I know, I know.
You’ve been waiting for this moment for almost a year now, and I can only apologise. Life, for want of a better phrase, has been off its tits! The lessons – the reason this blog was born – have been relentless, but I just haven’t had the time to sit down and reflect.
I haven’t had chance to tell you what it was like to get married, or the chaos that went down in the bridal suite afterwards! I haven’t had chance to write down my thoughts on becoming a father for the first time. Ok, Thor is a dog, but he shits and vomits just like a real boy!
There’s been no time to fill you in on our road trip through the US and Canada, or our trip to Madrid, or our most recent travels around Italy. I haven’t even told you about my new job. That’s right, after 10 glorious years, I finally left Liverpool FC and sought out a new challenge. I was with Freiburg for two seasons, winning the league twice and a couple of cups, before becoming the manager of Real Madrid. Like I say… life!
So what’s brought me out of retirement, you ask?
Well, it’s not to talk about any of the above… not yet anyway. There’s more important things to discuss right now. Darker things.
While I usually like to keep it lighthearted on here, politics has been stewing over in my mind this weekend, and, following the tragic events of last night – yet another terrorist attack in London, I’ve decided I want to say something just in case it makes the slightest bit of difference to anyone…
On Friday Jeremy Corbyn appeared on Question Time answering questions from the “general public” (I’m going to put that in quotes because at least one of those asking a question, about Zero Hour contracts, appears to have been exposed as a Tory plant/liar). I only caught the last few questions, but I thought that Jezza handled himself extremely well.
Apparently, the right-wing press feel differently. Jezza, you see, wouldn’t commit himself to being prepared to “press the red-button” in a strike-first situation. Can you imagine the outrage? Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour leader and general upstart, wasn’t prepared to admit that one day he would be willing to start a nuclear holocaust. Or even just use our brilliant nuclear arsenal to wipe out our enemies (along with the millions of innocent civilians living in their country) for daring to look at us in a manner that displeases us.
Because that’s the world we live in now. Sure, there was a time when striking first made you the bad guy, but we were all gentlemen back then and striking first was just not done. When Hitler stormed across Europe and the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbour, that was just bang out of line! (All of which just goes to show the benefits of nuclear weapons, by the way. Sure, it was the blackest mark against the allies from the Second World War, destroying two cities and killing over two hundred thousand civilians, but at least it won us the war!)
Times have changed though. For decades we’ve sold and dropped our bombs on nations in the Middle East, and now we’re surprised to find a well of hatred there that has allowed evil entities like ISIS and Al-Quaeda to warp the minds of young men and women who have lost, or never had, the things we take for granted.
Now we have psychopaths blowing up, shooting, and knifing innocent people in the name of some misplaced faith/cause. Sure, psychopaths have been killing innocent people since the dawn of time, but this is different because ISIS can put a video on the Internet saying so.
If they can fight dirty, why can’t we? It doesn’t matter that this is a war on an ideology rather than a nation, lets just nuke them! Even if they’re hiding behind a human shield, we can blow them up before they blow us up and just pick through the pieces of dead children afterwards. What can possibly go wrong?
I suppose, if that’s what you’re looking for, a leader with the moral fibre of a Bond villain, then you could do a lot worse than vote for Theresa May on Thursday. She wants to take free school dinners away from already malnourished children, allow pensioners to freeze to death in winter, and strangle the NHS to the point that it must be sold off to private health care, as has already started with VirginCare. Her government already has thousands of deaths on its hands from all the cuts to Welfare and the NHS, so I’ve no doubt that she would have the balls to press that big red button and end civilisation as we know it. The hero.
Jezza on the other hand, has been known to sit down and talk with terrorists. He’s never endorsed their actions, and the fact he refused to say he’d ever strike first suggests he detests violence, but he’s talked to the IRA. He did this at the same time the Conservative government of the day were also talking secretly to the IRA, but we won’t mention that. Nor will we mention the fact that it helped bring the IRA to the negotiating table, helped them to realise that politics was the best route to their goals, not terrorism. We won’t mention that it helped end the Troubles. We’ll just rage that he dared talk to them.
It would definitely be risky putting someone like him in power, especially when the current war on terror is proving so successful. A better life for the many is too big a price to pay to risk making a leader of a man whose moral compass means he would first try to trade words before trading bullets.
Much better to keep calm and carry on, following the Tories into the grim future they’ve already painted for us.
Tony
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