All you need is love? I don't think so!

I watched a programme recently about what people considered was the nation's favourite Beatles record. The winner was All You Need Is Love. I was a fan of the Beatles, not a massive fan but I liked them and more importantly I admired them. I admired their passion, their energy and their role as pioneers. However, from my perspective, All You Need Is Love was one of their weaker recordings. I have always thought that Help, Hello Goodbye and Paperback Writer were far more innovative and exciting. I always thought Lady Madonna was a quite brilliant record, and I remember She Loves You which I thought was historical as it ushered in a new era of popular culture and changed music in a similar way to Rock Around The Clock and Elvis. But I suppose that in the end it is all a matter of taste.

However, on one important matter I will take issue with the Beatles and argue that all you need is love is quite wrong. Of course the Beatles did not mean that to be taken literally and my argument is not with them, but with those in our society that do tend to take such things literally and use them as a scapegoat to mask far greater problems. Only someone who is financially comfortable would actually try and argue that all you need is love. For people in poverty love will rarely substitute for a life filled with the stress of day-to-day striving to make ends meet. Life without money is both mind-warping and ugly and will destroy a relationship faster than almost any other factor as it poses stress, tensions, ill-health and arguments and challenges love to the maximum. Poverty destroys individuals, couples, families and communities. It challenges all traditional values. Poverty, and particularly food poverty, has serious consequences for a person's health, both physical and mental. For people reading this from outside the UK I wonder if you are aware that in the UK, the sixth wealthiest nation on the planet, over 13million people live below the poverty line, that in 2014-15 foodbanks fed over 1,100,000 people, 400,000 of whom were children. This is all the direct result of an addiction to free market economics. The US have long been accustomed to their people relying on foodbanks, but Americans are quite indifferent to their neighbour's suffering believing that it is all their own fault. If the Good Samaritan had been an American he would have been denounced for being a commie bastard and that neoliberal poison has now deeply infected the British as well. However, in Britain and the US all that is absolutely unnecessary and there is neither excuse nor reason for this state of affairs, it is a choice.

I am not arguing that people in the UK or the US have rights that other people in the rest of the world do not have, what I am arguing is that in these countries there is absolutely no need imaginable for anyone to go hungry other than the fact that the elite in both Britain and America genuinely believe that anyone who is starving deserves all they get. I continually listen to David Cameron, Tony Blair, George Bush and the rest of their ilk telling me that they are Christians and they wonder why people like me detest religion. If any of these people are Christian then I am the Pope. In the Britain I grew up in no-one suffered from malnutrition except in exceptional circumstances. Today it is becoming quite normal, and is the direct result of quite deliberate policies of a Tory government. Britain is continually being told that we must tighten our belts, there is no extra money available for the NHS, for social security, for education and the police and fire services. This month has seen a ballot with a 98% majority of doctors voting in favour of industrial action, but the government is desperately trying to win a vote in Parliament sanctioning another war. There is no shortage of money for that, for bombs for nuclear weapons etc. The Tories are working on the policy of allowing their own people to die of hunger and poverty, of illness because they won't properly fund the health services, in order to fund killing people in other countries. As the movie said, Death Becomes Them. This is modern neoliberal Christian Britain, and it is what the British voted for because they were well warned by this government what it would do if elected. It would make you sick with shame, but free marketeers and Christians have no shame, they are continually bolstered by their own self-righteousness. This is moral and ethical bankruptcy on a national scale. You have been warned.  

Your Servant
Doktor Kommirat

What did we do to deserve our political class?

