The Worst Title for a Book, Ever?

There is a quote attributed to Alan Erasmus, the lesser know and much missed business partner of the equally missed Anthony H Wilson of, the twice bankrupted, Factory Records. Known for creating entire genres of music and responsible for some of the most beautiful album covers ever made. That quote was…

“We never knowingly made a decision that made money”

I think that I may have picked that up by osmosis somehow; particularly with the title of my new book.

I have spent fourteen months working on this book, getting to the point that you can now buy it and all the while I was asked what I would be calling it. When asked for a title for anything, I usually say a random name, ( this could just as easily have been called ‘Burt’ or “Wendy” if I had my way. My response back last year was “I dunno!” And then I realised that it wasn’t actually a bad idea.

Just think of all those people being asked what they want for Christmas or their birthday and their response is “I don’t know!” well, they can now have exactly what they wished for! Lucky people!

I suppose I better actually plug my book, though (see above Factory Records comment).

It started as one painting to hang above my bed in my, then, new home. I wanted something timeless, something recognisable but not so much so that people forget to look at it; as they do with most art. Most of the classic artworks annoyed me though, they were either misogynistic or irked me in some way or another. I settled for a version of Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus but with more clothes, but I had mentally prepared a shortlist of other works that were then stuck in my head and fighting to get out. I ended up going down an autistic rabbit hole and looked up months later and realised that I had started a new book.

I have always loved winding up therapists and psychologists by pointing out which of the nondescript prints that adorn their counselling rooms were made by artists that killed themselves, or murdered someone or were about as stable as chipboard furniture left out in the rain, there aren’t many perks in the “Hons” bit of your BA Hons being Art History so it’s nice to use that otherwise wasted knowledge for something. I did actually pay attention in my Art History lectures and even got a first in my dissertation and I love finding out about art and artists and their motivations for doing what they do. So it made perfect sense to accompany these paintings with some background on the art and the artists behind them.

This collection of my interpretations of well known art is available from today from my Etsy shop and next week from my loyal stockist, Walrus & Oyster near Canterbury Cathedral.

What an Uta fool!

I feel annoyed that I’m having to write this as I am quite ill right now and I have too much on my plate already. If this seems a bit rambling, it’s because I won’t be going over it numerous times. Also, there are people going into this in far more depth than I shall.

84 year old academic and emeritus (read long retired) professor Uta Frith has just been interviewed for a publication that I’m not going to name or add a link to because I don’t want to add to their web traffic. I’m not going to repeat what she said either as I don’t want it being taken out of context or selectively skimmed by AI. What I will say is this. I’m 55 years old with now diagnosed autism and ADHD, also known as AuDHD. My brain is basically the equivalent of a boy racer doing doughnuts in a car park in his mum’s ford fiesta shortly before they get their ear chewed off for burning the tires down to metal. Part of my head is whirring away at speed whilst the other part is wanting to stop completely because everything is simply too much. It took decades of misdiagnosis with mental health issues to get this knowledge and by which point my life had been destroyed and I am left mourning what is left with no children, no thriving career and zero security. Yet if Uta had her way, she would be dismissing my train wreck of a life in a flurry of outdated psychological terminology.

At 55 I am already feeling like much of the world bemuses me and I have the grace not to pretend to be ‘down with the kids’ or to get involved in anything that would make the younger generations cringe. I remember painfully trying to explain to my late mother who was then in her seventies how to access channel ten on her television remote as she had grown up with three channels on the tv and her pressing ‘one’ followed by ‘zero’ quickly sent us both into fits of apoplexy. There comes a time for all of us when we need to quietly take a step back and that goes more for pilots, doctors and judges than anyone else as outdated ideas and cognitive decline can cause havoc to others as did my mum’s stock car rally driving before she was forced to give up in her late eighties.

