So 2020, eh? What a shit year! I haven't felt a what-the-fuck-was-that reaction like that since Westlife released their debut album in 1999 and I was subsequently forced to listen to it on repeat play for weeks on end (don't ask).
Anyways, before we go any further, I must congratulate everyone who managed to survive the Tory government this year. That was quite a feat.
These Tory fuckers really have done their damnedest to cut the benefits bill by letting as many of our citizens die as possible. In a spectacular display of sheer audacity, they even tried starving the school kids - and next year, Priti Patel plans to reinstate the death penalty. Pretty sure that's to execute lefties, rather than children, and anyone who's not productive enough in the workhouses coming soon to a working class town near you. Probably.
So yeah, where do we even begin with this shit year?
How about the beginning, when we were still reeling from Blue Labour's devastating election victory over their own fucking party. Let's make no mistake, it was Sir Keith Starmer and his neoliberal buddies who slammed our most vulnerable citizens into Boris Johnson's twisted version of this Tory nightmare.
Jeremy Corbyn had the nerve to almost become Prime Minister, not just in 2017, but also 2019 when May's Brexit deal fell flat on its arse, and Blue Labour punished him by ensuring their own supporters had another five years of Tory rule. Utter cnuts.
January 2020 was a month I mostly spent away from social media, kind of in a daze, wondering where the hell we on the left even go from here. Defeat was unthinkable because we knew it meant more good people dying, and we weren't fucking wrong, were we? But I don't think any of us, even in our worst nightmares, thought things would get this bad.
I remember hearing about the scary coronavirus emerging in China, and at the time, I thought it was just the bird/swine flu situation all over again. I honestly thought it would blow over quickly, but here's where I differed from our complacent Tory government: I paid attention to the science and soon began to realise I was wrong. The scientists quickly identified how contagious and dangerous this thing was, and they warned us to stock up on PPE, ventilators, etc. Also, let's not forget a government report from a couple of years ago found we were woefully unprepared for the next pandemic, which was always an inevitability.
A pandemic was one of the biggest threats to national security and the government knew it.
But the Tories, who love to bang on about national security, decided not to take national security seriously at all. They went with more austerity, even in the face of the biggest threat to our nation since the rise of the Nazis. You see, Tories only care about national security if it means bombing brown people to steal their resources and make profit. They don't give a fuck about the kind of security response that costs them money and in all honesty, they'd rather we paid with our lives.
Our national security is a business to the Tories. Our very safety has been commodified.
And what makes all this even worse is the brass neck of these fuckers. When Iran's leaders were getting infected, they were using this as proof positive that Iran is a banana republic with a leadership that needs to be overthrown. When Italy was in crisis and under lockdown, they openly mocked them and sneered at how bad they let things get over there. All the while, our scientists were saying we were three weeks behind, and that if we didn't lockdown immediately, we would be hit as hard, if not harder than Italy, Spain, and other countries that were struggling.
The Tories had clear warning and they had an international scientific consensus that immediate lockdown was necessary. So what did they do? Allow the Cheltenham Festival to go ahead and welcome thousands of football fans into Liverpool from Madrid, knowing it was one of the worst hit cities in Europe. Meanwhile, they weren't even bothering to stock up on PPE and ventilators.
At best, you could say this chaos came about because the Tories didn't want to dip into their pockets. At worst, you could say this was a fantastic opportunity to slash the benefits bill, by culling citizens who were not useful to capitalism. This was a virus disproportionately affecting the elderly, frail, disabled, and the impoverished. And who gives a fuck about a socialist city like Liverpool in the north of England? Not Johnson, I reckon.
Remember the words "take it on the chin" from the Prime Minister when speaking to Phil and Holly on This Morning? Yes, our prime minister actually told us to take a pandemic on the chin. He got way with it though, because when he wasn't lazing on a beach in Mustique or dodging Cobra meetings or banging one of his mistresses or having a fake baby the size of a teenager or hiding in fridges, he was getting infected with Covid-19 to gain public sympathy.
Imagine fucking up at work so badly you actually kill thousands of people, but you shoot yourself in the foot in the process and say "poor me." That's Boris Johnson.
Now, how about that chilling phrase "herd immunity" from Dominic Cummings, which was met with horror from the government's own SAGE scientists. And let's not forget Cummings had no business whatsoever being at those SAGE meetings, let alone playing a role in decision making. He had no scientific background and he was not even a government minister. It's fair to say the Tories could not have made a worse choice, if they'd put Dr Mengele in charge of this shit.
