Not So Great Britain Anymore

This is a rant that I started writing while on holiday in Wales with my family, during which time, widespread rioting was making front page news nationwide after a bunch of kids got stabbed in Southport. I said in my post about the 2024 General Election that politics will no longer be boring if Reform gets its foot in the door, but I was wrong in the most bizarre way; as Reform have turned out to be boring, while the now incumbent Labour government literally can't go a day without making themselves look like either psychotic tyrants or utter retards. It has been entertaining, in a morbid, frightening kind of way, to watch the very concept of Government in Britain fall apart now that "the adults" are in charge again, and now that the fantasy that the uniparty doesn't exist and that the political structure of the country isn't broken is completely shattered. But I guess we should start at the beginning, not get ahead of ourselves, you know.

On the 4th of July 2024, there was a General Election held in the United Kingdom, and to nobody's surprise, it was a Labour landslide; Starmer's party gained two-hundred and eleven seats for a total of four-hundred and eleven, while the Tories were massacred, losing a mind-bending two-hundred and fifty one seats for a total of just one-hundred and twenty one. This result was a shock to nobody though as like I said in my pre-Election rant, the Tories suck. They'd been in government for fourteen years and in that time, had made and broken countless promises, betrayed their voters again and again, became the most progressive and liberal government Britain had ever seen, while also trying to ban everything, completely wasted the golden opportunity that Brexit gave them, and allowed the entire world to move here, housing them at tax payers' expense. To say nothing of that time they became full on fascists and completely destroyed our economy, every small business in the country, and the lives and opportunities of tens of millions of people over a cough. For a supposedly conservative party, they conserved nothing, and despite being voted in again and again on the promise of reversing the decline that was started by Blair and Brown, they did everything in their power to accelerate that decline, and when it came time to beg their disillusioned and disaffected voters for another chance, the best they could do was promise to send the youth to die in Ukraine, and that they were at least better than Labour.

Unfortunately for the Tories, many of their voters already knew that Labour were worse and didn't care; Labour and the Tories both represented the continuation of the decline, both sides didn't have the slightest interest in actually fixing any of the problems that they'd created, regardless of all their theatrics to the contrary. It was Reform UK, back under the command of Nigel Farage, that was actually promising to make meaningful change, and that seemed to be an honest conservative party that the disaffected right wing of Britain could rally around. On election day, the Tory vote collapsed, which led to their spectacular loss, but what's really remarkable is how badly Labour did as well. Voter turnout in 2024 was the second lowest in a century at just fifty-nine percent, and of that fifty-nine percent, Labour won just shy of thirty-four percent. It should go without saying that one third of two thirds is not a good result, it means that Labour represents as little as a fifth of eligible voters in the UK. Except it gets worse, the Tories came up second with a quarter of the vote, while newcomers, the Reform party, rocketed up to third place with fifteen percent of the vote, as well as coming in second in nearly a hundred seats. Twelve million people voted for the Tories in 2019, double the number of people who voted for them in 2024, while four million voted Reform in 2024, making it abundantly clear that Labour's victory is not a result of a swell in support for them, but a result of their opposition collapsing. 

And for the cherry on top of this turd cake, Labour actually did worse in 2024 than they did in 2019, getting nearly three quarters of a million less votes than Corbyn's Labour did when it was humiliated by Boris Johnson's Tories. The 2024 result is not a reflection of Labour's popularity or success, it is not a Labour victory, but a Tory defeat, and were Kier Starmer a smart man, he would understand the fragility of his new government and not do anything stupid. Unfortunately, Kier Starmer is not a smart man, and so joyously claimed victory in the aftermath, "we did it!" he proclaims, while his dying party stands victorious over the corpse of the party that killed itself. Now that they were back in government, Labour wasted no time in turning the entire country against them. They immediately scrapped the Tories' Rwanda policy, which was never anything more than containment for growing anti-immigrant sentiment to begin with, but then didn't bother to replace it with any other policy or containment, making it clear that they had no plan to deal with the immigration problem. Despite promising that they wouldn't raise taxes and that the math had already been done on their financial plans, they immediately identified a twenty-two billion pound black hole that they sought to fill in the worst possible ways. Starting with going against their promise not to raise taxes, which are already the highest they've been since the War, and then deciding to cut back on winter fuel allowances for pensioners, all while continuing to house illegal immigrants at the cost of millions of pounds a day, and continuing to send billions of pounds in aid to Ukraine. 

Unsurprisingly, the optics on scrapping the winter fuel allowance to save money was terrible, made even worse by the fact that before getting into government, they estimated that scrapping the winter fuel allowance could result in up to four-thousand deaths. Then there was the debacle of the prisons, which we were suddenly being told were full to bursting, and since legal reforms, deporting foreign born criminals or just building more prisons were all too sensible and therefore, too hard, Labour opted instead to let thousands of prisoners out early, including some violent offenders and people imprisoned for sex crimes. And then there was the debacle of housing and energy, as they announced their plan to start building onshore wind farms, you know, for the planet, while also planning to build houses in Green Belt areas, you know, for the planet, all the while letting out prisoners and allowing god knows how many immigrants into the country, increasing the demand for housing and energy even more. And on top of building wind farms to solve the energy crisis, they also immediately revoked drilling licenses in the North Sea that the Tories had already granted, risking getting themselves into legal trouble with energy companies who had already invested millions into North Sea drilling. And like every other western government, Labour are continuing to just not talk about Nuclear power, making ever bigger and more unrealistic promises about saving the planet, while continuing to pave over the entire country and turn it into Megacity 1. 

Back on the small scale, in their stupidity, the Tories decided to adopt a New Zealand style smoking ban that would stop anyone of or below a certain age from ever being able to buy a cigarette, a policy so bad that New Zealand abandoned it before the Tories stole the idea. Not only have Labour opted to keep the ban, they've seen fit to expand it, opting to ban smoking outdoors in public places, for why, well to save the fucking NHS, that's why, because smoking bad, never mind that it generates billions of pounds in tax revenue, and why stop at smoking, why not ban fast food TV ads during daylight hours, because fast food bad too, we must protect the health of the innocent baby children who will grow up to live in our utopian megacity where everyone lives in harmony and there are constant blackouts because of our energy policies and food shortages because we paved over every farm in Britain and can't import food anymore because we keep disrupting supply chains by funding foreign wars. Talk of protecting the NHS gets me a bit riled up as you can probably tell, after two years of having my life ruined to 'protect' it, I want it to burn, quite frankly. Most of their policies and decisions have gone down terribly with voters, even among their own supporters, as in addition to continuing to allow Britain to drown in the economic, political, cultural and ethnic sludge of globalism, they've made it abundantly clear that they do not give a shit about the native people of this country. They're literally prepared to let old people die in the thousands over the next few months, rather than stop housing migrants and funding foreign wars. They would rather Britain be a hideous jungle of eight-hundred foot tall wind turbines than allow us to be energy independent through our own fossil fuel reserves and Nuclear power, rather turn the entire United Kingdom into Delhi than address the cause of the sky high demand for housing, and flood it with violent criminals rather than address the failures of the justice system. 

