In the Pandemic Aftermath, Government Chooses Bread and Circuses

For his weekly monologue today, GBNews host Neil Oliver notes how government officials are now globally focused on stupid personality issues as a distraction from the complete mess they created.  Ironically, I just watched a Canadian parliamentary session yesterday where the most urgent policy for their assembly was ‘menstrual equity.’  Yes, you read that correctly.  It left me with that same bread and circuses thought as outlined by Oliver today.

Political leaders, not just in the U.K., are snipping and snarking at each other over the most ridiculous issues and personality points.  Do we really care about what kind of car the energy secretary drives and the hypocrisy it may represent?  Is there a purpose to the insufferable banality of it?  Indeed, they want us to move along, move past the issues they created with the pandemic nonsense.

They need us to participate in the great new pretense where consequences are inconsequential, discussion is disinformation.  We are to listen to their square dance music and participate gleefully, while pretending our economic barn isn’t burning down around us.  As the flames spread, we are supposed to ignore and forget the gasoline drums the politicians placed in the loft and just keep dancing….  However, most of us normal folk can’t ignore that it’s getting really hot in here.  WATCH:

(TRANSCRIPT) – “We need some grown-ups in the room – and pronto. As things stand in this country, right this moment, we’re being governed by what appear to be outsized school children intent only on picking fights with one another in the playground, calling each other names.

As far as anyone can tell, the party of government and those of the opposition are interested only in themselves and each other. Life in a goldfish bowl has apparently given them five-minute memory spans. Round and round they swim, seeing nothing beyond the glass and having the same tiny fights with their fellow inmates again, and again, and again.

It’s narcissistic nonsense from a political class that demonstrably feels entitled to treat us proles with out-and-out contempt while they set about the petty business of personal point-scoring. This internecine squabbling is apparently supposed to keep us happy, thrilled by their clever verbal sparring. As if. More than anything else, the carryings on of Johnson, et al take me all the way back to my own days at school – watching the members of the various self-important cliques sniping at one another in hopes of being briefly seen to have come out on top.

Partygate, Cakegate, Beergate, Raynergate, Porngate – it’s one childish tantrum and spat after another. And we’re supposed to care who’s winning. Events on the green benches of the Commons this week just past have been like an episode of 80s comprehensive school drama, Grange Hill.

Zammo got caught in class with a copy of Razzle magazine stuffed down his trousers.

Tricia Yates was in bother again, on account of her skirt not being deemed appropriate for school and serial clown Tucker Jenkins was, as per usual, caught up in one hilarious scrape after another. How we didn’t laugh.

If their antics aren’t from the school playground then it might as well be Carry On Up The Dispatch Box. It’s nothing more or less than embarrassing and to a great extent the joke really is on us – because we give these characters our votes.

Of course – none of it is really funny at all. It’s pathetic, when you get right down to it. And we’re paying for this skit-show.

Sometimes you have to wonder if what we’re seeing – what we’re being treated to as some sort of amateur dramatics slapstick comedy – isn’t deliberate distraction. Feeding us full of popcorn at the circus is hardly an original tactic from MPs who need the peasants to look the other way. History is awash with times when the rulers of this state or that found themselves so out of their depth they had to fall back on the time honoured trick of giving the plebs something else to look at while the fires burned out of control elsewhere.

This country – this world, in fact – is a damned mess now … teetering on the brink of chaos. Here at home our elected representatives have pushed us with the cattle prods of their emergency laws into a swamp of financial ruin. Two years ago they locked us down, deliberately and knowingly bringing the juggernaut of the economy to a stuttering, juddering halt. They sprayed trillions of pounds of fake money, money they didn’t and never will have, in every direction – including straight into the pockets of chums and also right down the drain. Desperate voices cried out that lockdown was madness – guaranteed to cause every kind of harm. But those voices were silenced and our leaders carried right on, ignoring their own rules while force marching the population along a trail of tears to where we are now.