As I've written before, Einstein told us that the definition of insanity is to keep doing the same things over and over and expect different results. The Westminster pigsty is in the process of repeating the same imbecility it has perpetrated over Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya and engage in a fruitless campaign of bombing that will produce the opposite of what these geniuses intend. The British Prime Minister is indeed a very stupid man, ignoring the advice of all the experts, including the top military, in his ego driven pursuit of glory and his desire to kill people. A genuinely worthy successor to Mad Tony. This week I have listened to the head of the British army, and the past head of the army telling  us that a bombing campaign will be worse than useless. The two most prominent commentators of Middle Eastern affairs, Patrick Cockburn and Robert Fisk have both supported this assessment, and the House Of Commons Select Committee on Foreign Affairs confirmed it as well, but Ca-moron is blithely proceeding as if they are all on his side, and the warmongering politicos in Westminster cannot wait to bomb Syria back to the dark ages for no discernible purpose other than the fact that this is how they get their thrill.

The really frightening aspect of British politics is the complete absence of any rationality, instead we are bombarded with emotional propaganda that bears little resemblance to reality. To listen to the Westminster sewer we are faced with the greatest problem in history, the biggest ever threat to our way of life and our 'values', bigger than Hitler, than global warming, than the financial crisis etc. indeed Isis has replaced the EU as our greatest threat in the fevered imagination of the Tory brain  and that takes some doing. It is getting beyond ridiculous. You see rationality has no place in a discussion that is purely ideological, and the Tories will never allow facts to penetrate their world view, because in the Tory universe Russia and Assad are actually a far bigger threat to them than Isis will ever be and they would rather see Isis prosper and continue than admit that perhaps Russia and Assad are the lesser of two evils. They really are that stupid and ideologically blinkered. As you all know I have no truck with Labour, but in this instance Jeremy Corbyn is providing far more insight than all of the other neoliberal gangsters put together, including the right-wing gang within his own party. We are preparing to embark on a course of action that is genuinely perilous as it is a knee jerk reaction to make the Tory government look good in the eyes of the Americans, that is the motivation and it has nothing to do with national security and the interests of the British public. You have been warned

Your Servant
Doktor Kommirat

How dare doctors think they are workers?

I was watching a typically moronic BBC reporter asking the head of the British Medical Association if he was not concerned that operations or other medical treatment may be jeopardised if the junior doctors in the UK go on strike next month? Now that the doctors are threatening industrial action they will of course need to be categorised (although not quite so harshly given that they are all middle class bourgeois pillars of the establishment), with the rest of the working scum who dare to seek to protect their conditions of employment against the wise and gifted geniuses of the British elite who are born with a deep innate understanding of what is good for everyone in society, as wreckers, unacceptable disrupters of normality, unappreciative of the luxury of having full-time employment and all the other insults the British heap onto anyone who dares to exercise the right of removing their labour. I doubt if the doctors will actually be accused of terrorism by our wise and wonderful masters, that is a category that is reserved for the working scum who went to comprehensive schools and did not go to university.

This useful BBC idiot asked the doctor about people who may be waiting for important consultations for cancer and how such a scenario surely cannot be acceptable. A very close member of my family was in just a situation when his appointment to discuss his cancer diagnosis was cancelled because of the wedding of Prince William and Kate, two of the biggest and most useless unemployed benefit scrounging parasites imaginable. This gentleman had been diagnosed in November and got his appointment with the consultant in May. The May appointment was cancelled because of the royal wedding and was not rescheduled for another six weeks. This resulted in this person and his family waiting eight months before there was any chance of treatment etc. in the knowledge that there was cancer and all the accompanying stress and anxiety. This however was not disruption, this was not an unacceptable incident, indeed the man with cancer should have been joyous and celebrating what was of course an infinitely more important event in his life than a paltry examination of a deadly disease. This was a royal wedding after all and his consultant would have been guilty of high treason had he not participated in the mandatory public holiday of celebration. Indeed it is surely an act of treason to complain about the cancellation in the first place. It is only an act of treason when you go on strike to protect you working conditions, the conditions of your family and the protection of your industry. That is indeed treason, but doctors are exempt from such criticisms because, well, they are doctors and of course anything remotely concerning the British royal family is above criticism.