But on the plus side, at least they're not as corrupt as the Tories, but after years of slamming the Tories for accepting donations from wealthy backers in exchange for access and influence, not to mention putting on a big holier than thou display about how not corrupt they are, Starmer and his wife recently got caught doing the exact same thing. It's blown up into a massive political scandal since he failed to disclose the donations, and it turns out that the backer in question, one Lord Alli had access to Downing Street, and even hosted a party in no. 10, who'd have thought. Needless to say, all of this has made Kier Starmer and his government very unpopular, in fact probably the most unpopular government in recent history, as proved by a few high profile examples of Labour MPs and even Starmer himself getting heckled, harassed and booed at in public. Starmer has brazenly declared that things will get worse before they get better, that the autumn budget will be "painful," that his government will need to do unpopular things and that he's ok with being unpopular, really hammering the point that they just don't care, hate them all you like because they hate you too. But like with the Tories and all their little lies and failures, there's an elephant in the room with Starmer's Labour, a crisis that had been brewing for years, and an opportunity for Sir Kier to show everyone just how evil he truly is. The Southport riots were not a freak event, but a release of several years' worth of building anger and anxiety over the issues of crime and immigration. For well over a decade, Britain has had problems with atrocities being perpetrated by it's more diverse elements. 

In 2013, Lee Rigby was stabbed to death by a pair of Islamists, in 2017, Islamists killed eight people and injured forty eight by ramming them with a van on London Bridge, not to be confused with the 2019 London Bridge attack where an Islamist who'd not long since been released from Prison killed two people. And in 2017, there was the Manchester Arena Bombing, where an Islamist injured over a thousand people and killed twenty two, including children. Yet whenever these attacks happened, the public were fed the line of not looking back in anger, and in 2017, Sadiq Khan, the Mayor of London, commented that being ready for terrorist attacks is "part and parcel of living in a major city." The political class of the country have expected the public to accept the ever-present threat of terrorism for years now, despite not being exempt from the threat themselves, as proven by the 2017 Westminster Bridge attack and the murder of David Amess. Outside of terrorism, there is the Grooming Gangs scandal, where groups of men of mostly foreign backgrounds groomed and sexually abused thousands of British girls, and were allowed to get away with it for years because the police, who were aware of the abuse, didn't want to be accused of racism. It's illegal to carry a bladed weapon in public in the UK, but in 2018, Sadiq Khan vowed to cut down on the Police's stop and search powers in London because it's racist, the result; knife crime in London and other major cities becoming so widespread and common that it doesn't even make the news anymore. Then there's the police themselves, who are pathetic. 

On top of letting organised child rapists operate for years under their noses, a Telegraph analysis recently found that in almost half of all the neighbourhoods in the country, the police haven't solved a single burglary for over three years, and the rate of charges for burglary is about five percent. The Office for National Statistics also recently reported that shoplifting has increased by more than a third from the prior twelve months, shoplifting is currently at the highest rate it's ever been. So what have the police actually been doing all this time instead of solving crimes, well naturally, they've been going after edge-lords and the most vulnerable in society. There was the famous debacle of small-time Scottish comedian Mark Meechan, known online as Count Dankula, who was charged and convicted of sending a grossly offensive communication under the Communications Act when he released a video titled; "M8 yer dugs a nazi," in which he films his girlfriend's Pug doing Nazi salutes. The incident sparked widespread outrage as the courts were being seen to be trying to make an example of Meechan for what was supposedly a terribly hateful video, but was clearly just a cringey joke. The Count Dankula shitshow is far from unique, it's merely the highest profile example of police going after people for things they've said online which violate the Communications Act, Section 127 of which prohibits the sending of "grossly offensive, indecent, obscene or menacing" messages. 

Videos emerging of the police overstepping their boundaries and being cruel is a common occurrence at this point, ranging from video of them arresting a woman for silently praying near an abortion clinic, to videos of them killing people's dogs in front of horrified onlookers, to an especially disgusting video that emerged last year of a group of officers dragging a screaming, autistic teenager out of her house for the crime of saying one of the officers "looked like her lesbian nana." And while you might expect that their twisted priorities and tyrannical practises are at least enforced equally, guess what. In 2020, at the height of the Covid lockdown, the police were more than happy to arrest and investigate people that broke the rules, unless it was politicians and pro-establishment press, and unless it was the BLM riots which were allowed to happen despite violating the Covid rules, and despite the protesters vandalising Churchill and attempting to set fire to the cenotaph. During the BLM riots, the police even went as far as taking the knee, a symbol of solidarity with the BLM movement, a movement supposedly advocating for racial justice after the supposed murder of a career criminal and fentanyl addict on the other side of the Atlantic. Last year saw the kicking off of the Israel-Palestine war, which resulted in widespread protests and riots in major cities across the UK, despite us having nothing to do with the conflict, and once again, the police took a light touch approach, allowing the protesters to cause as much disruption and trouble as they wanted. 

Only a few weeks before the Southport riots, rioting broke out in Leeds when the ethnically and culturally diverse community of Harehills turned against the police and social services that were trying to do their jobs. The police allowed the community to burn when rioters started flipping police cars, throwing bricks and starting fires. Going back to the Covid days though, when people began to organise and march against the Lockdowns, the gloves immediately came off and the riot gear came out, because it was in violation of the rules and putting people at risk, and definitely not because their anti-Lockdown message was a threat to the political establishment and its goals at the time. On the 29th of July 2024, less than a month into Starmer's premiership, an incident occurred in Southport in which a teenager who was later identified as Axel Rudakubana, a second generation immigrant and the son of Rwandan parents, went to a dance workshop and stabbed thirteen people, killing three, eleven of the victims and all three of the dead were children. While this seemed on the surface to be just another atrocity like the many others that have happened over the years, this particular one turned out to be the last straw, and years of simmering anger and hatred exploded onto the streets in several major cities across the UK, resulting in widespread rioting and disorder.  

After years of being told not to look back in anger, after Labour made it clear they had no plan to deal with immigration, after years of seeing the police treat non-white criminals with kid gloves, and after it emerged that this was a targeted attack against children, tensions reached boiling point, and it fell to the police and to the new Prime Minister to step in and calm the situation. Instead, the police withheld the identity of the attacker, and when Starmer showed up to lay flowers in Southport, he refused to engage with the crowd or even to look at them, making no effort whatsoever to look like a man who actually cared. As rumours swirled about the identity of the attacker, and as it became clear that the police and the Prime Minister didn't care about the situation, things finally kicked off. In response to the spontaneous rioting, Starmer showed his true colours, dismissing the concerns of the rioters as "illegitimate" and branding their anti-immigrant sentiment as "far right." As the days rolled on and the rioting continued, Starmer doubled down, branding anyone who was concerned about mass immigration and the safety of children as enemies of the state, and vowing that those involved in the riots or anyone who "stoked hatred" would face the full force of the law. What followed was a very public display of said force, as the police began to round up anyone and everyone who was involved in the riots, as well as anyone who expressed support for them online, and fast-tracking them through the courts, locking many of them away for hefty sentences. 

