My fault, mine, sorry.

Just realised I haven’t updated this blog for weeks.  And meanwhile such incredible things are going on.  You’ll have heard about them so there’s no need for me, generally; but I just wanted to point you at this:

Tories urge action over ‘reckless’ Labour MP

(Check the wee quotemarks.  They’re hating putting those in.)

This follows, as we can see, the normal pattern:

1. Government does something that will ruin thousands of people’s lives.

2. Somebody points this out, and says that the potential ruinees are right to do something about it.

3. Person named in 2 is responsible for everything that every single p.r. does, and sometimes for what they’re all protesting about.

It’s nice to know that they’re not abolishing some of our great British traditions, eh.

2 + 2 = VIOLENT VIOLENT MURDERING DEATH RIGHT NOW!

50,000 – 200 twats who like the look of themselves in black balaclavas and in twenty years’ time will be Mark from ‘Peep Show’ = 0

From PFI-Up Ur Eddercatoin, Richard Littlecock, Forgers’ Gazette Publications (Florida) Ltd.

Th*re is a b*tter w*y

Normally I try not to be disloyal (ok, I don’t try that hard; but it’s the principle of the thing), but this is just too sweet to ignore.  I got an email from Douglas Alexander this morning, saying something mildly cross about the nasty way the Tories are pushing through the Housing Benefit reforms

We are in favour of reforming Housing Benefit and where we can we will work with the Government on the detail of their measures and not simply reject all their changes out of hand.

But these changes are being rushed and as a result risk higher homelessness and increased costs for the taxpayer in temporary accommodation.

There is a better way.  Click here to have your say.

The last paragraph was a link to something on the Labour Party website.  ‘We are in favour of reforming Housing Benefit.  Where we can we will work with the Government…‘  I clicked there to have my say.  This is what I said:

‘A better way would be to avoid stigmatising and criminalising vulnerable people.  We should stand up for Socialist principles by opposing these upper-class warriors on every occasion, and in every way, possible.’

I checked it over.  Nice and concise, no spelling mistakes.  Click submit.

 

SENDING.. SENDING…

Please remove any inappropriate word from your pledge.

 

You want inappropriate?  I’ll give you inappropriate.  Fuck the fuck off and read some Orwell, Alexander, you dickwit.

Thanks to Richard

for this link:

http://mindinflux.wordpress.com/2010/10/26/disability-and-propaganda/.

It’s very good.

Right.  Well.  Here we are.

Here we are.

Thanks, Lib Dems.  Thanks.  I’m sure you wanted to see what ministers are supposed to keep in their red boxes, but this is too high a price even for you.  Although you, of course, won’t be the ones paying it.  It’ll be the young, the poor, the council tenants, the people who don’t even have the bloody manners to get better or die within a year of starting on incapacity benefit: us, the useless eaters.  I hope you dream about us tonight, as well as the next election (that would be a nightmare for the ages).

I doubt George Osbourne will dream about us.  I wonder what George Osbourne does dream about.

Right, you little shit.

Right.  I am sick and fucking tired of these people up top.  Turns out Alan Johnson is fine with the cuts.  Not the removal of child benefit from higher earners, of course – he’ll fight that till his dying day – but the DLA and incapacity benefit cuts.  He’s cool with those.  He’ll help the coalition push those ones through.  Neither he nor Ed Miliband will appear at the rally today.  Well, their personal safety must be paramount.  Awful lot of disabled people there.

No, I am not going to leave the party.  No, it is not some ridiculous sentimental attachment, some sort of misguided anthropomorphic gratitude; it is because entryism is the only viable way to get a Socialist into any kind of legitimate power under our bloody stupid voting system.  It’s hardly likely, of course, the way the whole discourse is fixed these days, but that… and that’s for another post.

By the way, Comrade Johnson, since you’re trying to stiff the housebound: have you ever heard of a postal vote?

Fair’s fair:

some good news for a change.

A British Foreign Office minister urged the United States today to abolish the death penalty as he vowed Britain would show “moral and intellectual leadership” on the issue across the globe.

Jeremy Browne [...] spoke out as the British Foreign Office put America among its top five priority areas for diplomatic action in its latest anti-death penalty strategy.

