The Worm on a Scooter Party

We now go live to British Patriot/Brexit/Tory/Reform UK/MyLabour feat. /ANTIVAX/Trump HQ for the latest updates on the which isn't happening...
(c)Frank Place

Just the JC being the JC.

The Cult of Corbyn has been replaced by the Cult of Gender There is a common denominator between the Labour antisemites and pro-trans activists

Oops. WoaS doesn't usually enter into debate directly on lesser pages but here the Quorum of Nemotode was enraged enough to comment... See you in 30 days after the Red Wall poor Tory voters have reported us for violating the cOmMuNiTy gUiDeLiNeS.

Today, nuclear annihilation is on the worm's mind. Enjoy!

I've studied nuclear war for 35 years -- you should be worried. | Brian Toon | TEDxMileHigh For the first time in decades, it's hard to ignore the threat of nuclear war. But as long as you're far from the blast, you're safe, right? Wrong. In this so...

What's on your mind, Facebjørk asks, day in day out. OK, I'll tell you.

This year will mark the 50th anniversary of a musical masterpiece that continues to speak illuminating truths about the impossibility of the human condition, and how people from these islands tend to cope with it. Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side Of The Moon was released in March 1973, as the last traces of postwar optimism gave way to mounting economic strife and international tension. The response it offered was twofold: a call to empathy and mutual understanding, and the pointing-out of a national trait that this writer – among many others – has probably quoted far too much. It comes nearly six minutes into a song simply called Time: “Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way.”

As a new political year begins, those nine words seem more apposite than ever, and they snugly fit one defining fact of our national predicament: that the wreckage of Brexit is all around us but our politicians will still not acknowledge it. The evidence now encompasses reduced trade, diminished investment and the fact that the UK has been the only major economy not to have returned to its pre-pandemic size. Brexit has resulted in a hit to tax revenues estimated at an annual £40bn – enough to have prevented 75% of the spending cuts and tax rises that were announced in November.

Meanwhile, amid impossible passport queues and howls of pain from businesses now tied up in red tape, stories that symbolise the folly of our exit from the EU seem to arrive at least one a week. Just before Christmas, for instance, it was reported that the Metropolitan police would now be buying armoured ministerial cars from the German manufacturer Audi because no UK firm was “able to meet the requirements of the tender”. Here was more proof of the supply-chain problems that are afflicting British producers, and a malaise that has caused annual UK car production to fall by more than half since 2016.

The government responds to such news with its usual ludicrous evasions: “I don’t deny there are costs to a decision like Brexit,” said Jeremy Hunt in November, “but there are also opportunities, and you have to see it in the round.” Meanwhile, even now, Tory zealots cling to the belief that life outside the EU could still deliver all the promised prosperity and general magic, if only ministers would try harder.

A good example: led by Jacob Rees-Mogg (who is apparently giving serious thought to being the next Tory leader), MPs are pressing Rishi Sunak to stick to a deadline of 31 December 2023 for “reviewing or revoking” EU laws that still apply to the UK, and imagining that the resulting legislative pyre will produce some kind of economic phoenix. The truth, as ever, is more prosaic. The task will involve hundreds of Whitehall civil servants forensically assessing nearly 2,500 pieces of retained EU legislation, and the CBI says the plan is likely to produce “a further drag on growth”.

What Brexit has done to Tory politics now goes beyond the party’s interminable debate about what exactly life outside Europe should entail, and deep into Conservatism’s collective psychology. Since the 2016 referendum, the English political right – by which I mean a cacophony of voices, including Conservative MPs, the Mail and the Telegraph, and the kind of pundits now given a megaphone by GB News and TalkTV – has become steadily more eccentric and unhinged.

‘Britain is broken, Nigel Farage says, but no one in politics seems minded to point out that he is among the key people who broke it.’ As far as basic economics is concerned, they endlessly deny the existence of gravity. But they now make much more noise about climate action, Meghan Markle, the BBC, the content of dictionaries and whatever other “woke” ghouls are irking them. This is partly a deliberate distraction from Brexit’s catastrophes. But it is also the kind of displacement activity that was always going to take hold once these people’s defining project had turned to dust.

And Labour? The tensions of Keir Starmer’s position are translated into denials of things that are self-evidently true. In early December, he claimed that “there’s no case for going back to the EU or going back into the single market”, and only “a very good case for making Brexit work”. Amazingly, he and his colleagues also rule out any return to the EU’s customs union.
The reason this once-devout remainer doggedly sticks to these lines is obvious: even if opinion polling suggests that residual popular belief in Brexit is now ebbing away, the Labour party has to secure the support of people who voted leave in 2016, switched from Labour to the Tories in 2019, and would supposedly greet any talk of revisiting the basics of Brexit with anger and dismay. But that does not make what he says any less absurd, nor detract from the depressing sense of a Westminster conversation that omits modern Britain’s most defining fact.
There is real danger here. The grifters and chancers who took us out of the EU are still around, threatening their usual mischief. Nigel Farage and his Reform party are apparently planning to field 600 candidates at the next general election, and amid widespread resentment about Brexit’s false hopes, even darker forces may also fancy their chances.

“Britain is broken,” Farage says, but for fear of questioning Brexit itself, no one in politics seems minded to point out that he is among the key people who broke it. A huge truth is thereby being ignored, which goes back to the 1930s, if not before. If you don’t want politics flooded with betrayal myths and conspiracy theories – which have a much greater purchase on public opinion than anyone in politics and the media currently seems to realise – then do not ignore uncomfortable facts. When mainstream politicians indulge in denial, demagogues often make hay.

