Oh dear God I’m bored. Fed up. Pissed off. And simultaneously angry and seething with contemptuous indignation at the sheer mind-numbing moronity of British politics and its media cheerleaders. It’s like we’re all being drowned in a big vat of stupid that’s being stirred with the silver spoons that the rich and powerful have in their mouths. And what applies to the British political establishment and the British media applies by the bucket load to its Scottish Unionist branch offices.
Brexit plans continue to be distinguished by the fact of their non-existence while the British government runs about in a panic that makes a headless chicken appear a model of sedate thoughtfulness, all overseen by a secretive control freak of a Prime Minister whose secretive control freakery tries but fails to cover for the fact that it’s no secret that everything is out of control. The British ambassador to the EU has just resigned, claiming in his resignation letter that the British government was ignoring his advice about potential pitfalls in the negotiating process, and for trying to disabuse the Tory cabinet ministers in charge of Brexit of their Empire based notion that the EU will cave in to Britain’s every demand. We’ll be having none of this negativity from a diplomat who’s spent most of his working life in the higher reaches of EU administration and governance. Who needs experts when you’ve got Michael Gove?
Just four days into the New Year and we’d reached Fat Cat Wednesday. Not that you would have noticed if you were relying on the Scottish media for your news. They’d only tell you about it if Fat Cat Wednesday was a meme on Twitter where people shared hysterical photies of overfed cats in with witty captions which were then republished by commercial organisations that leech off social media because it’s cheaper than paying for your own research or joke writers.
Fat Cat Wednesday is in fact the day when the bosses of the FTSE 100 companies have earned the average UK annual wage. It’s not even four days, because by lunchtime on Wednesday the average CO of a FTSE 100 company has received as much in pay as the average worker gets in a year. And at that lunchtime the CO will spend as much on a bite to eat as the average unemployed worker receives in social security. The average worker has another 361 days of hard work to go and the millions who earn less than the average wage will still be slogging away well into 2018 before they’ve earned as much as the top paid executives have earned in a couple of days. Well I say “earned”, but what that really means is “decided to pay themselves”. It’s not like they’re worth it and they’ve certainly not earned it. The real Benefits Britain is the tax breaks and tax avoidance strategies enjoyed by the rich. Yet it’s the poor person who gets slagged off for being a scrounger.
The pay gap in Britain is widening, and getting wider. When she came to power Theresa May promised that she’d crack down on the obscenities of excessive executive rewards, but instead she preferred to reinvent tautologies as a political strategy. To be fair however, Theresa May does possess one invaluable political skill, she’s able to take a journalist’s question and then answer a different question entirely. If you asked her how much two plus two was she’d reply that she’s not about to give a running commentary on her calculations but you can be sure that the answer will be red white and blue and then she’d make a poor joke about Jeremy Corbyn. When the auld Tory Kenneth Clark said that Theresa May was a difficult woman, what he meant was that it’s difficult to get a straight answer from her to a straight question.
Just four days into the year and already the bosses have raked in as much as the average worker while Theresa May’s promises to tackle growing inequality have gone much the same way as her promise that she’d govern for the many not the few. Although if you ask her about it she’ll instead tell you that she’s trying to get the best possible patriotic deal for the entire country and it’s going to be red white and blue. And she’ll do it with that very careful diction of hers with every consonant carefully articulated, which means that it doesn’t matter that what she’s told you is actually content free.
Fat Cat Wednesday is a sign of the growing inequality in the UK, a sign that this state has long since ceased to work for the average person, but all the Scottish media and the Unionist parties are interested in are an idiotic tweet from an SNP MSP whose daft comment apparently means that he’s actively condoning rape, and how the Scottish government’s baby box initiative means the metaphorical revival of Stalin and Hitler from their graves. You’d have thought they’d have welcomed a scheme to improve the lives of infants, what with two year olds being the demographic that the Unionist parties have pitched their intellectual level at.
They say a country gets the politicians and the media that it deserves, which can only mean that in a previous incarnation Scotland invaded Poland, started a couple of world wars, unleashed a zombie horde, slaughtered the first born, and knifed Pudsey the Bear in the belly and then drowned refugee children in his polystyrene beads. Although if you look at the Tory contingent in Holyrood you could be forgiven for believing that the zombie horde is still with us. Thankfully however, most of them never do or say anything of any importance and only ever impinge on the consciousness when one of them says something ridiculously asinine on Twitter, something which occurs with tediously predictable frequency. Strangely, this doesn’t provoke howls of outrage in the Scottish media. It’s only the idiocies of individual independence supporters who can do that. It’s a useful distraction from the much bigger idiocies of dumb Britain.
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