It immediately became clear that the light touch approach that other communities in Britain have enjoyed for years did not apply to the British themselves, and that examples were to be made of anyone who dared express their anger at what was being done to this country. After days of spontaneous rioting, the state managed to get control of the situation when all the major papers suddenly and mysteriously ran the exact same story of up to a hundred riots that had been planned across the country, riots that, amazingly, didn't end up happening. That didn't stop counter protesters from showing up, some of them wearing masks and carrying weapons, some of them attacking and harassing journalists on camera, some of them just getting bored and smashing up the town anyway. None of that was covered the next day though, only the peaceful show of unity, with all the papers running the same story and even the exact same picture of a massive crowd, all waving identical, professionally produced signs broadcasting their anti-racist message, almost as though the entire event was one giant psyop to get control of the situation again. Starmer and his minions may have taken back control of the streets by unleashing the full might of the suddenly very competent and hideously heavy handed police, but one thing he will never regain control of after Southport is the narrative. Sir Kier was more than happy for the police to turn a blind eye to crime carried out by his client class, but was swift and ruthless in stamping out any action taken against him, and so the nickname, Two Tier Keir was born, and it turned out to be the first of many as hatred for the man morphed into ridicule; Two Tier Keir, Keir Stalin, Granny Harmer, Free Gear Keir and so on, and at the point that the public are making up mocking nicknames for you, you really have reached peak politician. 

It's really not been that long since the election, and for a government with a supposedly massive electoral mandate, it's truly remarkable how much damage they have done in such a short time, not only to the country, but to themselves. That a party can win such a landslide and make voters miss the previous government in such a short period of time is a genuinely marvellous display of stupidity, arrogance and evil. Kier Starmer might honestly be the worst Prime Minister that the United Kingdom has ever had, he's certainly worse than Boris Johnson because at least Boris Johnson tried to be likable, whereas Starmer is evil and proud of it, he's not even human. While Labour's majority in the Commons gives them ridiculous power, the fragility of that power is getting more apparent with each passing day, if you ask me, they're already done, Labour will be wiped out in the next General Election, and I'd put money on them not even getting to 2029. But on the plus side, they've done one thing right, and that is prove that Britain needs change; it's not good enough to get Labour out and get the Tories back in, the Tories deserved destruction, and Labour aren't even pretending to be a party for the people, they are weak, pathetic tyrants who hate the public every bit as much as the public hate them, and they too deserve destruction. In recent weeks, I've begun to doubt that Reform UK is the change I wanted it to be, but quite frankly, I don't care at this point, and I don't think many people do anymore, Labour need to be destroyed and the political order of the United Kingdom needs to go with them, Britain needs change, Britain needs Reform.

On The Election (2024)

I've not posted anything Political on this blog in a very, very long time, in fact, outside of a few rants about the Tories' online policies and the EU Referendum, I've barely touched the topic of Politics here. That's not to say I have no opinion on the matter though, because it should go without saying that I do, and that in this particular case, I have a fair bit to say. If you somehow don't know, on Thursday, the 4th of July 2024, the United Kingdom will be voting in a General Election, one that's at once long overdue and, if you believe a single word any of them say, far too early. When the Election was called on a rainy day back in May, I didn't really care, I'd accepted that neither of the options are in any way acceptable or deserving of being in government, in fact I wasn't sold on even bothering to vote, that was until Nigel Farage threw himself into the race and made this the most exciting and entertaining Election I've seen. Now, before we carry on, just know that I'm not an expert on the matter of Politics, I never have been and I've never claimed to be, but I've still got some things to say about it, as you do. 

The first General Election I voted in was the 2015 Election, in which I voted Conservative, I knew very little of Politics at the time, outside of the burning hatred my Grandparents had for Labour Party leaders; Tony Blaire and Gordon Brown, a position I went on to share. In 2015, however, the race was between the Tories, let by David Cameron and Labour, led by Ed Miliband, neither of which were especially remarkable candidates, though the Tories, supposedly being the more traditionalist and conservative party, appealed much more to my Grandparents, which was good enough for me. In 2015, Nigel Farage, who'd been campaigning for Brexit for his entire political career, spooked the Tories enough for them to cave and promise a referendum on Britain's membership of the EU. A year later, in the Brexit Referendum, I voted to leave, liking the sound of Britain getting it's sovereignty back from the increasingly federalist European Union, as well as another elephant in the room that we'll get back to. Fast forward to 2017 and things weren't going well; Cameron resigned after the Referendum and the Tories' new leader, Theresa May, was hopeless, weak, and looked to be completely compromising the promise of Brexit, either intentionally or through complete incompetence. In the 2017 Election, I Voted Liberal Democrat, not out of support for the Liberal Democrats, but out of dissatisfaction with the Tories, who it seemed were going out of their way to stall on delivering Brexit and throw away the wonderful opportunity for Britain that it represented. 

Running against May in that election was Jeremy Corbyn, who was a lunatic, albeit one who had complete confidence in his convictions, which ironically made him quite charming compared to the awkward, robotic and cowardly May. In that election, the Tories lost their majority in the House of Commons and were forced into a coalition with the DUP to form a government, something they also had to do with the Lib-Dems in 2010. Having lost the majority in the House of Commons, May had now found herself in an even weaker negotiating position, the exact opposite of what she was hoping for going into the election, while comparatively, Labour and Corbyn's position had been strengthened, further hurting Britain's chances of ever actually seeing Brexit happen. Fast forward again to 2019 and things looked like they were going to get better. Theresa May had resigned after being humiliated over her Brexit deal and in her place was Boris Johnson, a bumbling, charming idiot that, through his charisma and the promise of finally delivering Brexit, carried the Tories to a thundering Parliamentary Majority, humiliating Jeremy Corbyn in the process, who had promised a 'People's Vote' as an alternative message to Johnson's 'Get Brexit Done.' And while Nigel Farage had historically nipped at the Tories' heels on the issue of Brexit, his new party; the Brexit Party, humbly got out of the Tories' way so they could make good on their promise. As you'd expect, I voted Tory in 2019, wanting the madness of Brexit to finally end and for someone with a positive vision for post-Brexit Britain to be in charge. And then it all went completely to shit. 

The following spring, Covid-19 swept across the world and many countries, including Britain, responded by going into Lockdown; closing all "non-essential" businesses including gyms, pubs, shops and cinemas, as well as churches and schools. In addition to closing down basically the entire country, they also literally made it illegal to see people; implementing social distancing and isolation policies that prevented people from mixing. On top of that, they implemented nation-wide mask mandates that remained in place for over a year. All of these policies were completely arbitrary and had little to no effect on the spread of the virus, as claimed by numerous reports and scientific journals, all the while the Tories' scientific advisory body; Sage was staffed by at least one member of the Communist Party, and as it turned out, Johnson's Health Minister, Matt Hancock, was busted having an affair while the isolation policies were in place. The madness genuinely didn't stop; it became illegal to have sex with someone you didn't live with, it became illegal to sit on a park bench, and pubs became able to serve drinks if they were served with a "substantial meal," leading to arguments over what constituted a "substantial meal," all the while one of the masterminds of this madness was getting his scotch eggs nibbled on by one of his staffers. The justifications for the Lockdowns came from the modelling of people like Neil Fergusson, who predicted half a million deaths if no action was taken, only for it to take months for the official death toll to reach a tenth of that, and would you believe it, Fergusson was also breaking the rules and having an affair. Famously, when the second Lockdown was announced, the modelling used to justify it was proven to be unreliable within hours of the announcement, but the Lockdown was imposed anyway. 

