It’s 2024 and the downtrodden peoples of 21st Century enshitified Britain are burning their tongues on their coffee pods and trying to reach the bottom of whichever flavour of curated soma they favour du jour.
In the real world, one nuclear nation is illegally invading another who agreed to give up its weapons as part of the nuclear non-proliferation pact, on the condition that the US, UK & Russia would defend it should the need arise. .
In the Middle East another nuclear nation wages brutal indiscriminate war on the civilian populations of its neighbours. Neighbours whose lands it has been illegally annexing for years.
Meanwhile the whole world awaits the slow motion car crash of the USA turning into a parody of Putin’s Russia. It’s so ironic that two of the world’s once greatest superpowers both end up with the same shitty “Dictator leading an Oligarchy” system that the UK Conservatives & UKIP strived so hard to achieve.
And of course we have to pretend that none of these are going to have any impact on our complete lack of progress to reducing the amount of atmospheric CO2 which if not stopped now is going to destroy our global civilisation
Back in Blighty though, there are more important issues than war crimes and oppressive regimes rampaging across the planet destroying the only environment we have, which we happen to be an accidental by-product of and our continued existence relies on its continued existence. Yes, in this country we have to concentrate on another debate about assisted dying.
A question it is unarguably important to open up to wide public scrutiny. I suspect, though, that unlike say our relationship with the EU or whether human induced climate change is real (it is), most people have the basic qualification required to have a valid opinion on this. They are human and they’re going to die. Everyone they love, everyone they are indifferent to and everyone they hate is going to die. Their pets are going to die. Their houseplants are going to die, repeatedly. Their hopes, ambitions, trust in local government are going….I could go on.
So I would expect a lot of prominence given to recent & past polls on questions around end of life options & legality. Certainly examination of the systems other countries have used, sometimes for decades. What were the outcomes? What lessons were learned? I confess at the moment even glancing at the news at the moment is given me pre-traumatic stress syndrome. Sometimes however we all have to have some background noise on to quell the relentless cacophony in our heads don’t we?…don’t we?
So over the course of the last 18 hours or so I’ve been repeatedly exposed to the same sentence. “Former prime ministers, Boris Johnson, Lizz Truss & Baroness May have all expressed their opposition to the Assisted dying bill.” Over & over again. Not just on Radio 4’s Today Programme (which I have only recently begun the occasional tentative listen to after a long absence prompted by its period as the “‘less newsy’ Radio 4 flagship news programme” under Sarah Sands) but also Global Media radio stations & the BBC evening news. I believe even Channel 4 mentioned the same titbit but I’m less certain of that.
I heard much less of “64% of people agree in principle” or “71% of people agree in principle.” or “Think of the atheists!” but my accidental & shallow sample is of course meaningless. As is the opinion of at least two of three of the worst, most damaging & most contradictorily titled ex “Prime” Ministers.
The woman who crashed a country within a fortnight after years of training at the Tufton Street School for learner corporate puppet ministers & climate denial and Britain’s most famous proven liar, both part of a Government whose incompetence and corruption was responsible for many tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths during the Covid-19 Pandemic. A pair of proven failures who have been weighed, measured & found whoring their stories of the damage they’ve done to millions of real people on the after dinner talk circuit as some form of success. Just once, I would love to hijack one of these multi-millionaire dinners by having all the serving staff be the destitute serving what they would have eaten if they hadn’t already dined on the banquet they were supposed to serve;A Peter Greenaway mashup with Extinction Rebellion.
The long list of Johnson’s failures & mishaps should really only qualify him to be featured on anthology clip shows like “It’s your trough!” or perhaps as a burning effigy for a yearly covid remembrance service? Granted it could be said Johnson & Truss are more familiar than most with death & how a lack of checks & balances or contempt of experts can result in the unnecessary death of thousands, but since neither he nor Truss have any more of a vote in the matter than you or I you have to wonder how their opinion, almost word for word ends up appearing on news show after news show.
Astronomers are able to infer the existence of unseen planets from differences in light measurements around distant stars and anomalous orbits in nearer bodies. Climate science, anthropology, archaeology & I’m sure many other disciplines use proxy measurements. This endlessly repeated snippet of news sounds, looks, & smells more like an advert than anything worth calling news. To me it smells of the same slimy tentacles that run from the US Christian right, Neo-liberal billionaires, through Tufton Street & straight into the lobby & cocaine gilded halls of Westminster.
Surely one of the first things we need to do to reclaim an adherence to truth & integrity is to stop giving media space to proven liars & hapless incompetents who have already had their chance to shine & been found incapable.