Brexit, the biggest lie ever told.

Remember when you were a kid and told a small lie so that you wouldn't get into trouble, only then you had to tell another, slightly larger lie to cover for the first lie. And so on, and so forth. Eventually the whole stack of lies came tumbling down around you.
Well, Brexit is the world's largest lie, and then they followed it up with a massive stack of lies to try to support it.

And now we are coming to the end of the beginning (Brexit is nowhere near "done", another lie) and the lies are now stacked so high, you can't even see the original lie.

I wish I could say that all the lies will come tumbling down at this point, but brexiters just keep stacking them higher and attacking anyone that points this fact out.

I wish I knew where all this will end, at the conclusion of the transition period it will either be extended or we will hard brexit.

I still maintain that this is Johnson's game plan, pretend he did all that was possible and blame the EU when we hard brexit without any kind of trade deal with the EU.

At that point the UK will be at the mercy of massive fish like China, Russia and the USA. I don't have a great deal of faith that we won't get eaten up and the remains spat out. None of these countries are our friends, unlike the EU members that brexiter's have worked VERY hard to make into our enemies.

There is no magic wand we can wave to make this all go away, there is no happy ending.

Who's afraid of the big bad UKIP/Bexit party Ltd.?

Well, it turns out that the simple answer to that question is, moderate Tories.

But why?

Well, extreme far right Tories said they had to be. After all, evil Nigel was coming to steal their seats!

Except, was he really?

The politics of fear is an approach long perfected in the USA where either Nazis (or the redcoats if we go back even further), the Communists (Reds under the bed!) and more recently terrorists have been set up as the enemy to be rolled out every time what passes for moderates in the US start to gain traction politically.

What does this have to do with right wing Tories?

It's the same thing. They used UKIP and then BXP Ltd. to scare moderates into backing them, but was there ever really a threat to moderate Tory seats?

The UK uses a first past the post electoral system which has ensured that only two parties ever really stand a chance of winning major elections. So even at their most popular, the BXP/UKIP have never really stood a chance.

Look at Nigel Farage's woeful election history, he was once beaten by a guy dressed in a dolphin suit!

If that doesn't tell you something about his "party's" chances of winning seats in parliament, I don't know what does.

But, I hear you say, UKIP have had two MPs!

Both were loaned by the Tories, neither won their seats while part of UKIP and both very quickly scurried back to their actual home once their job was done.

But what about EU elections (you know, the "undemocratic" ones)?

They have always had a MUCH lower turnout than general elections and don't use the FPTP electoral system so it's easier to get elected ("undemocratically") to office by smaller parties.

So, the "threat" of the extremists was never anything more than a right wing ploy to keep moderate Tories in line.

And now our political system is under attack from the very people sworn to uphold it.

Scary times.

A VERY American coup

Recently Donald Trump has said that those who worked on the Mueller report are traitors. This fits in with his portrayal of anyone who is against him as being against America.
In his mind Trump = America. A very dangerous situation.

This is dictator behaviour.

America needs to be extremely careful during the coming elections to ensure that:

A: There is no election fixing. It's something there is a very long history of in the US, usually on the Republican side (tho sometimes the Dems have meddled also, just nothing like as much).

B: That trump doesn't concoct a story-line where he can claim the elections were corrupted by the so-called Deep State (lol, yeah) against him and simply refuses to give up the presidency.

This is not as far fetched as it may seem, he has form when it comes to this kind of thing. Had he not "won" the 2016 election (by getting less votes) due to the electoral college method he was already preparing such a story-line (he had previously attacked the electoral college method, but when it enabled his "win" he suddenly dropped that line).

Even some members of the Republican party have started to speak out against him, and (most shocking) Fox "news" have done so (tho they usually try to refute the criticism later). His reaction to these transgressions has been to attack those responsible.

Trump has always seen anyone who doesn't wholeheartedly agree with him as being his "enemy", when he equates those who don't agree with him as being enemies of America, expect very dark times ahead for the USA.

Hate... hate?

I was recently taken to task for saying that people like myself shouldn't hate extremists as hate itself is bad.
So, if we aren't allowed to hate those who would do us harm, what are we allowed?
Can we disagree with them? Because we have been doing that quite loudly and so far it's not worked.
There are Nazis openly marching in America and in the UK, the right wing of the Conservative party has the government in a death grip they seem unable, or maybe unwilling to break out of.

Meanwhile we have actual hate "preachers" such as Nigel Farage and Katie Hopkins trying to use anything that looks even slightly like terrorism to spread their vile lies.

So, when, if ever is it OK to hate these extremists? When they are marching on the streets with guns and torches? When they are using cars or bombs to maim and kill those they disagree with? When they run  entire countries and use lies to whip up their supporters into a frenzy? When they use mass surveillance to pinpoint those who would speak up or take a stand against them?

Or can we hate them when they use the state apparatus and social media against us and herd us into camps to concentrate us? It hasn't happened in the west yet, but it's not very long since it last did and history has a nasty way of repeating when we forget it's lessons or try to pretend that loving your enemy has any useful effect.

