Saturday, October 17, 2009

The Autumn of Wrath

The Summer of Rage is fashionably late, it seems, but it has started. The Autumn of Wrath is here.

Tory Bear hit the nail on the head. People are outraged about bank bonuses, MPs' expensespostal strikes, the recession, lavish wasting of public funds, the police stateflagrant law-breaking by politicians, feral chavs... it's not being addressed, and it's spilling out in all directions - the Trafigura/Carter-Ruck gagging order, the TFL bully, Jan Moir...

Twitter is playing a large part simply because the news travels so quickly - assuming six degrees of separation and one minute to re-tweet, awareness of a story can cross the world in five minutes. The stories themselves are generally in the mainstream media, but there are no more "good days to bury bad news". The dead-tree press are, to their credit, reading the mood well and increasingly using online sources. The morning's Metro still feels like it contains two-day-old news - the same stories as the Lite and Evening Standard the night before, which were on the wire by breakfast - but it's still fresh to the majority of the population.

Predictions for the next few months? Nights are drawing in, and the recession is going to see cut-down xmas parties: people are going to be cold, wet and miserable, and will probably spend more time following the news. They'll have lots of time. Redundancies and strikes will dampen moods still further - I'm betting the RMT is out in London before xmas (possibly over the ponytailed git's "unfair" sacking), and RMT and/or ASLEF disrupting national rail wouldn't surprise me; the postal service is pretty much gone now as we've missed the union's "last posting day" for cards and presents. Other public services might strike as well - there are already signs, and they seem to feel they deserve job security and pay rises, which aren't on the cards.

It probably won't kick in until the quarterly bills arrive in January/February/March, but the price of energy is going to cause another blow-up when people realise just how much staying warm cost them in the winter - are you sure about those green energy subsidies, Mr Miliband?

While ever this lame-duck government remains in power, people are going to keep finding abuses of taxpayers' money, civil liberties, the law (particularly ironic when officials break any of the myriad new laws they've introduced in the last decade) and natural justice... and nothing is going to be done about them, which will only fuel the rage. A slap on the wrist here, a fine there, an apology, an inquiry - nothing.

The people of this country are metaphorically baying for blood... if these abuses continue long enough, that adverb will become "literally".

And I don't mean "OMG, I, like, literally died of shame!"... I mean literally.

- KoW

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