Voice of an angel, mouth of a __________ (insert your own faecally related insult here). Voice of an angel, brain of a ___________ (enter whatever imaginative metaphor you like; my favourite was “sponge” because, really, it’s a compliment). Voice of an angel, vagina of a / face of a / liver of a / intelligence of a… and so it goes on and on.
The I’m-alright-Jack right-wing are hilariously bad at coming back. I had never seen it so blatantly until I was castigated for making a case against the government’s policy of austerity at the weekend. You’d be hard pushed to find a single Tory/Ukip zealot on social media who’s willing to put forward any valid argument to counter my opinion. Instead I’m called “a moron”, “a hypocrite”, “a cunt”, “a fat cunt, good tits though”, “a hard faced bitch”, SHOCK-HORROR “a potty-mouth”, CRIPES “a chav”, SAVAGERY “a silly cow”; It goes on and on and on.
I could keep myself awake at night, Arya Stark-ing it (“Katie Hopkins, Andrew RT Davies, Louise Mensch, Paul Staines, The Hound…”), but actually there’s some comfort to find in being the target of so much toothless abuse. It means I’m NOT useless. It means I have a purpose. I am a litmus test for bigotry. I’ll bring ‘em all out of their dank little caves. You may not like me, and that is entirely your prerogative. I’m far too long in the fang to worry about popularity; I’ve been doing this for ages now. But to detest me to such an extent that you would waste your time broadcasting said loathing means a) you have far too much time on your hands, haven’t you got candy to steal from babies, and b) I’ve got right up your goat.
So the standard laughing-tory response to any criticism by the left is “yeah, but, you’re stupid so…” Apparently a good argument for austerity is calling those who oppose it “illiterate”. One of the best logic-when-it-suits-you arguments I regularly have filling my twitter feed is some tripe about Labour being responsible for the GLOBAL financial crisis; like the uncontrollably capitalist Tories wouldn’t have deregulated the financial sector as well; like New Labour didn’t learn it all from Thatcher in the first place; like the Tories wouldn’t have made even more of a Jackson Pollock of it. I find this argument directed at me baffling frankly, as never have I come out in support of the Labour party. I voted for them in the general election, sure, because the Tories hold a marginal seat in the constituency I live in. I will never vote tactically again. It didn’t work and I wasted a vote that could have gone to the Greens or Plaid. I might consider supporting Labour in the future, maybe if they vote Jeremy Corbyn leader. Right now I’m sticking firmly unaligned. But of course anyone who doesn’t agree with the Express is a labourite, and is therefore directly responsible for the crash. It’s so bloody boring saying it again, but the banking crisis was caused by unregulated bankers. It was greed manifest. And punishing benefit claimants for the wealthy’s meltdown, whilst defunding legal aid to make it virtually impossible to appeal against the effects of this pitiless “belt-tightening”, is quite simply corrupt.
The most frustrating aspect of rightwing response to what the left have to say is that it’s flagrantly obvious that they haven’t been paying a blind bit of attention to the content. Anti-Islam campaigner, Douglas Murray perfectly illustrated this in a blog post he wrote in The Spectator on Monday. Rather than saying anything constructive at all, he condescends (whilst claiming that he isn’t doing so), calling my speech “fascinatingly over-written” and mocking my use of the phrase “neo-liberal vernacular”. Coz i iz #2stoopid. He derided me for stumbling over some of my sentences. I’m not a very competent public speaker and I’m fairly new to it in all honesty, but I do wonder when it was that Mr. Murray last spoke in front of a quarter of a million people, and whether he was nervous.
One point I made did get past the blinkers. It was that when the NHS was formed in 1948, the deficit to GDP ratio was significantly greater than it is now. He addressed me directly with a number of astonishingly patronising questions. Firstly, “Does Ms Church know why Britain was so in debt in 1948?” Yes Douglas, I do know. Then “Does she think that any of the debt accumulated in recent years has anything much to show by way of comparison?” Arguably you could say that the context is very different from the post-WW2 economy (although we have just spent the last 15 years fighting in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, which the Royal United Services Institute says cost us over £30billion), however the forming of the NHS gave the UK economy something to work with, much like FDR’s New Deal. Shouldn’t we be doing the same with green energy? The New Scientist says that if we cut carbon emissions as we said we would, 60% of 1990 levels by 2030, “the average household would be £565 better off.” Low-cost fuel, 190,000 jobs, and you get to save the planet. Telegraph journalist, Geoffrey Lean says that David Cameron’s government have “heavily cut back on energy efficiency measures, promoted a virtual free-for all for development in the countryside, resisted measures to combat deadly air pollution, initially cut spending on flood defences and promised to “go all out for shale” while declaring apparent war on onshore wind farms – and the Prime Minister himself has reportedly sworn to cut the “green crap”.”
