing. JC, our erstwhile Marxist Captain Birdseye, has failed to offer any sane, articulate alternative voice for the UK to rally behind. Tim Dim Farron can’t do for the Lib. Dems what Cleggy once did. The good people of politics – those for whom US is a far better pronoun than ME – have fled. Cameron, Clegg, Milliband (x 2), Hague, Hunt (Tristram, not rhyming-slang-boy) Balls etc etc. There is a lengthening list of those who have cut and run to after-dinner speechifying, book deals, directorships and dancing. Guys and girls who were in politics ‘to make a difference’ leave the stage at an early age to pursue burgeoning bank accounts. And we can’t really blame them when the man on the street wants Polish brickies to fuck off, along with the rest of a (mostly) nonsensical wishlist. Banging your political head against a brick wall can only go on for so long.

The extraordinary inauguration of the Donald is a must-see event on Friday. Whatever teeth we pinko, mild centre-lefties are gnashing in the UK, it must be a dentist’s dream over the pond. A man and a family who reek of ME, ME, ME  have persuaded Yankee Doodles that they are really an US clan. I wonder if the man and his nation can live up to the pronoun? Theatre has become reality. Are lunatics running our asylums or am I just a Remoaner in a Coma?

Hope features in our late-year vocabulary. Hope you have a nice Christmas; hope for good things in 2017. Much that went on in 2016 gave Hope a kick in the goolies. The fragile ceasefire in Aleppo; Putin cuddling up to the Turks; the Israelis pushing their luck; the madness of North Korea; the implacable Saudis; the scattergun terrorism across the world; Brexit and Trump.

Making sense of it all may be a futile exercise. Democracy seems to have failed a fundamental test. The Brexit vote was predicated on tabloid intolerance and racism backed up by inglorious campaigns of fear and lies. Over the pond a misogynist, racist, lying bigot won the race for the White House on the basis that the American people couldn’t find a better candidate. Politics is truly fucked.

On the brighter side I find that my interests have contracted to trivia that is closer to home. Half the world seems war-torn, terrorist-blighted, environmentally beleaguered, refugee-flooded, disease-ridden and starving. Responsibility lies with the rich and powerful on the one hand and religion on the other. Much safer to hunker down and think small in the hope that the big things will get better or at least hope that my village in Kent won’t become a war-zone any time soon.

On this basis my first blog of the new year concerns shoes, money Vs value and Sat Navs. We are in the midst of an international crisis. We have become obsessed with taking footwear off. Almost every house I enter has  a pile of shoes at the door, the welcoming hosts be-socked and padding about, expecting me to unclamp my Timberlands and reveal the big-toe holes in my socks. Mats are no longer used for the cursory brushing of excess dirt but a repository for guest booties. I shall return to footwear shortly.

Today I purchased a Gillet (GeeLay) so that I could pronounce it with an exaggerated French accent. It was £13.49 from Sports Direct. That is well short of the four drinks I bought in the pub on New Year’s Eve. Now I know that wearing a Lee Cooper GeeeLay won’t propel me on to the front cover of Vogue, nor will it placate the leftie right-on mafia who want to hang, draw and quarter Mike Ashley for his sweat-shop, zero hoursing approach to business…but bloody hell, £13.49!! When we know the price of everything and the value of nothing (thanks Oscar), we chuck important things away.

On the way to my sister’s new house over Christmas, I plugged her postcode into my shiny new TomTom. New postcodes send it potty and we were hurtling in the opposite direction before commonsense kicked in. Then we realised that we knew where Horsham was and the verbal directions from Sis would get us there with greater alacrity than the Sat Nav. The world is losing its sense of direction as we all rely on iphones, Sat Navs and the bloody Daily Mail to mangle our joint path to truth.

Back to Hope. It’s a nice name and when I look at my Grandchildren and think of the many brilliant young people I have the privilege to know, I manage a flicker of hope for 2017 and beyond. You may say I’m a dreamer but I’m not the only one.

Another year, another list.

Resolutions and active blogging start tomorrow.

Keep up with Simply Sorro.

Happy New Year.

books-2016