Uta Frith is 84; and while she seems perfectly cogent in recent footage of her, her ideas are riddled with holes that you could comfortable sail an oil tanker through. The work she was associated with in the 1980’s regarding autistic people and theory of mind is now regarded as problematic and dangerously outdated by many in her field. She comes from an academic background that was heavily guarded and pier reviewed by people who were equally stumbling in the dark. This was a pre internet environment where Hans Asperger, one of the leading thinkers on autism had put their name to the death orders of their test subjects and the other, Leo Canner, sincerely believed that autism was caused by having a cold and distant, refrigerator, mother. Thankfully, the world has moved on since those dark days but I can’t help but feel that Frith can only move so far given her background and ideas intrenched during her early career.

It is clear that no one has significantly challenged Frith on the nonsense she is spouting now and it touches on the dangerous reliance on empirical proof that was used by the tobacco industry to avoid links to lung cancer for decades. I get the impression that these recent monologues were done by people who either wished to use her narrative to reinforce an idea that they already believed or had insufficient knowledge on the subject themselves and didn’t spot the dangerous ideas that clearly needed to be rigorously pushed back on.

The context of Uta’s words are particularly alarming as she has links to a British institution and the current iteration of the neoliberal uniparty is seeking to cut funding both for special educational needs support in schools and for welfare payments for neurodiverse adults. I can’t help but feel that her outdated to the point of embarrassment ideas will be picked up and used to target some of the most vulnerable in the UK.

It is worth noting that last time I checked, unemployment amongst the neurodiverse was at over eighty percent and the incidents of suicide, self harm and street homelessness are much higher than the general population. To have someone who once had an important role in the study of autism come out repeating such garbage is very harmful to the autistic community and while I would like to put it down to the naivety of someone who spent their entire life in academia and doesn’t understand either politics or the concept of manufactured consent, it seems pretty close to looking like malice.

Using unaware academics is not a new thing; as Friedrich Nietzsche sat catatonic in a syphilitic induced form of dementia in his last days, countless fascists turned up for photo opportunities after misreading many of his concepts and turning him into their idol. There is a point when someone should have stepped away from public life before everything positive they did is erased and, sadly, for Uta Frith it should have been a few years ago.

A New Hope?

Like many people with AuDHD, my flat is strewn with virtually empty sketchbooks; each with a few words scribbled in them to intimate a grand project that never happened. One of these notebooks has the word ‘Hope’ penciled on the front and is accompanied by a sketchbook full of ideas for artworks based on the word and everything that it represents… I think it has sat there for six months now, long before Zack Polanski started talking about it; but it is down to him, Hannah Spencer and a whole team of brave and determined people to make me want to pick it up again.

Anyone aware of my book, Gruel Britannia might have an inkling of what I have been through since austerity began and as Mandelson gets hauled off by the police and McSweeny starts scrolling through jobs I can’t help but feel slightly smug at being proved right yet again. Sadly, my Cassandra complex has never helped me buy a moment of security or peace of mind in this train wreck of a nation.

As someone who comes from a family of plumbers and has lit many a cigarette off a blow torch in my youth, I find the idea of a ‘real’ person becoming an MP rather refreshing. If we can have a few less PPE graduates and ex special advisors and few more people who know what it’s like to deal with the mind boggling welfare system or come home with dirt under their fingernails and are too tired to undo the laces on their boots once they’ve sat down at night, we might have political choices for the 99% rather than a handful of multi millionaires and billionaires and this country might be less rotten.

Whilst Hannah might only be one more MP and she brings the total for the Greens up from four to five, the voting statistics send a sign to our neoliberal Labour (in name only) party that they are haemorrhaging support from the left. When Keir Starmer announced in 2023 that the door was open and that anyone who disagreed with his rightward lurch could leave, I’m sure he felt ever so big and clever… Those words and his faction’s talk of “shaking off the fleas” is coming back to haunt him in the most painful way possible.

So, I guess I better put my money where my mouth is now, or rather dust off this sketchbook that hints at unfilled promise. Let’s see what happens next. There is the faintest of hopes now that it might be something good for a change.

What doesn’t kill you…

I’ve been a bit quiet on here recently. It’s not that I haven’t had anything to say; it’s more that I have been reluctant to contribute any more to the relentless sea of human noise that is the internet in the era of AI. That said, today’s entry in my personal , paper and fountain pen journal probably deserved a wider market than just gathering dust until some house clearance operative dumps it in a skip one day with the rest of my life’s work.

