The Sex Pistols, ‘Pretty Vacant’ – could there be a truer description of our shallow, vacuous government? Need I really explain the aptness of this?! Queen, ‘Bohemian Rapsody’: ‘ I’m just a poor boy, nobody loves me…caught in a landslide, no escape from reality‘.
Rising inequality, tax-cuts for the rich, spending-cuts for the poor, the demonisation of the poor, unemployed, disabled. The Who, ‘My Generation’: ‘ People try to put us down‘. New Order, ‘Blue Monday’: ‘ How does it feel to treat me like you do?‘ A question from every disabled, disadvantaged, unemployed and demonised person, every public-sector worker, every pension-bereft Briton to David Cameron, Ian Duncan-Smith, Andrew Lansley and the whole coalition government. ‘NHS is safe in our hands’, ‘No top-down reorganisation of the NHS’, promises of investment, maintenance of numbers in policing & health, protection of ‘front-line’ services and many others – all lies, all now rotting on a scrap-heap. Except we didn’t choose our current ‘leaders’ – but the sham of their promises couldn’t be clearer. The Jam, ‘Going Underground’: ‘ You choose your leaders to place your trust, but the lies all come down and the promises rust‘. Now I probably didn’t catch every relevant one, as I was trying to tweet those I did catch to others to share the significance, but here’s what I did get:
Quite amazingly well done – but as bitter as gall to realise that what steel-making we still have is courtesy of Indian, Thai and Dutch companies. The spectacular steel-making scene, culminating in the ‘manufacture’ of the Olympic rings. Servicemen and women paraded, inspiring pride and admiration – and the realisation that the government is reducing the armed forces to a shadow of their former selves, while hoping for the oxymoronic miracle of a ‘professional volunteer army’ (I kid you not, I heard that on the radio today!).
ENOLA GAY OMD OLYMPICS FREE
Tragically, those hundreds of kids getting free access to a hospital bed while tended by ample numbers of nurses are soon likely to be a thing of the past – and as if to signal that, at the end of the segment the lights went out, one by one, on the NHS. The scene of nurses making what looked like a time-out signal while famous villains ran amok among them was painfully meaningful and apt.
The NHS tribute, strikingly lit and heroic – something we still think we have but whose roots the government has severed with its Health and Social Care Act, so that we’re watching it die but without most of us realising it. Industry, manufacturing, epically-depicted miners rising from the mists of memory, engineering – strikingly portrayed and all tragically reminiscent of things that Tory (and occasionally Labour) governments have actively destroyed or allowed to wither on the vine. Was it intentional? Well, let’s just say that if it wasn’t, it was the most spectacular ‘Freudian slip’ in history! So, what was the message? The bits I’d heard were going to happen seemed to threaten to be either unbearably twee or just tragic – a ‘celebration’ of the NHS, for example, at a time when the government is busy dismantling and giving it away.īut as I sat, watched, listened and tweeted, I started to see it as a coded message to our robber-government. I watched the Olympic opening ceremony tonight with a kind of dread.