United Kingdom

While safely ensconced on home soil he can slob around in his undies all day watching various Party drones spew unchallenged bullshit on TV, secure in the knowledge that the people asking the questions have instructions from the top to steer well clear of anything too ‘partisan’ and wouldn’t dream of constructing a more honest counter-narrative out of the daily (hourly) fuck-ups Johnson’s Government seems to birth faster than the frequently horizontal harem of Sultan Blue-Pill the Priapic. There’s no Opposition worth the name (don’t get me started), the Press has his back, and thanks to the eternally online trollic legions of the ‘Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy’ he knows that his legions of fans will be getting their daily dose of “Good Old Boris, he’s on our side and have you heard how FILL IN THE BLANK is not really happening or is actually someone else’s fault?” bread and circuses on social media.

It doesn’t matter how bad it gets here, and believe me, it’s pretty bad (but I’ll come to that), he’s got the playing field so heavily slanted in his favour that it would take a suspension of the observed laws of physics and a cannon bigger than Long Dong Silver’s for anyone to land so much as a single pebble on the roof of his Teflon-coated glass house. Nothing sticks because nothing is allowed to stick. Britain is the current world leader in the excavation of memory-holes because our News Media have employed and filled so many of them in service to Flobalob and the Tory Party. Half of the municipal bowling greens in the country have had to be shut down because of the bulging hillocks of mislaid facts and uncomfortable truths stuffed beneath them, it’s that bad.

However, there’s one place that the normal rules don’t apply, a tiny patch of soil that will be forever Not England, and that’s Everywhere Else. In the spirit of that old headline about “Fog in the Channel, Europe cut off”, the scripted faux-reality that reigns here in Lesser Brexitania simply doesn’t translate to foreign markets. As observed during the recent G7 punishment beating where Flobalob’s tired shtick cut zero ice with the other participants, and we caught brief glimpses of how badly an unprepared and incompetent conman can be exposed by a few simple questions from non-intimidated journalists. When he has to step outside the ‘Boris Bubble’ and perform as an adult in the real world, Flobalob bombs harder than Nicki Minaj’s cousin’s friend at a ‘Survivors of Testicular Cancer’ support group.

But the UN Climate Week shindig was going to be going off big-time in New York, New York, and Flobalob never met a free lunch he wasn’t duty bound to stuff his muzzle into. Granted, there was always the possibility that exporting his rotund, pointy-beaked bulk with its ashen complexion and ill-fitting suit to the streets of Gotham might lead to a dramatic case of mistaken identity, but that was a risk he was more than willing to take in order to rub shoulders with the real movers and shakers of the world and get his photograph taken cosplaying at ‘Britain’s Prime Minister’. So, nervously clutching his Brexit Blue passport in one sweaty palm, Maximus Decietus Verbius, father of uncounted kids, husband of unloved wives, waster of unnumbered lives, hoisted himself up the steps of BritFarce One and crossed the Atlantic Ocean to bring the good news of Global Britain to the Temporarily Mislaid Colonies of Yankia.

Surely, he no doubt reasoned, everyone else would see the humour in the situation and play along with his lark? This time everyone would be too busy with their own problems to mind if funny old Boris told a few porky pies to burnish his reputation at home, yes? This time it would be different, a proper jolly jamboree where the Clown Prince of Solipsistia could get well and truly wankered on someone else’s wine and maybe lay the groundwork for a few of those juicy post-political sinecures he’d heard about while helping the Brazilian Ambassador’s nephew and a line of NDA’d models through the various stages of a ‘Madagascan Carwash’ or two. Surely, this time…

Nah.

