Leftism – It’s A Mental Disorder

Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett outlines this perfectly:

This weekend has, for me, been like the most savage of hangovers. Waves of despair, punctuated by panic, anxiety, paranoia, and fear. A profound weltschmerz and a curious lack of appetite, not to mention a high-pitched monotone in my left ear that sadly, this time, cannot be put down to our decrepit fridge.

Good lord!

I keep remembering and then forgetting; a welcome pleasant thought will be interrupted by the terrifying reminder of what they are going to do to the Human Rights Act. As my father said, “It’s all too awful.”

I can see where you get it from, Rhiannon…

I wonder how many of you, up and down the country, have been trying to hold it together too. I retained my composure for most of Friday, despite no sleep, despite returning home with the birdsong to tell my boyfriend, a public sector worker, the bad news, which he met by rolling over, saying sleepily but with cold certainty, “Well that’s my job gone, then.”

Oh, really? What, the first act of the new government would be to personally sack your boyfriend, would it?

I held it together on College Green during a BBC World Service segment and, later, as I jokingly discussed with friends which sunny, socialist paradise we would decamp to before they shut the borders. I finally broke down properly at around 6pm on Friday, when I allowed myself, finally, to think about my little brother, who is severely disabled, and what might happen to him. Whether I should grab him and run for the hills so that we could camp down together under warm, soft blankets and not come down again until the bad people have gone.

‘The bad people’...? Christ, how old is she?

There’s something vaguely embarrassing about crying about the government. It buys into a stereotype of left-leaning people as overly emotional and childlike in their naive idealism and belief that there is a better way to run the country than cutting services to the bone. But those of us who cried over the election result should not feel embarrassed.

No, no, you should. You really, really should!

There are some who are saying that Labour was too left-wing, yet unlike the SNP, it failed to challenge austerity in any meaningful way, failed to encourage the passionate pride we should be taking in our welfare state. It failed to tell the stories of those who suffered most. It failed to listen.

I think it was the voters who decided not to listen. And I can’t blame them.

The deliciousness of this article is only increased by this footnote:

• This article was amended on 11 May 2015 to remove an incorrect statement that in 2014, government figures showed that 10,600 people had died within six months of being found fit for work by Atos.

ROFL!

No Advertising Please, We’re Students!

Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett on the awful injustice of … getting an advertising email in your inbox?

If you needed further proof that education has become little more than a commodity, then the news that Ucas is selling access to millions of students to advertisers might just be it.

Just advertisers? Good lord, from the pearl-clutching going on, you’d think she’d discovered they were planning to sell students’ personal details to white slavers...

And anyway, aren't teenagers supposed to be clued up on all this technology stuff? Just set up a divert for these emails to go straight to the trash folder – job done!

Yes, you can opt out of receiving the digital marketing emails, but only by also agreeing to miss out on the education and careers newsletters, too.

And how many students even read these in the first place? Will they miss them?

But it seems Rhiannon has been perturbed by commercialisation even from a tender age:

Even as a teenager I knew instinctively it was wrong. It was about 10 years ago that the first advertising posters cropped up at my school, in the corridors and canteen, advertising films and junk foods. Prior to that we had been using Pepsi-branded exercise books, but the posters were a step too far.

Couldn’t you have just hurried past, eyes cast firmly on the ground, shielding yourself from the awful sight..?

“My Parents The Tories Don’t Understand Me!”

Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett worries…

I worry even more for those unlike me, whose parents can't offer anything, even love. Those with perpetually skint but not-so-nice parents, or those coming out of care.

I worry for young mums, with kids to support.

"Young people" are not a homogenous group in need of arbitrary policy – they are adults, quite vulnerable adults, actually, with different needs and desires and circumstances. You can't just slap a Neet label on them and order them back to the tech. You can't just force them to borrow 27 grand for a course they don't want to study.

If they are adults, they can shift for themselves, surely? Isn't that what 'adult' is supposed to mean..?

But then, I suppose if they're in work or education, rather than at home, thinking about other things, such as how spectacularly shafted they have been by the previous generation, then they're that little bit more malleable.

Ahhh, yes. The perpetual cry of today's perpetual childults - 'Waah, everyone else got all the resources and I'm left with nothin'..!'

I probably sound angry, and that's because I am. Over the years I've seen a raft of policies that make things tougher for young people, from the scrapping of education maintenance allowance to workfare to tuition fees. I've felt increasingly alienated by the government's failure to limit the power of the buy-to-let landlords who impoverish us, and the failure to provide us with affordable housing. How can young people hope to engage with a government that seems to hate us so much? How can that government expect to get our vote, when the time comes?