But for as bonkers as it was, there was a sinister side, one that I genuinely think has given the people of the British Isles a kind of shared PTSD. Social interaction and contact was illegal, leaving countless people alone, isolated and scared, and completely unable to seek comfort in their friends and family, or to relieve the stress by indulging in hobbies and pass-times. Compounding this was a several-year-long campaign, carried out by the government and media class, to scare the British people into compliance. Johnson's government waged full-scale psychological warfare on the British, vastly overstating the lethality of the virus, counting Covid deaths as anyone who died within twenty-eight days of a positive test, regardless of what killed them, and flooding the TV, radio and newspapers with constant messaging of the threat. There were posters and advertisements supposedly showing dying Covid patients, asking viewers to "look them in the eyes" and tell them the threat wasn't real and that they followed the rules, using aggressively emotive imagery and language to guilt and coerce people into obeying the rules. They actively encouraged snitching behaviour as well by turning the fear and propaganda on the people, incentivising and encouraging the more zealous and fearful of the population to rat out and be confrontational with people who didn't follow the rules, who were being selfish and putting everyone else at risk, so a lot of rule breakers went on to be investigated and fined, leading to widespread distrust and paranoia, which inevitably further compounded the fear and isolation. 

I myself was on the receiving end of a lot of this zeal and abuse, being someone who very quickly decided to ignore the mask mandate and who was very vocal about my opposition to the rules, which got me branded as a selfish, ignorant, stupid, science-denying, cruel, evil Granny killer, and yes, I was called all of those things, as well as being accosted multiple times in shops for ignoring the mask mandate. All of this culminated in the argument about Vaccine Passports, an idea that was not just being floated around, but was actually being implemented in several major countries across the EU like France, Germany and Austria, as well as in places like Canada and New Zealand. The plan would have effectively forced unvaccinated people into permanent Lockdown while allowing the vaccinated to get on with the "new normal," which still meant social distancing and masks, but also gave you access to luxuries like restaurants, cinemas, gyms, sporting events, even churches and public transport. Had the Vaccine Passport system been widely adopted and kept, it would have created a two-tier society in which unvaccinated people became an underclass with less rights and freedoms than the vaccinated, and this was something all the governments considering and implementing them knew. Famously, then Prime Minister of New Zealand, Jacinda Ardern, when asked by a journalist about creating a two-tier society, smirked and said "that is what it is." 

Covid Vaccination became a requirement for doctors and nurses within the NHS, despite the entire justification for the Lockdowns being to protect the NHS and allow it to carry on running smoothly, it was now at risk of losing as many as a eighty-thousand staff. At the same time, the NHS was falling apart; completely failing to treat and diagnose patients, all the while being pedestalised as a divine institution that was beyond criticism of any kind, a position that's become a lot harder to defend in recent years as the NHS has failed to recover and is continuing to fail it's patients. Then there was the care homes scandal, in which British care homes became prisons where countless elderly died alone, confused and scared because their families were forbidden from visiting them, all the while untested hospital patients were being moved into said care homes with the full knowledge of the NHS and the Department of Health and Social Care. And on top of all the old people that had the final years of their lives completely destroyed, an entire generation of kids had their futures destroyed by being robbed of two years of their education and vital social development. And all the while people were actively having their lives destroyed by the government and it's evil policies, criticism of those policies was branded as insane, conspiratorial and dangerous, with concerns about the safety and effectiveness of the vaccine being aggressively supressed and discredited, even as it was being effectively forced onto the people and an unfortunate few were suffering from severe reactions to it. 

And to top off all of this insanity and cruelty, while the country was in full Lockdown, the Tories, who had implemented the Lockdowns, were throwing Christmas parties and Labour's new leader; Kier Starmer, who had been in full support of said policies, was illegally gathering with his staff for drinks. Naturally, the news media stabbed the political class in the back for their breaking of the rules, all the while refusing to acknowledge the real reason people were mad; that the political class knew the policies were stupid, ineffective and evil, and implemented them anyway while deeming themselves exempt. The revelation that the Tories broke their own rules caused the entire Covid narrative to collapse, and today most people look back at this period in recent history as though it were a bad dream. There are some of us out there who will never forget though, nor will we forgive, I'm one of them and even to this day, I hate Boris Johnson and the entire political establishment with a burning passion. And even in the years after Covid, the Tories have continued to be traitorous and crap; with Boris committing Britain to supporting Ukraine in it's war with Russia, a war that he personally played a key role in prolonging. But then the bastard decided it was time to step down, and when he did, he was replaced by Liz Truss, someone every bit as thick and with nowhere near the charisma, but someone who's heart appeared to be in the right place. 

When Truss took office, Britain's economy wasn't doing so good. Endless money printing during the pandemic had rocketed the rate of inflation, the war in Ukraine had caused disruption to food and energy production, causing prices to go through the roof, further compounded by the British government's refusal to subsidise British food production and its fanatical commitment to green energy as part of it's Net Zero plan. Within two months of Truss taking office however, she was forced to step down after apparently and miraculously destroying the economy with tax cuts, only to be replaced by her opponent in the Tory leadership race, none other than Boris Johnson's Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rishi Sunak. So with no electoral mandate, sky high inflation and the highest tax burden since the end of World War II, Sunak bravely carried on with business as usual, in which time Britain began to literally, as well as figuratively, fall apart. Now, in addition to taxes, inflation, house prices, and energy, fuel and food costs being the highest in decades, on top of the complete destruction of the British high-street through the bureaucratic strangling of small businesses and closures caused by the Lockdowns, roads, schools and hospitals were beginning to crumble, and through financial mismanagement and incompetence, the institutions tasked his maintained our infrastructure were unable to do their job. And all of this was now being overseen by a man that the electorate and Tory base did not vote for or support, and who they believed had no love or loyalty for Britain, just great. 

There's an elephant in the room here though, something I haven't mentioned yet, but that has compounded every single issue I've brought up. It's the issue on everybody's minds this Election, it's immigration. Journalist and commentator, Tom Harwood once quite hilariously observed that in the late 1990's, "something happened" that caused house prices to spiral out of control, and even after nearly thirty years, they're still spiralling, and we're still not building enough houses to meet demand, even though Britain has a sub-replacement birth rate. Meanwhile, the NHS is falling way behind on appointments and treatments, with a tenth of the entire country on a waiting list, despite funding for it being increased year on year. In major cities like London and Manchester, crime has skyrocketed and community cohesion has almost entirely eroded. Entire boroughs in many major cities have effectively been colonised, and have become isolated from and hostile to the surrounding culture, and as highstreets across the country have withered and died, they're now swarming with Turkish barbers and Vape shops. But probably the highest profile example of Britain's 'cultural enrichment' is the Grooming Gangs, organised groups of men, almost always from a foreign background, that groomed and sexually abused British girls, and that managed to get away with it for years because the police, who were aware of the abuse, refused to take action out of fear of being called racist. 

