Ewww are you EU in or EU out!

I’ve been quiet lately, but now that the government has lifted it’s gagging order I thought I’d pop back for a quick skit about the EU.

I don’t know how you feel about it, but I’m convinced that this is the worst referendum campaign in world history.  Pol Pot was fairer to his people than David Cameron has been to his ministers, when it comes to the European Union.

That’s not Dave’s fault though, he’s always been in charge of a deeply divided Tory Party when it comes to Europe…
 

Two tribes…

The way I see it is that at the moment the conservatives are divided into two camps.  There’s the tories that think that the EU is costing them money so they want out.  Then there’s the tories that think the EU is making them money and they want in.

None of them have at any point thought to themselves ‘my God this is important, what’s best for the entire country?’

Not one of them have thought about you and I and the millions of other people that live in these sceptred isles, this green and pleasant land, this England… Wales, Northern Ireland, Scotland; this congealed lump of soil that pokes proudly out of the Atlantic Ocean like an old shipwreck (more honestly like a stiff turd that’s broken the waterline at the bottom of the bog).

All I keep on hearing is that we have the fifth largest economy in the world and that people will still want to do business with us if we leave or that it would be foolish to risk the aforementioned economy by leaving.

Like I give a rat’s arse!
 

It’s all about the business.

You see what the tories fundamentally fail to understand is that your average rank and file british person or recently made british person doesn’t have a very good relationship with business, not even if they own their own business and this is why…

The people at the top of any big business do not work Christmas day, yet they want you work on Christmas day.

The people at the top of any big business do not work Sunday, yet they want you work on Sunday.

The people at the top of any big business do not work Bank Holidays, yet they want you work on Bank Holidays.

The people at the top of any big business do not want to pay you decent wages, yet they pay themselves big wages.

The people at the top of any big business do not want you to have time off, yet they take loads of time off and only ever turn up for meetings where they give themselves pay rises.

The people at the top of any big business do not want to give you a job, (honestly the robots are coming) yet they still want you to pay for their crap products.

The people at the top of big business do not want you to cross borders, but their money can cross borders instantly.

The people at the top of any big business do not want you to do a quality job, as quality is not required, only profit is required, and whatever you do don’t pride in your work, that’s a sackable offence!

The people at the top of any big business do not want to pay you overtime, yet they get copious extra benefits and bonuses.

They don’t want to give you sick leave, yet they’ve got BUPA, and as for maternity leave, that’s right out!  Women of childbearing age are definitely not wanted and are deliberately made to harm their careers by having kids.

The people at the top of any big business want you to be productive when they do **** all themselves.

Worse than that they want their money to be ‘globalised’ so that they can get Vietnamese wage slaves to work in unsanitary and dangerous conditions for pennies on the pound, whilst selling their crap back home to people who could have afforded to buy a nice quality product from a local or national supplier had some idiot (read political simpleton) not agreed to a free trade zone (no tariffs) with countries that do things that we do not approve of.

To be fair though the political simpletons were told by businessmen that such an arrangement would be good for business and as such good for Britain!
Isn’t it suspicious how the ‘national interest’ always aligns with the interests of the rich and powerful.

This is one of the reasons why I hate the tories.  The average tory MP or electoral candidate usually have a business background and will at some point in their election campaign say something like this.

‘Vote for me I know all about business, I’ve run my own business, so therefore I am fit to run the country!’

Like the two things are vaguely similar…

 

All businesses are equal!

If it was true then by extension your average Swansea £15 prostitute would be fit to run the country.  I bet she knows all about ‘business’, after all she’s run her own business and is by extension, a fully qualified Tory mp in the making.  She might even pay her taxes, which is a lot more than many of our elected representatives with their offshore tax havens for all of their other businesses that they shouldn’t have time to run, because being an MP is very busy work apparently.

Yet…

Some write books.

Some star in TV shows…

Some sit on company boards…

Some have huge property empires that need managing…

Some have more than one house…

Some have houses bigger than your council estate.

Some have had those houses decorated out of the public purse.

 

Politics and business go hand in hand when it comes to unsavoury stuff, let me give you an example…

Furs were seen as being very cruel way to make a coat in the 1970’s and public opinion turned against natural furs, people stopped buying them and went for synthetic fur instead, fur farming was eventually banned in britain in 2003

Now we import fur that most people think is fake or synthetic from other countries where there is no ban, as the trade has been globalised.  It’s cheaper and easier to make a new animal, treat it badly, skin it alive and then stick that fur on a hat or a glove than it is to mix some oil and chemicals in a factory to get the same result.  That’s globalisation for you.
The average British person does not want child labour in factories, inhumane animal products, workers forced to toil without breaks or drugged into heroin addiction to prevent them leaving; in the same way that they do not want poor quality food, massive amounts of environmental damage, big bonuses to un-deserving directors,  cheap tatt imported across the face of the planet in carbon spewing container ships, or to be replaced by robots or cheap foreign workers in one of the few jobs that’s remaining.