The last question I was asked was: have I ever been to Greece? Yes I have. I’m going to work out with my lumbering concrete lefty brain that the tree you’re barking up is the Greek economy, which bears such little resemblence to our own as to make the comparison utterly bizarre. Considering that he just knocked me for putting forward an argument out of context he should maybe think about checking his work before he posts it.
There’s just a couple of other things I really feel I need to address here, and they are all to do with defamation. Guido Fawkes has revealed my deepest hypocrisy: I have an accountant. This is duplicity of the highest order; how can I possibly say that I’d pay 70% tax (when asked by a journalist, by the way, not something I wanted to become the story of that press conference) when I use an accountant; an accountant who says “Lowering and deferring tax is, of course, a key aim” on his website. Shame on me! Although, to be fair, this is not what I employ him for.
I’ve been invited to interview Pussy Riot at Glastonbury this weekend, and I’ll be partaking in a debate at the Leftfield stage with Shami Chakrabarti and Ken Livingstone. DISGRACE! £225 a ticket, oh yes, that’s very rich coming from a self-proclaimed prossecco socialist. “Why doesn’t she give all her money away if she cares so much?” “So I assume Charlotte Church has got a new record she wants to plug.” “Like she gives a fuck about Austerity” “Charlotte Church can fuck off and die!” “Just dip her tampons in petrol and set them alight…when inserted.” It goes on and on and on and on and…
charlottesayshmmm 
Reblogged this on Short Blogs for the Distracted……… and commented:
Sticks an stones… keep doing what your doing Charlotte.. rattling the conscience of idiots with nothing to say.. x
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Hi Charlotte can you please email me e r i s k a o s s@ g m a i l . com I would like to email you an idea / proposal. Many thanks, Bronwen / little eris
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Don’t let the bastards get you down. You are amazing and I’m so happy that you are getting out there and doing something to change our messed up country. You have my respect and admiration.
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Church’s fashionable memes, and institutionalised blindness does nothing to recognise one simple fact. When it comes to the services and benefits curtailed by austerity – she represents a collective mindset that consumes without producing and forgets she didnt work for it. What is more she overlooks there is no money. There hasnt been any money for decades and successive governments (all sides) have continued to deliberatly blinker the common man with ever more expensive promises as a means to maintain the status quo. One that is utterly unsustainable.
Church’s communist manifesto only needs one word: TAX. Just another example of an entitled generation that expect mother state to produce the goods yet has not one clue as tpo where the money is coming from.
The harsh reality for Ms Church is that there are people that are sick of spending money on people who have no intention of contributing back to the communal pot. This is not just the poor and persecuted labourite I might add. Starbucks/Amazon/Barclays deserves a serious kick in the nuts as well.
All Church represents now is enabling the lazy. As any father is right to do – Church and her ilk should be booted out to fend for themselves. This may sound harsh – but its part of growing up, something we all eventually have to do if we are to be credible.
The target of Church’s ire is misguided and THIS is the problem. Her reaction is engineered beautifully as she rails against the symptom, NOT the cause.
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I think you’ve missed several very important points here. The two most important ones are: 1) There IS money – the pot isn’t empty. And 2) you haven’t appreciated how an economy works.
To expand on 1) Money is being spent. For example, ridiculous amounts are going to the EU, with further amounts going from the benefit budget for absurdities such as Child Benefit for children living in Eastern Europe (or allegedly living there, as it’s not feasible to check what people who are living here claim for back `home.’) Charlotte is probably wary of getting into this as she seems to still be fooled by anti-UKIP and pro-EU propaganda being spouted endlessly by the Labour Party, the EU itself, and so on. I can appreciate that; if UKIP was what the Labour Party and certain others lyingly claim it is, I’d be opposed to them as well and would mistrust their analysis of things. As ever, we need to look past the smoke and mirrors and work out what the facts are.
Regarding 2): This is, I think, the essential point about so-called austerity. An economy isn’t a finite pot of money. A healthy economy is money moving. A sick economy is stagnant – and austerity creates a stagnant economy. I find myself looking at things in shops and thinking “That’s nice. I wish I could afford it.” And then I realise the shop is full of other people doing the same. The next time I go there, the shop has closed down because people who wanted to buy couldn’t afford to. So people don’t get the goods they want; the person making the goods loses their income and either goes on the dole or fights for one of the ever-diminishing number of jobs available; the person running the shop loses their job as well; the person renting the shop to them doesn’t get rent any longer, and so it goes on. If the items are absolute essentials things aren’t much better. People end up going for the cheapest options available, which usually means supporting poor working conditions or even child labour in the third world, and still bypasses the major part of our economy.