The Tory party has promised in manifesto after manifesto to bring down the rates of immigration into Britain, and where Brexit was motivated by a desire to see the end of free movement of people, it was Boris Johnson's government that decided infinite immigration was the future, even as he shut down all the pubs and schools and told everyone to stay at home and be afraid. In the last few years of Tory rule, immigration has increased year on year, not just from the tens of thousands that cross the Channel illegally and are somehow allowed to stay in Britain, but from the hundreds of thousands of legal immigrants that are allowed in on work, student and dependant visas. Not long ago, the Tories announced a plan to start flying illegal immigrants to Rwanda, a plan that's so far cost god knows how much money, not seen any results, failed to discourage opportunistic illegals, and doesn't even factor in the bulk of immigration into Britain that's coming in legally and being allowed in by a supposedly conservative and anti-immigration Tory government. And to add insult to injury, when illegal immigrants arrive, instead of being sent straight back, they're shacked up in hotels and allowed to apply for asylum, meanwhile all the homeless people across the country get to carry on sleeping on benches and in the doorways of shops. And just in case you're not insulted enough, to publicly complain about immigration is to be branded a far-right, racist Nazi and to be targeted for harassment by demented leftists, or worse, denied services and employment. But for the immigrants, these concerns don't apply, and they have no obligation at all to be decent or respectful to the native population, even further contributing to the erosion of community cohesion and the simmering resentment towards the new arrivals. 

The problem the Tory party has here is that they've been in power for fourteen years. In that time, there have been three General Elections and in each one, they've promised to reduce immigration, but there's always been someone or something else to blame for them not being able to; the European Court of Human Rights, the European Union, the Labour party, "lefty lawyers," human trafficking gangs, the French, and foreign conflicts. But at this point, the good will is completely gone; no one trusts the Tories to reduce immigration, just as no one trusts them to lower taxes, get housing, food and energy costs under control, or fix our crumbling infrastructure and institutions, in fact, Tory voters now see the Tories themselves as the source of all these problems, the party which has failed again and again and again and again, and which seems destined to continue to fail forever, almost as though it's trying to. And on the other side is Kier Starmer's Labour party. The Tories' message in this election is to not let Starmer and Labour into government because they'll be worse. I have no doubt they'll find a way to be worse. Starmer has promised to clear the backlog on immigration and build a million new homes, making it abundantly clear that mass immigration will continue. He's vowed to solve the energy crisis by investing in green energy as part of their Net Zero policy, which is the same as the Tories' policy, just with a 2030 deadline instead of 2050, so they're not going to fix energy costs. Going back to Covid, Starmer and Labour's only objections to the Tories' Covid response was that it wasn't tough enough, making me very doubtful that they will respect and uphold the British people's rights and freedoms any more than the Tories did. 

Despite promising more of the same while also blaming everything on the Tories, Labour look set to win this Election, not through their strength, but through the total collapse of the Tories, who have had fourteen years to stop the degradation of Britain, and used that time instead to accelerate it. Now all they can offer is an assurance that things will be worse under Labour, hardly an inspiring or optimistic message, but it seems they just can't help themselves. In a desperate bid to hold on to older voters, the Tories decided that, were they to be re-elected, they would introduce National Service, a policy that's unsurprisingly massively unpopular with the young voters it will effect, the very same young voters who feel that the Tories have betrayed them and stolen their futures, to say nothing of the erosion of the very concept of the nation state and national pride that started under Blaire in the 90's and was continued under the Tories, to the point that you can't fly an English flag anymore unless you're a football hooligan or a racist. All the while LGBT ideology has been a adopted as a sort of state religion, one protected under law and actively promoted by both the Tories and Labour, and if it's all the same, I'm not prepared to die in some foreign war for the sake of Gay Rights, nor am I prepared to die for some stuffy office manager that thinks he's making the world a better place, be that Starmer or Sunak. 

So when the election was called, I didn't really see a point in voting, I felt that I didn't have a choice in the election, that the only meaningful difference between the two options is the colour of the rosette, and that incompetent, boring globalists who don't care about this country, my country, don't deserve my vote, be they red or blue. Then in barrels the man of the hour, Nigel Farage. Before the return of the Farage, the Brexit party had been rebranded as Reform UK, a party under the leadership of Richard Tice, one that positioned itself as a right-wing alternative to the Tories and promised to actually answer the demands of the British electorate and bring meaningful and positive reform to Britain. Except like Liz Truss, while Tice's heart is in the right place, he is still a product of the political machine, and like Truss, I doubted his ability to deliver on the promises he made, as nice as they sounded. I met Richard Tice on the campaign trail while on holiday in Skegness, I shook his hand and told him I intended to vote Reform, and that wasn't a lie. After the election was called, Nigel Farage stepped back in, not only running for Parliament, but also as the leader of the Reform party, and over night, this election became awesome. Suddenly the discontented voters that the Tories had alienated had someone they could rally around, an outsider to the political establishment that was making all the right promises, saying all the right things, had complete confidence in himself and his beliefs, actively engaged with and was honest to his supporters and, perhaps most impressively of all, didn't give a damn what the political establishment or news media thought about him. 

Farage almost instantly sent Reform rocketing in the polls, quickly closing the gap and then, amazingly, overtaking the Tories, while also putting a noticeable dent in Labour's lead. Starmer and Sunak are hopelessly unexciting and unimpressive, then along comes Farage, getting up on stage like some kind of Rockstar, complete with roaring crowd and pyrotechnics, and while Labour and the Tories are floundering on social media sites, Reform's social media is exploding. It genuinely looks like all the political will in the right wing of the British electorate, having been beaten down to almost nothing by endless Tory failures and lies, has reawakened and mobilised behind Farage, and whether you love him or hate him, you can't deny him this achievement. With only days to go before the election, all the stops have come out to try and discredit Farage, from channel 4 releasing footage of a supposed Reform canvasser making racist remarks about Sunak who, it turns out, may or may not be a professional actor with ties to Channel 4, to past comments Farage has made about NATO's responsibility for the War in Ukraine, to Farage being ambushed about his racism on Question Time by guests who turned out to have ties to the BBC, to the most desperate allegation of all, that Farage is a Putin lovie whose massive upswell of social media support is actually an army of Russian bots. 

Like a certain other Populist superstar, the endless attempts to damage him are having the opposite effect; far from people now believing Farage to be a racist, they're now seeing him as a man under attack from the political and media establishment, who would only go to such depths to hurt his chances in the election if they were afraid of him, a notion that's only further galvanising his supporters who, like him, hold beliefs that the establishment have deemed to be morally wrong and in need of being stamped out. It's a great tragedy that Boris Johnson saw himself as the heir to Churchill, a true leader who would see his great nation through its darkest hour, when he turned out to be one of the architects of it, and in his place, there is Farage, a man who might actually be the change this abused nation has been crying out for. Does he have a chance of winning this election though, unfortunately, no. Even for as popular as Reform has become in the last few weeks, it's still not enough, and as the Tories have crumbled, this election will be a Labour victory, but give it a few years, let Labour not be the change people want and let them continue to ruin Britain just as the Tories have, and come the next General Election, who knows, maybe Reform and Farage will be able to make their move, and maybe we might have an actual conservative government that will look after this country and, you could say, make Britain Great again.