Thus far, all not hating and standing against extremism has done is to give carte blanche to them to go on and build power in the very countries that stood and fought against everything they represent.

The Trumpocalypse

Well, here we are, more than three quarters of a year into the utter shitshow that is #donaldtrump's presidency and what can we say.
He has exceeded in every way possible our worst predictions and done so with a form of manic intensity that horrifies sane onlookers.
Those who thought he might "settle down" once he became president were proven wrong almost immediately and those members of the press that search in vain for any sign of gravitas from him must surely give up any hope.
He will continue to react in the worst knee-jerk manner to anyone who attacks him and he may even turn against the Republican party if they decide not to back him on the Iran nuclear situation.
I have to admit that at this point, I would love to see the bunfight that would break out were that to happen.
And then there's the Korea problem. I't pretty clear that they have read Trump like a book (probably one of those ones for toddlers with the woven pages) and are playing him like a badly made, gold plated fiddle.
I only hope the finale doesn't come with bright flashes, this won't be any 1812 overture.

The price (continued)

I gave up trying to make ends meet in rented accommodation, it just wasn't possible. My total out goings (rent/food) was greater than my total incoming by nearly £200/month. Once all my savings were used up, I gave the landlord a months notice and had to move back with my family.
I can only imagine what would have happened if I had no family I could have done this with :(
I was lucky, many are now homeless as a direct result of UK tory party policies. Many are dead as a result.
Many people are now in working poverty, barely earning enough to live on while working several jobs.
We need to bring down this government (general election ASAP!) for the good of the UK.

The horror of the Trumpocalypse will soon be upon us. Combined with the Brexitshambles (brexit means wrexit) and the advances the far right fascists are making in Europe, Vladimir Putin must be crying with laughter (thats if he even has tear ducts). All his christmas wishes come at once! Next step, recreate the old soviet union and expand it even further.

Just a quick shout out to all those in Canada who voted out the extremist right Harper government.
It must feel like waking from a long nightmare!
I hope that Canada can return to being a beacon for all those who feel that one form of extremism cannot be used to combat another.
Well done all those who voted.

Another wizard wheeze!

I have just been informed of the boys from Eton's latest wizard wheeze.
Now, if you go to sign on, once you are finished with the signing, you will be directed to a job coach and you will be expected to leave the dole offices with an actual job!
Of course, it won't actually matter if you are suited to the job or even fit enough to do it, as long as the unemployment figures look good the evil shits in this govt couldn't give a fuck.
This week, my signing officer mentioned to me that other dole offices that have started using this scheme have had a huge increase in "rapid reclaims", people who have been put into unsuitable jobs and have very quickly found themselves back signing on.
Any pretense at humanity has gone from our government, they only give a shit if you are fabulously rich or own a newspaper that is aligned with their evil.
Viva la revolución!

The price

On money management.
Every month I am just barely scraping by.
During my previous term of unemployment, it was possible to make ends meet fairly easily, I simply stopped having a life of any sort. No going out, no meals with friends etc.  This time, that simply isn't enough. Rent has increased hugely (up by £40/month since then) but housing benefit and dole has pretty much remained static.
This has made budgeting next to impossible. Of course, as soon as I lost my previous job, I took my car off the road as you just can't run a car on benefits. Even if you could afford the fuel, the yearly tax, mot and insurance hit will put a stop to it.
But even basic things like food are unaffordable. And as I am receiving JSA, I can't apply for food banks so there is no relief there.
Oh, and the lie that the unemployed don't pay council tax? Most unemployed people who don't live with relatives are in shared accommodation and as such, pay the full amount of council tax.
So, yeah, life could be better.

Mind numbing

The days just fly by.
Except of course, they don't.
I recently read an article about a long distance swimmer who swam from Land's end to John O'groats. The bit that caught my attention was when he described how he managed the boredom. He would segment the time into chunks, that way he wouldn't have to think about the distance he had left to swim.
And I recognised that as how I deal with the days here. It's not as if you can spend the whole day on Jobsearch. Once you have exhausted the websites that cover the kinds of jobs you are looking for, how do you fill the rest of the day?
The answer is epic clockwatching.
Oh look, it's 10am, only 6 more hours til home time. Then 5 then 4 etc. Of course there is always other websites to look at, but the huge majority of these are blocked at the servers (as are the proxies).
I suppose I could run up massive bills on my phone (from which I type this, by the way), but one of the major problems with being unemployed/slave is the lack of money.
So yes, I guess one skill I could now add to my cv is boredom management, tho I very much doubt many employers would be pleased to see that there...

They pile it on...

the pressure that is. The nightmare that is Seetec continues.
Today I was told that rather than allowing me a brief respite (not having to attend on Thursday mornings), I am now here 9 til 4, 5 days a week. They don't count lunch breaks (unlike pretty much every real job I have ever had) so this only adds up to 30 hours/week.
For me, those few hours on Thursday mornings allowed me to decompress a little, it took the edge off what was almost unbearable.
There is a strange feeling of being trapped at the same time as feeling pushed into doing something that would allow them to sanction me.
I can only pray that I get the job I interviewed for last week, because the alternative is too horrendous to contemplate.

