Rantandwail

I am not waving a flag for the Tories but Gordon has to go.
We have not had a chance to say what we think about so many things - he should have called a General Election when he got to Downing Street, to get a mandate.
I think people are utterly dis-engaged with the present lot.
We had our pension funds looted (by Gordon, helped by E Balls), we still work the longest hours in Europe, our elected representatives have been sidelined and left to twiddle their thumbs (since T Blair), had their egos boosted by massive defence and security installations round their offices, still sit in a dreadful building designed to encourage confrontation and division, and been allowed to pay themselves expenses on a colossal scale as if they were sleepwalking. Where did their sense of reality go? Did they ever have any sense? The image in my mind is of lots of fat pigs squealing at a feeding trough. You can just hear them.
The rest of us were kept quiet with palliative placebo politics, reality TV and football (bread and circuses - the Romans knew a thing or two), avalanches of meaningless political twaddle-talk. We all knew it was wrong.... there was a bubble in house-prices which we could, some of us, sometimes, take advantage of, but we all knew it was wrong and couldn't last. It was scandalous that Gordon as Chancellor could claim year after year to be so 'prudent' when he must have known it was all based on a bubble.
They're doing it again now, by printing money to get out of trouble - actually they just hope that our old enemy inflation will save us from the massive, unbelievable debts which they've stacked up for us in the future. More immoral, worthless, bad stuff.
Do they think we are idiots?
This is the worst country in Europe to be a child. We have kids getting drunk on the streets, and using horrendous criminal drugs to blot out their worries, and who can blame them? Children can't even play safely outside. They choose to carry knives - KNIVES - just to walk around 'safely'.
What is this? The age of the Vikings?
We have a horrendously expensive and inefficient public transport service in this country.
Our canals belong to the 17th century when they could be taking literally loads of our freight across the land, cleanly, quietly, cheaply and greenly.
Our public lavatories are disgusting - probably the dirtiest in Europe.
New houses are built so small there isn't room for a bookcase, and the sound-insulation is worse than in a wattle and daub house built six hundred years ago. Is this progress?
We have rats living in vast numbers in our cities and towns, no-one baits the drains with poison any more.
Municipal decision-making has been spirited away towards 'regional' (inaccessible) 'centres' which no-one has any connection with.
Some cleaning ladies famously pay higher rates of tax than their millionaire employers.
There are few jobs for the young, or for the over-50s. Schools are full of disaffected teenagers who cannot get work, or a place at college. The young have become feral, hunting in packs, with no-one to inspire them or keep them safe.
We are more spied on than any other country in Europe. The so-called security system with all its surveillance technology and its links to Royalty and the police and the old guard is a threat to us all.
Even when we vote, in our much-vaunted so-called system of 'secret' ballot, it would be child's play for 'them' to find out who we supported... each ballot paper has a number on it, carefully tied up by local government officials to match our names and addresses.
The banking system has imploded, melted or crashed and though there's a certain amount of paper being plastered over some of the cracks - we all know the whole system is a sham. Who will we trust with our savings now? I mean, really trust?
Our local hospitals got closed down or lost the really useful services like A&E, and now we have regional hospitals and those are full of doctors who are more likely to kill you than cure you, wedded as they are to the use of drugs which have worse side-effects than a jug of meths, and we still have scares about killer diseases and filth in the wards and old people neglected and starving when they are supposed to be getting nursing and care.
The main parties just don't get it. None of them.
What happened to Britain's fantastic industrial heritage of skills, industry, production, education and natural resources? What about literacy and bravery and invention and duty and public service and honour?
Since Mrs T reached out her flickering tongue to see how far she could go, the country has been in disarray. She was credited with 'smashing the unions' but that was a false award - she just happened to be there when small computers (IBM, remember them?) came in - and changed everything. Accountancy (or number crunching) got the upper hand, so that £££££ became more important than anything else and all the old values went out of the window....professionalism and love and tradition and real family values, like bringing up children with patience and love instead of dumping them in front of a screen and hoping they'd thrive on chicken nuggets and pizzas.
It's not just Gordon. It's the whole lot. In some ways it's all of us.
But anyone who claims to lead a party and a country, who says he wants to finish the job when all he's done is preside over a stinking dungheap of complacency, wilfulness, self-congratulation, self-seeking deluded decay and corruption should read the writing on the wall.
Gordon - it's time to GO!
By all means use the Houses of Parliament as offices and maybe apartments for the MPs, but give us a new debating chamber in amphitheatre style, give us local accountability like the French communes and give us mayors with real power. Give 15 year-olds the vote. Give them some sort of responsibility and connection and chance to make good.
Sweep out these Augean stables, get rid of the rubbish, take a fresh look, start again.