I can’t think of anything more racist than importing foreign people into Britain just because they are cheap…

Yet according to big business and their corporate shills in parliament, there’s nothing racist about this at all, these foreign workers simply want to do the work that people already living here don’t want to do at all.

What they really mean is that people already living here can’t afford to do those jobs for the terrible pay that they offer, so they import people just to exploit them, because they can’t exploit us or more accurately we can’t afford to be exploited by them.  We’re not cheap enough (except for me that is, I work for peanuts…)

The people at the top of any big business like to tell you that capitalism is raising living conditions all over the world, yet in the next breath want you to take a pay cut or put up with price rises that harm your living conditions or tacitly accept things that are morally bankrupt because you have no other choice.

 

Up PompeIi!

The average uk citizen has fifty slaves working for him or her to support our current way of life.  Slavery in the twenty first century.  Are we suddenly Romans now?  Is this the country we want to be, didn’t we reject all of these morally repugnant values a long time ago, so how come they keep on getting sneaked in through the back door.  How come they keep on coming back, but they get disguised as something else?

The answer is easy, it’s because the people at the top of big business do not see you as a human being, they do not see their staff as human beings, and they themselves have ceased to be human beings.

All that I know is that when it comes to business I’ve only ever been a cog in someone else’s machine, a consumer of their products or a worker whose labour and brain they’ve wanted to exploit.

Either way it’s exploitation pure and simple, whether it’s your time or your money, this is all is all you are to them, a unit of exploitation, a cow on their grand farm. You will either be slaughtered, sold or milked.  And they have the cheek to call it capitalism which it definitely isn’t.

That’s why the business argument does nothing for me in the EU, I need heart and soul arguments, or a big vision.  I suspect that most people feel the same way.  Sadly our politicians being business lobbyists mostly, have no heart and soul, and definitely no vision.
 

Where are the statesmen?

That’s the question we were asking the other day in our office, how come our elected politicians are nothing more than corporate shivs and political toadies who see it as their job to represent parliament in their constituencies as opposed to representing their constituency in parliament?

Where and who are the Aneurin Bevan’s and Winston Churchill’s of this age?  Even that odious old cow Thatcher had principles for ****’s sake…  Not very good ones mind you, but principles all the same.

This island is made mainly of coal and surrounded by fish. Only an organizing genius could produce a shortage of coal and fish at the same time.

Aneurin Bevan

 

Anyhow as proof of the above I offer the fact that in the last few years we seen oil prices hit an all time low.  It started just after Vladimir Putin annexed parts of Ukraine and around the same time we started fighting a proxy war with him in Syria.

Wait you might say, the low price of oil is because the Saudis are over producing in order to maintain market share thanks to all of that high quality fracking that’s going on in America as our lords and masters in London indeed claim.

Nobody “over produces” a finite asset such as oil, with the certain knowledge that one day it will run out as the price can only ever go up, especially when the alternatives are as poorly funded and invested in as to be practically worthless (wind turbines anyone).

Overproduction in order to maintain market share is economic suicide, pumping it out of the ground and selling it on the market for less money than it takes to extract it is (once again) economic suicide.

Now what’s cynical about this is that the good folk in London clearly think that the average brit is thick as pig **** to go along with that, especially as they’ve been telling us for years that Russia’s economy is heavily reliant on a decent oil price.

Now given that Vladimir Putin is busy bombing the **** out of some very bad people in Syria that we call rebels and he calls terrorists, whilst we simultaneously arm and support people that he calls terrorists that we call rebels with round the clock airstrikes against the other rabble it’s easy to see that it’s no coincidence that oil is suddenly cheap.

Between the barrel bombs and daisy cutters, Syria must be a terrible place to live if you have a migraine…

Oil is so cheap that for the first time in nearly ten years I can afford to visit any part of West and South Wales in my diesel car.  Added bonus I’ve also had the luxury of not choosing between heating and eating this winter.

 

Passport Control in Ceredigion!

I can also afford to visit my family who live in another county, this privilege was removed by Messrs Blair and Brown who slapped so much tax on the price of petrol that they turned separate counties into the equivalent of separate countries.  The rural areas have never recovered since…

Vladimir Putin has done more for my standard of living than any British politician has in thirty years.  I wish he was standing over here, he’d get my vote!

I bet he’d know what to do with the EU…

 

*I was just adding the final tweaks to this article when it was announced that Vladimir Putin has recalled his planes from Syria as the job is now done.  A friend of mine told me today that petrol has gone up 2p a litre at the pumps.

I’m a veritable modern day prophet, yes I am…

 

by Mike Spudley – Llanelli’s Angriest Man…