"With great power comes great responsibility". A wise man once said that. Batman I think it was. Or at least his butler. I've been thinking about that quote a lot recently, especially with the recent revelations in the UN report on austerity in the UK . I say "revelations", but I guess it just depends how much attention you've been paying. With all the talk of "taking our country back", how many of us knew what the country was really like to start with? T he UN’s rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights declared that levels of child poverty in the UK were “not just a disgrace, but a social calamity and an economic disaster”, and that the UK government has inflicted “great misery” on its people with “punitive, mean-spirited, and often callous” austerity policies driven by a political desire to undertake social re-engineering rather than economic necessity. Oooft. Strong stuff. But if that's true (spoiler alert: it definitely is) ...
One of the surprising things about England doing well at the World Cup (apart from the fact that England are doing well at the World Cup) is this focus on what an absolute legend Gareth Southgate is. It’s great that he’s getting recognition for being a thoroughly decent bloke. And he does genuinely seem to be one. But why does that seem so out of place nowadays? Why the massive fuss? The world’s full of thoroughly decent men and women, quietly doing the right thing without making a big deal of it. The problem is obnoxious twattery makes better TV and press coverage. So we get wall to wall footage of weapons-grade plums each trying to out-arsehole one another to stay in the limelight, until we start to believe that these fucknuggets make up a significant percentage of the population, rather than a tiny minority. And all this shifts the Overton window away from the vast majority of people who just want to quietly get on with their lives without overtly shitting on anyone else, un...
I want my country back. I want it to be great again; it feels so different now. I hear conversations on the tube I never used to hear, and it makes me uncomfortable. I want my country back I worry that we’ll forget what “British” really means. This isn’t what that generation fought for, not so long ago. What would they think if they saw what we’ve become? I want my country back They’re not like us at all. They don’t fit in. They don’t even try. They’re just out for themselves. They don’t play by the rules. They don’t care about our values. I want my country back. I want to take control. I want things how they were in the good old days. Cold nights, warm beer, drizzle underdogs and queues. Sarcasm, lack of respect for authority. Inclusivity. Diversity. A country that welcomes your contribution to society whoever you are, wherever you’re from, whatever your faith. I want my country back. T...
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