The Judge RANTS!
Date: 15/03/15
Another Thousand Words Not Needed
(A back-reference to this, in case you were wondering)
But I'll throw a few hundred at it anyway.
Here, from the BBC this morning, we are treated to the heart-warming sight of two true soulmates:
- On the left (as before, only geographically speaking): Edward Michael Balls. Age 47. Son of a senior academic, secondary education at a private school, then at Keble College, Oxford and Harvard. Former adviser to the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Parachuted in to the consitituency of Normanton (later Morley and Outwood) in Yorkshire (a place with which he had no prior connection) to be 'their' MP in 2005.
- On the right (in every sense): Gideon Oliver Osborne (who added the name 'George' in his teenage years, presumably because he didn't want to be thought of as constantly hanging around hotel rooms being a nuisance). Age 43. Son of a wallpaper magnate who was himself in the descendancy of the Ascendancy, that branch of the English aristocracy planted in - and on - Ireland to stop the surly natives getting above themselves by thinking that it was their country. Privately schooled, followed by Magdalen College, Oxford. Former special adviser. Parachuted in to the constituency of Tatton in Cheshire (insert obvious aside here) in 2001.
But it isn't just in this that Balls and More Balls are singing on top the same flagpole ["Some mishtake, shurely?" Ed.]. Consider:
- Osborne proposes a further £30bn in cuts in public services and jobs? Balls and his bags march proudly through the same lobby to support them.
- The régime mounts a relentless attack of unprecedented viciousness against the poor, the unemployed, the disabled, the chronically physically- and psychiatrically-ill and even the terminally ill? Balls' colleague Rachel Reeves states that a Labour government would be even more vindictive.
- Osborne and his boss go on about "hard-working families"? So does Labour, extending it to include the so-called "hard-pressed middle class".
In short, what we see in this picture are two pees in the same pot. If you are not one of the 'swing voters' in the 'marginal constituencies' (both of these categories of people being artefacts of one of the most hopelessly unrepresentative voting systems to be found in the developed world), you simply do not appear within the purblind purview of the political machines which - along with their corporate donors and sponsors - have taken full control of what we are still expected to call 'our democracy'.
It's difficult to avoid the conclusion that - absent (as the educated Yanks say) an actual uprising, which wouldn't ever happen in England unless the State threatened to nationalise B&Q and Homebase - we are (and I apologise for the academic jargon) terminally fucked.
