Vicious satire and existential threats
For starters, some vicious but even-handed satire about Islamic life in The Gambia...
I have finally signed a decree with the Chief Imam here allowing for the creation of a new all-purpose fasting and gorging Islamic festival,
RAMATOBASKIDAN
In the light of this historic accord, the Government will bring forward legislation creating a new two-day Bank Holiday, beginning on February 28th and ending on June 30th. It will be forbidden to have sex, eat or take fluids between the hours of 7.00am-7.30pm, but from 6.oo pm to 10.00pm, all women over 15 years of age will be allowed to cook an entire four-legged animal, serve it to various compound parasites until 7.00 am and then do all the washing up prior to going to work for a rest.
During the celebration, the price per kilo of goat, ram, lamb and cow will miraculously double, and none of the ATM machines will be refilled.
President Barrow issued this statement from Zurich alerting all tourists, foreign residents and retirees to the absence of any fresh fruit or veg at the markets during Ramatobaskidan: "As always, your understanding of our traditions is both assumed and appreciated, but poor hospitality workers must be paid more....Insh'Allah".
But the President's remarks were the subject of a rebuttal from ASSHOLES (Association of Hospitality Exploitation Slavedrivers), whose media relations Director Thierry Davos asserted, "I continue to believe from the feedback I'm getting that a salary of £50 a month is more than enough to keep an honest cleaning lady in productive poverty".
This intro represents the educated observations of a permanent non-ecowas resident....and every part of it ensures that all religious pharisees, hypocritical mysogynists, profiteers, corrupt African leaders and greedy First World hospitality providers get an equally and richly deserved thwack around the earhole.
But I'm also using this satire as the overture to a symphony about how complying with injustice will never ever bring about genuine change.
Lasting change will only take place when oppressed human beings say, "You're not getting my taxes or my vote until you stop asking me to eat this shit".
Such is dangerous ground for commentators, given that the eternal 4% demigods long ago made it illegal to encourage tax strikes as a weapon.
But just as inbuilt culturo–religious misogyny, political corruption and greedy foreign investment are enslaving Third World nations, so too State theft and unaccountable corporocratic power are destroying First World free-speech democracy.
Most of the regular visitors to this site already know what my skin is in this game. The UK Department of Work & Pensions (DWP) has stopped my State pension for the second time in a year....on both occasions based on utterly spurious excuses and mendacious delaying tactics.
Most of the work I do here in West Africa is charitable: raising money for boreholes to reduce village Malaria, gifting raw materials for young entrepreneurial black women tailoring, selling street food and so forth, funding safari-taxi providers, busking to attract tourists into fresh-food shops, and finding/providing extra work for hospitality workers who are being exploited by greed and misogyny from morning until night.
My State pension is a Civil Right, paid for by 42 years of UK National Insurance prior to my retirement. It represents 60% of my income, but I despise the DWP and all it's works not out of holier-than-thou self pity, but because the DWP spineless senior jellyfish are being bonused to deliver State welching on a scale not so much titanic as Satanic.
I freely admit I am a difficult, gobby, often angry and at times cynically pessimistic commentator....but then, I didn't invent the condition. Just over 120 years ago, GK Chesterton remarked:
"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for many good men to do nothing".
Five years later, he added with even greater wisdom:
"Leaders who proclaim the need for new values do so because they can no longer live up to the old ones"
The DWP doesn't cheat and rob UK citizens because "there is no money tree" or "benefit scroungers are parasites". It robs us because it spends our money incontinently (and without our permission) on unsound Now World Order blocist clap-trap.
So this is my recommendation to all readers tonight: demand two things - in this order - from your existing and wannabe leaders:
- The Starmer regime. Be it known among you and your constipated Police State ideologues: if you give any more money to the Zelenskyy Nazis in Ukraine, or any more power to the sociopaths at the DWP, you can whistle Dixie for any more PAYE income from us.
- All Opposition Parties at the next UK General Election. We demand that root and branch accountability reform be undertaken immediately to dismantle the State theft scam at the DWP. Unless that sentiment is clearly included in your manifesto, we will vote for another Party with more balls and principles than you.
Other instruments of government fully support your disgust at the antics of the DWP rogue elephants
You can register your distrust of the DWP with the National Audit Office here - like you, the people at the NAO have long expressed their disapproval of Sir Peter Schofield's arrogance in the face of long-established Whitehall accountancy rules.
Post script: Whether your own constitutional vandal is called Elon Musk, Ursula von der Leyen, Emmanuel Macron, Xi Jinping or Adama Barrow, the solution is to assume that the person standing next to will do nothing. The elites need to be scared into desisting. My own preference is for the them to be terrified of concerted action.
God bless and keep you all