I normally have little time for the whackjob conspiracy theorists. Knowing as many civil servants as I do I fully believe that the Government's power for cockup knows no bounds (sorry civil servant friends!). But when you start to see the decisions being made that have been made in recent times, or that have come to light in recent times, it makes me wonder just what on earth is going on.
We have a person who stole a bottle of water from Aldi. Sent to prison. We have a person who made a nasty joke about a footballer on the internet. Sent to prison. We have a person who made a nasty joke about a (presumed) dead little girl on the internet. Sent to prison. We have a man who liked looking at pictures of gay men performing kinky sex acts on each other. Thankfully was in front of a sensible jury, but he had his whole private life splashed across every single newspaper.
And then on the other hand we have a man who has allegedly sexually abused tens, if not hundreds, of little girls. No further action taken against him. Everything hushed up. We have a man who called his partner every name under the sun and systematically beat her and abused her for seven months. Punished by spending a little over one working week picking up litter. A senior public official who stole £30,000 in fraudulent expenses. He was asked to pay it back and no more was said about it.
Either these people have been protected because of who they know (or what they know about who they know), or they have been protected because raping little girls, or stealing taxpayers money, or beating the living crap out of your girlfriend doesn't matter. And I honestly can't decide what's worse. In some ways I hope the whackjob conspiracy theorists are right about funny handshakes, because the alternative- that the people who have appointed themselves as protectors of society- don't give a monkey's about the poor, the weak, the vulnerable. The alternative quite simply is that the self-appointed guardians don't care about guarding those who cannot defend themselves.
The depressing truth is that I don't believe in the conspiracy theories, I believe that the vulnerable are simply ignored in this "democratic" country of ours. They are dismissed when they allege they've been abused, sent packing with a flea in their ear and stories of how they must have liked it really. They have what little income and possessions they have taken from them. And if they lash out in the only way they know how- a bit of petty theft here, a tasteless joke there- then they're locked in a cage in the blinking of an eye. It doesn't matter, they're not really people. Or so say our all-knowing masters.
Maybe I'm getting softer now I'm a father, maybe I've always been a wet lefty liberal (much to the chagrin of my Thatcher-loving mother). But I see what is happening in this country and I really don't like it. Not one little bit. The question is, what do we do about it?
It's easy to slate the Tories- and I do, all the time- but Labour are just as bad, if not worse. It was a Labour government that gave ATOS the contracts with demands to kick people off benefits. It was a Labour government who "reformed" disability benefits by making it harder to get any. It was a Labour government that privatised our hospitals. It was a Labour government who locked people in cages for months despite having no evidence they'd done anything wrong. It was a Labour government who taxed the poor more and the rich less. Labour, the party set up to protect the vulnerable, just carried on the Thatcherite kicking spree. Bizarrely enough, in a lot of ways we can trust the Conservatives more: at least they're honest about screwing the poor and lining their own pockets instead.
So politics is clearly not the solution. I don't just mean votes either. I mean protesting, demonstrating. Labour ignored a million people and turned Iraq into glass anyway. We can't trust them.
Answers on a postcard I think. I'd leave the country and move somewhere else if a) I had a job I could take with me and b) the countries I could move to were any better.
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