HALF-DEAD SHEEP NATION

" No one told me there'd be days like this" - Johnny Lennon.

Each day the tabloids compete for the most gloom-laden shout-headlines; whether it be oil, knife crime, MPs expenses, house prices, utility bills or immigration - all of a sudden the nation seems to have woken to the fact that's been staring us in the face for decades.
The country's being systematically raped and ransacked by the politliarsTM of both now near-identical persuasions.

Yet along with the gloom comes a new chink of hope, for in amongst the black despair, there's emerging a certain mood of rebellion amongst the national flock masses not seen since the poll tax protests under Thatcher bitch, a kind of "we won't take no more crap" mentality. We've seen the first stirrings this past week with the ram lorry drivers rubber stamping their well-articulated ways to London in a - for now at least - orderly protest convoy against the grand extortion that is the 70% fuel duty at the pickpocket PM Gordon Brown's stand-and-deliver pump pricesTM.

Yet when the unelected gutless jobsworth himself, along with his decidedly shifty-looking chancellor gate-crashed the meeting of oil company bosses in Scotland this week, it was still more about putting up appearances, spinning out a little more of the big lie, trying to con the public into again accepting gesture politics in the stead of concrete action. But no longer does this weave the Blairite spell, New Labour's well-worn cheap party tricks have become all too see-through.

Only last night on Newsnight, Brown's energy minister had the nerve to spew out the well-spun stat', that " The government doesn't earn any more by proportion when the price of petrol goes up". He repeated this ad nauseum like some vacuous Westminster mantra. Of course the key con trick spin words were "by proportion", counting on the viewers not to notice that 70% of £1.30 a litre is substantially MORE than 70% of 80p a litre ( 35p per litre more in Brown's coffers to be precise)

The electorate know well that if they hadn't both threatened to and actually given Gordon Brown a good thumping in the polls recently, no way would he have given the concession on the 10p tax, no way would he now be contriving to rescind the new forecourt tax proposals or the absurd 42 day detention without trial limit. The only language this man, or any politliar understands.... is fear of losing office.

Perhaps, in the end, this is the only way modern democracy can really give a voice to the people - by the electorate themselves gathering to protest in numbers enough ( Ian Thorp's "pitchfork revolution" ) to scare the living seat pants off the governing party's MP majority enough for them to pressure the PM to change or go.

Pity then, that it takes self preservation-motivated fear of the sack for the spineless Labour MP maggots to act to change policy, rather than the unparalleled tragedy of the nation being taken into a totally unjustified war - by a laughingly obvious conman PM - that has cost hundreds of thousands of lives, with oil tanker loads of innocent men women and children's' blood in the sand in a far flung desert land: when most of them simply sat on their hands in shameless indifference.

We surely all deserve better than this of our so-called leaders.

M St.M