I’ve been trying to work out which of the many terrible things that have happened this year was the worst as I still don’t know. I was going to make a joke about my ‘annus horribilis’ but it sounds better when spoken than in print. I’ve had a number of annus horribilises recently and after this last one, I’m looking at 2026 in fear, wondering if this is all turning into decennium horribilis; which has no comedy value at all. This year has been despicable both personally and politically from the very start. The stress of going through yet more government bureaucracy left me so battered that ended up in Accident and Emergency at my local hospital with a whole raft of follow up tests and scans that took up the bulk of the year. It was while trying to recover from this that the Labour (in name only) Party showed their true blue colours and announced their intent to attack Britain’s sick and disabled in ways that sunk below the worst of fourteen years of prior Tory austerity. I cynically got a book out about this situation as I needed to feel that I was adding to the fight against the Labour Party’s betrayal for my own peace of mind (with a touch of petty vengeance on the side). They were forced to backtrack somewhat to much humiliation but I don’t think the general public realise that the situation isn’t over. Labour are just biding their time and finding ways to magically ‘cure’ those with debilitating mental health and neurodiversity issues under the old chestnut of ‘work will set you free’… Yep! The Labour Party are actually going THERE!

When Friedrich  Nietzsche wrote ‘what doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger’ he was wrong… In my experience , what doesn’t kill you, scars you for life and makes you vulnerable for the next attack.

It’s New Year’s Eve 2025 and I am huddled by the oil filled radiator in pain from sleeping in a cold a draughty room and struggling to breath as my COPD has left me with the lung capacity of someone thirty years older. I have only just recovered from the side-effects of a raft of antibiotics for a lung problem and a year of physical neglect that had manifested as numerous skin conditions…. I have also realised that I haven’t spoken to another living soul for five days as being single and childless, I have, understandably, dropped off everyone’s radar.

There is another reason I haven’t spoken to anyone; and in a low key way, it is probably the worst part of the year sneaking in there right at the end when I wasn’t paying attention. It doesn’t have the drama of the Judas scaled betrayal of the Labour Party on the British working class, but in its own, smaller, more personal, way, it is far far worse or indeed will be when I finally have the mental capacity to process it properly. My brother has rapidly slipped into dementia. What a month ago was just ‘getting a bit forgetful’ has become a permanent need to be housed in a care home and family politics mean that I will probably never get to talk to him again. Like many people with autism, I have a thing called alexithymia. This means that I struggle to process certain feelings or physical sensations properly… I suspect I haven’t felt this yet. I miss the five minute chat every morning. We didn’t have much in common, but he was (is) family and that meant something. Now there is a very obvious void in my life that I have yet to process in any meaningful way.

I guess if I scratch around, I can come up with some positive for this past year. I did a whole pile of paintings; some of which I don’t hate. I got a piece in a prominent show. I made a whole ton of stuff of various descriptions but in a failing neoliberal society that places zero value on kindness, creativity or self development without a monetary figure attached, my life and by extension myself can be regarded as a colossal failure.

Looking forward to 2026, I am finding it hard to see anything in my future except for more of the same but worse. Declining health to mirror the decline of the country in general.

There is some positivity amidst all this doom and gloom above. There are a couple of art projects that I have been tinkering with for a while. I don’t want to ever temp fate but if I can get through these next few winter months unscathed, I may have something to put out in the world next year.

I’m far too exhausted and ill to tie this up in a better manner, so that’s it for now.

Look at what you made me do!

Well my new book is out! If by ‘out’ you mean up on etsy or available to the few people who I allow to contact me… Such is trying to ‘do’ capitalism whilst being massively autistic.

I never wanted to make this book, I wanted to cheerfully plug my iconic art book and generally live my best life. But it turned out Britain had gone and elected yet another bunch of austerity driven ghouls and; here I am! Writing and illustrating human misery yet again. For the older readers, I am rapidly turning into a bargain basement Bob Geldof; someone whose creativity is being overshadowed by a perpetual need to rage against injustice when what I want is to sit by the sea and drink coffee from my favourite yellow thermos and daydream about what mad crap I plan to paint next.