As 2023 unfolds, the gap between Brexit’s delusions and our everyday reality will become increasingly inescapable. The Tories’ internal strife and poll woes will go on, but Labour will also be confronted with questions it will no longer be able to avoid. Running through everything will be a massive question about what happens next: how can you even begin to think coherently about the UK’s long-term prospects when any truthful discussion of the present is off limits?

Two more lines from the aforementioned Pink Floyd album evoke the essential problem: “Every year is getting shorter, never seem to find the time / Plans that either come to naught or half a page of scribbled lines.” This is what Brexit has done not just to politics, but our sense of the future. Will we hang on in quiet desperation for another year?

- John Harris in The Guardian

What's on your mind, Facebjørk asks, day in day out. OK, I'll tell you.

I fu***ng hate Republicans. Republicans are all about the man. The man who works hard and plays hard and drinks hard and shoots his guns. The white man, that is. The straight white man. With a few token blacks and asians thrown in as a concession to 'modern times'. Well, blacks anyway. But just one or two, where they are visible but controllable. Maybe the odd token woman in a similar position. I'm thinking Colon Power and Condoleeeeeeza Rice, and maybe, erm... Pfff... I dunno. There must be some other Oreo cookies in the US government but I can't think of any right now.

But the things which are actually important to families, like people spending their time together to live good, fulfilling lives, not spending all their time at work or stressed out or hugely in debt, oh no! To Republicans that is boring. That is weak. That allows the government to come and make you do what you don't want to do. Except that Republicans were all up for the regime change in Chile that saw Salvador Allende removed and General Pinochet establish his military dictatorship for twenty years. Like Iraq, that's the kind of war that Republicans love, because firstly it generates a lot of dead cannon fodder for them to feel patriotic about one day per year, and secondly it enriches the Donald Rumsfelds and Bushs of this world, whom all Republican men aspire to be when they grow up.

And Republicans creamed their pants over Vietnam. If that wasn't the government taking their children and flinging them into a jungle just to make their point that fu***ng Yanks are superior to every other race on the planet then I don't know what is. Then they even have the loudmouth small brain lack of irony to love films about it, as long as it's easy to digest, like Rambo - First Blood, Rambo 2 and Rambo 3.

I suspect there are maybe one or two thousand genuinely Christian women Republicans in the United States who are not psychotically averse to gay men and women. They will be those who generally live their lives in fear and had a domineering father figure to kneel before. But the majority of American Christians are now Christian Nationalists. That or ex-Cuban Catholics, who, because they couldn't make Cuba work for them also support the Republicans, because Republicans represent fReEdDoM. Yeah man, freedom in tRuMpIaN, because it's the freedom to work 100 hours a week and drink yourself stupid afterwards and beat your wife then blame it on Mexicans at Pastor Learjet's Mega-Maga-Church on a Sunday.

Absolute f**knuts the lot of them.

Bizarrely, despite all the evidence to the contrary in the Forde Report and Al Jazeera's somewhat hyperbolic but predominantly factual The Labour Files, some people persist in maligning Jeremy Corbyn, and have even been rewarded for it in this year's New Year's Honours. By doing so, they show that they have unquestioningly swallowed the ruling elite's propaganda, hook, line and sinker.

There are still many people who haven't realised that Corbyn was denied an election victory on two occasions, but especially in 2019, by backstabbers within Labour, including Keir Starmer, who leveraged NEC pressure to force Corbyn to include a promise to consider a second advisory referendum as part of the 2019 Labour manifesto. Starmer knew that the who would abandon Labour in droves if their dearly beloved Brexit was put at risk, and along with Rachel Reeves, Margaret Hodge and other Blairites, publicly celebrated their own Party's 2019 election defeat because they were frightened by Corbyn's mildly socialist policies.

These people, along with the billionaire's club of Great Britain, chose to put Boris Johnson in charge of delivering the Brexit that has decimated the UK's economy.

I know that even the so-called left wing mainstream news outlets in the UK, The Guardian and the Mirror, also fell into the trap of spouting the same lies that the ruling elite wanted everyone to believe, but can someone explain to me why now, three years, three Prime Ministers, one disastrous mini-budget, a looming NHS crisis caused by 12 years of Tory underfunding and an overtly racist Home Secretary, there are still some people who think that Sir Brutus "Keir Hardie Must Be Turning In His Grave" Starmer can be trusted to do anything other than squeak his way effeminately through another destructive four years of sub-Mandelsonian Centrist kowtowing to the billionaires?

The man has no principles and no spine. He does not dare to voice support for the unions because he's afraid of ending up in a Scargill/Foot situation, which won't happen because it's not 1979 any more. Starmer supported the £billion upgrade to Britain's Trident nuclear deterrent, despite overwhelming evidence showing that it makes Britain more susceptible to nuclear attack than if the whole suicidal US-supplied weapons system was scrapped. And his obnoxious assistant Rachel Reeves has stated that Labour will be tougher on those needing government support due to illness or disability than the Conservatives, presumably in another attempt to win back the aforementioned Red Wall bigots.

Apart from saying "well, he's not great, but it's the only alternative to the Tories", how can anyone in their right mind defend Keir Starmer?

Photographer slams Rachel Riley for using his Corbyn image on t-shirt A photographer who captured Jeremy Corbyn protesting against apartheid has hit out at Rachel Riley for wearing a t-shirt with an "illegally manipulated" version of his picture.

Elon Musk’s net worth collapse is the biggest loss of wealth in modern history Billionaire’s fortune has fallen by $200bn, roughly equivalent to the GDP of Greece

WE SHALL RISE AGAIN !