I trust that their experience will somehow seep into the consciousness of the medical profession and they may begin to understand miners, train-drivers, refuse collectors etc. and refrain from demonising them when they need to take the kind of action the medical profession feel it is necessary for them to take. What will I ask a doctor if I meet one who is on strike. Well if you read this blog you will know, I will ask him/her what they voted at the last election? It tells you everything you need to know about this government that the medical profession have reached this stage, but it is hard to sympathise with people like them who think that they are entitled to take such action but no-one else is allowed to. However, this action by the doctors is only a start because the Tories are hell bent on destroying the entire welfare state. You have been warned

Your Servant
Doktor Kommirat    

Who says we need an alliance with Russia?

I haven't posted anything for a week because I felt that everyday politics had become a bit unimportant following the terrible events in Paris and I wished to reflect for a bit. One of the striking things I find about the aftermath is how we are suddenly looking to the Russians for a satisfactory solution to the Middle Eastern dilemma. The rhetoric in the UK about all things Russian and the evil Vladimir Putin has taken a rather remarkable U-turn with the Russian President being held up as not such a bad bloke after all, I mean not in the same league as old Uncle Joe Stalin eh? Even Michael Portillo commented how we must form an alliance with the Russians if we are to be successful in defeating Isis. In other words, if you want someone to do the dirty work of actually taking the fight to the enemy who better than the Russians? Maybe old Doktor Kommirat was correct when he warned you that he saw something flawed in the anti-Russian western narrative after all?

As I've commented before, most of the important decisions in politics come down to choices between bad and worse. No-one is saying that Assad in Syria is anything but a seriously nasty piece of work but it has now become obvious that whilst the British government and its useful idiots in the press propagandise about supporting 'moderate' forces in Syria, in reality no such thing exists. It is what I call Kommirat's law that if the British and Americans are supporting anyone you can bet they are supporting the wrong people. The real evil in the Middle East are the Saudis and yet we hold these murderous barbarians up as the good guys and are right now supporting their attempts to eradicate Yemen as a viable state whilst they also continue to supply and finance Isis. I hope you have noticed how no refugees, all of course Arab and Muslim, are welcomed in the richest Arab Muslim state on earth.

I am not a Russian sympathiser, nor despite my blog name am I a communist, but I refuse to be bullied by propaganda and outright lies. I am probably wrong but throughout my life I never bought into the idea that Russia was a threat or had any intention of attacking the UK. I could not see any genuine reason why they would. As far as I am concerned we have Russia to thank for Hitler's defeat. Without diminishing the tremendous contribution of the British armed forces, particularly in such events as the Battle of Britain, the turning points of the Second World War were Stalingrad and Kursk. Hitler effectively lost the war on 22nd June 1941 when he launched Barbarossa. Over 4 million German troops invaded Russia, can you imagine if they had been deployed against us? Anyway, recent events will see a change in British propaganda as we look to the Russians to give the lead in dealing with a genuine threat that has been caused by our own incompetent and stupid foreign policy. As I said, bad and worse, we will have to somehow come to terms with the need to support Assad now which means (whisper it quietly) changing our attitudes towards Iran as well. Is it any wonder that the Conservatives are called the stupid party? You have been warned

Your Servant
Doktor Kommirat

David Cameron makes Ben Carson look like a genius

I genuinely understand how people who read this blog from outside the UK can find it difficult to accept a lot of what I write about the state of British politics and government and not only how incompetent this Conservative administration is, but how out of touch they are and divorced from reality. The British Prime Minister David Cameron is the MP for a constituency in Oxfordshire called Witney and he has written to senior politicians in Oxfordshire county council, the very people he is the elected MP for, to challenge the council not only on the scale and extent of the cuts to front line services such as elderly day care centres, libraries, museums etc. that have been imposed by Oxfordshire county council but also on the necessity for them. This correspondence between Cameron and the council has been made public and the council responded by explaining how it had already cut services by over 40% in the past few years losing 2,800 jobs in the process as a direct result of his own policies, sold off almost all of the property owned by the council and reminded the Prime Minister that using the income from these sales to pay for the council’s running costs “is neither legal, nor sustainable in the long-term since they are one-off receipts”.