The infection and mortality rates were public knowledge at this point and people were calculating herd immunity meant in excess of 500,000 people dying. Oh, how we were mocked, even as scientists backed up our concerns. And then the pandemic hit our shores...
I'd been toying with the idea of pulling the kids out of school, and made the decision to do that on Friday 13th March when, as luck would have it, we all got infected. The kids expectedly shrugged the coronavirus off, but not me - nine months of long Covid and counting - that's breathlessness, fatigue, and strange reactions to foods I used to be able to eat without problem.
20% of the infected go on to experience long Covid, and we might never be the same again, but our pain is clearly worth it, as long as Julia Hartley-Brewer doesn't have to stay indoors. Blitz spirit and all that.
Obviously, the infection numbers skyrocketed in March and the government realised they could no longer get away with ignoring science, so we locked down. That was quite nice actually, apart from being really tragic and terrifying. I got to sit in my garden and enjoy rare sunshine as a lack of cars on the road cleared our skies. It was so tranquil and poignant, just sitting and pondering the collapse of modern society. I remember thinking I hope capitalism never recovers - that's definitely one casualty I would gladly accept. But those Tory bastards were never going to give us Universal Basic Income and build a society around need, rather than want, no matter what.
It wasn't long until the Tories furiously denied herd immunity was ever their policy, and that it honestly wasn't their fault health workers were wearing PPE that was five years out of date and didn't fucking work. Imagine sending soldiers into battle without rifles during World War 2. That's what the bastard Tories did to our health workers during the pandemic. How did they ever get away with this shit? How does Boris Johnson still have a job after this scandal? How isn't he in prison?
As if the Tories weren't already taking the piss, Dominic Cummings decided to breach his own lockdown rules to drive across the country and stay at a cottage on his parents' farm, then test his failing eyesight by driving to Barnard Castle while sick from Covid with his children in the back. His family even got out the car and had a walk while they were sick - they actually chose to cause a super-spreader event so they could see a tourist attraction! Anyone else would've got a massive fine and been sacked from their job, but not Dominic. He was being a good parent, apparently, by risking his children's, and the public's, lives. My God.
But it gets better.
Journalist Alex Tiffin conducted an investigation and broke the story that the cottage on the Cummings' farm lacked planning permission and was overdue about £30,000-£50,000 in council tax. It was the scoop of the year, and yet when the mainstream media jumped on the story, they decided not to bother giving Alex credit. Even worse, Cummings' council tax bill was written off by the government! They gave tens of thousands of pounds to one of their mates for no reason whatsoever, but they've made a habit of that, this year. If that cottage belonged to an ordinary person, it would have faced a demolition order, but the rules don't apply to the Tories. They never have.
At this point, the Tories decided to start treating the pandemic as a free-for-all and hand out contracts to companies with no expertise in a particular field, often without tender, while paying way over the odds. Remember when they asked Dyson to start building ventilators, despite their complete lack of expertise in that field? And who can forget how they handed over £12 billion to Serco to build a test and trace app, under the watch of the woeful Dido Harding. Ireland paid £870,000 for their app and it actually worked. Ours didn't work, and we ended up with a much higher death toll as a result - even Northern Ireland which shares the same landmass as the Republic of Ireland was hit much harder.
While the Tories were fleecing the tax-payer and spending twenty times more money than the "unaffordable" Labour manifesto would've cost, and getting nothing to show for it, apart from failure and death, they decided they wouldn't feed the kids during the school holidays. These kids being the children of families expected to survive on less than minimum wage in a pandemic.
Step forward the leader of the opposition.
No, not Keith! That useless dickhead was too busy agreeing with the Tories, and insulting Black Lives Matter as they toppled slaver statues, and siding with the racist bullies in his party, and risking bankrupting Labour while paying off Panorama "whistle blowers," even though his lawyers said they would likely win the court case. No wonder 60,000 people have walked out of the Labour Party - its leadership fucking hates them.
The real leader of the opposition is actually Marcus Rashford MBE who was honoured by the Queen for taking the same position Jeremy Corbyn was vilified for. He demanded we feed the kids. He used his huge platform to speak out and gained public support by remembering his roots and campaigning for the kids growing up in the same struggle he was fortunate enough to escape.
Marcus Rashford is the best kind of rich person - the kind who actually gives a shit. Scientists have confirmed there are only about four of his kind in the entire world so we really should treasure him. If I had my way, he would be prime minister, but our dumb electorate only votes for people who despise them. Go figure.