Anyway, it’s done! According to the media, barring something even more insane than usual in UK politics, I may have been spared from the latest government cull; although I will need to read the small print in a few months time to see if there is a devil in that detail that finally sends my world crashing down around me. These are only ever reprieves though as who knows what future and steadily more right wing governments hold for the likes of me.

Anyway, it’s there, buy one if you like but I have to warn you; It ain’t much fun.

You can buy Gruel Britannia via my etsy store along with much nicer stuff.

Not quite the Shawshank Redemption

Life has not been much fun of late. I have discovered that there is one thing worse than being disabled and the wrong kind of sick in a country that is trying to intentionally impoverish you and that is writing and illustrating a book about said atrocities at the same time.

Like any occasion in history when a government slides towards fascism, it is very tempting to wear a blindfold, stick your fingers in your ears and go “la, la, la” and pray that it will miraculously go away… But it never does. Granted, if you happen to be able bodied, straight, white and can track your genealogy back a good few generations you have nothing to fear… yet, but for those like myself that aren’t perfectly formed cogs for the capitalist machine, things are getting very scary in the UK right now. That is why I made the decision to face the situation head on.

I have been experiencing an odd sense adjacent to calm for the last few days as I finally sent the first draft of “Gruel Britannia” off to the printers to get some sample copies. The way my brain works (or doesn’t) I need to see a real version of whatever I am working on for all the mistakes to jump out at me. this has meant that for a blessed week I have been stuck in limbo while a physical copy was printed and bound and then made its way back to me it the post.

And now it’s back; and I have to deal with it again; and I really don’t want to.

When you write and illustrate a book on austerity and how it’s destroyed your life and ruined your country it feels like the grimmest part of the Shawshank Redemption where Andy crawls to freedom through a sewer full of shit. Except that for myself and at least 1.3 million other disabled people, there is not freedom at the end of the tunnel; just even more shit.

I have spent months now, buried in the most horrific of statistics about misery and death caused by my own government, spending day after day drawing and cross-hatching monsters who would not look out of place goose-stepping around in jackboots in Auschwitz or Bergen Belsen , all the while contemplating just how long I will be able to survive in this country when the cuts start… Suffice to say, this is not good for my mental or physical health and it is taking a terrible toll on my mind and body.

The only reason that I am putting myself through this is “the almost child-like sense of justice” as quoted from the first “are you autistic?” book I read. Someone needs to document these crimes against humanity in the hope that at some point in the future, the monsters perpetrating this all out assault on the British disabled will be made to feel, if not true justice, then at least a modicum of shame for their actions. They never do though.

I figure that I can push it another few days before I pick up Gruel Britannia again and start the grim task of reading through it and making necessary corrections. But for a couple of days at least, I will pretend that it doesn’t exist.

Because I’m worthless.

It seems that in terms of Britain’s new government, I have committed the worst of sins… I am ‘Economically Inactive’. Being disabled by a dodgy heart, knackered lungs and the wrong kind of autism that makes me hopeless at tech and maths and brilliant at being utterly bemused and even terrified by the world, I am neither use nor ornament in the beancounter terms of my toxic neoliberal government. As the Labour party schemes to rob vital support from the sick and long term disabled, an older definition than ‘economically inactive’ springs to mind; that of ‘useless eaters’ which became popular in 1930’s Germany.

I am a naturally stubborn person and I suspect that it is the only thing that has kept me alive for as long as I’ve lived so far and when politicians start to question the worth of those like myself, my instant response is to question theirs instead. Take my local MP for example; she signed a letter cheerleading the head of the Department of Work and Pensions on in her ‘moral’ crusade to take money from the disabled. If that wasn’t enough, she has publicity photos of herself taken in local food banks. What kind of person would do that? If I were part of a political party that was actively keeping its citizens in poverty through their choices, I would not want to be associated with that level of poverty. In a right and sane world, the only time a ruling politician should visit a food bank would be to close the wretched place down because it was no longer needed. The fact that they exist is a sign of abject failure. My MP gets paid £93,000 make such morally bankrupt choices and in terms of the value structure of the UK she is ‘worth’ so much more than I… That’s pretty twisted isn’t it?