Since all the statistics seem to show that your generation simply don't bother, I guess they aren't worried.

The Conservatives don't understand.

Awwww, diddums! Have a sulk in the pages of CiF rather than your bedroom, then.

They don't understand that some of us don't have parents who can see us through, and that those that do still crave, nonetheless, independence.

Really? It’s a strange sort of ‘independence’ that demands everyone else fund your lifestyle choices, isn’t it?

And as they age, they'll expect this feckless bunch of worthless youngsters to fund their soaring medical bills and spoon-feed them, and nod politely when they make politically incorrect comments about immigrants.

Oh, those wicked racist elderly people! Can't wait for them to die, can you, Rhiannon? Much better to import a bunch of immigrants to do that job of caring for them, leaving your generation to think grand thoughts and be employed by...

Well, by whom? Doing what?

Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett Opines....

...on the subject of water. And a column from the most vapid of the 'Guardian's' stable is always a treat, eh, Reader?

Like many who saw it, I was saddened and shocked at the disregard for animals: people were clambering over nests, and trying to reach an island specially safeguarded for birds. Yet I also wondered what a polarised, emotive debate is going to achieve when, lurking behind the justified anger, is another question about our access to water.

Eh?  

“It’s like nothing is free any more and that’s not fair for us as well. We don’t want to pay for … natural water” – this comment, given anonymously by one of the swimmers to the Times, was telling. There’s a feeling, I think, nationally, that our water no longer belongs to us. It is being cynically polluted, fenced off, or monetised.

Well, too bad, you have to pay for everything worth having in this life! 

It’s great that we are seeing new designated swimming spaces, but demand is only going to increase as the climate continues to heat up.

Maybe, or maybe we'll switch to demanding aircon on the taxpayer's dime?  

The well-known bathing ponds on either side of the wildlife pond on Hampstead Heath used to operate on an honesty system. Now you have to pay, and in hot weather the queues are long. At the same time, temperatures are getting hotter and hotter, and city life is becoming less bearable. There are not enough accessible places to swim.

Well, gosh, its almost as if honesty systems don't work anymore when you transition from a high trust society to a multicultural one! 

On the one hand, wild swimming has become totally fetishised, tweely marketed as a middle-class lifestyle choice and a cure-all, and spots where you can swim are more and more swamped. On the other, you have “no swimming” signs but very little clarity about why they are there (at the wildlife pond in Hampstead Heath it’s not made clear why that one, of the three, is off limits, and there was scant information about the birds and their habitat), let alone a proper national conversation about what our rivers, seas, lakes and ponds are for.

As if anyone from the most selfish generation would read it, or care if they did! 

The many campaigns against the pollution of our rivers and seas have been excellent, but as well as those, and teaching children to swim, we should be discussing how we navigate risk and educate people about the potential impact of open water swimming both on human and animal lives. By all means issue more fines – but also put up boards explaining why people shouldn’t swim, just as “no swimming” signs in danger spots should explain the actual risks.

If organisations were to put up signs warning of the danger of drowning, they would get complaints  about them being that most overused modern word, ‘triggering’ and if they were to put up signs noting the prevalence of drowning deaths amongst ethnic minorities , that too would attract campaigners whining that water is racist! 

They can’t win, so the only sensible move is not to play the game!

In some ways, the Hampstead Heath saga reminds me of the visceral response to the felling of the sycamore gap tree: valid anger about the environment or animal welfare escalating to an irrational point, with outraged comments online wishing diarrhoea and vomiting on the swimmers.

As an island nation, swimming is encoded in many of us from a very young age. As people continue to lose their lives, education and investment are more urgent than ever.

Only if the people we were losing were worth saving, Rhiannan.... 

Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett Doesn’t Understand Life…

… today’s story of the single but divorced adults building gigantic detached homes for themselves does leave a funny, sour taste in the mouth, but talk to most members of our parents’ generation and they feel as worried as we do. We are, after all, their children, and many of them have stepped in try to create a better life for their children where the government has failed to do so.

Newsflash, sweetie: it’s not the government’s job to create a better life for you or your children, it’s your’s and your parent’s job…

Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett Is On Track For ‘Line Of The Year’…

…for this comment in her CiF column on public conveniences:

I write as someone whose disabled brother recently defecated in the bushes outside Tesco.

I mean, what, exactly, does one say to that? Other than to wonder at the 'Guardian's' need to hire people unable to cope with modern life...