[...]  Speaking at the launch of the strategy, Mr Browne said “We do not regard these values as intrinsically British values or Western values, we think they are human values, and we think it is important that our government expresses those values around the world.”

(This was in this link on the front page of my email, by the way (just so you can check the ellipses for interesting bits).)

Well, good for him.

H/t my sister

Here’s a slightly better report from the demo than the last post:

http://carerwatch.wordpress.com/2010/10/05/disabled-activists-lead-protest-march-against-condems-welfare-cuts/

And, not wanting to boast like, !!I’M IN THE – sorry, I’m in the photo.  The second one down, with the banner.  I’m the one on the right with the green cagoule and the expression like a dog having a bath.  The other people are Eleanor and Tina who actually made the thing.  Photos by Dave Swinnerton.

UPDATE:  Tina’s just said that the other person is Connie, rather than Eleanor.  Oh dear.  Sorry.  All the other attributions are right, though.  Probably.

Say it loud

I got to the demo and I got back, neither arrested nor beaten to death by the police.  It’s a bit of a surprise that they didn’t beat up anybody just out of boredom, because they had sod all else to do.  There was a police helicopter hovering round above us, which must have cost a good bit, and a couple of policemen taking photos with a long-lens camera out of a window above the rally.  (My dad pointed this out to me in the middle of a protest song we couldn’t hear, which seemed to be a kind of reggae remix of ‘Power in a Union’ and ‘Yellow Submarine.’  I suggested he blow the policemen a kiss, but he didn’t seem that keen to.)  All in all, it was probably rather a good day to go burgling in Birmingham.

And the mention of nicking people’s stuff segues smoothly into what was going on inside the steel and concrete lump full of Tories.  The Guardian did a decent film on it, which is here.  The presenter keeps asking people if the cuts are pragmatic or ideologically motivated, and they all look grave and say it’s only because we need to save money, we’re all in this together and we’ll all have to tighten our belts (are there 22 or 28 millionaires in the cabinet? I keep forgetting).  One of them says, ridiculously, that the Conservative Party in government has always been pragmatic (do the words Keith Joseph mean anything to him?).  Alan Duncan is brief, but he doesn’t seem too unhappy.  Maybe he’s just not as good an actor as the rest of them, or maybe he doesn’t like hiding it.  Say it loud, we’re worthless, mindless, conscienceless, vile lying cunts and we’re proud, and we’re the boss of you now.

There’s a Tory MP in that video saying that the ‘big society’ was a great idea, it would get people really involved in their communities, people could take the time and energy and whatnot that they’d used to arrange the protest and use it – direct quote – for “a more constructive reason.” 

What’s a more constructive thing to do than getting this government out?

A high-pitched noise to be heard all over the land

The whiny bit comes first.

Ok.  My case.  I have had temporal-lobe epilepsy since the age of 14.  I take ten pills every day as a matter of course, sometimes more.  Admittedly three of these are to deal with the side-effects of the other seven.  Unsurprisingly with all this wandering around inside me I get tired after two or three hours of continuous work, and need to sleep at least ten hours out of twenty-four.  It does however work up to a point, the point in question being that I haven’t died in status epilepticus (which is where you have one fit after another after another until your brain just gives up); although I do have a fit, on average, once every fortnight.  It takes all my energy to pretend to be almost normal, to think up normal people’s excuses when I can’t do things, to save face so there’s no danger normal people will label me as something different.

Contrary to everyone’s expectations, I am actually pretty much ok with this.  It’s pointless to say ‘why me?’  Why not me?  Generally people are very nice about it, I’m just a bit paranoid.  But like a lot of disabled people, like all people with invisible disabilities (invisible disabilities is when you’re not in a wheelchair.  They are pretty visible when you’re digging holes in your wrists with a penknife or passing out while trying to walk twenty yards or writhing around unconscious on the pavement; but that doesn’t count), I am now a worthless scrounger on disposable benefits.

And I am going to Birmingham to say Mr Cameron, Mr Duncan Smith, we’ve got our own problems, ok?  We really don’t need your fucking shit as well.