This notion of value becomes even more unfathomable when you look those higher up the political food chain, like the aforementioned Liz Kendall. What kind of human would spend years of their life vying for the position of the head of the DWP? An institution that according to the tireless research of John Pring is responsible for the deaths of many of those that it should have been protecting. A kinder person than I would want to ask Kendall “who hurt her?” and try and understand what has distorted her internal values to the point where she wants to take vital financial support from 1.3 million disabled people. Personally, I don’t care. What I wish for Kendall, Reeves, Starmer and my local MP is for karma to royally smite them in ways that are fitting to the misery they are willing to inflict on others. I have to add, for legal reasons that I have no intention to aid in said karmic backlash in any way but it wouldn’t stop me having a good old chuckle at any that arrives. As to their value though… Well, from my point of view, politicians that set themselves above others and then proceed to make laws that actively harm the disabled are utterly worthless. While they might have the power to make someone like myself poor, homeless or even dead, in the value systems of myself and my friends they are the human equivalent of black holes that suck the life and love out of the world. And I haven’t even started to their complicity in the atrocities going on in Gaza right now.

It takes a special kind of monster to be in politics right now. It mostly attracts those that want power for no other reason than its own sake and that of the money it will bring. For someone like myself, even the thought of wanting that power is horrific and it seems to me that those in charge of the country right now are exactly those who should be farthest from it.

I’m sad to say, that Britain is truly broken, as are those that are running it. I hope one day that a few more people decide to speak up to the wrongness of this country but until things reach a tipping point, those like myself will be constantly under threat and at the mercy of politicians that are truly the least amongst us.

What is worth defending?

The British government is planning to spend billions on ‘defence’ with a vast amount of the funding being directly taken from the budget earmarked for supporting the sick and disabled. The justifications for both choices are thinner than cheap toilet paper and just as unpleasant and as Starmer, Reeves and Kendall use wording that was once attached to swasticas and jackboots to take vital funding from those in most need, that money will be handed to those that need it the least, namely the shadowy figures that inhabit the arms trade.

I have written at length about this neoliberal Labour party’s victimisation previously, but today I want to ask a very simple question… What exactly are we defending?

If you listen to the bulk of Britain’s political and media class, you could be forgiven for thinking that we are a major player on the world stage; to everyone everywhere else though, we are seen as, at best, irrelevant but mostly as a bit of a joke.

I have been scratching my head and asking around and I can’t find a single valid, tactical, reason for anyone to invade the United Kingdom. Land-wise, it has a very small footprint with much of it uninhabitable or unfarmable, particularly as global warming has messed up the growing seasons. In terms of natural resources, our coal fields are dead, our natural gas is on the way out and our steel industry has been in managed decline since the 1970’s. Much of our industry has gone and we are losing the generation that could remember how much of the machinery worked. Given the decline of our natural resources and our ability to turn them into anything, my question is this? What on earth could anyone gain from attacking the UK? What could anyone want so badly that they would risk the lives of their population to get it?

After much thought and a great deal of asking around, I have found precisely two things that are left in Britain that are uniquely ours and they are Marmite and a decent cup of tea. That isn’t much is it? For those outside of Britain, Marmite is a salty, yeasty, gooey substances that is left over from the beer brewing process… It’s nice to many and equally hated by others but whatever your opinion of it, it’s not worth waging a war over.

When I see Kier Starmer’s lardy physique dressed in camouflage I don’t know whether to laugh or grind my teeth in fury. It doesn’t take much in the way of brains to work out that his involvement in Ukraine is nothing but an attempt to ape Thatcher’s Falklands bounce of the 1980’s and try and make people see him as a great statesman rather than a feeble puppet doing the bidding of his billionaire donors.

There is something despicable about Starmer’s current jingoism and of Reeve’s harebrained scheme to boost our economy by trying to ramp up arms manufacturing at the cost of our most vulnerable. When those who are as detached from reality as professional politicians are plan to throw other people’s children into a meat grinder under the guise of ‘defence’, we need to ask again, “what are we defending?”

