The Last Laugh Looney Party has decided to continue with holding Prime Minister Bodj to account throughout 2020 to make sure he keeps his promises.  Otherwise there could be a French style revolution, complete with chopping off politicians heads 🤡

Bodj’s pledges in his election manifesto were typically not very specific.  Like all politicians, their promises always have enough wriggle room for them to be broken.  This is called Plausible Deniability, although you could call them downright lies.

These are some of the things that I intend to write about in this coming year in relation to holding Bodj to his promises :-

FUN

• One of the things you can say about Prime Minister Bodj is that he certainly has a great sense of humour and I think this should be a theme for his term in office.  Bodj stuck on a zip line should set the tone for the new parliament and MPs should be given cream buns to throw at each other across the Houses of Parliament.   This should certainly be more interesting than many of the speeches they make.
• BREXIT.   Former Prime Minister, Mrs Maybe-Maybe Not, famously coined the phrase “Brexit means Brexit”.  Except of course for her it didn’t.  Prime Minister Bodj added a deadline date to his Brexit, except it kept changing.  The latest deadline is 31st January 2020, but even if he keeps to that, nothing will change until the details are sorted out, supposedly towards the end of the year.  So expect Brexit to appear in this blog regularly in the coming months.
• SOCIAL CARE.  This is the subject which is probably the most important to older people.  Sadly it’s the issue that politicians of all parties have failed to get to grips with for decades.  Its history is littered with Parliamentary Commissions, Green Papers, research reports, committee reports and reports on reports.  Proposals have been labelled as a “death tax” and/or a “dementia tax” and that guarantees that nothing will happen.  Now Bodj has called for an all party consesus, but there’s absolutely no chance of that happening.   So my recommendation is that older people forget about the Government helping them and sort out Social Care for themselves.

PACKAGING 

• I don’t remember the word “packaging” figuring very largely in Bodj’s election manifesto, but he did refer to ridding the world of plastic which would be a jolly good start.  If we can get Bodj to wear gloves for the next year, no doubt he will come to realise that there is lots of other packaging that needs to be gotten rid of.

SMALL  PRINT

• Unfortunately, small print didn’t figure highly in Bodj’s promises.  But I’m sure his advisors and civil servants will try and add as much of it as they can to Bodj’s “one line promises”.   As most old people don’t read small print, I will hold Bodj to the “one line promise”, without qualification.  So we expect to have “20,000 more police”, “40 new hospitals”, “instant GP appointments”, “a teacher for every child”, “prison sentences that last a lifetime” and finally “only a trickle of immigrants who will all have to be Nobel prize winners”.
• MUMBLING.  This is a subject which I haven’t talked about before, but it’s one which excludes more and more older people from society.  Initially, I put it down to more and more older people being hard of hearing, but now I’ve concluded it’s not that, it’s the fact that young people talk too quickly.  And that people talk over each other on TV programmes.   And that background music is often louder than people talking.   And that rapping is completely incomprehensible.   And that people use more and more jargon words which are only understood by young people.   ALL OF THIS DISINFRANCHISES OLDER PEOPLE AND NEEDS TO BE STOPPED.   So I propose that the BBC loses £1 million of their Government grant for every 1000 complaints it gets about mumbling.   And ITV loses the same for each advert that older people can’t understand, which is probably most of them.
• CLIMATE CHANGE.   This would seem to be one of the biggest issues the world has to face in the next decade.   Older people, with notable exception of Sir David Attenborough, seem relatively silent on the subject, presumably because they think they aren’t going to be around that long.   I think if they more clearly understood the subject, they would certainly be concerned for their children and grandchildren.   I will write more about this subject in the year ahead.

CLUTTER

• This has been a big subject in my blog for the last few years and it isn’t going to go away in a hurry.   However much I try to dispose of clutter, more steps up to replace it.   So I need a radical solution and here it is :-

      Pile it all up outside parliament or politicians houses and gardens.  That            will give them something to do rather than endlessly debating issues                    where nothing changes afterwards.   

DOG FRIENDLY

•  More and more old people have dogs as pets and they are definitely a             socialising influence as well as a guard against loneliness.   So expect             Coco to feature in my 2020 blogs.
• SOMETHING ELSE ?   This is a space for the unexpected, because one thing you can be sure of is that something will crop up this year which forecasters didn’t forecast and the politicians didn’t pontificate about.  Nor did Google or YouTube or Twitter predict this the very beginning of the new decade.