‘Our Present is Your Future’

I saw this excellent, short, but shocking film last night, and I’d recommend it to anyone who is worried about the future of our NHS, (y’know, the one our granparents and great-grandparents supposedly fought for during the Second World War), especially healthworkers in the light of the fact that the political class in this country have engineered the bankruptcy of 30 (and rising) NHS Foundation Trusts.

Having ensured that health trusts have run-up massive debts through Private Finance Initiative funding (aka their privatisation ‘Trojan Horse’) the rich are guaranteeing a return to the obscenity of turning a profit from suffering, illness, old age and disease.  Both the Labour and Tory parties have for years assured us that the NHS was ‘safe in their hands’: They lied. And why shouldn’t they? Both parties are in the pockets of corporate finance, and corporate finance wants to abolish socialised medicine as much as they want to abolish social welfare- they don’t want a social safety net, they want to drive down wages and living standards and create a society of ‘all against all’, -but one where they are themselves protected and subsidised by the state, as in the case of PFI where the debts were originally underwritten by government at our expense. Big Pharma, medical insurance companies, associations of right wing GPs are now circling up like vultures to asset strip our hospitals and clinics.

They’re laughing at us -the vapid, vane, conceited and arrogant scum of the upper classes, the investment bankers, the media professionals, the marketing consultants, the lawyers, the consultants and the rest, as they steal our NHS from under us, happy in the knowledge that they have private health care insurance which costs them next to nothing against their vastly inflated incomes. The liberal middle classes read about in the Guardian, worry about it, then toddle off with their bleeding hearts to their 50 quid an hour therapists and Shiatsu practitioners…

But, if your Gran needs a hip replacement, your toddler has leukaemia, you break your arm at work or need meds for your diabetes, you’ll be fucked if you don’t have the readies- so what then? A pay-day loan from a tory donor’s company?

As in Greece, they are using the crisis as an opportunity to swindle us out of what we’ve already paid for, many times over.

…and remember, they’re cracking down on sickness benefits too, like forcing terminally ill cancer patients to seek work, or this guy, deaf, blind and mute, classified as ‘fit for work’:-

http://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/scottish-news/2012/06/01/disability-benefits-bosses-said-deaf-blind-and-mute-man-was-fit-to-work-86908-23881667/

One thing though- Imagine how A+E departments in the UK would cope on a Saturday night if they start asking for £25 fee to be seen after waiting 3/4/5 hours. Not a pretty picture, but then I can already see a boom in the private hospital security industry -anything to turn a greasy coin.

…and they wonder why we hate them?

JIMMY CARR IS A CUNT.

…and so is Gary Barlow, the Tory supporting Royal arse-licker by appointment. Carr is another product of Oxbridge, women-hating and homophobic, so are we surprised? Nope.

IAN BONE’S BLOG: GONE BUT NOT FORGOTTEN!

Friends, anarchists, comrades, lend me your ears;
I come to praise Bone, not to fucking bury him;

(Apologies to Shakespeare, and no, this is not a political obituary)

 

So, for the time being at least, Ian Bone, that old war-horse of the anarcho/revolutionary scene has laid down his digital sword after five years of blogging- some would say he has retired with egg on his face –a swan’s egg at that.  His critics have rapidly formed a disorderly queue to take a pop- the usual assortment of sectarian, middle class anarchists, ideologues, Trotskyites , para-statist trolls and smear-artists, to condemn him for his ‘failures’, his ‘ego’, his ‘stunts’ , his ‘leadership’, for single-handedly ‘wrecking the anarchist movement’…

In this veritable circle-jerk of bitter criticism, all of them with their own impotent axes to grind, in the time-honoured traditions of factional in-fighting, political sniping and covert intrigue, they have fallen on a ‘wounded’ Bone like the vultures they are.

Many of us who read or commented on Ian Bone’s blog naturally take a different view.  We recognise someone who has been consistently militant and uncompromising in his politics and that it was he who popularised anarchist and revolutionary ideas in this country, more than anyone else had done in decades. It’s an inescapable fact. Whether it was striking miners, prisoners or inner city youth, (you know, those real people who exist outside of a bubble of an entirely academic ‘anarchism’), those of us who related to his absolute hatred of the upper classes when he expressed a justifiably vicious anger towards their arrogance, their ill-gotten wealth, their hypocrisy and their gleeful maintenance of disgusting social inequalities.

We will miss his commentary on issues affecting our class today, his unparalleled spirit, his playful ferocity and his charming personal interests. While not all of us agreed with, or participated in, his tactics, The Arseholes would have us believe his ‘stunts’ were nothing more than ‘tilting at windmills’ (and what is any show of dissent is if not a ‘stunt’?)- whereas we saw them as a valiant effort to stimulate resistance through that trademark humour, self-parody and irony we have all come to know and love, if not admire. We know that many of the tactics used by protest groups today owe their origins in the sort of mischievous stunts reintroduced in the UK by Bone himself.  We recognise that lately Ian’s role as the movement’s Eminence Noir has certainly been important and influential- not least the recently revived awareness in the bourgeois press of CLASS as an issue in mainstream politics (and some serious plagiarism)- attacking the ruling classes at their educational roots, twisting the knife in that revolting old turd Murdoch, exposing the Oxbridge Mafia that runs UK-PLC, speaking out on behalf of the victims of the state and providing both a voice and an ear to our class outside of the corporate media, not least during the return of the King Mob in 2011.  For us, the positives always outweighed the negatives, even when he appeared to be a bit of a tit (The Libyan intervention- certainly a far more grievous error than the Cambridge ‘flop’), but then we always knew Old Boney is human, like us, and prone to errors too, unlike that ideal of the mechanically perfect politico that some people seem to aspire to being ( and complemented with a compulsive need to split hairs over exact class origins)…

But that was just it, the SPIRIT that informs his writing, was what is so lacking elsewhere amongst would-be revolutionaries, the sheepish, abstract, unfeeling theoreticians of the high church of Anarchy- those detractors, alienated by Bone’s and Class War’s relentlessly working class-based politics, alienated because they cannot relate to the raw energy of an original class hatred that exists outside the cloistered world of hushed references to obscure and holy revolutionary texts.  The high-brows never ‘got’ Bone- which was, and is, their failure and his abiding success.  Doubtless  some of these were the very same people who negatively critiqued the Great unrest of 2011, and needed to have the error of their, instinctively terrified, middle class ways shown  them, before they tipped into full-blown, rigid, humourless, Leninist contempt for the proletariat.

Meanwhile, the Class War logo and its ethos can be seen right around the world today…

So raise a glass to Comrade Bone;  ‘propagandist extraordinaire’ of the deed and the (swear)word, with all his exaggerations, his hyperbole, his invective, his rhetoric, his mistakes , his simplifications and his victories-

THE CLASS WAR CONTINUES!

 

UPDATE:   BONE IS BACK!