Over the last many months I have been battling with losing the plot completely. Every day has become an unbelievable battle with constant panic attacks, heart pounding anxiety and barely contained, and almost impossible to restrain, livid fury.
The most ridiculous banal things trigger an explosive rage that I have never previously experienced: the loo not flushing first time, missing the bathroom light pull as I enter the bathroom and I have almost lost the ability to read books as I am unable to retain the meaning in single paragraphs let alone the bloody plot.
It’s stress, I know that but it is a very particular stress, it’s a stress that is built on the futility of trying to live life peaceably when the Tories are tearing our lives apart and there is nothing I can do to stop them.
I am a great believer in the notion that if you decide, in the clear, cool, light of day, you really can do nothing about a situation, then walk away and don’t sweat it.
There is a prayer that will be familiar to every alcoholic who has been to AA. It’s called the Serenity Prayer – “God, grant me the Serenity, to accept the things I cannot change, Courage to change the things I can, and Wisdom to know the difference.” Because, if you stress about the things you cannot change, you’ll lose your mind and, worse, your sobriety. I am a recovering alcoholic and I know this intimately.
But what the writer of the Serenity Prayer never envisaged was the Tories. They have taken it upon themselves to ruin the lives of millions, killing hundreds of thousands of vulnerable people in the process. Even worse, they have done it for completely bogus reasons as they increase the wealth of the few at the expense of the lives and well being of millions of, decent, honest, law-abiding people. David Cameron began the great austerity deception, telling us that we’re all in it together, even as he cut taxes for the already obscenely wealthy and dished out billions in corporate welfare. [1] [2]
As Mark, the Artist Taxi Driver, said, “This is not a recession, this is a robbery”. Little did we know the lengths they would go to in their persecution of the lives of ordinary people and the helplessness they would foster because they have the power to change and write laws that make their persecution legal, no matter how wrong and foul they are.
When I attempted to report Ian Duncan Smith and David Freud to the police for violations of our human rights, including the right to life, I was told by a police inspector that I would have to bring a civil case because the government had made sanctions and depriving people of the means of survival lawful and such a conflict in law could only be decided as a (vastly expensive) civil case. [3]
There was also the heinous matter of David Cameron telling us, “For too long, we have been a passively tolerant society, saying to our citizens ‘as long as you obey the law, we will leave you alone’.” [4] So confident was he in his arrogance and his ability to hound us to death that he actually told us that his government would persecute us and the law would provide us with no protection. Of course, in order to facilitate this, he cut Legal Aid to the bone, such that in 2017 it was reported that cuts to Legal Aid had triggered a 99.5% collapse in numbers receiving state help in benefits cases, from 83,000 before the cuts to just 440. [5]
They have been nothing if not relentless and through it all, they have lied and lied and lied as people have died and died and died.
Amber Rudd is currently spending the nation’s money on the Daily Mail owned Metro paper in a 9 week propaganda campaign telling us we are all entirely wrong about Universal Credit. In the first week, they launched with a six-page charm offensive which included a front-page advert ‘designed to resemble investigative journalism and “deliberately” left off DWP branding’. [6]
This has been going on since 2010 and I’ve weathered the storm, not least by writing ‘A Letter a Day to Number 10’ for four and a half years during which time Cameron walked away after the EU referendum and he was replaced by the architect of the UK’s hostile environment, Theresa May, who was, without doubt, the worst, most duplicitous and evil Prime Minister in living memory.
I have also been subject to various attacks and assessments which have seen my income drop substantially and having to deal with the most criminal organisation in Britain, the DWP, which has cycled through ministers to find anyone as foul as Iain Duncan Smith or Esther McVey, which they finally achieved with Amber Rudd.
Over the last 2 years, I have felt my mind slipping, literally going spastic (that is neither a joke nor a misuse of ‘spastic’) on the inside. I may not cry daily, but not a week passes without tears, of rage, frustration, deep, pounding, sorrow, despair and the plague of helplessness. My days are passed in survival mode, battling to hold on to what sanity I have left and detesting the architects of hate, the bastard Tories. I have let friends slip, people who I have nothing but love for and from whom I have received nothing but love, as I fight and strive daily just to hold myself together and deal with a raging internal violence that I neither trust nor easily contain.
No government should ever be able to do this. Of course, there have been many despotic governments and dictators throughout the history of the world, we are not the first and nor will we be the last, but what is shocking is that a once first world democracy, even one with as violent and checkered a history as Britain, has been driven into a despotic dictatorship by a government which is the living, scheming, spinning, plotting enemy of the people.
But worst of all, the thing that tears my mind apart, along with so many others, is their vile posturing of righteousness and their false assertions of being for the people and doing good when their every action hounds and persecutes us – and they even refuse to count our dead. [7]
Of course, their day will come, even and despite the relentless campaign to demonise and vilify Jeremy Corbyn with every lie at their disposal, aided and abetted by a poodle media that no longer deserves the name as even the BBC is now just another government propaganda machine. But these thugs do not deserve to walk away into their gold plated futures with their publicly funded gold plated pensions, even as they steal our pensions. Nothing will be well now without justice, but I do not know how to achieve that, nor do I know how we will recover.
I am afraid it is much, much bigger than me, an ageing cancer sufferer with a body that is telling me I’ve spent far too much time abusing it in unrepentant intemperance and human folly. I have no regrets for living a colourful life, it’s been an astonishing journey, but I never imagined, not in my worst nightmares, that we would get a government that revels in its own corruption at such a human cost.
The Tories used to be called the ‘nasty party’, but that is now far too tame, they are the party of consummate evil and we much never forgive and never forget.
KOG. 03 June 2019.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jan/27/cameron-tax-cuts-voters-labour-austerity
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/jul/07/corporate-welfare-a-93bn-handshake
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4WPMxT9-qdk&t=628s
[4] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/britain-is-too-tolerant-and-should-interfere-more-in-peoples-lives-says-david-cameron-10246517.html
[5] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/legal-aid-cuts-benefits-cases-state-help-dla-esa-ministry-justice-disability-living-allowance-a8028936.html
[6] https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/fury-dwp-launches-taxpayer-funded-16183343
[7] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/the-dwp-wont-tell-anyone-how-many-people-have-died-after-having-their-benefits-sanctioned-10332573.html
