#the a to z shuffle unit is real it's been confirmed

[dumbenstarsmemes]

[gaiatheorist]

What IS happening?

I’ve started writing this one about six times now. Every time I think I have a grasp on what might be happening in the aftermath of the UK General Election, something new floats into my field of vision, and the head-shaking starts again.

Election-night was surreal, not just because I was so sleep-deprived, or because it looked, at some points as if the Conservatives might have shat their pot-full, with their arrogant assumptions that they didn’t even have to try. I missed Mr Fishfinger, but I did see Lord Buckethead, and a giant Elmo standing on the same podium as the Prime Minister. What? It’s traditional, as long as I can remember we’ve always had ‘novelty’ candidates, like the Official Monster Raving Loony Party. We ripped the piss out of a certain US presidential candidate in the same way we would have ridiculed Screaming Lord Sutch and co, the wind changed, and we stayed in that mode. The difference between the ‘Standing at the back, looking stupid party’ candidates, and the American one was that people voted for the American one, on the back of pledges he can’t possibly honour.

The news kept repeating that the Labour party insisted that their manifesto was the only one of the bunch that was fully costed, and workable. I can’t verify that, and I’ve said from the start that, despite voting Labour, I didn’t agree with all of their pledges. (Boring tactical-vote, if you don’t vote Labour in this constituency, you might as well vote Conservative or UKIP, the Liberal Democrat and Green Party candidates don’t hold enough sway over the local demographic to make a difference.) It would appear that we’re in another ‘could/would’ scenario, with the Conservatives feeling the need to alter some of their manifesto points, in light of overwhelming public opinion, and their will-they-won’t-they alliance with the DUP.

“Hello, people of the United Kingdom, If you elect us, we will do THESE things.”

(Five minutes later,)

“Yeah, you know those things we said we’d do? We’re going to change some of them now you’ve voted us in.”

That’s ludicrous, nobody in their right mind would order one thing in a restaurant, and then shrug, and say “OK.” when they were served something else entirely, that’s not how real life works. Oh, apart from the EU referendum, and Boaty McBoatface. (Well done, me, you managed a couple of paragraphs without mentioning Brexit...) 

Not taking the electorate seriously enough to engage with them was offensive, but enough people voted for Mrs May to almost secure a working majority. Gods, it was close, though. This is where it gets all British-complicated, we’re first-past-the-post, not proportional representation, either way, the final-final count had the Conservatives with something like 2700 votes more than Labour. The Conservatives ‘won’, but had lost sufficient seats to no longer have a viable majority of MPs. All of the main contenders had already ruled out coalition governments, and the opposition deputy put a rocket up Mrs May’s rear with “If you don’t sort a workable majority by Monday, we will stand ourselves as a minority government.” I think he’d forgotten that the woman will do absolutely anything to remain ‘in control.’

So, for the last couple of days, the UK has been up in arms about the DUP being dinosaur-denying homophobes, I suppose that’s taken the heat off Tim Farron a bit, poor lamb couldn’t get through a single Q&A session without someone asking him if he thought the gays were damned. The voters over in Northern Ireland knew this already, and have delivered the goods in terms of a DUP politician trying to ban the serving of alcohol at a beer festival, a cracking over-dub of the DUP dancing to ‘Gay Bar’, and their inference that the DUP manifesto is essentially The Old Testament with mention of bin collections.

Nobody else wanted to play ball with Dalek-May. She played the numbers game, for a working majority, paying no heed to the impartiality ‘the mainland’ is meant to hold since the Good Friday Agreement, or the you-scratch-our-back-and-we’ll-scratch-yours agreement being with a group of people who have no more jurisdiction ‘over here’ than we do ‘over there.’ That’s before you get onto the archaic beliefs of the party she’d climbed into bed with. (Lights off, covers up to the chin, penis-beaker, and only for purposes of procreation and such, which is probably right up both sides’ alleys.) Some elements of non-DUP parties, including some Conservatives, decided to jump up and down about “We don’t agree with them on x, y, and z.” Bastard superb, a very slightly more grown-up version of inviting your whole school-class to your birthday party, but telling a bunch of them you think they smell of wee, and you’ve only invited them because your Mum said you had to. Oh, wait, hang on, it’s not a children’s party, they’re political parties, and they’re slagging each other off before the ‘confidence and supply’ agreement is even written.