Is the social murder of the disabled something to defend? Is a country run for billionaires rather than its population worth dying for? Is a nation that at best turns a blind eye to the suffering in Gaza a nation to be protected? Why should our youth be sacrificed for a country that can no longer provide them an affordable home or utilities? Who would lift a finger to protect a nation that clearly despises its own people?

What our political class have failed to tell the population is that we have already been invaded. We were invaded back in 1979 by an ideology. Neoliberalism didn’t need an army to destroy Blighty yet it did what Hitler couldn’t, it crushed our spirits, sold off our infrastructure and closed down our industries and has left us with an unending stream of stamped out of a mould uniparty politicians to give us the illusion that we still have a democracy left worth fighting for; we don’t.

Britain has lost, Britain is over, Britain is done, finished and the least these clowns in office can do is give the disabled the right to a quiet life and stop picking on us and let this country die in peace.

Picking up the pieces again.

My life has been hell for the past couple of weeks. I have barely slept, barely eaten and each time I wake up I have to drag myself back up the day as a gibbering wreck whilst I take on the latest horrors drip fed through the media by my own government… again. No one chooses to be disabled and I wouldn’t wish this on my worst enemy…. I’m sorry, that’s a lie actually. I would wish it on the heads of this current government as I would all those before them going back to the Con / Dem coalition. I doubt one of these people, from nice middle class families to an inch off aristocracy had any true comprehension on the harm that they caused people like myself with their welfare ‘reforms’

Every time I have been forced to engage with the welfare services since 2011, my entire world has been destroyed. If you take money away from the most vulnerable in society and then expose them to a brutal welfare system that presumes the worst of those that engage with it, it is hardly surprising when their mental and physical health starts to rapidly decline. Each time this has happened, my life has been swept up and put back together by a plethora of doctors, therapists, supports workers and hospital teams; and every time I am fixed, I end up worse than before. I missed the prime of my life because it was spent trying to claw my way out of debt yet again after numerous fights and appeals. I have to live with the knowledge of what my own successive governments did to me and it has scarred me deeply.

I find the words of this government extremely hollow as like everyone that has dealt with the DWP knows their attempts at trying to support those with complex disabilities are laughable. The last of these was back in July, where after being migrated to universal credit, the art book I had spent eighteen months creating was declared ‘non viable’ within minutes by someone whose grasp of employment choices available for those with life limiting conditions was non existent. The major flaw in the DWP’s job coach system is that if an employee is good at finding jobs, their first action would be to find themselves a better one somewhere else in a less oppressive environment; the very nature of the systems automatically weeds out those competent enough to do the job. The truth is, there will never be the resources to provide work and training for many disabled people and taking away their support with a promise of something they can never hope to provide is toxic positivity at its most insidious.

I would beg everyone to protest against the supposed welfare reforms proposed by this government as they are clearly ill thought out and will do nothing but cause harm to those that have suffered enough already.

Joyful Revolution

It’s been a difficult few weeks in the UK. When your own government launches an all out attack on its poorest and most vulnerable and starts using words that would not look out of place in 1930’s Germany, you know there is something seriously wrong. Suffice to say, I haven’t had much sleep or any peace of mind during the many waking hours I have experienced since then and my physical health is starting to seriously suffer too. Whether you wish to file Starmer, Reeves and Kendall’s policy of punching down on the most poor and vulnerable as stupid or evil is immaterial, the fact is that whether consciously or unconsciously, they are doing a great deal of harm to those least able to either fight back or cope with the consequences.

The fight back has started, despite the propaganda or complicit silence from the mainstream media; independent media, grass roots organisations, charities, legal specialists, pressure groups and even the United Nations are gearing up for an all out fight against the insane legislation that has been proposed by Britain’s latest incarnation of the neoliberal uniparty. Everyone I know is doing their part, whether that be signing petitions, physical protesting, correcting the lies that our government feeds to the gullible or writing and drawing stuff to highlight what a corrupt and vile government is now running the UK… But there is something else that we need to do to resist all this state sponsored tyranny…

We need to be having some fun.