Cameron’s letter to the council expressed bemusement at the extent of the cuts because of what he described as “a slight fall in government grants in cash terms”. The leader of the council replied to him that “I cannot accept your description of a drop in funding of £72m or 37% as a ‘slight fall’. In his letter Cameron argues that the cumulative cuts in the council’s budget since 2010 amounts to £204million when in fact it has been £626million, and this is the man who is the member of parliament for this authority. You genuinely could not make this up, it reads like something from PG Wodehouse. Indeed I would argue that Wodehouse's characters are actually more intelligent that Cameron. It is only a year ago that the National Audit Office told us that the government has only a ‘limited understanding’ of what is happening because of their budgetary decisions and now we have graphic evidence of the truth of that statement coming from the Prime Minister in person. Now, for those of you from outwith the UK I have to tell you that Oxfordshire is by far one of the wealthiest parts of the UK. If that is what is happening in Oxfordshire, what do you think it is like for people in places such as Liverpool, Newcastle or Glasgow which are genuinely deprived areas? On top of that, it was announced just this week that local authorities will be required to make a further 30% of cuts to their budgets by 2020. What the Prime Minister's letter demonstrates beyond any doubt is that he is blissfully ignorant of the reality of life within the nation he is Prime Minister for. He does not even have the remotest idea of what is happening within the authority for which he is the member of parliament. I wrote in my last post about Ben Carson, but these revelations make Carson look like Albert Einstein next to this complete imbecile that is the British Prime Minister.

It is an imperative in any system that claims to be democratic that the elected representatives are indeed representative. Modern Britain is about as unrepresentative as is possible. This man comes from an aristocratic elite as do most of his government, educated at private exclusive schools such as Eton and Harrow and Oxford and Cambridge. It is hard to imagine anyone more out of touch than this Westminster parliament given that the opposition parties of Labour and the Liberal Democrats replicate that same demographic. If anyone doubts this unrepresentative picture, then consider the Labour Party. Jeremy Corbyn was elected by 70% of the Labour Party members, but has almost no support within his own members in the Westminster pigsty. Britain is in political crisis that has yet to manifest itself. When the backlash comes from the longsuffering public against this cruel, sneering, arrogant ruling elite remember where you heard it first. You have been warned.

Your Servant
Doktor Kommirat 

Ben Carson is surely a figment of my imagination?

As readers of this blog will know I am very reluctant to comment on other political systems as I realise that as a Brit I have little to brag about my own. The British have some of the most appalling politicians on the planet and we have the distinction of not only electing a Prime Minister whom I consider to be quite insane, but re-elected him twice, even worse, we have David Cameron and Iain Duncan Smith, two people who believe that empathy and compassion are horses running in the Grand National. However, I was watching a programme on the Republican campaign in America to elect a presidential candidate for next years election and was genuinely speechless on the performance of the man that we are being told is the front runner, Ben Carson. If this is indicative of the state of American politics then that poor country is in for real trouble, especially given that, at this time, his greatest challenger is Donald Trump who is definitely a fugitive from the Mack Sennet studios.

