Politics

posted in: General | 0

So politics… Look away now if you’d rather. Unfriend, block or simply scroll down for some amusing animal videos or photos. For the curious who want to read, here’s why I feel compelled to post political things every once in a while. Firstly because it’s important, really important and secondly because I am a passionate believer in fairness, equality and generally doing the right thing. So when I see just the opposite of those values it angers me. Quite a lot sometimes. Tomorrow I’ll probably post a photo of a sunny sky or a Xmas bauble. Today I want to get politics off my chest.

People in the UK have the chance to vote tomorrow and please, please do, because as I say, it is important. Right now things are a mess, a big mess. If your life is lovely and rosy, lucky you, because elsewhere it’s a long way off from rosy. 

Climate change is a massive issue, maybe not for you right now, but think about your kids and their kids beyond that. We’re killing the very planet we live on, plus a lot of the wildlife who have been unfortunate enough to share this planet with us. What we’ve been doing to this planet over the years is horrific. The issue needs to be dealt with right now; so when the Conservatives & Brexit parties decided not to bother attending a recent TV leaders debate on climate change, it really spoke volumes about their level of concern, or complete and utter lack of.

The Earth is currently losing animal species at 1,000 to 10,000 times the natural rate and a recent study has estimated that as many as 30 to 50 percent of the planet’s species may be extinct by 2050!!! Sorry Channel 4, we’d rather talk about Brexit than that climate crisis nonsense…

Voters and politicians, not all but most, seem so hung up on bloody Brexit. Personally I think having the 2016 referendum was one of the worst political decisions that I can remember. Regardless of which way you voted, all Brexit has done in my view is to stir up some pretty nasty xenophobic opinions, massively divide a nation and cost a staggering amount of money. Since June 2016 Brexit has cost the UK economy around £70bn!!! Seventy billion and three and a half years later and we’ve still neither left or remained.

You can argue all day with some people about Brexit. I’ll just say that £70bn is an awful lot of money. The UK currently has about 14 million people living in poverty. Over 4 million of those are children. That’s 22% of this country’s population. We now have around 2000 food banks in the UK. Over 300,000 people in this wealthy country of ours are homeless.

Look on any list of the richest countries globally and you’ll usually see the UK sitting proudly fairly near the top. We’re only a few weeks away from 2020, yet 22% of the UK population are struggling to live, struggling to pay bills, to feed their families, to clothe their children, to find a safe warm bed for the night. Kinda makes you think again about that £70bn lost due to bloody Brexit. The wealth gap in this country has continued to widen during recent Conservative governments. Vote them in again and those figures above will just get worse.

This is why I sometimes take a break from photographing my dog or my posh Saturday night meal. Issues that I’ve already mentioned really get to me. They’re important and what is currently happening is so massively wrong on oh so many levels. I’m sure there are plenty of people who think, ‘I’m doing OK so why bother changing anything’, ‘I’m not going to ruin my happy family Xmas, thinking about all those poor people’. ‘It’s not my problem if they can’t afford to buy their kids a present this year.’ My social media accounts recently have been littered with ‘comical’ or offensive posts, by people who clearly don’t have any problem with the current state of affairs. A Conservative MP said last week that people who relied on food banks should learn how to manage their finances better… All a bit sad really. 

So I will be doing my small tiny bit this Thursday, in the hope that things can change. Because I believe that something has to change. I’m only one little voice, one vote. The sad reality is, my vote will probably be in vain, as current polls predict yet more Conservative rule… We can but try