Lockdown thankfully helped us get the infection rate under control, albeit at massive human cost. We have the worst death toll in Europe at 83,000 excess deaths, despite having had the longest warning and best information on how to act.
Thankfully, we have leading epidemiologists like Denise Welch acting like we can just go back to normal now. Denise has been one of the true victims in this pandemic because she's had to stay indoors so her fellow countrymen and women don't die agonising deaths. Poor Denise.
One of the more hilarious aspects of this whole mess was how anti-maskers and conspiracy theorists who've been terrified of staying indoors, have kept banging on about "blitz spirit". We used to send men into the trenches and tell them to walk through minefields with bullets flying towards them.
You snowflakes would've switched the lights on during blackout because your freedom mattered more than your compatriots being blown to pieces. Fucking blitz spirit? You lot invited the Nazis into our country and pointed them to your neighbours. It's just in this case the Nazis came in the form of a virus.
On a happier note, July saw our friend and comrade Jane Heybroek defeat Rachel Riley and Tracy-Ann Oberman in court, after the pair had sued Jane for libel. They agreed to settle the case and pay a substantial sum towards Jane's costs, showing that not everyone on the left gets priced out of justice. This was incidentally our biggest news story of the year and it cheered me up no end. You can read more here.
So, during a period of madness when one of our princes was fending off paedophilia claims and the Tories were doing their level best to do everything wrong, Sir Keith Starmer was broadly agreeing with them while focusing on the real enemy - socialists. He was purging socialists from the socialist Labour Party, kicking the Labour leaks report into the long grass, and suspending the previous leader and most decent human being in the country, Jeremy Corbyn. All the while, he was taking the worst possible positions on those rare occasions when he chose not to sit on the fence.
Who could forget Starmer insisting he wanted children to return to school in September, "no ifs, not buts" when every creature more sentient than an amoeba knew this was not a good idea? Fast forward three months and Starmer was aghast we had to cancel Christmas due to the second wave he helped usher in! The man really is a danger. This is the same fellow who abstained on bills which violated our human rights, like the infamous "spy cops bill", knowing it gave police the right to not only spy on us, but break the law with impunity.
Starmer couldn't possibly have voted against such a bill because he wanted to win back "trust". The trust of who? Fascists? Sociopaths? Rupert Murdoch?
Come the end of the year, Starmer was all set to not abstain for a change! Hilariously, he whipped his MPs to vote for a 1200-page hard-Brexit bill he couldn't possibly have read properly. Twelve months ago, People's Vote was so important to Starmer, he was willing to jeopardise Labour's general election chances, and when the opportunity arose to get his stupid PV, he and the Liberal Democrats decided they couldn't possibly make Jeremy Corbyn interim PM to accomplish this. He screwed the FBPE cult over then, and he's screwing them over now.
And today, we're seeing queues of trucks tens of miles long at Dover as France closes its borders to us idiots on Plague Island. This is only the start as well. Expect things to get so much worse.
For four years, FBPE told us remaining in the EU came before anything else. Now their leader has voted for a hard Brexit Jeremy Corbyn could and would have prevented. They had the nerve to call Corbyn a Brexiteer, even though he didn't vote for the bill because it didn't satisfy Labour's six tests. But Starmer dropped those six tests just as easily as he dropped his ten pledges, and the result is FBPE are all inadvertent Brexiteers now. Oh the irony!
What this mess means is we can expect a 2021 which should be even worse than 2020. A Brexit-Covid apocalypse with food shortages and mass unemployment in a fascist police state. But at least Starmer's lot stopped Jeremy Corbyn, eh?
Do you plan to specialise in rat catching or pigeon trapping next year? Or will you just starve?
Our single ray of light, our only hope is Jeremy Corbyn's Peace and Justice Project, and we owe it to ourselves to turn that into a Peace and Justice Party in 2021. Corbyn has said that's not in his plans, but just wait until Starmer expels him from Labour and the mass walkouts go to the next level.
We've seen the Jeremy Corbyn legal fund raise incredible sums this year when he was facing the threat of libel action, and we've seen tremendous excitement about his most recent project. The public appetite for Corbyn to act is incredible. And if he no longer feels up to the long-term fight, he can at least set the ball rolling and make way for a new leader in a year or two. We just need that figurehead to get started, that person who can attract members in their hundreds of thousands.
We on the left have one hell of a fight on our hands and we desperately need a rallying point. The Peace and Justice Party could well be it.
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email: r.d.hale@outlook.com