What’s needed, as Charlotte pointed out on here earlier, is an economy that’s moving, where people have enough money to buy and the seller therefore has enough money to pay other people and so on. So long as we have what money there is being directed into the pockets of the few, or squandered, we have a sick economy, and austerity is basically all about making sure that happens – because, naturally, the few who have money directed into their pockets are the exact people who either implement austerity or happen to be very friendly with those who do.
Regarding the lesser points I referred to earlier, I’ll take up just one. If you think Charlotte Church doesn’t work and doesn’t produce anything, you have no idea what she does and how much she puts into it. Not only have I followed her career long enough to realise how hard-working she is, but I also know enough about the business of making music to appreciate what’s involved. It’s fair enough – most people have no knowledge of that and therefore no appreciation of the hard work involved. But if you’re going to accuse someone of being lazy, you really need to know what their work involves.
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“There is no money” … is simply wrong. It is exactly what you might think from following what passes for economic analysis in commerical media or the BBC, but it is junk economics. A Sovereign State with its own currency, such as the UK, has the power to create new money. The question is how it might do so, and what the effects would be.
The UK did create £375bn of new money, in the QE programme. The money was used to buy up Government debt (which means that Government debt is really about 25% lower than it is claimed to be – but that’s not the main issue). Unfortunately, this had little positive effect on the real economy, and mainly increased asset prices (i.e. prices of shares, bonds, and property) – as the Bank of England has since admitted.
What the UK should do now is a different kind of QE, Green Infrastructure QE, in which new money is instead used to invest in improving the energy efficiency of the UK’s existing buildings, building new energy-efficient homes, improving local transport, and more rapid development of renewable energy. More info: http://www.greennewdealgroup.org/
This would create new, decently-paid jobs throughout the UK. As a result, people would spend more, and pay more taxes, and claim less in social security, and so the Government deficit would fall. As people spend more, the private sector would have more customers, and expand more. This would be a virtuous cycle (austerity is a vicious cycle, in which cutting Government spending leads to fewer jobs, less household spending, less business for the private sector, lower tax receipts, and hence a higher deficit).
There are currently over 5 million people either unemployed, or inactive but who want to work, or employed part-time who would like to be employed full-time. And there are huge unmet needs. A proper way of running the economy can solve both these problems simulataneously. Creating new money – in the right way – is a key part of the solution.
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Changing the subject completely:
Charlotte, re the (silly) comments about your accountant, perhaps you would be interested in signing the Fair Tax Pledge – http://www.fairtaxpledge.uk/ – which is a way for individuals to make a commitment not to avoid tax by dubious means, and (for people who use an accountant) to make it clear to their accountant that they do not want their accountant to use such means to reduce their tax bill.
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AleqGrai’s comments are no surprise to me, having been accused by him of supporting Pol pot type atrocities on the basis of being a socialist. He has obviously decided that such a manifestly crazy approach, presumably in very bad faith, wouldn’t work here, and a sort of extreme thatcherite, still in bad faith, might seem less bonkers, but it is not really worth responding to, although Andrew Redhead does a good job.
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Hi Charlotte, apologies as this is not the right forum, but have you heard about the plans for a biomass incinerator in Barry? It would create some 20-30 tonnes per day of hazardous waste and emit fumes containing NOx and nanoparticles.The prevailing wind will take fumes over towards Cardiff. Then there’s the issue of increased traffic on the roads. A vote on the application will take place on 30th July. There’s a facebook group – Stop the Barry Incinerator. Please take a look and, if you feel strongly, please publicise. Many thanks (and keep showing up the childish name-callers, you’ve clearly got them rattled).
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The attacks are infantile and predictable.
Anyone who dares challenge, you, Russell Brand, Jeremy Corbyn, George Monbiot, are all subjected to the same infantile attacks.
What it shows is we are winning.
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You missed one descriptor at the start of this blogpost:
Voice of an angel, heart of a lioness.
Keep it up!
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You’re just speaking to the already converted. If you truly wish to make a difference, you need to offer something the majority of either left or right cannot. Respect. Only then (if you treat people with respect) will they listen to you.
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[…] vagina of a / face of a / liver of a / intelligence of a … and so it goes on and on,” she has written. “I could keep myself awake at night … but actually there’s some comfort to find […]
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