A waking nightmare

I'm getting a lot of reading done, however I can't really think of this as a good thing.
In May this year, I found myself back among the ranks of the unemployed.
A few months later and I was transferred onto the so-called Workfare scheme. In case you don't know about it, this is the privately run scheme that exists, ostensibly, to get people back to work.
Let me get things straight, it exists to get people off benefits, and if you think these are one and the same, you may be in for a shock.
The main tool used to reduce the number of people on this scheme is called "sanctioning" which doesn't sound so bad. Until you know what it entails. Sanctioning means that you loose your benefits for a specific period of time (both housing and unemployment benefits). Essentially, you have no means of support for however long they decide is appropriate. Need to pay rent or buy food? Hard luck. So, you either jump as high as the government sanctioned private company says, or become homeless. And what do they say you have to do? Full time work (usually at a compliant charity, that way you can't complain that you are taking up a real job). I have heard rumours that the charities are paid for every placement they provide, tho I have no proof of this. I wouldn't be at all surprised.
Boiling it right down, we are looking at state funded slavery, only missing the physical torture.
Also of interest is the fact that this scheme costs the taxpayers considerably more than simply paying benefits. The scheme has to pay for travel (I was sent from Cambridge to Kings Lynn four days per week for a month for my placement until the place was shut down due to health and safety concerns that had been brushed under the carpet for months).
So, when David Cameron complains about the cost of benefits to the UK economy, keep in mind, he is actively jacking up those costs.
And the reading? As I am still on placement but they haven't actually found me anywhere to go, I have to sit in an airless office all day doing "jobsearch" which even the employees here admit will only take up a couple of hours a day, so the rest of the time I read.

Time for a little reaming, bend over Cameron and your banker and press friends...
This government is despicable at best.
While unemployment rises, they have the nerve to blame their very victims for the state of the country.
Meanwhile, the newspaper owners get to decide the very law that governs the garbage they push.
The government's policies are based entirely on their ethos of blame the poor for the economy and a spreadsheet that was so full of bugs and inaccuracies they had to pick and choose which bits they made public.
And so, the press (in exchange for the neutering of Leverson) become the puppets of the government, faithfully parroting every lie about the poor being the ones to blame for this countries woes instead of holding the true culprits, the government, hand in hand with the big banks, to account.
There is no happy ending here, just tissue after tissue of lies.

What a bunch of total bankers!

You have to wonder what the press are doing when they yet again, jump all over the banks when they announce massive bonuses.

Are the press in on the scam? The banks announce "massive" bonuses for a very good reason, it keeps the public irritated about piffling small change (and to the banks, a few million, maybe even the odd billion is small change).

They do it so that they can look good when they can then change their minds later.

Meanwhile they continue to owe the UK public hundreds of billions.

The death of ID cards

OK, score one for sanity, the coalition government take a step back from the stupidity that was ID cards (but lets be honest here, their reason isn't the right one, they only want to save money).

Oil and petrol

It seems that the price of oil has less and less to do with the price of petrol in the UK.
Recent falls in the price of oil have not only failed to be reflected in the price of petrol, but in fact seem to have pushed it higher!
And I am not talking about the ridiculous increases in "fuel duty" (read - tax), but the price charged by the petrol companies. Both before and after the recent fuel tax increase, it was noticeable that the base cost of petrol (before tax, fuel duty, what-have-you) increased despite falls in the price of oil.
I would really like to know how the big oil companies can justify this increase, as it seems to bear no relationship to a, the cost of oil and b, reality!

HELP!

I can't help but wonder at what point (if at all) the UK and US governments realised that they no longer had any real control over their economies.

It seems amazing to me that any government would think it a good idea to hand over control of something quite so important to people who are only interested in one thing, the bottom line, how much they can make for them selves and their clients (probably in that order too).

And now we all need help, but who else is there to ask for it?

Ah, of course, increase taxation to cover massive bailout plans that so far have done nothing other than to underline the fact that they can do nothing. Oh, and show to the stock markets around the world that they are panicking. Which of course, only induces further panic.

Would someone please stop the planet, I want to get off now.

42 is not the answer!

Desperate Brown scrapes through
Frankly I am appalled that anyone in their right mind would oversell the threat posed by terrorists to such an extent that they feel that one of the mainstays of the British legal system should be done away with totally.
The only people that feel that they need a whole 42 days to question people are the police themselves, and quite frankly they are wrong!
Personally I am disgusted by those politicians who allowed themselves to be swayed by the "sweetening" of the deal. You are morally bankrupt, and you should step down from your positions, you have no mandate to rule any more!

UK ID cards possibly put back two years.

The BBC are reporting that National ID cards could well be put back two years.
While this may seem like the government are finally listening to the public and taking our criticism in, I have another take on this.
Should they decide to out them back by two years as reported, I am sure that the only reason they are doing this is to give the UK public time to forget their appalling record on data security (see the "Nothing to fear?" article below). I am sure that by 2012, most people will have forgotten how useless the British government are at not loosing vital information.
Perhaps I am being cynical, but until I hear that they have given up on this pointless waste of taxpayers money, I won't rest easy.