Choose today’s Britain

First Published in the Mudhutter Football Express Fanzine February 2008

Choose today’s Britain. Choose income tax, council tax, does anyone remember the poll tax? Choose value added tax, inheritance tax and every other fucking tax under the sun. Just when you think the whole thing is becoming too taxing, don’t worry, the bastards will invent a new one. Choose chocolate puddings from that advert that is on TV and buying into it’s shallow depiction. Choose congestion charges, toll roads and parking permits to park on the roads you’ve already paid for with your car tax. Choose fermented urine as a natural fungicide next time you’re having coffee at your organic java hut. Choose global warming and being duped that it really is the biggest threat to humanity whilst the waters in the Persian Gulf are boiling over. Choose to let yourself be distracted long enough so you wont see what their left hand is doing whilst they tickle you on the belly with their right. Choose inflated petrol prices, domestic fuel charges and every other charge that they can link to Black Gold, Texas T, as the powers that be rename and repackage the war on terror as a moral crusade. Choose to join the armed forces and go half way around the world to fight a war against an invisible enemy with boots on that melt in the sun. Choose faulty weaponry. Choose to have your family back in Britain living in a shit hole that is imaginatively called a barracks whilst your local mugger resides in a 5 star prison. Choose the tail wagging the dog. Choose to conform to everything that you’re told is fashionable without further question. Choose premiership football. Choose to free all people from oppressive regimes except the ones whose oppressors have economies to trade with and whose armies are too big to defeat. Choose to join the ranks of the pseudo middle classes and forget your roots. Choose the NHS and to pay into a system that promises to deliver treatment to you at the point of contact. Choose to wait in a hospital corridor lay in your own piss soaked bed to see a Doctor who isn’t even there. Choose to have fought in two world wars for the privilege. Choose to live in a lottery postcode culture and hope to receive the treatment. You didn’t choose to die before the ruling changed. Choose to subscribe to a variety of overseas charities that you can’t remember the name of, but always remember to casually bring up at dinner parties. Choose to show no charity to the men and women you went to school with who just want to be paid a fair wage in their local low paid sweat shop. Choose to pretend you didn’t hear. Choose purple, as labour red and conservative blue meet in the middle and melt into each others arms. Choose the centre of the fence to sit on. Choose an ASBO and choose to wear it like a badge of honour. Choose the glamour of a mid-morning weekday show to display your ineptitude. Choose 3 litres of 7.5% cheap cider a day to mask the pain. Choose a lack of respect for your elders and a passport to unnecessary oblivion. Choose today’s Britain, a nation full of self serving, inflated egoed, vacuous, pseudo middle class pompous prats. But why would you do that?