Cicero's Songs

A system where the choice of British Prime Minister is Theresa May or Jeremy Corbyn is -self evidently- a system that needs reform.    Despite the humiliation of a hung parliament, the current Prime Minister, Mrs. May, has nevertheless started the negotiation to leave the European Union. The Conservatives do not intend to stop at any halfway houses, but to leave the jurisdiction of the ECJ, and so withdraw from the customs union, the single market and essentially all the institutions of the EU. Although Brexit will cause major economic damage- not to mention trashing the national brand of the UK- it is not the most immediate problem the country faces right now. Britain is sailing into the mother of economic storms with the engine stopped and a huge argument on the bridge. The " sombre national mood " identified by the venerable Queen Elizabeth II is rightly named. The sense that the Brexit vote has cast Britain adrift in uncertain international waters has grown over the...

When the Exit poll arrived I was, for a moment, utterly elated.  The Conservatives had finally done enough to alienate even their most die-hard supporters. Fox hunting, grammar schools, dementia tax and above all the Kamikaze Brexit -not to mention all the other festering, broiling drivel of their brain dead manifesto and vacuous campaign- had finally brought the Tories to defeat. Yet, and yet, Theresa May, in all her tin-eared, out-of-touch, arrogance remains the Prime Minister. Despite Boris Johnson's transparent moves- as George Osborne noted, Johnson has a permanent leadership campaign- in fact Mrs. May, despite electoral embarrassment bordering on humiliation, remains Prime Minister and will probably survive for far longer than the chimpanzee cage of the British press currently thinks. The fact is that after the biggest scare of their lives the Conservatives are in the same mind set as Dr. Johnson: "When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates h...

Watching the UK election from afar has been a sad and chastening experience. The fact is that neither the Prime Minister nor the Leader of HM Opposition are fit for office.  The partisan media scream for their particular political brand but have utterly failed to dissect the issues that threaten to wrench the UK into crisis and possible collapse. Biased, incoherent and feral, the British press has systematically undermined democratic debate and even basic rules of decency. Frankly the drivel that most of the print media serve up is a slop of insults to the intelligence and out-and-out depravity that genuinely makes me ashamed of the country of my birth. That the FT, The Economist and sometimes the Guardian do provide nuanced and thoughtful opinion doesn't off-set the verminous alt-right lies published by the off-shore owned, tax avoiding right wing bastards in the Dailies Telegraph, Express, Mail, or the Times or the Sun. In future years we will not need to look far to understand...