If there’s one thing you can guarantee, it’s that, thanks to the enormous tissue of lies that surround and support the delusion of Brexit, any British representative trying to discuss the topic in a positive way in front of a foreign audience might as well start emitting guttural barks and rolling around on the floor catching anchovies in their mouth, because they’re certainly not going to be telling the truth, and in this Flobalob is no different. It’s predictable and entirely unavoidable that any question lobbed at him will come back with a lie attached, either a barefaced lie in support of whatever confabulated bullshit the Brextremists are currently pushing (the Northern Ireland Protocol was always a short-term bridging document that the EU are trying to pretend has legal force) or an equally barefaced lie telling the questioner whatever he thinks they want to hear (now that Britain is free to decide its own rules we will be pressing on faster and further towards a Green future than any of our rivals) all in the hope that they just file the copy and fuck the hell off to bother someone else.

Flobalob’s big problem in New York and Washington, however, was that he was lying about it in real time while the people he was lying about were RIGHT THERE and available for questioning too. It was always a recipe for disaster, and it cooked up a storm.

Just a few examples of how badly this shockingly out-of-his-depth mammal performed while on the world stage.

Claim – Johnson told journalists on the plane before even leaving for New York that he had spoken to the Dutch PM (Mark Rutte) the previous night and Rutte had offered to mediate between the EU and UK over the issue of implementation of the Withdrawal Agreement Johnson signed in order to claim he had ‘Got Brexit Done’.

Truth – The Dutch PM told Johnson to be pragmatic, meaning stop fucking about generating tabloid headlines and enforce the terms you asked for and agreed to in the WA before the European Commission loses all patience. No offer of mediation was or could be made, because the entire EU 27 have given the European Commission the task of ensuring the UK lives up to its side of the deal and the Netherlands is one of the 27.

Claim – Brexit will allow the UK to negotiate a great Trade Deal with the US that will more than replace the loss of trade with the EU

Truth – That’s not going to happen any time soon (if ever), and to be bluntly honest the UK is not just at the back of the queue to sign anything like that, it’s not even staying at the same hotel as the convention where the US will be signing things. We’re in a motel 40 miles away and there’s not even Wi Fi.

Claim – Johnson and Biden didn’t discuss the Northern Ireland Agreement in their White House chat.

Truth – Biden told Johnson very clearly that the US was committed to the Northern Ireland Agreement and would not countenance any fucking about with it, which is about the only thing Democrats and Republicans agree on these days, so you’re welcome for that.

Then the man who only last year went to the UN to display his sneering contempt for environmental activists (“hair-shirt-wearing, tree-hugging, mung bean-munching eco-freaks” was I believe the phrase the lard-arsed gobshite used) had the barefaced cheek to get up in front of the entire UN General Assembly and demand that everybody else “grow up” and take the climate crisis seriously.

As you’d expect, this went down harder than a traditionalist Cardinal at a Vatican sex-party with the assembled audience of notables, all of whom have staffers efficient enough to have made them aware that, far from speaking from his cholesterol clogged heart, St Tubby of Chequers has happily stripped away Britain’s environmental regulations in order to let companies dump their toxins in our rivers [Ed – Surely there must be some mistake? Checks notes. Fuuuuuck].

Johnson, who is constitutionally incapable of keeping his cool if people aren’t smiling at him, then shifted gear in a vain attempt to win over his audience by lying about the Tory Party’s commitment to Green Energy, lying some more about his own, personal record as a champion of environmental causes, and then concluding with a section… breathes deeply… chastising Kermit the Frog for being wrong about the difficulty of being green and for his abusive attitude to Ms Piggy.

At an obscure independent film festival somewhere in rural West Australia, down in the Modern Auteur tent the organisers set up next to the portaloos, a flickering screen emits images of baby calves being fed into a giant mincer interspersed with footage culled from ‘A Serbian Movie’ and ‘Carry On Up The Khyber’. Grainy reflections of horror dance in the eyes of the writer-director-producer of this 10-minute piece of black-and-white drivel as he sits, alone, abandoned by even the most committed fan of ‘experimental non-linear drama’. Tears flow down his scarred face as he recognises, far too late, how badly he’s wasted whatever meagre talent he once possessed if this… dreck… is the best he can produce. And yet, as his heart flutters and the blood oozing from his slashed wrists slows to a crawl, one thought gives him solace as the great, dark forever expands to claim his soul.

