United Kingdom

What might that be? Could be anything. Clear evidence of Russian funding for the Leave campaign? Proof of Russian bot-armies helping Leave spread their message? Confirmation of Russian infiltration of the Tory Party? Possibly even actual names named of who the Russians have under their control? Conceivably all of the above with Russo-American in place of just Russian? For all we know the Secret Services could have mapped out the entire influence, manipulation and bribery network that made ALL of 2016’s major failures of democracy happen and handed them to Number 10 wrapped in a big, red bow, but we just don’t know, because Downing Street is deliberately concealing it from us. It’s not hard to see a wide range of reasons Johnson would want to keep the Report bottled up until after the Election, but it is hard to see why an independent Media dedicated to keeping the British Public informed about the major news stories of the day wouldn’t be making a MUCH bigger deal about his deeply-suspicious order to supress it. If only we had one. For example, the BBC didn’t even have the story on their website until very late in the evening after the story broke, and you’d struggle to find it there even now. Needless to say, I can’t imagine that happening if a hypothetical Labour Administration were supressing an Intelligence Report about pressing national security threats. They’d be on it like a drake on a passing lady duck and wouldn’t cover a single other story until it all came out. Still, the topic isn’t going away and every day Johnson sits on it is another day he can get violently buffeted by accusations of complicity with Putin’s aims for the UK. Serves him right.

What’s next? The Advertising Standards Agency has forced the Government to pull its latest tranche of expensive advertisements about the much hated ‘Universal Credit’ system (Welfare or Social Security, I think you guys call it) for being chockablock full of misleading inaccuracies (i.e. blatant lies). That’s a good few hundred thousand pounds of public money spaffed into the void trying to defend yet another Tory project that has as its main purpose inflicting cruelty and misery on millions of defenseless people. Not a good look just weeks before an Election where Labour are making their determination to scrap Universal Credit a centerpiece of their campaign.

It’s been revealed that the figures bandied about by the Government for affordable houses constructed since they won election promising to build 200,000 of them might have been a little bit inflated. Rather than the 200,000 expected, the real figure is a lot more like, uh, just let me check my notes here, ah, more like…. zero. That’s right. Zero. Nada. The big Duck Egg. More millions wasted on incompetence and graft, and what do we the public get out of it? A whole lot of land with absolutely shit-all on it in the midst of a massive affordable housing crisis. Wow, talk about a vote winner, eh guys? They’ll be popping the corks all night at Conservative Central over this one, won’t they? What’s that? Those pops aren’t corks? Then what….? Oh, well, yeah, they obviously knew the price of failure when they took the job on.

Let’s see. In the debate over Johnson’s Withdrawal Bill his Government made a clear promise to MPs of all parties that of course Parliament would have a vote on extending the transition period between agreeing to leave the EU and actually leaving past the December 2020 cut-off should any hypothetical Johnson Government fail to agree a Free Trade Agreement with the EU in that time. This was the infamous No Deal time-bomb identified as the real reason the Brextremists who’d scuppered May’s Withdrawal Bill three times voted for Johnson’s very similar one. If they just held their nose and waited a year, they could force a No Deal Brexit by voting against signing off on whatever rushed and unbalanced FTA the UK and EU managed to cobble together in such a short period of time. The promise to MPs that they could prevent a No Deal by voting to extend the transition period to cover however long it took to get an FTA agreed and signed won a lot of votes over to Johnson’s Withdrawal Bill, but now they’ve bluntly announced that MPs won’t get any such thing, making it crystal clear that Flobalob wants the threat of No Deal back on the table to wave at the next Parliament’s MPs should they reject the terms of any FTA he negotiates. This has not gone down well at all, and leaves Johnson wide open to accusations that he’s just a lying sack of shit who will say whatever he has to in order to get the person he’s talking to to drop their knickers, which has the added benefit of being oh so true.

Next, the Secretary of State for Wales, one Alun Cairns, has been forced to resign from his post after an e-mail emerged proving that he’d been (prepare to be shocked) lying his stumpy little arse off when he denied knowing anything about a former aide (who he had later backed to become a member of the Welsh Assembly) deliberately sabotaging a rape trial in order to get a friend of his off. The thing is, Johnson didn’t sack him, and he’s not stopping him standing as a candidate in the election. On the contrary, he thanked him for his service and is apparently looking forward to welcoming him back when he’s spent enough time in ‘exile’. It’s a really, really bad look and gets worse when (as has been pointed out by Labour) neither Cairns nor his boss seem to have given a moment’s thought for the actual real-life victim in all this at any point during the proceedings. Coming very soon after another Tory candidate in South Wales was outed for having used social media to tell everyone the people featured on Godawful poverty-pron reality TV show ‘Benefits Street’ should be “put down”, this isn’t doing anything good for the Tory campaign to pinch lots of Leave voting seats across South and Central Wales.

And then there’s Flobalob himself, who just can’t seem to get through a single sentence without segueing off into a fat old lie or three. That’s been the key to his success for all these years, but things are a tiny bit different when electoral ‘purdah’ rules are in effect, because the national media have to at least look like they’re being unbiased now that everyone is starting to tune in. In other words, there’s immediate fact-checking going on and (important) the fact-checking is being reported on in real time.

So when he claims that Parliament blocked his Withdrawal Deal from passing, it’s immediately pointed out that, no, Parliament started passing his Withdrawal Deal but rejected his attempt to restrict the whole process of passage to three days, at which point he pulled the Deal and demanded an Election, you fucking liar.

When he claims that electing Labour would mean two Referendums next year and no Brexit, its immediately pointed out that Labour promise one Referendum (on Brexit) and have actually ruled out giving the SNP another Independence Referendum early in their first term, you fucking liar.

When he claims that the Tories are building 40 brand new hospitals, it’s immediately pointed out that the Government has announced six hospital upgrades, with dozens of others being promised some funds to plan these upgrades themselves, you fucking liar.

I could go on, because this shit incenses me and there’s just so much of it happening in such a short period of time, but you get the point. This is supposed to be an Election Johnson and his cronies have wanted and planned for, yeah? So why is this bed piled so high with shit you could throw a sheet over it and provide low-cost skiing opportunities for daredevil midgets? Why can’t the Tories stop stepping on each other’s dicks like they’re trying to skip across Todger River? Could it possibly be that, despite the hype, they’re actually not that good at this unless they get to define the terms and cheat the system in every situation? This is supposed to be Day One of the Greatest Arsekicking Ever Delivered To The British Left and, I’m sorry, but I’m really decidedly unimpressed by the quality of the beating I’m receiving. If I was paying for this, I’d want my money back. Hell, Johnson and Co are paying for this, but they’re using public money to do it, so I feel doubly aggrieved.

Maybe we are going to come out of this with a Government that isn’t actively trying to run some sort of enormous con to immiserate the country in order to enrich their business sponsors. That would be just great, thanks. So if the Tories want to continue being garbage at the job they’ve given themselves, that would be great too, because it looks like Labour are really up for this and chewing up that poll disadvantage even faster than they did in 2017.

Fingers crossed. What’s happening over there? I hear you had some elections that went well?