In the early 1970’s I returned to my home turf of the London Borough of Hillingdon (LBH) having spent a couple of years working for an outdoor adventure company, learning and eventually qualifying to be a canoeing instructor and river leader. Those two pivotal years were spent in the company of a mixed bag of raving lunatics who introduced me to my first rapid by filling my kayak with beer and telling me to get it down the rapid to our watering hole for the day without losing it by capsizing.
I had not seen the rapid and from my kayak it appeared that the river disappeared past a line across the river into who knew what kind of maelstrom accompanied by a great deal of busy water noises and the tales of the savageness of what awaited me, all of which had reduced me to a bone melting state of terror. I had been warned to stay in the centre of the river at all costs. Bastards! A bathroom duck could have navigated that rapid and I learned that this was the standard introduction to Symonds Yat on the River Wye and to never overlook the chance of a good wind up.
Returning jobless to LBH I began working for the council on a tree gang. Our job was to fell all the Elms smitten with Dutch Elm disease in the north of the borough. I was young, I was fit and the money was great because we made damned sure we hit our bonus target every week. I enjoyed both jobs, the first setting me on a path I was to pursue for the rest of my working life, and the second working with a great team, earning good money in the great outdoors. The Tories would have been proud of our tree gang, we treated it as a fitness training camp and the work made us very fit and well indeed. But that was not the point.
The point was to earn money and when they cut our bonus time to impossible to reach targets all but two of the gang resigned for having the royal piss taken out of us, not unlike what the shower of charlatans currently in government are doing with their ridiculous rebranding of work as something essential to good health and peddling the ‘value of work as a health outcome’. It never was and never will be, but, hey, as long as they keep saying it, people will believe it. Reality takes a back seat to a dialogue of meaningless gobbledegook from a government stealing the life out of our bones.
Jeremy Hunt is the latest snake oil salesman to jump on the ‘arbeit macht frei’ bandwagon, following in the boot heels of Iain Duncan Smith before he resigned his post to work on his image adjustment programme as champion of the poor. Smith was the man who was clearly inspired by a trip to Auschwitz in his years as Secretary of State for Work and Pensions.
They hope that in dominating the dialogue with their twisted dogmas, they can persuade us that somehow we’ve got our real lived experience all wrong, in much the same way that they brand pensions as a ‘benefit’, an entitlement that we pay into out of our real earned wages over our working life times.
Living on state sufferance is the new normal, as David Cameron said, “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’.” We are living by government dictat with whatever complete nonsense they decide to make up and force down our throats via a complicit, stupifyingly bad, media.
The expression, ‘you couldn’t make it up’ is now meaningless, they are doing just that. They peddle the lie, as Jeremy Hunt has with his, “With all the evidence showing that work is a major driver of health,” spoken with beaming wide eyed sincerity, or insanity, with not a lick of sense in a single word he says.
In my local Tesco the other day, I said to a friend on the till, “how’s it going?” “Living the dream,” he replied.
The government pursue their fantasy world of reality, made in their own image, with all the intensity and fervour of religious zealots, seeking to discredit our lived experiences and eliminate our lived reality and, indeed, eliminate us and our inconvenient lives if we are not profitable to them.
The very idea that Iain Duncan Smith or Jeremy Hunt gives a damn about work as a health outcome is too ludicrous for words. It would be laughable were it not for the danger of that turning into the unhinged cackling of dribbling insanity and of becoming permanently mentally deranged, like them.
Opening our minds, even for a moment, to their twisting of reality is incredibly dangerous. We are forced to counter with reason when they deserve nothing better than a good twatting with a baseball bat. Even mocking them is too good for them, giving them the pretence of credibility that they are even worth mocking. The trouble is they have got their hands on power and no matter that they are feeble minded fuck wits, we have to take them seriously, long enough to try to be rid of them once and for all.
David Cameron played a blinder when he established a fixed term parliament. No prizes for guessing whose interests that served. Many have called for a general election but why would Theresa May call a general election when all she has to do is sit tight and create as much ruin as her party sees fit till 2020?
Oliver Letwin was right, the NHS will not survive this parliament. How many times and in how many ways does it need saying? Jeremy Hunt isn’t a health secretary, he is a disease and he is hell bent on eradicating our NHS, no matter what nonsense comes out of his mouth. He’s a liar and a thief as is his corporate chum and chief executive of NHS England Simon Stevens. They are signing off our NHS as I type. Privatisation is a done deal.
The Tories have rained ruin on the lives of ordinary people. Damian Green, successor to IDS, has called Ken Loaches film, ‘I, Daniel Blake’ (although he hasn’t even seen it), “monstrously unfair” to which Loach has fittingly responded, “If they don’t know what they are doing to people they are incompetent and shouldn’t be in Government. If they do know what they are doing then they are not fit to be in Government.”
Exactly!
Cameron lied his way into and through his time in government and the unelected Theresa May is doing the same. That is not legitimate government. Those who play us false are themselves false.
KOG 02 November 2016
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/i-daniel-blake-director-ken-9176668
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/dec/30/oliver-letwin-a-career-in-gaffes
Fear and Loathing in Great Britain 
Reblogged this on sdbast.