“At least I never badmouthed the Muppets.”

I can’t express how humiliating it is to have Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson representing this country. Millions of my fellow countrymen voted to put that feckless ballgag in charge of absolutely everything and it’s shameful that the millions who weren’t that wilfully blind still have to explain exactly why that was such an unforgivably stupid thing to do. With our News Media it’s hardly surprising that the vast majority of people remain blissfully unaware of how Flobalob comes across to a global audience. Consider, if you will, this nugget of other-dimensional whitewashing from none other than Laura Kuenssberg, the BBC’s Political Editor.

“And of course, Mr Johnson himself is not exactly a stranger to a gaffe or a glitch. But as I write, shortly before he and the press pack fly back there hasn’t been any major slips or surprises – at least not that we know about yet.”

He lied about the Dutch, lied about the US President, got fact-checked virtually instantly for both examples, then stood in front of the UN and picked a fight with a fucking puppet, but as far as that bought and paid for hack is concerned her ‘good friend’ (if you know what I mean and I think you do) didn’t make any major slips. There’s grading on a curve, and there’s… whatever that is, but it’s not journalism, it’s not even opinion, it’s just straight up misinformation and State Propaganda beamed straight into the homes of every British family on a daily basis.

It’s also not surprising. The Right to Hard Right bias of the British Press is one of those well-known but never explored facts of national life that somehow exists in a Schrodinger state whereby the talking-heads will sort of acknowledge it, but will never, ever accept that it could have any negative effect on the quality of their news output or the opinions held by their readers. It’s getting the same way with TV News, since the upper ranks of the BBC have been stuffed full of Tory Party donors and apparatchiks from the far-Right broadsheets, while the powers and influence of the bodies tasked with overseeing them have been reduced and their budgets slashed, then stuffed full of Tory placemen to make sure no one complains too loudly.

When a news outlet forgets its place (as with Channel 4, the publicly owned but privately funded channel) and asks the Government difficult questions they are immediately threatened with being sold off, and this is all apparently fine and dandy with the rest of the Media. “Some (actual experts and everyone involved in the matter) might say” that the Tories are out to silence any contrary voices through brute force and bullying, but look, here’s random Government junior-Minister Digby Butterballs MP in his overstuffed blue velour three-piece suit and gaudy Union Jack cufflinks to tell us that nothing could be further from the truth and, indeed, blah-blah, take the shackles off, waffle-waffle, wasting Public money on Woke issues, burble-burble, exciting future ahead, so that’s ‘both sides’ heard from and let’s just leave it to the general public to make their own minds up about who is really bullying who. Then a couple of weeks later, when the Government is once again revealed to be exerting undue influence over supposedly independent bodies via funding or exploiting the appointment process, we go through the whole “well, this is new” charade again, except this time they don’t bother interviewing anyone other than junior-Minister Butina Balldigger MP so that she can tell us to move on, nothing to see here, just some partisan Lefties whining because they hate the flag and British fairness. This happens over and over and over again until everyone just tunes it out and pisses off to watch TGBBO or MasterChef or whatever.

Have I ever mentioned that I fucking hate these people?

It’s against this background of wall-to-wall gaslighting that the UK is facing the inevitable fallout from electing a bunch of posh-boy gangsters and ball-licking middle managers to office on a platform of xenophobia and economic auto-asphyxiation. Covid rates are steadily rising, with about a thousand people a week joining the ranks of the Silent Chorus, the NHS is creaking again as beds fill up and Staff face the prospect of another winter under the cosh, but that’s okay, everything is fine and dandy. Covid as a problem that anyone needs to worry about is O.V.E.R. in the UK since The Government’s Vaccine Rollout ™ saved the day and it’s rare to hear it mentioned on the News as anything other than something lingering in the background like one of Granny’s post-cheese salad farts.