I'm not sure how to wrap this one up, but as I said at the beginning, I'm no expert on politics, I'm just a guy with an opinion, so if you think I'm wrong, that's fine, and this isn't me trying to persuade you on who to vote for. I'm just someone who's had enough of Labour and the Tories and wants there to be a change in the political order of my country. Do I know for sure that Farage and Reform are that change, no, I don't, do I know for sure that they can win the next election after this one, no, do I even know if Reform will get it's foot in the door in this election, no. But if they did, and if Farage actually is the change I want, the next couple of years of British politics will, at the very least, be a lot less boring. 

Junji Ito's Gyo Manga Review (2024)

Here's what you need to know; Kaori's overly sensitive nose is causing conflict between her and her boyfriend, Tadashi while on vacation in Okinawa. However, the source of the troublesome smell turns out to be far worse than the couple could have imagined, as an army of undead fish begins to rise from the deep and swarm the land, bringing with them not just a terrible smell, but something far more evil. 

A long time ago, like eight years ago, I wrote about this manga and what I thought about it. At the time though, I wasn't very familiar with manga or with Junji Ito, and I was not a very good writer, not that I am now, but trust me, I was worse then. It was about eight years ago that I was first introduced to Junji Ito and to Gyo while watching an episode of the Rooster Teeth Podcast, in which they discussed a short horror story called The Enigma of Amigara Fault. Their discussion of the story intrigued me and that night, I tracked it down and gave it a read, and then I didn't sleep. It was my first real introduction to horror manga, to manga in general, and it messed with me real good. That was eight years ago and since then, I've had a lot more experience with manga, scooping up and reading Battle Angel Alita, All You Need Is Kill, Kaiju No.8, and perhaps most prominently, the works of Junji Ito, a horror mangaka known for his freaky, insane, occasionally comedic and often nightmare inducing stories, and I think it's safe to say I'm a fan of his, given that my collection of his works takes up an entire shelf on my bookshelf. It all started with The Enigma of Amigara Fault though, and by extension, with Gyo, a story that's equal parts horror, science fiction, and acid trip that was the first book of Ito's I ever bought, and after recently picking up PTSD Radio and getting back into reading manga, I thought it would be fun to go back to Ito and his zombie fish, and to look a bit closer at this bizarre and disgustingly unique apocalypse, and I will be going into some detail about the story of the manga, so be warned if you don't want spoilers. 

Gyo opens with our main character, Tadashi diving near a shipwreck and narrowly avoiding sharks, taking the chance to taunt the sharks for not being able to catch him, which is quite cool. But before being chased by sharks, Tadashi has a mysterious encounter with another thing on the ocean floor, an impossibly fast object that flies right past him like a torpedo, a peculiar encounter which I'm sure won't become relevant later. Once back on the boat, we meet his girlfriend, Kaori, who's not too happy about being on a boat and wants to go home. It turns out that Kaori has a sensitive nose, and is upset by the smell of the sea and particularly of fish which, again, I'm sure won't be relevant later. But we quickly learn that her sensitive nose is not your average cute quirk; her intolerance of bad smells is a major point of contention for the couple that blows up when they get back to the house, where Tadashi is infuriated by her demand that he brush his teeth ten times a day just so he can kiss her. When I first read this, I was a lot more sympathetic to Tadashi, having just got out of a relationship with an equally clingy and unreasonable girl. But reading it now, and when looking at it in hindsight with how the story goes, I find myself feeling sympathy for both of our main characters, and I'm surprised by how well done parts of their story are. 

Typically, Ito's characters are not so much characters as they are vehicles for us; our guide through the weird and twisted world Ito has drawn for us, and usually vehicles for whatever commentary or horror Ito has in mind for the story, and Gyo is no exception, but even within his style of character writing, Tadashi and Kaori are surprisingly well written. Other the course of the story, we learn that Kaori comes from a broken family, and that Tadashi puts up with her neuroticism because he wants to take care of her and thinks no one else will if he doesn't, while Kaori clings to Tadashi like a bad smell, demanding he protect her and get rid of the problems around her. The toxicity of this relationship doesn't get the pay off you'd expect it to either, in fact, it's payoff is surprisingly melancholic and understated, certainly surprising for Ito. Kaori is an interesting case in this story because of what happens to her, as Gyo quickly drops the pseudo-science fiction and leans hard into body horror, which is undoubtedly where it's at it's scariest and most fucked up. The body horror aspect is really well done here too, as the Walking Fish, while starting out too outlandish and otherworldly to really be scary, slowly and quietly shift into a far more pernicious threat that our heroes are powerless to fight, being forced to watch as it corrupts and deforms their bodies to suit it's needs. 

This corruption is where Ito really shines as an author and it's on full display in Gyo, as well as a few of his other defining traits. One thing that isn't as big an issue in his short stories, but that does become more noticeable in his longer stories is that his characters are not the most complex and, in a lot of cases, not the most likable. I've mellowed on Kaori over the years since I first read this story, but her demanding, neurotic and clingy personality doesn't make her the most likable character, though her fate is made no less twisted and darkly poetic by her just being a bit of a bitch to Tadashi, who puts up with it and stays loyal and protective, even as the world rots around them. Other characters include Tadashi's uncle, a mad scientist who devotes himself to studying and understanding the Walking Fish, and probably knows more about them than he should, he also makes some very crazy decisions over the course of the story. The uncle's payoff is also just plain ridiculous, and had Gyo not already literally jumped the shark several chapters prior, it certainly would have then. But before things get really fucked up, the initial premise is, to put it bluntly, bonkers; as the southern islands of Japan are swarmed by rotting fish, scuttling up onto land on mechanical spider legs. 

In addition to the chaos and confusion, some of these fish pose a more serious threat, as Tadashi and Kaori learn when the house they're staying in is attacked by a walking shark, and all of them bring with them a terrible smell, like the smell of a rotting corpse, which is sometimes referred to as the 'Death Stench' over the course of the story. But what I really like about the Walking Fish is how the threat they pose to our characters changes over the course of the story, going from a bizarre, absurd and almost comedic threat that our characters can fight, to an apocalyptic, existential threat that they are powerless against, and the true horror of the Walking Fish unfolds slowly, as the fish rot and melt away and their mechanical legs start to look for new hosts, and this being a manga from Junji Ito, you know that means things are going to get gnarly, and how many pieces of media are there that blend fears of sharks, spiders, germs and violation of the human body, let alone do it as well as Gyo, getting out of the water will not save you here. Another strength of his that's on full display is his ability to take the most outlandish, nonsensical vision and put it on a page, his art is mesmerising and his work in Gyo sells the sheer grossness of the subject matter flawlessly. 

