A letter to my MP about the EU

Dear Jeremy Wright,

Here – https://images.app.goo.gl/a11CPfxJDKtQiiW78 – is a picture of Boris Johnson in front of a bus on which is written the slogan “We send the EU £350 million a week let’s fund our NHS instead.

We have now left the EU. Please could you confirm that the government has set up the necessary standing order to send this money to the NHS?

Yours sincerely,
Milomitu

P.S. My wife, an NHS consultant, feels that the money could probably be used to ensure nurses and other less well paid staff didn’t need to use food banks.

 

Self-reflection

One of the things that I am currently finding curiously fascinating and slightly disturbing is the polarisation of emotions I have experienced since becoming a father last year.

On Blogging (or adding more good intentions to the road to hell)

I am going to try to blog more. I haven’t had much in the way of free time of late for reasons which may become apparent. However, I have a lot of ideas floating around in my head, and I would rather write them down and put them out there.

Going forward, I have decided that I will abandon my self-imposed rule of no swearing. If somebody is being a fucking idiot, I will describe them as being a fucking idiot. There’s no point beating about the bush, and there are many fucking idiots out there. Trump. Farage. Pretty much all the professional Brexiteers. And so on.

Also, for context, I no longer read or watch the news in any great depth, thus my understanding of what is going is informed almost entirely by the following:

• Things I glean from discussions with friends and relations
• Whatever appears in my Instagram feed
• Whatever I can learn from the Washington Post front page (I don’t bother looking at the Guardian or BBC news which were my previous sources of information)
• Paul Krugman’s op-eds in the New York Times

I gave up Twitter (my personal account) a year or so ago, I don’t bother with Facebook. I am still on Instagram but that jumped the shark quite a while ago; I miss the simplicity of “people posting photos that they’ve taken and that’s it”.

I disable “like” and “sharing” buttons as a matter of course. If you want to share something, copy and paste the URL like nature intended.

Another letter to my MP about the ongoing Brexit disaster

Dear (my Tory MP),

Once again, I am compelled to write to you about Brexit. I wish this were not the case, but then I wish I didn’t suffer from insomnia brought on by the stress, uncertainty and misery of it all. We can’t have everything.

A letter to my MP about the ongoing Brexit disaster

Dear (my Tory MP),

I am writing to you about Brexit, and the growing opinion that the Great British Public should have a final vote on the deal. I am in favour.

A letter to my MP about the toddler-in-chief

In advance of the Donald Trump’s visit, I wrote the following.

Dear (my MP)

I am writing in an attempt to convey my deep concern and anger about the impending visit of Donald Trump to Britain.

A moral dilemma

So you’re on a bus. There’s no driver as such; steering is done by a curious collective process which ostensibly involves all of the passengers, some passengers’ views on the direction carry more weight for reasons which are unclear, but generally accepted. The speed of the bus can’t be varied, which means that maneuvers are based entirely on careful steering, and may occasionally require planning. Currently, the bus is pointing in a direction that will soon result in it plummeting over a cliff. Something probably ought to be done.

An open letter to President Trump

Dear President Trump,

You’re a busy man, so I’ll keep this short. It is apparent, from your choice of Myron Ebell to lead your transition team for the EPA and Scott Pruitt to lead it, that you walk the walk as well as talk the talk when it comes to climate change denial.

Trump Thoughts

My record as a pundit is pretty poor as I didn’t think Trump would get this far (but then, I reckoned without the Russian / Wikileaks / FBI interventions). But, for what it’s worth, here’s my reading of the situation and a prediction for how things will pan out.

Regrexit? Fixit!

As I’ve outlined in my previous post, I think there are good reasons for supposing that Brexit will, in fact, not happen, but this is far from certain. If, like me, you voted Remain and are quite appalled by the result, what practical measures can you take? If you voted Leave but wish you hadn’t (for whatever reason), how can you make amends? Note that if you voted Leave and still think it’s a good idea despite the wave of chaos you have unleashed, this piece is not for you.

Well, you could post things about how awful it all is on Facebook, to be read by a group of friends who think broadly the same as you do. You could make attempts at tweeting pithy comments that will demonstrate once and for all how silly the whole thing is. Both of these are approaches I have adopted in the immediate aftermath. Neither of them is ultimately very helpful.

However, if you want a more constructive approach, there is a third way – why not write to your MP?