You wouldn’t really know that this Government is being slowly dragged through the Courts by the wonderful Good Law Project to expose the wholesale and blatant corruption surrounding the issuing of contracts for Covid testing and PPE back when Johnson and Co were under pressure to look engaged and focussed after their earlier insouciance had left tens of thousands of elderly people exposed to the virus. The existence of a special V.I.P. lane for expedited contracts was initially denied, then proven to be a fact, followed by accusations that this V.I.P. lane was being used to shove contracts towards Tory party donors, family members and just any casual acquaintance who fancied a turn at the public-money teat being loudly poo-poo’d, until evidence came out that that was totally true too. The Good Law People have just won a case to get access to former Health Secretary and very naughty boy Matt ‘Lying T#&t’ Hancock’s WhatsApp messages from that period, so that’s a ticking time bomb right there. All of these cases continue, but 99.9% of people don’t know about it because the News Media simply doesn’t tell them about it.

There’s just so much going wrong here that’s directly attributable to this shower of guano-sniffers, all of it being made skin-peelingly worse by the ‘solutions’ they’ve cribbed from hand-scribbled notes in margins of The Fountainhead. The Brexit Project continues to devastate the economy, with even the most Establishment of financial institutions shitting bricks over the hundreds of millions of pounds being lost in trade and services every day, all because Flobalob and his rouble-roped army of Brextremist Incels can’t admit that the ‘oven ready deal’ they signed to drag us out of the EU was a hastily cobbled together Media prop that none of them even read.

So we’ve got the worst of both worlds. British goods going out are getting treated – obviously – as if we’re no longer an EU member (tariffs, red-tape, checks, etc) but EU goods coming in are being waved through unchecked, because the infrastructure to check things properly was never set up and the Government are terrified of the blowback if they tried playing funny buggers at the border. We’re still getting it in the neck anyway, since the Government has gone out of its way to make Fortress Magna Anglia a hostile environment for EU workers, so hundreds of thousands of them have gone to seek better pay and conditions elsewhere in the world’s largest free-movement community, leaving the UK suffering from massive staff shortfalls in hospitality, care homes, the NHS, food distribution and, most pertinently, Heavy Goods Vehicle drivers.

Shop shelves are empty and prices are rising because there’s no one around to drive the goods from warehouse to warehouse, and since that’s how fuel is shipped to the pump we’re also seeing petrol stations run out, which leads to panic buying, which leads to enormous traffic jams, which leads to using too much fuel, which leads to, well, you get the drift. Flobalob is now talking about using the Army to get the fuel moved around (because what else are they for if not for Emergency ‘being seen to be doing something’ situations?

Meanwhile we’re told that the Cabinet was split between panicked corporate frontmen and hard-Right ausländerfrei maniacs over doing a screeching U-turn on the issue of giving work visas to dirty foreign types until Flobby himself stamped his feet and insisted that he was so sick of all the bad headlines this was causing that another U-turn was the only recourse.

Of course, with Priti Patel the cosplay Cardassian at the Home Office, the execution of this policy 180 has been somewhat lacking in the necessary j’nai sais quoi, with the Government phrasing their desperate need for EU drivers to come to Blighty’s rescue as, and I almost quote, “You lot, we’ll let you back in, but only for a very limited time, and while you’re here we’ll watch you like hawks because we know what you dirty dagos are like, and if any of you try and hang around in our Unicorn Playground a second past the arbitrary deadline we’ve set for this problem to be kaput, we’ll set La Migra on your dirty, brown arses.”

Surprisingly enough, not a lot of EU drivers are taking them up on their generous offer, I guess that’s because Those People are so lazy they’d prefer to storm our pristine beaches in fleets of leaking dinghies or something [Ed – This might be a Daily Mail headline, I haven’t checked].

