A bit of background: Last week I shared a tweet of mine to Facebook, reminding people that amid the Hancock scandal not to forget that Boris Johnson is still a gaslighting shitlord (technical term). It got around 2,300 likes, which isn’t bad given I made the exact same joke when Dominic Cummings was in trouble last year.
Obviously there will ALWAYS be people that disagree where politics is concerned.
I won’t hide the fact that I loathe and despise the Tories and I’ve said as much in many previous blog posts. However I guess however tempting it is, you can’t live in a bubble (much to my eternal chagrin) and so I’m happy to let them have their say and tell me what a good job Boris has done (they wrong tho) and that they’d like to see me do better (I don’t have the time right now but thanks for the vote of confidence!).
These are usually random people who rock up from nowhere and didn’t follow anyway (spoiler alert: page owners can tell if you are actually a follower, so threatening to unfollow only really works if you actually do, and even then they probably won’t care too much). More often than not, their arguments involve words like ‘triggered libs’ and ‘snowflakes’, and if I’m very lucky they make strawman arguments about how much worse it would be if ‘Corbyn and Abbott was in charge’ to fully complete my bingo card.
Their grammar is generally shit and no one really takes much notice, or else others delight in dissecting their arguments until they delete their comments and fuck off.
Then there are the other people; the ‘You Shouldn’t Have Posted This’ people.
The ‘Don’t Get Political!’ people. The ‘This Isn’t A Politics Page’ people. The ‘Stay In Your Lane And Only Write About Things I Want To Read, Funny Mummy Blogger’ people. The ‘I Used To Like This Page’ people.
Maybe they think they’re doing the nice thing by telling me not to bring up politics as it might upset people, or they just want everyone to be kind and have somehow confused holding the government to account for their failings with not picking on people for having cellulite. Or maybe, just maybe, they have followed my page, laughed at the things I’ve written and thought ‘she’s a bit like me!’, except they voted Tory, and they’re having some kind of internal struggle because they thought they liked me, and now they don’t.
<Insert shrug emoji here>
I guess they’re right to a degree; it isn’t a politics blog.
I would quite frankly find that dull, exhausting and depressing. But it is my blog, and now that my kids are older I don’t write about them so much. For a start, they’re both at school and I have other shit going on. It’s also an invasion of their privacy and quite frankly they’re good, sensible kids who generally make me very proud and don’t do ridiculous toddler shit which can be memed and shared to make people laugh.
While I recognise that my roots will always be in parenting, as that’s what kicked off this whole shebang, things move on and it has naturally developed into much more than that; a place to share my thoughts and things I enjoy and find funny, interesting and/or important – and among the silly rants and stupid clothes and lamenting my youth, that includes politics. You are welcome to come along with me for the ride, or if it doesn’t float your boat anymore, that’s cool.
I love reading comments and I am often entertained many of my followers, but as I have pointed out before in my Complaints Department blog, unless you’re paying me to write stuff, your opinion on what I should and shouldn’t cover isn’t particularly relevant. I do this for me. Much like those that don’t like ads or sponsored content, they are cordially invited to unfollow with no hard feelings. It’s my page, and I’ll do with it whatever I wish, and if that means people unfollow because they can’t bear to see Boris so heartlessly mocked, then well; I’ll bear that.
But I won’t stop talking about politics.
Parenting is political. Everything is political.
Who you vote for matters. If you want to live somewhere where children’s centres and libraries aren’t being desperately underfunded and closed, it matters. If you want to send your children to your local school where the teachers aren’t disillusioned, overworked and underpaid, kids aren’t unable to learn because they’ve had a decent meal, and you want them to grow up in a country where they don’t have to pay to access healthcare or die trying to scrape together the money for cancer treatment in a GoFundMe, then it MATTERS who you vote for.
If you are angry at the Government’s poor response to COVID – resulting in both a huge death toll and the decimation of the economy they apparently wanted to protect at human cost – you need to take that anger to the voting booths. If you’re angry that the very people that make the rules don’t seem to think they apply to them, you need to make your voice heard. If you don’t understand why someone can be entirely incompetent at their job and corrupt, awarding contracts paid for by public money to their friends, family and pub landlord and then only quit when they’re caught shagging their mate, then it’s something worth getting angry about.
You can stick your head in the sand and avoid it all, turn off the news and unfollow any page that dares to mention it, and it might be less frustrating but it won’t help. You, and your children, will have to live the consequences whether you have your say or not.
And that’s why I won’t shut up about it.
PS Boris is a prick, pass it on. And that Hancock c*nt too. And the rest of them.
LOL well said! Though I will give you a run for your money on the despising of this government. We won’t even start about the B word from 2016. Then there is all there cuts and vilification of the vulnerable ad infinite.
As for it having nothing to do with mommy things, they sat, etc yes it does cos what the government do affects us and our children 😏
It never ceases to amaze me that the people who keep telling you to “stay in your lane” and not talk about politics because you’re not a politician are invariably people who aren’t staying in their own lane by talking about politics despite not being politicians themselves.
It occurs to me that we would probably be in a better state as a country if more people talked more often about politics, rather than fewer people talking less often. Politics literally affects every aspect of our lives, from the taxes we pay to our children’s education to telling vulnerable people they should shield in their homes forever (if not longer). The problem is not people *talking* about politics; the problem is people *shouting* about politics just because you don’t share their particular world-view.
And, no, I won’t stop talking about politics either. 🙂
Do I win a prize for “most uses of the word ‘politics’ in a comment”?
Ah, we still love you. Sod the miserable buggers. And eat the rich.
No pasaran
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Good work. That is all.
We should all be concerned about politics. Especially young parents, as what they decide now WILL affect their children when they are adults. If you want a right wing government, that attacks other races, cultures and the LGBTQ population, the elderly, the poor and the infirm, then vote for the Tories or Reform. They will despise you anyway, because you’re not wealthy. They’ll try to get your vote on lies, then immediately renege on all promises made. They will sell off the NHS – you already know how difficult it is to get an NHS dentist – that is the future of our health service, if the Tories get in. I’m old, I won’t be around when your children are adults, but hopefully you will be, that’s if you can afford private healthcare. Politics isn’t just about you, it’s about the future… make sure your children have one!
Not that Labour are much better frankly, but that’s a whole other story!
Well done Fran, keep it up. This old girl loves you, and your often acerbic wit, it matches my own.
Not all grannies are handing out flyers for Reform, I’d rather get my eyeballs bleached than even touch one. That Farage geezer has the look of a second hand car dealer, but he’s potentially dangerous… there’s a photo of him from a few years ago boarding a boat, and a sign says ‘slippery when wet!’ And it sums him up perfectly
Ps thanks for mentioning libraries