Somewhere Over The Rainbow

Like PiS, the ministers in his cabinet are a motley crew for whom politics was never a calling, but a winning lottery ticket. A special group whose shoe size and IQ invariably correspond, yet like PiS they have a latent talent for tapping into a nation’s basest morals. This has given them a god-like ability over their opposition rivals who can’t lay a glove on them. Labour like Platforma are in a continuous existential drift. Both are like a collection of French philosopher’s staring at a train timetable wondering why their semiotic analysis of deconstruction in the context of phenomenology is perpetually making them miss their connection.

Since 2019, the Conservatives have held an 80-seat majority over the Labour Party, giving Johnson a firm mandate. This victory was won on Brexit. The Conservatives jumped on the back of the most divisive issue in English politics for 200 years, riding the misdirected hatred towards emigrants over the finish line. The last two years have seen a litany of scandals that would have sunk any other PM and his government, not least the coronavirus death toll of 127,500 that remains the highest in Europe. Three times Johnson delayed lockdowns in 2020, and compounded this by the criminal act of planting Covid into nursing homes. His decision to keep UK borders open during peak lockdown, was akin to putting on the air filter during pollution season while keeping the house windows open.

Scandals? Some of Johnson’s best friends are scandals; PPE contracts given to friends of his Ministers. £37bn committed to a test-and-trace programme that never worked. Johnson’s support for Dominic Cummings, his one-time strategist, but now remembered as the man who took an almighty dump on the most important public health policy in a century by going on a sixty mile trip during lockdown. The failure to sack his Ministers after they were found to have broken the ministerial code. His illegal suspension of parliament, eventually overturned as a violation of the core tenets of democratic practice by the supreme court. Siding with Vladimir Putin to suggest that the EU had provoked the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

The Wizard of Oz indeed.

With an impressive sleight of hand, both Johnson and PiS have successfully labeled their foes as anti-family, unpatriotic, urban snobs who think they know what is best for those who live in less exalted circumstances. We, myself especially, blame the feckless, uninspiring Butka, a man who continuously gives the impression during interviews that he has just been tasered. He and his UK clone, the Labour leader Keir Starmer, are as much use ast tits on a bull, and yet both are symptomatic of the real problem in that we inhabit a society that permits someone like Johnson to be prime minister – this after all is a man who refuses to tell the public how many children he has – that allows Morawiecki to be appointed as leader of a country be a lowly member of parliament. A society that allows our votes to be crudely bought. The real problem is our pathetic expectations of what a government should deliver beyond ludicrous nationalist soundbites and glaringly obvious lies.

The truth is that we are selfish and uninspiring ourselves. We want a lot, but offer little. It isn’t only Johnson or anyone in PiS; they are the figureheads of the depths to which we have descended.

Somewhere over the rainbow are two lands and both are populated by tiny, mediocre Munchkins.