And while the natural Party of Government presides over the jerky stop-motion collapse of the country, their plans to pay for all of the mess they’ve caused places the entire burden on, you guessed it, the least well-off and the lowest earners. They want to cut the extra £20 a week uplift they were forced to add to the already miserly Universal Credit allowance (think Welfare, but designed by Kafka and overseen by Count Orlok) while Covid still existed as a problem, even though everyone and his dog and his dog’s veteran accountant has pointed out that this will plunge hundreds of thousands of people into suicidal levels of abject poverty (unfortunately that’s dirty talk to your average Randian übermench and gets them stiffer than one of Jeffrey Dahmer’s dates) with predictable knock-on effects for the economy and society.

They’ve tried to sell a raise in the National Insurance levy as being vital to ‘solve the Social Care conundrum’, which didn’t fly because it was quickly apparent that Social Care wouldn’t see a penny for years as they were really intending to use the tax raise to ‘solve the NHS waiting list conundrum’, for which read ‘shovel billions into the pockets of private Healthcare corporations to provide zero-contract staff but otherwise just make things worse’, and anyway the real genius plan behind it was to ensure that the savings and properties of wealthy Tory voters were left mostly intact to be passed on to little Hyacinth and Jasper once Mah’mah and Pah’pah had relocated to the Sunny Uplands Residential Care Estate for a little end-of-life partying.

Meanwhile they’re snorting orphan’s tears through rolled up £50 notes at the thought of getting rid of the Furlough system of taxpayer wage-support that has allowed millions of said taxpayers to just about manage while Tory-enabled Covid ripped through the country and shut down their workplaces. The fact that this will lead to a truly cataclysmic wave of job losses as those jobs may not even really exist anymore is airily dismissed as another ‘Project Fear’. They can all just retrain as Heavy Good Drivers and Care Home workers, can’t they? Two birds, one stone, back of the net.

All this, you might think, should be a Rock and Rolling Christmas every live-long day for the ‘Opposition’. I’ve barely scratched the surface of how disastrous Tory rule has been for the UK but you get the point, it should be like shooting very big fish in miniature barrels for a functional opposition Party. One teeny tiny problem. We haven’t got one.

All I’ll say is this.

A’la Cole I can no longer rationally discuss the travesty that is the current Labour Party leadership. It’s not just the vindictive brutality they show towards anyone outside their closed circle, or the flagrant hypocrisy of their demands for loyalty after years of daily backstabbing, or the infantile whining they indulge in whenever it becomes obvious even to them that their prior status as media-friendly Kool Kidz was an entirely transactional affair reliant on them sabotaging and badmouthing their own Party, or all the other failures of character that make them completely unsuited to the roles they’ve been appointed to. It’s the wholesale, undeniable, unteachable incompetence they display at every single turn. Politically and organisationally speaking they really are the biggest fucking idiots on the planet. Total, spring-propelled failurenauts who can’t manage the simplest political task without punching themselves, the Party and everyone within range right in the plump-danglers.

These are supposed to be the experienced adults come to tidy up the mess created by the “sixth-form anarchists” but all they’ve done since seizing power is fuck up the simplest tasks while stubbornly learning absolutely nothing from each debacle. Groundhog Day Gobshites with entirely unearned superiority complexes who can’t arrange a half-hour visit to a pub without dropping their leader in a PR cowpat. Their one and only skill, honed over years of backroom scheming and ratfucking, is in deploying Right wing smears against the vast majority of the Party membership and exploiting their control of the disciplinary mechanism to expel or hound out anyone deemed insufficiently dedicated to their warmed-up grot of mid-90’s ‘Business-friendly Centrism’.

While the Tories have been eviscerating the country with their greed and cruelty, the very best that Labour’s damp cardboard cut-out of a ‘leader’ can manage has been eighteen months of barely audible, mealy-mouthed tut-tutting about how the Government has failed to meet its ephemeral targets, while in the background executing a series of tremendously ill-timed 180s on everything from Brexit to Social Justice in (failed) pursuit of the same aging, white, ex-Labour converts to Race Realism who he and his crew spent years attacking the previous leadership for trying to keep onboard so they could, oh, I don’t know, win an election or something.

