That pitiable conference, this directionless party – and the tale of Johnson’s lion and May’s frog
“We have our reservations about the Foreign Secretary, but concede that he alone, of those Ministers who spoke this week, made the Tory message sing.”
By Paul Goodman |
Shiraz Socialist 
petrel41 said,
October 5, 2017 at 2:00 pm
See also
https://dearkitty1.wordpress.com/2017/10/05/theresa-may-flops-at-british-conservative-conference/
rotzeichen said,
October 6, 2017 at 10:52 am
Thought this was highly relevant:
UK
People as Commodities; Commodities as People
October 4, 2017
By Lisa Dempster
In today’s world of throwaway goods, when it’s often cheaper and less hassle to replace items rather than repair them, one has to wonder if that also goes for human lives. Is it easier to turn our faces away from the lives that are deemed to be worth so much less than our own, to pretend it’s not happening because it doesn’t affect you or me? Are we so desensitised to the atrocities across the world that it’s all become just another news item that we can switch over channels and ignore? Don’t turn away: the media wants to drip-feed us more of the same.
I sat in a theatre recently and watched a play entitled The Last Train to Auschwitz. The play, written by Jo Mac, was performed in a small theatre in Liverpool and was well attended by smartly dressed men and women. Quite busy for a Saturday night, I thought, and I wondered how many of the audience would then continue on into town for a drink and a dance. I also queried, in my head, how many of those same people had walked past the homeless man sitting outside Tesco, a couple of doors away from the theatre, and had acknowledged his presence with a kind word, a donation of money or food? Or had they, like so many others, passed him by, either not seeing him or trying not to look at him for fear that they might have to accept that even in this day and age we have people living on the streets?
I’m not ashamed to say that I cried while watching the play. Millions of lives lost in the death camps, people murdered for being born Jewish or Romany. People too weak to work: the elderly, the sick, the disabled, the mentally ill, the very young. Husbands, fathers, sons and brothers shot and killed on the spot. Women and children, who were beaten, raped and experimented on before being sent to their deaths in the gas “showers”. These were somebody’s mother’s and sisters and daughters, and yet people turned away and pretended it wasn’t happening. Arbeit macht frei, they said, and everyone promised it would never be allowed to happen again.
My tears that night were not just for those lost in Germany but for the lives that even today are being thrown away like discarded rubbish. Hundreds have been killed in Burma, hacked to pieces or burnt alive. Children’s bodies washed up on a Turkish beach, whole families drowning in the sea while trying to escape atrocities that we are lucky enough to not have to face here in the United Kingdom. Families in Palestine who are living under an occupied forces regime with limited access to water and electricity and always the threat of life being ended by a bullet or a bomb, regardless of age or class.
Even here in the United Kingdom life has become a throw away commodity. Every week more stories emerge of people dying after having draconian sanctions placed on them by the DWP so that they’re faced with the grim reality of having to pay for life-saving medication or starve to death. So in one of the richest countries in the world people are essentially committing suicide because they can’t see a way out of the poverty and debt they find themselves in. Working families having to resort to using foodbanks to feed their children because the wage they earn is only enough to cover essential bills is now commonplace.