by uzwi

One thing we learn is that we’re in no way insulated from the state collapses we’ve been taught to associate with Those Other Kinds of Countries. Between now & the end of next winter, we’re looking at half a dozen crises that aren’t even being admitted to, let alone addresssed, by politicians whose panic, incompetence, greed, epic self-fictionalisation and disconnection from practical, infrastructure-level administration are systemic & nothing to do with Johnson except inasmuch as he became their public face. You can regard this as simply the chaos likely to arise when entitled morons, rendered unemployable by a poor Oxford degree in an impractical subject, get power; or you can detect behind their clownish conversion of childhood psychodrama into politics the determined application of deregulation-based disaster capitalism. The end result is the same. Poverty, disease, sudden bafflingly huge price rises for basic commodities, shit in the rivers. In addition we have a diffuse, disorganised group of opposition parties, each too afraid or too obsessed with their own single-issue Theory of Everything to work together to change the situation. This makes the 70s look like a time of prosperity and stability. Meanwhile, as the Tory body totters from one organ failure to the next in a climate crisis during which control of basic infrastructure will mean everything, the infrastructure is being encouraged to fall apart. It’s a disaster. How can politicians across the board be forced to acknowledge this & take responsibility? Politics is still all about being the entertainment; it’s all about the ratings, all about its own self-regard, just another expression of UK celebrity culture.

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