It takes a special kind of contraflow imbecility (or a deliberate intention to stir up factional outrage, or both) to wait until the day before your Party Conference to casually announce that you’re gambling every granule of your already shaky authority on changing the Party’s election rules so that MPs (selected by the Party leadership, natch) can overrule any unfortunate outbursts of democratic sentiment in the choice of Party leader, and, very important this, can’t be deselected by their local constituency Parties no matter how badly they perform. It takes an absolutely monolithic grade A+ qualification in Anal Earmuff contortionism to do it without talking to the Trade Unions (whose support you need) first or laying any groundwork at all, other than drawing up a Shit-list of Conference delegates who Security are instructed to deny entry to because your Beria-lite and widely hated General Secretary has once again violated disciplinary procedures by secretly suspending them from the Party on bullshit charges of retrospective thought-crimes.

Then, when it quickly becomes apparent that your genius move is going to crash and burn in humiliating defeat, it takes a kind of ostrich-egged shamelessness to whittle your Absolutely Vital Reforms down to a squirming nubbin of nothingness and, once you’ve jammed that through with a surprise last-minute defection of one Union delegation in a pretty shady move, to claim Total Victory and “this was, of course, what we always wanted”.

Pathetic. This was about nothing more than the realisation that Starmer is a dead-man walking, and gerrymandering the leadership election rules to ensure only centre-Right breadsticks need apply for the role of Figurehead when he’s told to bite the bullet and move aside. Policy? Opposition? Democracy? Fuck that noise. It’s just clear the Party of dirty hippies and bankrupt the coffers with pay-offs to ratfuckers so that a handful of Islamophobic donors can come riding in on their white steeds to save the day, with conditions. Fuck them. They’ve no intention of fighting the next Election to win it, preferring to plump up the cushions on the VIP decks for when Johnson’s chaotic reign has rendered the Tories toxic to enough for the Powers That Be to look for another comfortable berth. Fat chance of that happening, but as I said, they’re uneducatable.

Rant over.

Anyway, so that’s us. Growing poorer, colder and less relevant by the day, chained to a failed system by a rancid Media culture and the ugly, insular revanchism it’s bred. Cruel, dirty, dumber than a sack of severed ears, trained to the yoke and quick to the whip, y’know, Murdoch Country.

Makes the American grass look a little bit greener, doesn’t it?

You may remember last week when Johnson’s deeply compromised whipping-boy of a Health Secretary Matt ‘Grannykiller’ Hancock was sacked forced to resign by Johnson / shame / the threat of angelic justice panic amongst Tory backbench MPs after Murdoch’s Sun tabloid (Liverpool’s most popular loo-roll alternative) published video footage of him re-enacting school disco face-gobbles of the ‘80s with a Private Health Industry lobbyist he’d given a publicly-funded job to in violation of the same Covid restrictions he was telling everyone else to follow, or else. Well, leaving aside the inherently icky matter of Hancock’s intimate transgressions, and the quite important questions of who leaked that video and how it came to be taken, the current whispergossip is that Hancock was actually a thumb in the dyke where dropping restrictions were concerned, and his removal was orchestrated in order to open up the Health Secretary role for someone much more willing to play the favoured tunes of the UK’s own version of the Freedumb Caucus.

