So what the hell can Britain afford then?

Britain can’t afford child benefit or to finish building news schools. We can’t afford free education, so higher education is insanely expensive. We can’t even afford adult training programmes that get people into work and paying taxes with which to afford stuff.

And now, if a new report is to be believed, we can’t afford juries.

Let me just restate that – we can’t afford juries.

We can afford to cut fucking corporation tax!

We can, as ever, afford to drop expensive bombs on sand-niggers (praise be to Bill Hicks for putting better into words the contempt with which our leaders seem to treat the remarkable Arab world!).

And we can afford to write off the taxes of multi-billion pound companies who make a fortune from our country.

Yet for some reason, with the same money, we can’t afford a tradition and a basic right dating back to ancient Germanic tribes.

We can’t afford a right that this country managed to cling to through the worst atrocities of the vicious oppression put upon us by Norman rapists and rulers.

We can’t afford a tradition and a basic right so powerful that theNormans under Henry II even gave up oppressing it and instead adopted it. 

And we can’t afford what has, since Parliament formalised it in 1730, become a cornerstone of civilisation and human rights all over the fucking world.

So I really have to ask – in as scholarly tone as possible – What the fuck has happened to us? What happened to our pride? Our dignity? Our decency? Our lack of deference to those who want to lead us?

Are we really this pathetic? Are we really so complacent? Are the words “can’t afford” really enough for 60million people to bend over and take it up the arse every time?

There are no musts in politics. There is never no choice. Governments make decisions. They choose how to spend your money. And for a thousand years they have chosen to spend money on juries because we demanded it.

So what changed? It isn’t the fucking money. That’s a meaningless concept. Germanic tribes had no money. Our government has hundreds of billions to spend. They have hundreds of billions we let them take from us to do things like, oh I don’t know, provide us with a fucking criminal justice system.

If it takes too long to get a case to court – and it does – that means we don’t have enough fucking courts.

It doesn’t mean we give up on justice.

I mean, what the hell do we pay these people for?

So come on people, demand to know, ask the question. Why is it we can afford to cut corporation tax but we can’t afford enough courts?

Slow train to nowhere

Ever order a steak in a restaurant only to be given porridge instead?

No?

How about buying a cinema ticket and being handed a DVD to take home?

Perhaps not?

Well have you paid for champagne and been given a cup of tea?

Yeah, that seemed unlikely.

So why the hell when I pay to travel on a train can a train company stick me on a FUCKING BUS?

Of course I know it gets me to the same place – eventually. But so does a BMX when you’ve just bought a second hand car! You’d still have the dealer arrested right?

I mean come on! How about an apology at least? How about a look of shame on their faces as they fail so utterly to earn a penny of their income? How about a half price ticket for god’s sake?

And what I really don’t want to be told, as though it’s inevitable that I have to be treated like shit, is that engineering works have to happen.

Of course they have to happen. That’s part of running a fucking railway. But if a factory shuts down while its machines are serviced, does the owner still try to sell goods that won’t be fucking produced?

No he fucking doesn’t!

But worst of all is the times they choose. Why weekends? Or more importantly why Christmas Eve for Christ’s sake? The one day a year when, more than any other, the travelling we do has real meaning, real expectation and real passion behind it?

“Oh but more people travel on commuter days than weekends or bank holidays, and we want to minimise disruption.”

Bullshit! I go to the shops more often than I go to hospital… in an ambulance… with the lights blaring… clutching my chest as my heart punishes me for a lack of fucking exercise.

Do those journeys sound equal in importance? Do they? Do they really? I mean, am I nuts for thinking that a simple “like for like” attitude to anything is grotesquely incompetent beyond all reason?

No company ever watched Planes Trains and Automobiles (Rest in Peace your magnificent John Candy) and only a company could decide working is more important than time with our families.

So don’t shut the railways for Christmas Eve. Shut them down when I have to get to work for Christ’s sake. I don’t want to go to work. I don’t want to stand for the outrageous price of a seat I won’t get – with my nose stuck up some other sod’s armpit five mornings a week. I don’t want delivering like cattle to the slaughter via the job at which I metaphorically suck a banker’s dick for a living that amounts to fuck all.

Screw up that journey for me and I’ll thank you!

Because do you know what I do want to do? I do want to make the most of my weekends and I do want to get me, and the gifts I’ve accumulated or crafted for my loved ones, home to my wonderful family.

That’s the stuff that matters – being delivered to my loved ones for the rare couple of days we can wrap ourselves in love and pretend the world outside isn’t horrendously fucked up in just about everyway imaginable to anyone sane.

Merry Christmas.

screw love?

Sex sells right? That’s been the longstanding mentality that has seen a caffeine buzz (diet coke time, girls?) and keeping fit (sex enhancement at Virgin gyms?), sold by fucking. Be it the prospect of more fucking, the hope of better fucking or the desire to fuck hotter people – sex sells.

But is it me, or has something else happened? Something really sick? Something that sees the blood-filled gutter of vomit that is the advertising industry stoop lower than the bottom of the drain they should slither away down?

Dolce and Gabbana run their adverts like everyone else. They pay a large some of money to a woman who doesn’t need it but doesn’t care enough about artistic integrity to turn down visual prostitution – a woman that men aspire to shag and that women aspire to look like. But this insidious shitty little fashion label then pretends it’s love. And they are not alone.

Not satisfied with pornographying “the one” (a D&C brand, as well as an ideal intrinsically linked to our sense of lasting happiness), the industry now labels several of their superficial bottles of chemicals – each a mere product of no inherent value and serving no human spiritual need – “love”

Please god tell me I’m not the only one who thinks that’s fucked up?

Our society is now literally selling a “love” potion in a bottle again – primarily to a bunch of tired and thoughtless men too busy with their soul-destroying under-paid jobs to give real and time to creating or encapsulating something of genuine value and meaning to the woman they love and have loved for years.    

Love is meant to mean something isn’t it? Isn’t it  “all we need” (Thank you oh worshipful Beetles)?. Doesn’t it conquer all? Wasn’t it the thing we were told meant more than money, fame, fucking and all the bullshit clutter with which we fail to “fill” our unfulfilled lives?

Have we really reached a point where love – the one thing that makes life on this miserable fucking planet worth waking up to each morning – is now a fucking brand to be bought and paid for as though even the greatest spiritual experience can be replaced by a wad of notes or a line on a credit card statement?

Because if we have, we are dead.

I wouldn’t be ranting if there was any a hint that the advertising wankers thought for a second that it would be great to promote through their work an image of love – true love – selfless love – love like you never see in a major motion picture and rarely read of in the latest pulp fiction paperback. 

When I say real love, I mean the love that at the end of a terrible day, when all you want to do is load a gun or bury yourself in a bottle, drives you to put all of that to one side and make some one else a hot meal, hear about their day, or do something wonderful together, whatever wonderful might be to the object of one’s true love, knowing that the resulting simple smile on their face makes the rest of world seem less shit.

But there isn’t any hint of that. It’s always just another advert promoting the usual aspirational figure to fuck.

So I pray to god, all gods, any god or no god – that one day the absurdity of 21st century love potions becomes as apparent as that of those of the ninth century.