There’s no formal agreement, there’s no finalised manifesto, and the Supreme Dalek is meant to deliver her outline on how this Omnishambles can be brought to order to Her Majesty a week from today. On the same day the Brexit negotiations are meant to start. On the day after she’s ‘re-shuffled’ her dodgy pack of fawning underlings. (”Right, you cocked your last post RIGHT up, have a different one. You, I fired you, I’ll have you back if you do exactly as you’re told.”) So, no agreement, no confirmed manifesto, no confirmation of the terms of the alliance, and a cabinet where the bloke who ruined the NHS is left in charge of health, and the bloke who ruined the education system is now in charge of environment, and has already been quoted as suggesting de-regulating drugs-testing, and lifting bans on construction on protected areas. My head’s spinning just thinking about it, I imagine she’s so busy trying to finish it her plunger is where her egg-whisk should be.

“Right, there’s no way we’re going to untangle this in a week. Suggestions?”

“Erm, we could say we need more time to sort it out?”

“Yes. No. If we say we need more time, they’ll cotton on that we didn’t actually do our homework in the first place, and we’ll get a detention.”

“Blame the new guys? Say they’re holding up the process.”

“Good. Excellent. No, that’s stupid, if we say that, they’ll hear it, and they might dob us in.”

“Goat-skin.”

(Robotic whirring and lazer-eyes.) “What?”

“Well, the thing needs to be written on goat-skin, doesn’t it? That’s why Jeremy will never be PM, he’s a vegetarian.”

“Go on, what about the goat-skin?”

“We could say we’ve run out, and that we can’t deliver the Queen’s Speech until we get some more? That ought to buy us some time?”

“Perfect! Go with the goat-skin, I’ll carry on peeling these puppies over here.”

So, the rest of the world had a massive chortle at us, that we’re so ‘British’ that we cling to archaic traditions, like certain proclamations and such needing to be written on vellum. Me, I was sitting here thinking “Do you wait until you’ve used all of the toilet paper before you think to buy any more as well?” They haven’t run out of vellum, the vellum hasn’t gone off, and a big dog didn’t run off with it, thinking it was a string of sausages in a cartoon. The timelines on this thing were set weeks ago, it’d be a pretty poor Prime Minister who didn’t check there was vellum first. While the rest of the world was chuckling about #goatgate interest peaked in the actual process. The speech IS transcribed onto vellum, for longevity, but FIRST it’s delivered to Her Majesty by more conventional mechanisms. What we have here is the Prime Minister and her advisory team doing what I did with my A-level coursework. I kept telling the tutor that the printer was broken at home, and that was why I hadn’t handed it in. She told me to load it onto a disc, and print it at school. I ‘lost’ the disc. (I’m so old and warty, we didn’t have internet or USB drives when I was doing my A-levels.) She gave me a brand new disc to save my work onto. I told her the computer had broken, and all of my work had been lost, and spent the entire night before the deadline hand-writing what I claimed to be two year’s worth of coursework. Yes, I passed.

This is absolute nonsense, there was a line thrown out earlier today that The Queen is due to attend a horse-thing next week, it all looks so much like delaying tactics. The Dalek doesn’t know what she’s doing, because she hadn’t envisaged this outcome. She’s surrounded by people who don’t know what they’re doing, and might not even have agreed with some of the things she ambi-vague said she might have been intending to do in the first place. Nobody knows what’s happening, a respected BBC political commentator has just Tweeted that the Queen’s speech might still go ahead next week, or it might not. NOBODY KNOWS in this tangled-web of spin and slur and absolute lack of clarity. We’re all going a bit mad again, I don’t think we really recovered properly from the last few times.