Enter Sajid Javid, another Big Finance loanee to the domestic political theatre, this time via the disaster-capitalist school of Deutche Bank, though clearly his genetic matrix was cooked up in the clone-nurseries of the Sontaran Empire. A hardcore libertarian fuckwit and a yet another disciple of Randian theology (Northern Conservative Reformed Temple of the Holy Dollar and the Divine Resurrection of 2008) Javid took a whole fifty seconds to effortlessly master the entirety of his new Health brief (Fuck Up – Sell Off) before bounding into the nearest press conference, non-ironically assuming a wide-straddle power stance like he’s not a neutered Reek to the corporate Boltons of this world, and informing the witless sheeple who were now under his all-seeing yoke that he’d had enough of their weak-willed collaboration with the non-dividend producing Virus. The time had come for Britons to reject cultural-Marxist claptrap like ‘social distancing’, ‘exponential rate of infection’ and ‘viral mutation’ in favour of the iron hard truth that Work Makes Free and only snowflake cowards with the lazy bodies of workshy untermensch don’t understand that the paramount duty of every capable prole-drone in these Sceptred Isles is to enthusiastically assist in wringing every possible drop of profitability from their worthless half-lives until they finally see death as a gracious boon for which they will not be personally charged (though their work-kin, of course, will be).

Light restrictions that only a few days ago were common-sense obstacles placed in the way of the Virus are being scrapped left, right and centre. No mask mandates, no social distancing, no restrictions on occupancy, all gone. Enacted instantly and in the face of loud opposition from every independent scientific expert in the five closest solar systems the signal rang out loud and clear, in what I can only assume to be an homage to that great humanitarian thinker and results-based visionary Don Rumsfeld, sweep it all up, things connected and otherwise. Get back to the office (ground rents, bay-bee!), get back on the buses and the trains (fare gouging, hell yeah), get into those eateries and pubs and clubs and bistros and restaurants and anywhere else that money could change hands. Like a cut-scene we weren’t expecting we were suddenly living in a different country than the day before, one where everyone was double-spike vaccinated and therefore somehow immune to the Virus. It truly was our Independence Day.

Except, of course, that was a movie about incompetent aliens, while this is real life and we’re just ruled by them. The country isn’t fully vaccinated. In fact, the rate of vaccination is slowing and falling behind those evil Eurotrash schemers (cue – blackout on those comparison figures now, yeah?) and with the Johnson-Modi Variant (Delta my arse) proving quite virulent enough to infect even the 60+% of the population who have had both jabs, what we’re looking at over the next few months of gung-ho Party Time are the absolutely perfect conditions for the creation of one or more vaccine-resistant mutations. No restrictions + semi-vaccinated population + time = Variant Factory. They know this. They’ve been told this. They just don’t give a fuck. There were 60,000 mostly maskless people stuffed into Wembley stadium to see ENGLAND’S HARRY KANE and ten other people overcome Denmark’s brave attempt to lose to Italy. How many of them do we think are going to be playing host to naughty Mister Covid right now? Scotland’s Tartan Army took hundreds and hundreds of cases back across The Wall when they left London last month, so I should think it’s a goodly number. Wimbledon’s strawberries and cream diet and transient population of Good Bloodlines certainly won’t prove to be a deterrent to infection (I hear that Middleton girl may have been around some presumably asymptomatic variant-vector when she visited Centre Court and has had to go into isolation, and she’s the white Princess) so we’ve got that to factor in as well. They are deliberately stripping away any defences the population has at a time when the spread of the JM variant is shooting up faster than late-90’s Downey Jr and fucking boasting about it. Get ready for 100,000 cases a day, Javid tells us, like each one is a brilliant financial trade he’s personally negotiated, and just to make sure all vectors are levered wide open, let’s put a stop to closing school bubbles when cases are confirmed, shall we? How are we ever going to achieve ‘herd immunity’ if we won’t let the kids take part in spreading the C-love? And while we’re at it, about those onerous child labour laws…

Sigh. What a fucking marmalade.