Trust me when I say I know I sound like a broken record on all this – ceaselessly banging away, week after week, about the same old stuff. But the fact remains no one is being held to account for any of it. Far from it – with every day thar passes it seems like more and more people are just too worn down to care anymore. Those decision-makers, who ignored warnings and calls, like the Great Barrington Declaration, for other, better ways of handling the situation, plainly think they’re off the hook.

A court ruled last week that the decision to send elderly patients from hospital to care homes was unlawful – and yet all former Health Secretary Matt Hancock seems intent on doing in the aftermath is pushing his self-serving memoirs to anyone who’ll listen.

Without so much as an acknowledgment of error, or wrongdoing, far less any sort of apology for stubborn disregard of warnings of hellish consequences for millions of silenced, essentially invisible people, those responsible have moved on, leaving the broken unheeded in their wake. And we’re letting them away with it for no better reason but that we’re tired of it all and have been handed, by the same people, even more to worry about instead. No one is more tired of thinking about this stuff, hearing this stuff and talking about this stuff than I am.

But if they think after two years that I will just call it quits, and meekly watch the rubble swept under the carpet, they can think again. For as long as I live I will not forget, far less forgive, this disaster of our leaders’ making.

There’s certainly a palpable desperation to see us us all move on, though.

“Don’t bother about that,” they say, “that’s old news! Bother about this! Look at her legs, check out the porn site on the screen of his mobile phone! Miss, Miss – he ate a cake – and him over there … he drank a bottle of beer!”

All of it shows they felt they had nothing to fear – and just went ahead and did as they saw fit while telling us something entirely different.

You know they call England the Mother of Parliaments? This shaming debacle, this parcel of rogues, hissing and spitting at each other like cats in a sack – this is the bunch we’re supposed to trust to navigate the great ship of state through the storm ahead … and without a doubt there’s a storm coming.

They’re calling it a cost of living crisis, of course, but it sounds more like financial ruin to me. Spiking, spiralling prices for anything and everything. Rising inflation … rising interest rates. Disrupted supply chains … dependence on other people’s energy. Shortages of this, that and the other. Let’s not forget, either, the mental and physical health tsunami for young and old alike. The NHS that was the focus of all efforts – the church that was to be saved at any cost – can’t meet the needs of untold numbers of the sick and dying. Every day, more questions are asked about the safety and efficacy of the vaccines – and with good reason – and yet still they push their concoctions – boosters, jabs for children and babies.

Lockdowns compromised young immune systems, impacted early development, robbed many of their educations … and yet no one is brought to account for any of it. Before long they’ll have the temerity to say we all made our own choices, personal responsibility and all that.

Now there’s war in Europe; talk of nuclear weapons being brought to bear for the first time since Hiroshima and Nagasaki. An energy crisis – caused not by war but by the madness of Net Zero and the lack of reliable domestic energy supply – might soon see the lights going out all over that continent.

Would-be authoritarians are skuttling around laying the foundations of Digital IDs and social credit systems that might create a world of human bondage. Allied with programmable digital currencies controlled by central banks we might be en route for lives in which privacy, let alone personal freedom, are consigned to the dustbin of history.

No matter where you look there’s trouble and strife and more on the way. And what are our lot up to? What are our elected representatives focussing all their attention upon – and thereby trying to focus our attentions too?

A months-old “he said she said” still rumbling on.

Yet more rank hypocrisy from Sir Beer Starmer, who turns out to have downed a few indoors with chums while simultaneously berating the PM for not placing harsh enough restrictions on the lives and loves of the electorate.

Infantile, degrading nonsense about the crossing and uncrossing of a woman’s legs, did she or didn’t she, and whether or not the PM was distracted by the scissoring.

Time out for a tax-payer funded perusal of porn on the green benches of the Commons.

The world is in flux as never before in our lifetimes. Pestilence, War, Famine and Death. The gang’s all here and back in Westminster it’s cake and skirts and Internet porn. Someone’s fiddling, right enough, and coming from somewhere not far away, there’s a smell of smoke.” (link)