Day 249

So, politics for a change. Johnson is live on TV right now, and has just said that he hadn’t realised the Premiership was a relay race and that the rules had been changed halfway through. This from a man who didn’t even obey the rules he himself set during the covid-19 lockdowns, yet more proof that whenever he opens his mouth he lies. And later today we will see the third female Prime Minister the UK has had, all of them unfortunately Conservative, all of them hostile to the working people and to minorities of all kinds. Although the rot in our society could be said to have started well before Thatcher (even a superficial examination of British history shows an absolute disregard for workers from those in power, and an absolute absence of respect from those in the upper layers of the still existing British class system for anyone without landed wealth), it was she who started the active suppression of the working class in the modern age, and she who decided she would break the working people and grid them into the dust. The trend continued with May who was the implementer of the Hostile Environment approach, a racist policy aimed at expelling legal immigrants and asylum seekers from the UK, an approach she continued with her Brexit policies, an approach which ultimately led to the current government policy of evicting immigrants and asylum seekers to Rwanda (which has so far evicted zero people at a cost of £120 million). The third, Liz Truss, will take power today after the charade of being asked by the Queen to form a government (let’s leave to one side that we shouldn’t even have a queen, never mind a Prime Minister elected by less than 100,000 members of the Conservative Party, not by the people of the UK), Liz Truss, whose biography I have already titled An Unprincipled Woman, who started out as anti-nukes, anti-Royalist, and pro-Europe, and who has now turned coat to become pro-nukes, Royalist, and anti-Europe, and who will probably make Johnson look like a good Prime Minister. Of course, it would be wrong to lay the blame for the UK’s travails solely at the feet of three women – the history of the Tory party is littered with men both spineless and unprincipled, liars, deceivers, and racists all (perhaps John Major excepted who was a good but disingenuous one-nation Tory and remains pro-Europe, though he is not without blemish in this sad history).

The path forwards is not clear. The cost-of-living catastrophe will claim more lives than covid-19 has, all poor and sick people. The march towards totalitarianism will continue, the suppression of any views which challenge the status quo, which challenge the upper-class white privilege and exceptionalism upon which British society and British Imperialism were built, the suppression and criminalisation of minorities, the one-sided and discriminatory attitude which has been the hallmark of every Conservative government in history. The history of this part of the 21st century has not yet been written. I just hope we don’t get to the point where it will be written by an official historian of a one-party state which has no free democratic elections.

AGGIE’S ART OF HAPPINESS – CHAPTER 202