I always debate doing political blogs. I’ve had a few ideas mooching around now for the last few months but ultimately they’ve always come across as a bit malformed or they wernt worth the potential controversy that publishing them would create. Not to mention that this is a Film website that predominantly deals with awful movies. But I am quite politically minded, it plays a part in my life and these blogs tend to be a bit more personal and a bit less filmy…so with that in mind and with the European elections rapidly upon us this seems like as good a time as any to take a general look over the political landscape.

(Speaks for itself)

This will of course be a biased breakdown because I think it’ll make for tremendously boring reading if I just impartially rattle through whats going on. So without further ado!

Overview:

We’re fucked.

Real Overview:

Okay, okay…well…being in the UK is pretty grim right now politically. Since the vote that must not be named In 2016 the media and even our current government have tried their absolute damndest to radicalise the people pressing for us to leave Europe. (Under the guise that those crazy liberals who’ve been ruining everything by being PC now want to press for us to stay in a system that’s taken away your bendy banana’s and want to ban conkers being played in school) While Simultaneously trying to splinter the people who want us to remain part of the European Union via demonization of certain politicians through the media and by giving off the appearance that some parties are “More in favour of remaining than others”.

The combined anarchy of the rabid frothing masses on both sides was entertaining at first but the more you dig into it the more deeply troubling it becomes. It’s effectively become a smokescreen to our democracy, with the majority of policies that arnt related to us leaving Europe being pushed to the back of the cue, while less savoury bills are passed under the radar without note. Party politics has taken center stage in a game of chicken where the loser is disintegrated. I could have written that overview at any time in the last 2 years but quite recently we’ve seen the launch of the…Ugh…”Brexit Party” led by Nigel Farage; the personification of the stereotypical corrupt politician bought to life. Hell I could dedicate an entire blog post just to his sordid and strange history but for your sanity and mine I wont here.

(#Suffering)

Note that I purposefully haven’t decided to assign Leavers and remainers “Right” and “Left” titling here and that’s because our leaving the European Union runs deeper than political affiliation. It’s a social issue more than anything else, it’s been dressed up, dressed down, simplified and purposefully complicated and yet no matter how much people pontificate about what it actually means the reality is that it boils down to 2 very clean cut issues that are:

*Do I want people from Foreign countries in my country

And

*Do I want people outside of my direct electoral control to tell me how to live my life.

Now. The former of those questions is just a clean cut question of racism. Considering we emigrate (345,000) out more people than we immigrate (283,000) in here in the UK this really shouldn’t even be an issue. But unfortunately it is… My own opinion is that while basic checks on anyone wanting to come into the country should be carried out there should be no limit to the amount of people who want to come in to or leave the UK. Equally I can understand the mindset of people who suggest setting a reasonable quota on immigration and emigration. I don’t necessarily agree with those people, but I understand them.

The people I don’t understand are the “Drawbridgers” the people who’ve been saying “Britains full” since about the late 70s and if anything have only got more isolationist since then. I also tend to bundle the “Unreasonable quota” people in with these lot too as they seem to believe that saying “Only allow 100 immigrants in” seems like any kind of a justifiable way to run a country. You’d think these kind of people were in small numbers but the reality is they’ve been steadily increasing over the last 4 decades thanks to the absolute Arse rag that is The Daily Mail fabricating stories about immigrants taking jobs, killing and raping people and generally being an shit trumpet to anyone who doesn’t vote conservative. Combining this with the recent rise of groups like “The EDL”, “UKIP” and individuals like Farage, Boris, Robinson and Reese Mogg.

(Group Selfie Guys!)

A lack of education and engagement and an unwillingness to try has ultimately left a large swathe of the public terrified of anyone non british through fear that they’ll either offend someone and face criminal charges, or that these people plan on stripping the country of anything that isnt nailed down. Which is of course ludicrous given that the british themselves are a mongrel nation in terms of our ethnic background.  But unfortunately until theres some kind of seismic shift in favour of getting to know thy neighbour it’s a mess that’s only going to get worse unfortunately.

The latter question is a bit more understandable but still falls down after the slightest bit of scrutiny. Politics in the UK as of 2019 is arguable one of the most fractured and diverse seen in this countries history since the world wars at least. If not earlier. And this is a problem. Under any other system of voting diversity would be fantastic. But due to a total lack of equal representation in our parliament it effectively means that we’re somewhat stuck in a two party system where it’s either a case of “Conservatives” or “Labour”, Blue or red and anything else doesn’t really matter unless we end up in a hung parliament in which case ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING MATTERS.