Mr Carson made several claims that I found  astonishing, such as the claim that the pyramids were built by the biblical character Joseph to store grain. At first I really believed that this was a spoof programme until I realised that it was quite real. This man obviously works on the supposition that you should never spoil a good theory with such bothersome things as facts. Despite over a hundred years of archaeological and scientific study he is quite happy to pander to the right-wing fundamentalist Christian myths that sustain the Bible Belt and make himself an international laughing stock. However, it was another statement he made that was truly jawdropping, because in his opinion, and he has spent his working life at the top of the medical profession in America, Obamacare is the worse thing to happen to America since slavery. This was an African-American neurosurgeon, a supposedly intelligent person and he actually said that. This is a very good example of someone who is obviously well-schooled, but is just as obviously not very well educated. The proper title of Obamacare is The Affordable Care Act, I mean the clue is in the title, but, in this man's opinion, a system of national insurance, designed to provide a basic and affordable national medical service for even the poorest sections of society is a bigger catastrophe for American society than the First and Second World Wars, a bigger catastrophe than Vietnam, a bigger catastrophe than the 9/11 attacks on the Twin Towers. I raise the fact that Mr Carson is a prominent African-American, because he obviously believes that Obamacare ranks as a greater threat to America than the Ku Klux Klan, than the social problems facing African-Americans that gave rise to the civil rights movement and the emergence of Dr Martin Luther King and the Black Panthers etc. A greater threat than the Iraq war, than the 2008 financial crash, than Prohibition and the rise of the Mafia etc. etc. I could go on but it is not necessary as it is obvious that this person is most definitely not wired properly.    

This would be all very amusing were it not for the fact that he is being taken seriously as a candidate for the highest office on the planet and his lunatic ravings are being enthusiastically applauded by whole sections of the American public, or they were in the programmes I have seen. There is still a year to go before the election and a lot will happen before that, but the American right are definitely off the wall and people like this must surely pose a genuine threat to the rest of the world. We are definitely straying into Doctor Strangelove territory here. You have been warned

Your Servant
Doktor Kommirat 

This Tory government is genuinely dangerous

As I wrote in my last post we have a crisis in politics because of a complete lack of trust in politicians. One of the reasons for this is that most politicians and almost all of the public do not understand what politics is. For most people and particularly politicians, politics is about winning elections and the mechanics of how to win them. I find almost no discussion about the nature of politics, its roles and purpose and the purpose of government. In today's modern world we find that governments not only claim rights, but superior rights to the people who elect them. I continually speak to elected politicians who do not understand their own parties policies on even the most fundamental matters, they are simply party ciphers, doing what they are told by a centralised elite with no concern whatsoever for the rights and welfare of the people who elected them. A debate about the role and functions of government has become one of the most fundamental imperatives facing us today but I have no confidence that it will happen. In the UK we are passively watching a bunch of neoliberal elitists erect an authoritarian political structure that is developing into a totalitarian system and are being repeatedly told that there is no alternative and that what they are doing is 'the right thing to do'.

In Britain we have the deputy Prime Minister in the last government, Nick Clegg, now telling us that, beginning with Mad Tony's criminal clique, not only the public and Parliament, but most of the government were kept in the dark as to the extent of the surveillance that was being illegally carried out by the security services. The citizens of this country really need to sit down and digest what the real implications of this revelation are? Clegg was informed by senior civil servants that only a tiny handful of Cabinet Ministers knew what was happening. Now think about that. In Clegg's estimation that tiny handful was four, but the civil servants knew. Thus, in the so-called democratic United Kingdom at the most, six elected politicians knew what was being done within the country by the most dangerous and criminal, but frighteningly incompetent, elements in government, the people who were responsible for the "intelligence" that was used to justify bombing Iraq back to the dark ages and ushering in the chaos that has resulted in the Middle East and the rise of Isis. These people are spending billions of taxpayers money, operating outside the law, and without the knowledge of the public, Parliament, and the majority of the government. Yet, all this is being done with the full knowledge of the Prime Minister and his inner circle. Is this what you voted for? This is the gang who have just introduced measures that, in the words of the British press will make Britain the most spied upon people in the world. This is not what government is for and, in addition, the British civil service are even more dangerous than the security services and any right thinking government would remove every civil servant in the country and begin from scratch. What is happening in Britain is profoundly disturbing.