It was something that was pointed out to me yesterday after weeks of protesting and producing art and writing to highlight this assault on the sick and disabled; we need to try and experience some joy in life. It was a hard concept for me to wrap my head around and nearly three weeks of waking up in a panic and scraping through the day, fearful of the next piece of bad news or government leaked monstrosity but the first thing these privilege bastards took from me was my sense of fun.

Whether the British Government intended disabled people to be fearful, or it was just a convenient side effect of their wish to appease the right wing morons in society who can’t seem to grasp that they could so easily be me or worse with just one twist of fate, they have caused incalculable harm to those whose lives are already lived on ‘hard mode’. We have a duty to ourselves, the rest of the wobbly community and our allies to take control of our lives back and our peace of mind with it.

In short, when the government wants to make you scared, rob you of your dignity and generally make your life hell, being happy becomes a revolutionary act!

With this in mind I would ask all good people to take the occasional break to do the things that you love, whether that is spend time with friends and family, exercise, play games, eat nice food, read a book, watch a film, do some craft activity, be in nature… Do whatever floats your boat because you need the break before going back to the fight otherwise you will just collapse beneath the pressure of it all. Go and do whatever fills your heart with joy even if it is just out of spite because every moment of pleasure you feel is one less when these pathetic scumbags are winning.

One

Today was a shameful day for the once proud British Labour party as supine MPs did the rounds of the UK’s complicit media explaining their intention of cutting a support network that was once a source of national pride. One particular no mark,‭ Shabana Mahmoud, clearly has an axe to grind with those that have the barefaced cheek to become sick or disabled in smugly pointing out that it’s the “labour” party and the clue is in the name… I have for quite a while thought that the party that is currently being squatted in by neoliberal scumbags is in desperate need of an accurate name change… I can think of a good one and it rhymes with “hunts”. I find the idea of someone who studied law before drifting into politics talking about the definition of “labour” frankly hilarious as I suspect that the heaviest thing that she has lifted in her working life is a pen.

This, I feel, is part of the problem when it comes to a “labour” party whose MP’s are mostly the product of PPE degrees, political think tanks and the legal profession. They are rich from an early age and have no comprehension of what it is like to “labour”; i.e do a hard day of physically strenuous work and certainly none of financial insecurity.

Many of the great figures from the Labour’s past that created the post WW2 welfare state had come up through the trade unions. They were manual workers and understood only too well how many jobs can chew a person up and spit them out, leaving them unable to work any more. The likes of Mahmoud and the sort of political Lilliputians that populate the “labour together” movement under the control of Morgan McSweeny and his focus groups are mostly ‘educated idiots’; brilliant in one area and utterly clueless when it comes to everything else.

Not only are the knock off Labour party who are currently attempting to run the country ruining the brand that used to mean so much, they are running fowl of the United Nations who are severely critical of how this and previous governments have treated the country’s poor and vulnerable.( You can read more about this here.)

For those that sneer at those that need welfare or those that seek to use them as scapegoats and diversions from those that are really to blame for society’s collapse (who are the ultra rich if you aren’t paying attention) you only need to be able to count to one. Surely that isn’t a hard thing for all these new MPs from the professions. You can count to one can’t you? Come on! Follow me!

You are one wrong step from being disabled. Whether that is falling down the stairs, tripping over an undone shoelace or stepping out in front of a car.

You are one accident of birth from a lifetime of being vulnerable. From oxygen starvation, foetal alcohol syndrome, chromosomal abnormalities, neurodivergence or just having really crap and abusive parents.

One blocked heart valve.

One tumour.

One violent partner.

One industrial injury

One severe illness.

One of the many, many, many things that can lay someone low that I can’t even think of.

And the last thing anyone who’s life has been permanently altered by an accident of birth or a life changing event needs is some clueless, greedy, servile, self serving, neoliberal scumbag trying to denigrate whatever life they have managed to make for themself because some shitty little MP doesn’t want to disrupt their stream of donations by doing what they should be doing and TAX THE RICH!