Why? Why would they do something so long-term destructive? Well, speaking just for myself, I don’t think they’ve got much of an interest in the long-term. That’s something that can be massaged into shape by friendly media coverage and multi-million pound PR campaigns, or if you’re totally mercenary you can just take a step back into the private sector and reap your rewards for voting to funnel as much public money as possible into the bank accounts of the people and organisations now employing you. Fuck it, it’s not their problem. What *is* a problem is the short term. The Tories just lost one very safe seat in a bye-election to the Liberal Democrats (a safe repository for Tory protest votes since forever) and failed to take another seat from Labour in a Red Wall Leave voting constituency (which they’d been forecasted to take with ease) despite having a Russian-funded faux-left candidate splitting the Labour vote. Plus, Johnson’s favoured candidate failed to oust Covid-sceptic Graham Brady from his post of Chairman of the 1922 Committee (basically the Club for Backbench Tory MPs where leadership challenges are arranged) in a defeat seen as a warning of discontent in Flobalob’s performance. It seems Tory MPs fear that the ongoing drip-drip-drip of scandal and corruption is hurting Johnson’s electability argument, and though the main Opposition Party’s lurch to the right has rendered it about as much of a threat to the Tories as any other well-trained sub-gimp, he clearly fears that his own personal grip on Number 10 is steadily slipping away from him. Sharks, they are circling.

More to the point. September is when Parliament has to vote again on the Covid Emergency laws that give the Government so much leeway to outlaw protest and – yum-yum – hand out multi-billion contracts to party donors without oversight or culpability. If the nutters on the Covid Recovery Group (who map almost perfectly onto the European Research Group of Brextremist Ultras who made Theresa May’s premiership such a well-earned misery) decide to repeat their Brexit shenanigans and abstain or even vote against re-enactment of the Covid laws, Johnson would (possibly/probably) have to rely on Labour votes to get it through. Not a look he wants to be wearing after Brexit, Media hand-jobs and Labour’s self-harming right-wing handed him an 80-seat majority back in 2019. Installing Javid to cry “Hail Sontar!” and let rip the Dogs of More (Covid) gives that bunch what they want and lets him tout ‘Freedom Day’ as an expression of national will, while always giving him leeway to place all the blame for what is bound to happen on Javid and his ‘too-enthusiastic’ push for ‘normality’.

In addition, there are a whole swathe of radical power-grabs on the docket that the Tory Party’s owner caste wants rammed through. The Police Bill will make protesting illegal and could see people sent to jail for 10 years for ‘damaging a memorial’, for which read toppling slaver’s statues. It also makes being homeless, a Traveller or a rough-sleeper a crime if the Police or landowners decide it is, which of course, they will. They’re changing the Official Secrets Act to make it a criminal offense to have any connection to the dispersal of any leaked information that the Government chooses to label ‘secret’, which pretty much makes it illegal for any journalist to publish information the Government doesn’t want the public to know about, doesn’t it? Oh, and our venomous Home Secretary, the vile Pritti “I once got sacked for secretly plotting to funnel UK aid money to the Israeli Security Forces” Patel wants it to be illegal for anyone to ‘assist’ with the arrival of a non-approved refugee or asylum seeker on UK soil, which yes, does include any volunteer Lifeboat crew foolish enough to pluck drowning children from stormy seas. She also wants to be able to dump asylum seekers in offshore concentration camps while her lawyers use public money to prosecute them for daring to pollute our sacred purity, which is pretty fringe behaviour for the daughter of Ugandan immigrants but is absolutely on brand for a Tory who was found guilty of breaking the Ministerial code by bullying staff to the tune of £370,000 in legal fees and damages but for some reason didn’t have to resign.

Ah, sod it, I’m just ranting now. The bottom line is these Nether-spawned vermin are trying to kill us all while simultaneously ensuring that anyone who does survive the Plague will probably be locked up for it, and I’m at a loss to see how they get stopped.

But still. The Football! I wonder if English ‘fans’ will maintain their high behavioural standards by booing the players for their non-violent protest against institutional racism and attacking Italian families on buses as they did some unforgivably foreign Danes after the last game. Bring on the meteor.

But not until it gets to penalties.