NAUSEA

Rarely do you find out something horrible has happened directly these days, or at least that is how it has been with me recently.  I log on to twitter and see a tweet mentioning Charlie Hebbdo or Brussels and slowly the truth begins to emerge. So it was that I heard that an MP had been attacked and, amidst the cacophony of tweets, that she had died. Her murder, on the same day that UKIP launched a poster taken straight from the Nazi playbook c1939. I began to experience a range of symptoms, a visceral sense of my own impotence, rage and a sick heavy feeling in the pit of my stomach. Since that afternoon it has not gone away but has grown into a paralysing feeling of nausea, as I have witnessed  so much that I value and cherish about this country being  trashed.

So I have not witnessed events unfold on the television screen but on social media, on Twitter. This has made it feel more personal and direct. It has also led to considerable  distortions and amplification of feelings of insult, impotence and despair, all feeding the growing sensation of nausea. To watch TV, however, makes it much worse, to see the smiling face of Farage, a man so bereft of morality that he would sell his own parents if it was what it required, demonstrating his ability to turn a profit. Standing now, an inflatable demagogue, declaring, as he is surrounded by a surgeon, army officer, university lecturer, “you have never done a proper job in your lives!” Was there ever such a populist clown? Though this clown was given a hammer and he has used it to wreck the joint.

And what of the now unsmiling Boris Johnson, emerging pale and pensive, his witty repartee now ashes in his mouth as he surveys the monstrous catastrophe of his ‘victory.’ A man who gambled all our futures at the roulette table, and lost, turned, asked for his hat and coat and hailed a cab home. A man so fatuous,  so bereft of a sense of responsibility, that Caligula would surely have hesitated before making him a senator.

My Coat Please

Meanwhile the leader of, what laughingly we must call ‘the opposition,’ hides in a broom cupboard frightened of his own deputy. The central character in a darkly comic farce, ‘The Life of Corbyn.’ The tale of an obscure backbench MP who comes to believe he is the socialist messiah. 

He is now held prisoner by the cult that he created. “What shall we do oh Corbyn,” they cry. “Help him build socialism,” comes the reply from his comrade, McDonnell, holed up with the master, for Corbyn now stares vacantly into the distance bereft, not having had a new idea since 1979. He now dreams of ending it like Allende cut down in a hail of no confidence votes, call to arms clutched in his hand.

The Life of Corbyn 

It has taken years to come to this, years of tabloid hatred, years of politicians playing to the gallery, of undeliverable promises. Years of a far left that grew to despise the white working class and became fellow travellers of theocratic fascism. We now face the revenge of this despised class, though it is they who will ultimately pick up the tab for the damage wrought.

So a period that began with the murder of an honourable and idealistic politician ends with the victory of dishonourable ones, charlatans, bigots, demagogues, opportunists and chancers.

And so the country drifts, leaderless, rudderless, unanchored toward the rocks, already at risk of breaking up in the growing storm. I feel nauseous, seasick.

Goodbye the UK was great to have known you.