(You guys need to get into “It’s always sunny” if you havent already…it’s amazing)

As a result a lot of people feel terrifically unrepresented because while there is pretty much a party to suit every flavour and taste these days, your votes worthless because unless you vote for one of the two main parties noone else is likely to win. And even when smaller parties do make marginal gains, the government (who actually win generally) choose to ignore that because they didn’t win enough to actively challenge them. This is predominantly where the left find themselves. You have Labour, the lib dems, the green party, Change UK, Plaid Cymru and to a lesser extent the SNP (a party I still haven’t really got the full measure of, but that just seem a bit…off…)

Because there are 6 parties that would claim to “Represent the left” all on a sliding scale of “Socialist” through to “Well…We’re not the conservatives!” the biggest issue that the left has always faced is splintering of votes. In fact if even 3 of the more left leaning parties pooled their support together there would be an overwhelming majority left wing government in power right now (And this would have been the case for a majority of the countries history). Unfortunately due to infighting and disagreements over minutia this hasn’t happened in decades and is unlikely to happen any time soon. And as a direct knock on of this watering down of the votes it means that the left is in a perpetual nightmare of forever wanting to change things for everyone for the better but being too principled to sacrifice any ground to anyone who doesn’t agree with them entirely on even the smallest policies.

The Right by contrast don’t tend to have that issue as much. They have the inverse issue really. They actively want to make their own lives and the lives of the immediate people around them better while sacrificing any ground they can to ensure that happens to the further right but not an inch to the left. anyone else? Well they can “Get fucked”. The current government is the right wing “Conservative party” and their biggest issue at the minute (And one that seriously threatens to demolish them) is 2 fold.

*The Rise of the “Brexit party” and “Ukip” has started to leech them voters in droves. Because:

*There current policy on leaving the European union has gone down about as well as a turd in a swimming pool with the far right of the party leaping over to “BP” and “Ukip” while the more middle ground of the party have fled to the Lib Dems.

Why is their plan such a bad one? That’s down to how brexit was defined in the referendum. The binary “In or out” approach has ultimately led to people claiming they voted for every shade of brexit feasible. People voted for unicorns and are now mad that they didn’t get the exact unicorn they were promised (Even though no unicorns were ever described to these people). As a result the conservatives (Tories to our US readers) are effectively frozen in an even worse perpetual nightmare than the left. petrified to do anything firm lest they accidentally cause an uprising of people who want to leave or people who want to stay. On the one hand they face a revolution that will likely see them out of power near permanently and the installation of pure facism at the heart of government. On the other they see an uprising likely to completely segment the country, equally destroy them near permanently probably resume some level of peace and ensure arguments are had back and forth about what is to be done for generations.

How does this tie into the second point I raised earlier? Well the people who no longer wish to be part of Europe who claim that it isnt a racist thing usually point to the fact they don’t want to be “Bullied by Brussles” the idea being that they don’t like the idea of being told by bureaucrats in Europe what they can and cant do in Britain. They believe the UK should govern itself in the sense that the only people who should be allowed to make the rules are the government, the queen and sometimes the public (Unless the public give the wrong answer…whatever the hell that means) and that “Unelected” representatives are converse to british values. Forgetting of course that we do have elected representatives in Europe and that theirs literally a vote on who gets to go in next week (the 23rd of may)

This has been a long misunderstood element of Europe. We have MEP’s…people who represent us in the European parliament, who are (In principle) supposed to carry british interests at heart. The problem is in typical british style, noones been bothered about them until this one that’s coming up. Most people didn’t bother voting in them in the past and as a result for the best part of a decade  (If not 2 decades at this point) we’ve allowed the ardent Europhobes to conquer these elections on a regular basis. And as a result we’ve been sending a violently anti EU party (UKIP) to represent us in Europe… and you can imagine how well that’s gone down over the years.

To that end, we as a nation have pretty much spent 15-20 years refusing to work with Europe in favour of working against them, purposefully proposing changes to legislation that will only benefit a few of the wealthiest in society and effectively giving them the finger whenever they ask anything of us. We have only ourselves to blame for the utter disdain Europe has for us from a political standpoint.

Am I going to say the European union is faultless? No. it has issues and there are corruptive elements at play. But our own government make them look like choir boys in comparison and ultimately I’d say it’s better to try and rectify issues while working with Europe, than to say “Au revoir” and get into a system under a conservative government that’s shown to be actually fatal to people…as in the government are aware they’re killing people…but are choosing to do nothing (Or almost nothing) about it.

The Reality of the situation is that years and years of persecuting minorities have finally taken their toll on the very government who attempted to weild it as a weapon. Like a version of the Midas touch but instead of gold it’s turds everything any party currently tries to do now is set to cause pain suffering and trouble for anyone involved one way or another…

Or to put it more succinctly. We’re Fucked. At least for now.

(Well…things cant get much worse…)

I intended to actually go into detail about the European election parties and how I was going to vote in this blog but I got so distracted on the backstory that I actually never got round to it…so in the next blog I’ll pretty much be talking about that. Bye!