My heart bleeds, my soul is sick and my land is broken and dying. How else can I describe how I felt when I learnt that the dis-United Kingdom was back in the greedy and unfeeling grasp of the ‘nasty’ party, the Conservatives. I was not alone.
“I was quite happy this morning – until I saw a newspaper on my way to work… I hope to God my children end up living abroad,” was one acquaintance’s reaction, her face still shocked hours later.
But my heart sings for Scotland, a nation that has shown corrupt Westminster the door, the Scottish National Party taking all but two of the seats. Bring on land reform; bring on social justice; and bring on independence! For independence there will be. Scotland has taken too many insults from Westminster politicians. If no others demand reform of our broken political system, they will.
But so should the rest of us, the English, the Welsh and those in Northern Ireland.
How did this happen? How did every single poll get it wrong? How could a country where so many of its citizens have suffered because of the ‘austerity’ policies of the last five years vote for another five years of misery? What kind of a future are we looking at with Cameron and his rich cronies back in power?
These are people who will make the most outrageous promises to buy your vote, and forget them the moment the vote is cast.
These are people for whom the land which feeds our souls with its beauty and our bodies with its food has little intrinsic value. They will kill more and more of our badgers in the name of ‘science’. They will repeal the Hunting Act which gave not enough protection to foxes, stags and hares. They will do this despite what the public says.
They enjoy the land by striding over their countless acres, shotgun ready to fire at deer, at pheasant, at grouse – and at buzzard and eagle, hawk and falcon to preserve their ‘game’. Should one even wonder why the word ‘game’ is used to describe their prey?
These are the people who farm their land on an industrial scale regardless of the cost to the animals and environment, pocketing millions of pounds in EU subsidies, while shouting that the EU must be reformed or they will leave. Do they care about the little farmer trying to make a small living by growing food? Like hell, they do.
These are the people who will bulldoze through any regulations that protect our land in the name of ‘development’. They will waste our money on pet projects like nuclear weapons and high-speed trains, when both people and expert opinion say these things are not needed – or wanted.
These are the people who will stand in the way of wind and solar power, but do their best to bring fracking to the UK, regardless of the cost to the land and the people who live on it.
These are the people who can buy the best medical treatment in the world, but who plan to deny access to any totally free treatment for the rest of us, – who have all helped pay for our National Health Service.
These are the people who will make the already-poor homeless and sell their homes to developers to create houses and flats for the more well-off; who will cut an already savaged welfare budget to the bone, while wasting millions on useless government projects.
These are the people who will climb into any bed that offers money and more influence, prostitutes of the highest order. And the one thing they prostitute more than anything else is this beloved country, which truly is not theirs to sell.
And they are deaf to the people they represent, being far richer than almost all of them.
They have a long history, men like David Cameron and his colleagues. Much of Britain’s history is littered with them.
It was those men who enclosed land belonging to the people and made it their own, an act of never-acknowledged theft.
It was those men who got rich through slavery.
It was those men who sat in their big houses while hundreds died in their mines, mills and factories, and in the ‘back-to-back’ unhealthy and hideous little hovels they were made to live in.
It was those men who stayed at home watching their riches increase while they sent countless thousands to die on foreign battlefields.
It was those men who got rich selling arms to dictators the ordinary person would have deemed an enemy of humanity.
And it was those men, who lied to citizens and allies alike, who were responsible for this island becoming known as ‘Perfidious Albion’.
For Albion was the earliest recorded name for Britain, and our history, full of greed, arrogance and wrongful claims of entitlement, has dirtied that ancient name.
And it is now these men who would sell off this country’s assets to the highest bidder – or one of their friends – until there is nothing left, the land and its people stripped bare of all.
It is these men who would like to remove our human rights while defending their own.
It is these men who do not give a fig for the threat of climate change, and who will not pause in their rush for more fossil fuels; who will delay and delay any action while they make just a little more money.
It is these men who would privatise the very air we breathe if they thought they could get away with it.
It is these men who believe they are entitled and have a right to do what they do.
It is these men who believe that money and power are everything, and the people are naught.
There is a legend that says the land is a sleeping giant waiting to wake up. There is a legend that says King Arthur lies sleeping under a hill not many miles from my home and that, when the country has need of him, he will rise again to defend it.
We the people are not those who deal in perfidy. So where are the people who make up the body of the giant, where are those who will wake up and say “Enough!” On this dark and depressing day, our land needs us.