The descent into authoritarianism is gaining pace and will accelerate if the UK votes to leave the EU. The future of the UK is quite grim with an increasingly unaccountable government who treat the elected Commons with contempt and a Parliament that treats the electorate with contempt. Democracy is a joke in the UK but in the small part of the democratic system that still works, if we are not vigilant it will disappear altogether. As Edmund Burke warned us, all that it requires for evil to prosper is for good men to do nothing. You have been warned

Your Servant
Doktor Kommirat

Trust me, trust is dead

The fundamental problem with modern politics is the question of trust. There is a vast chasm between the public and the political class and this seems to be the situation in all modern so-called democracies. Just last week in the UK we had the spectacle of the composer Andrew Lloyd Webber flying over from New York for the sole purpose of voting for the government in the House of Lords to prevent their tax credit cuts being voted down. This is one of the richest men in Britain going to all that expense and trouble for the purpose of impoverishing an estimated six million of his fellow citizens. A very working class and down to earth pensioner remarked to me that this is the actions of a nut case, a fanatic with a burning hatred of ordinary people. In another story, a Labour MP introduced a motion in the House of Commons to exempt people who are carers for long-term sick people and who visit them every day, often for long periods of the day, from the heavy parking charges that exist in hospital in England and Wales. The motion would also have exempted the people who work in hospitals from parking charges at their place of work. In England, the government outsourced hospital car parks to private firms who now levy quite swingeing charges for parking at a hospital. These charges also apply to all visitors and the staff who work there. The Scots, who as you all know are far more civilised than Tory voting English barbarians, abolished hospital parking charges years ago. However, true to their hatred of both the NHS and all working people, four Tory MPs filibustered the proposed measure by speaking over it for over four hours and preventing it from being voted on. Thus, long-term carers, nurses, cleaners, doctors etc. will have to continue either paying for the privilege of parking at their place of work or using public transport. Either way they will continue to be financially penalised by their wise and wonderful Tory masters. However, my sympathy for them is somewhat muted because that is what they voted for.

For those of you who are from outside these sorry British Isles, the Prime Minister and several of his colleagues gave categorical assurances before the last election that they would not cut the tax credit system. Thus, both the last two election results were influenced by bare-faced lies. In Britain we are going through a farcical process called the Chilcot Enquiry that is supposedly attempting to get to the truth of the circumstances that took us into war in Iraq. This Enquiry has been going on for seven years now and it is the worst kept secret in the world that it will exonerate Mad Tony and his henchmen regardless of what it uncovers. The referendum on Scottish Independence resulted in the Labour Party being almost wiped out last year because of the ferocious lying propaganda the Scots were subjected to by the Better Together campaign. The Scots turned on all three Westminster parties with a vengeance that has shocked the establishment to the core. The lies and deceit of the Westminster establishment and their quite open hatred of their own people has reached a stage where even the Tory voting English are getting sick of it. We now have the situation where polling data shows that the most popular and most trusted personality in Scotland is the leader of the SNP Nicola Sturgeon. That is the result of the almost total lack of trust in the British establishment, that a politician who will not bend the knee to Westminster outpolls sportspeople, showbusiness personalities etc.

I told you over a year ago that the Labour Party in Scotland will only survive if it divorces from the national organisation. They have finally come to that conclusion themselves, but in Westminster we have a Labour MP, Tristram Hunt, or to give him his proper title, The Honourable Tristram Julian William Hunt, son of Baron Hunt of Chesterton, telling us that Labour will have to be once again led by the top one percent of the British establishment from Oxford and Cambridge for their future survival. How on earth does an upper class imbecile like that ever get elected to any kind of public office? It tells you all you need to know about modern Britain that he would actually say that in public and in the press and get taken seriously. Britain is in a perilous state and it is going to get worse as the campaign for withdrawal from the EU gets under way. The lies and propaganda will reach a pitch previously only seen in Hitler's Germany and the racist foreigner hating English will probably vote to come out. When the campaign gets under way, I invite you all to read the Daily Express and the Daily Mail, I confidently predict you will not believe what you are reading, it will be so bad. You have been warned

Your Servant
Doktor Kommirat