Burn Boris Burn!
I am very lucky to have grown up in the 50s and 60s. Not that everything was perfect (60s architecture — ugh!) but in terms of social mobility and equal opportunities for all levels of society there’s probably been nothing like it since the hunter gatherers! Of course all good things come to an end and here we are, a mere fifty years later, teetering on the edge of a new Dark Age where a minute handful of obscenely rich technocrats strive for immortality as technologically enhanced humans while the majority of the world wonders where its next meal is coming from. (If I exaggerate it’s only by a little!)
I cannot imagine what is happening in the poorest countries of the world, I only know how bad it’s getting in the richest. The social contract where the capitalist flourished by rewarding the workers with fair pay and jobs has been torn up and replaced by corporate dominance where profits for the wealthy are the predominant goal. ‘Tax the poor, not the rich!’ Neoliberalism, the most oxymoronic label of all time, and ‘trickle down’ capitalism, where the majority of the world is supposed to be fed by crumbs from the rich man’s table have both proved to be failed notions but what has replaced them? COVID 19 and globalization?
In Britain half the population was persuaded to vote to leave the European Union, whether by lies, fear or desperation. Think what you like about the Union but leaving has left us at the mercy of a bunch of possibly corrupt and definitely inept right wingers fronted by an overgrown schoolboy who is so out of his depth he has to rely on his Machiavellian side-kick to tell him what to do. That’s how I see what’s happening so, when they used COVID as a convenient excuse to ban this year’s Bonfire Night (traditionally a night of fireworks and the burning of effigies since 1605), as someone lucky enough to have a back garden, I took great delight in burning an effigy of our Prime Minister. We must not be dominated by fear lest we lose the last tattered shreds of our democracy.
