E Y E W E A R, THE BLOG - FREEDOM MEANS BEING UNAFRAID TO WRITE WHAT YOU THINK

The Eyewear blog is no stranger to hyperbole - I can go over many of our past posts, as editor and chief writer, and see claims of looming disaster, downfall, or war, that never quite materialised; crisis is the loom on which a poet spins his best writing. The past week in Britain - to be dramatic, in British history - has been different.  It rendered me speechless. While there were some facebook declarations, I could not face this blog, or gain the strength to compose lines on this debacle. I have been profoundly hurt by this nasty decision. It has all been said, and at least as well by others. I think the Downfall video meme, featuring Boris Johnson , may be the best, but Jonathan Freedland, Polly Toynbee, AC Grayling , and others, have also done a good job of sketching out the horrors ahead, and the horrific causes of them. But the past week has just been plain bad for England, the UK, the world - and me personally, too. Since last Thursday I have lost my 12...

BAA, which runs Heathrow, has admitted it turned down an offer by the British Army to help shovel away the snow and ice on its runways.  Instead, it went it alone, and has cancelled thousands of holiday flights, spoiling Christmas for tens of thousands of people.  It also only invested half a million pounds this year in cold weather removal gear, but boasted of profits of over 350 million.  Heathrow should be ashamed.  The truth is, British companies offload the suffering onto the British people, when bad weather strikes, shrugging their shoulders and blaming an act of God or aberrant weather, when in fact the fault is in their own balance sheets - the weather is perfectly ordinary at Christmas (we had snow last year too) and such snowstorms, in American, Canadian, or Russian, cities, would be shrugged off, as minor, easily de-iced and cleared away.  This is incompetence with a human cost.

The British election of 2010 has been, from a progressive point of view, an almost abysmal failure - a disappointment so staggeringly at odds with the Obama -like energy of the debates and campaigning - and it raises a question - is Britain too broken, too destabilised or demoralised, civically - to even be able to mount a rebellion or radical break with its outmoded electoral system and corrupt parliamentary structure? It seems so. In the end, the Clegg revolution was only televised, but never materialised - actually losing seats and barely raising above their normal low-20s limit of support. What happened to change, to a new way, to bolting past the two old parties? The voters bottled this one. In the end, they seemed to panic, from London, Dundee, Carlyle, to Humberside - everywhere. No pattern has emerged, but drift and lack of consensus. And, though the Lib Dems should have supported the larger progressive majority, and shored up Labour, it appears they will let Cameron form som...

The Labour party in Britain has just unleashed a series of free animated manifestos from the land of chalk drawings.  They're awfully cute, and even rather funny.  Will they tip the swing voters back?  Meanwhile, Gordon Brown now claims to be a fan of Lady Gaga .  I am trying to square that one with his circle, or rather, circle that with his squareness.  On another bat channel, Cameron and Co . are offering a government we can all join (without the smell of the sedan leather, as one BBC pundit put it this morning) - which means WE get to set up the schools, run the fire departments, clean the wards, and fire bad cops - making Britain the first fully-functioning Fisher-Price kingdom.  Very juvenile all this.  What is Clegg offering - free candy-flavoured unmentionables?

Eyewear is currently reading Blond 's Red Tory , this new book that may or may not be Cameron 's Third Way . In the meanwhile, let me say it is a pity the author doesn't seem to acknowledge he has not coined the phrase Red Tory at all - such progressive conservatism was de rigeur in Canada, for the PC party, for decades, and many great Canadian politicians have been called red Tories in their time. Blond does make a compelling case, as Eyewear often does, for a new space for values in British society, and calls the current State-Market nexus flattening - in the sense it leaves no community space for what used to be social good (as in Church groups, caring neighbours, genuine virtue, etc.). Blond is also good on the Broken Britain of young sex, young knives, and young drinking, where youth is bought and sold and marketed, cheapening everything.