It's in the latter half of the story that the really disturbing imagery starts to pop up, and that the body horror aspect of Gyo comes into full effect, and the best word I can use to describe it is gross, it's a dirty, nasty and uncomfortable kind of horror that takes the creepy Walking Fish and ramps it up to eleven. This is when Ito is at his absolute best, when he's presenting you with an insane story, art that is horrible to look at in the best possible way, and imagery and payoffs that leave you feeling violated and anxious. But a problem that comes up in a few of his longer stories, or at least the ones I've read, is that Ito can sometimes go a bit too far in some areas. For example, Tadashi's uncle is a genius scientist and inventor who figures out the Walking Fish before anyone else, but who recalls a war story from his father that is presented as a likely origin for the Death Stench, and deduces that it is, in fact, an Imperial Japanese bioweapon. So far, so sensible, but it's when it takes a turn for the supernatural that things start to go off the rails, as Ito implies that the gas is alive and self aware in his expectedly unsubtle style. And at the point in the story that Tadashi comes across a circus where the performers are all infected, things go completely nuts and the story loses a lot of it's scariness. The circus sequence is among other moments in the manga that come across more funny and silly than scary. 

Part of the infection is that the infected produce obscene amounts of gas, which escapes through their orifices, which sounds horrible until you see a dog tied to a table, literally farting and burping itself to death, or more dogs charging an American position while also farting and burping themselves to death. Probably the worst offender of this is a scene where one of the characters attempts to hang themselves after becoming infected, a moment that should be dark and horrific, and that should hit like a freight train, but is kind of ruined when the person in question is farting so hard that they're spinning around on the makeshift noose. There's a lot of tonal inconsistency in Gyo. There are moments that are horrific, there are intense sequences that play on the mind and imagery that burns itself into your brain, and as this apocalypse slowly winds up and becomes more horrific, things only get darker and nastier, but then there are sequences so ridiculous and outlandish that they completely muddle the manga's tone, and I don't know if these moments are supposed to be funny or not, more than anything, they just leave me confused and frustrated. Another issue I have with Gyo is how the first and second halves of the story are split up with a time jump, and how Tadashi is basically told that in the month he was gone, the entire world ended, an apocalypse that would have been really interesting to see unfold, rather than having our main character sleep through it. 

Gyo has a lot of great things going on; it has revolting imagery, a bonkers premise and, for most of the story, a genuinely terrifying threat that grows more and more horrific as the story progresses, but there are aspects of the story that are underwhelming or that go a bit too hard into the absurd, and these things, while not out of the ordinary for Ito, sometimes muddle the tone of the manga and hold it back from being truly terrifying. That being said, when Gyo hits, it really hits, with some fantastic body horror and a unique and compelling story that, while not populated with the most likable or complex characters, keeps the action moving forward and keeps the nastiness coming. While it's not Ito's scariest work, or his most insane, Gyo is an incredibly enjoyable and fun read, and had it been released on it's own, it would still be more than worth a read. But Gyo comes with two bonus stories, and it's here where the bang for your buck really comes from. The first of the bonus stories is The Sad Tale of the Principal Post, a little vignette that's only four pages long, yet gives us a depressing and curious mystery of the patriarch of a newly built house getting stuck somewhere he couldn't possibly get stuck, dying before he can tell his family how he got there. The second bonus story however, that's the big one. The Enigma of Amigara Fault was the first of Ito's works I read, it was probably the first of his works that a lot of people read, and that's not a bad thing by any means, because it's probably Ito's best work. The premise of the story is expertly simple; an earthquake opens a fault in a mountain, along which are thousands of holes, perfectly shaped like human silhouettes. 

Thousands of people flock to the fault to see the strange holes, including our main characters, Owaki and Yoshida, but as more people come, one by one, they start finding holes that they believe are their silhouettes, they are their holes, made for them and one by one, these people are overcome by a compulsion to enter their holes. This story plays on a lot of common phobias; darkness, entrapment, isolation, claustrophobia, compulsion and a loss of identity, and mixing in some body horror here an there for good measure, all with a premise so elegantly simple and uncomplicated; not bothering to explain what the holes are or why they're there, just presenting the phenomenon to the reader and letting it mess with their minds. It's a story that masterfully burrows it's way into your subconscious and would have left you feeling uncomfortable, even without it's ending. But after playing on your subconscious for a bit, the story jumps ahead a few months to a team of researchers finding the other side of the fault and finding that it also has holes. I'm actually not going to go any further than this because the ending is genuinely something you need to see for yourself, but if it hasn't already been said a thousand times, the ending of The Enigma of Amigara Fault is terrifying, it's honestly one of, if not the scariest thing I've ever read, and even all these years later, I still squirm a little bit when I remember that final panel. Needless to say, it was one hell of a first impression and ever since, I've adored Ito's work.

Drr... Drr... Drr...

Gyo and it's two bonus stories are certainly interesting reads that, for better and for worse, perfectly exemplify Ito's strengths and weaknesses as an artist and storyteller. While the longer story of Gyo goes a bit off the rails as it goes along, and is driven by not especially likable or compelling characters, it is the premise and the art that keeps the reader moving forward, in equal parts excited for and dreading whatever abomination awaits them on the next page. And while Gyo goes a bit too insane for it's own good, it remains a fun, bonkers, disgusting and sometimes frightening little read that I always enjoy coming back to. But it's with The Enigma of Amigara Fault that Ito fires on all cylinders, giving us a short, simple tale that ends on a gut punch that leaves you confused and terrified, without outstaying it's welcome or undermining what makes it so enigmatic and unpleasant with exposition. If nothing else, I can't insist enough that you track down The Enigma of Amigara Fault, it's more than worth it, but if you're ever in a book shop and come across Gyo, it's certainly worth picking up.

Godzilla X Kong: The New Empire Movie Review

Here's what you need to know; in the years following their victory over Mechagodzilla, Godzilla and Kong are living their own lives in their own separate domains, with Godzilla patrolling the surface world and keeping the Titans in line, while Kong ventures deeper and deeper into the unknowns of the Hollow Earth in search of more of his kind. But hidden within the Hollow Earth are secrets best left buried, and as Monarch begins to detect a mysterious signal and Jia begins to have strange visions, an ancient evil trapped in the Hollow Earth readies to make it's move on the surface world, leaving Kong and Godzilla with no choice but to join forces to stop it before it can spread it's empire across the entire globe. 

Godzilla vs Kong was released almost exactly three years ago, and I'd have normally been really excited for it and would have gone to see it on opening weekend. However, every cinema in my country was closed down when the film released, meaning I had to rent it on digital and make do with my own shoddily put together home cinema. I always felt that Godzilla vs Kong lacked some of the spark of the previous two Godzilla entries of the Monsterverse, though I still found the film to be very enjoyable and did a lot of things right. I sometimes wonder if not seeing it in a cinema was part of the problem, and so going into it's sequel, I was optimistic that I'd find that spark I was looking for before. I was still in little doubt that I'd enjoy the film however, my question going in was; is it good or is it great, and having seen it twice on it's opening weekend, I at least feel that I've found my answer.

Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire, which I'll be referring to as GXK for most of the review for all our conveniences, starts just as strong as its predecessor, giving us another day-in-the-life sequence with Kong as he is chased by some Hollow Earth wolf monsters. Meanwhile, on the surface, Dr. Andrews, Rebecca Hall's character from the last film, is doing talks and making TV appearances talking about Kong and Godzilla, who we then see turn Scylla from King of the Monsters into crab meat before taking a nap in the Roman Colosseum. This film really doesn't waste any time at all, giving us some strikingly violent and gruesome monster action in the first few minutes, setting the tone for the rest of the film. Godzilla vs Kong knew full well that it's main selling point was Godzilla and Kong fighting, and GXK takes this to a whole new extreme, having the biggest focus on the monsters of any film in this series which, as I'll get to, is a good thing, albeit with a catch. But whereas GVK followed two teams on separate adventures that come together in the end, GXK wisely narrows the human cast down to a single team; Andrews, Jia, Bernie and newcomer Trapper, who go down into the Hollow Earth to investigate the mystery signal. There's not much going on with our humans, but this is Godzilla so there doesn't need to be. 

Andrews and Jia still have their cute mother-daughter thing going on, which gets complicated in this film when they discover the Iwi tribe in the Hollow Earth and Andrews worries that Jia will decide to stay with them. Bernie is every bit as entertaining as he was in GVK, equal parts excited, overgrown child and crazed conspiracy nut who has Playmates GVK toys in his studio and still hosts his Titan Truth Podcast, only now with sponsors. GXK gives him someone to bounce off of in Trapper, a new character to this series who is by far the film's most entertaining human character. He is introduced through having him pull out one of Kong's teeth to the soundtrack of I Got'cha by Greenflow, sporting sunglasses and a Hawaiian shirt while dangling precariously over Kong's gaping mouth. The character gives off strong Ace Ventura vibes for the entire film, even being mockingly called Ace Ventura at one point, and there are countless moments with him that just make you smile and chuckle, he's just fun, and he fits like a glove into this film's whacky, stylish tone. Like in most of the films in the Monsterverse, the human characters are not key players, but this film strips back their screen time more than any other in the series, focusing far more heavily on Kong's adventure into the Hollow Earth and his battle with the Scar King. GXK rarely goes more than a few minutes before catching back up with either Godzilla or Kong, and the Kong sequences in the film often continue uninterrupted for several minutes. 

What's really pleasantly surprising about this is that even without human characters to provide context or exposition, the story is very well told and easy to understand, the monsters have conversations with each other and while they're just growling and snarling, their conversations are clear enough, and these moments in the film are by far the most charming moments, even occasionally being funny. Where this is at it's strongest is with the three main apes of the film; Kong, Suko and the Scar King. Suko has a very funny and cute relationship with Kong in the film, starting out antagonistic before slowly becoming more trusting and loyal, and even coming to Kong's aid at several points. On the complete opposite end is the film's villain, the Scar King, who is a fantastic villain. like Kong, Scar King is an intelligent and highly skilled combatant, packing a gnarly bone whip as his main weapon, but where the two differ is in just about every other area. Kong is a hulking, imposing figure, but is calm, compassionate and righteous, he treats his fellow apes with respect and decency, even if they try to kill him, while Scar King is a lanky bastard that gleefully mistreats his subjects, he's cruel and sadistic and keeps himself on top through fear, grinning and laughing as he controls and tortures his underlings, he is everything Kong is not, a dark reflection that makes for a fascinating and deliciously evil foil. 

And on top of being a sadistic arsehole with an army of giant apes under his command, he has a secret weapon; Shimo. Like Scar King, Shimo is a new monster to this series, and as Scar King is our anti-Kong, Shimo is our anti-Godzilla in a lot of ways. A massive, albino dragon with dazzling blue crystals jutting out of her head and back, and an ice beam attack that can freeze everything it touches completely solid. While nowhere near as intelligent as Kong or even Godzilla, she makes up for it in two key areas; one, having all of Godzilla's physical strengths, near invulnerability and an unstoppable beam attack, and two, she is completely under Scar King's control. Like the apes of his tribe, Shimo is shown to be just another victim of Scar King, a benevolent Titan that he keeps as a pet, forcing her to do his bidding using a magic crystal. The conflict between Kong and the Scar King is clearly where the thought and effort in this film went, and is undeniably very well done, but I said earlier that there was a catch, and unfortunately, it's not a small catch for me. Despite being on the poster and having his name in the title, Godzilla is very much in the back seat in this film, being less of a key player and more of a supporting character. And for as brilliant as everything to do with Kong is, Godzilla feels like an afterthought in comparison, with the film only cutting back to him every now and again when it remembers he's supposed to be in it. That's not to say there aren't cool moments with Godzilla, there's a scene where he attacks a nuclear power plant that is very reminiscent of classic Toho Godzilla. 

There's also an adorable moment early on when he scares away a news helicopter that's flying too close to him, which comes immediately after the equally adorable moment of him waking up from his nap in the Colosseum. From the moment that him and Kong meet up again, the film is none stop kaiju carnage with Godzilla kicking all kinds of ass, but it's disappointing to me, as a Godzilla fan, to see how small of a presence he has in this film, and I wish they did more with him. Godzilla essentially spends the first two thirds of the film bulking up in the background, and this soured my first viewing, though it was less of an issue on my second viewing, having already had my expectations checked on the first viewing. On the plus side, his new design works quite well, the bright pink is certainly a unique look that fits nicely into the film's colourful and whimsical visual style. But once Godzilla and Kong meet back up, I can almost forgive how little they use Godzilla as from that point on, the Big Guy is finally side by side with Kong, and the film delivers the promised team-up in spades. We'll get to the fights later, but there are a few more monsters in this film that need addressing. Scylla returns from King of the Monsters, but is immediately killed, Final Wars style by Godzilla in the film's intro, and Tiamat, a monster from the Monsterverse comics makes an equally brief appearance, also getting a Final Wars style execution before Godzilla steals her power and becomes Pinkzilla. 

But the Monster I was most surprised by in GXK was Mothra, a monster who had been rumoured to be in the film for months, and I was worried about how she would be used in the story. Well the rumours were true, Mothra makes her grand return to this series and to my pleasant surprise, she is as glorious as she was in King of the Monsters, an angelic and benevolent Titan who is positioned in this film as a guardian monster to the Iwi and the Hollow Earth portals, and her design and colours really get a chance to pop in this film, as does her personality and her relationship to Godzilla. There is a great scene in this film that's very reminiscent of a scene in Ghidorah: The Three Headed Monster, where Mothra shows up and breaks up Godzilla and Kong's fight, calling on Godzilla to join them in fighting the Scar King, and just like earlier in the film with Kong and the Scar King, no words need to be said for us to understand what's going on, and it's kind of funny to think that Godzilla basically gets a telling off from Mothra before being convinced to join them. That, of course, is our entry point into the film's finale, where everything goes completely insane and the film becomes an almost completely uninterrupted kaiju wrestling match. And the final battle of this film, in addition to being insane, does things that no Godzilla film has done before, and is dazzlingly choreographed and stylishly directed, making for what's almost certainly the most entertaining monster battle in this series. 

If you wanted to see Godzilla and Kong in a tag team battle, this film definitely delivers in it's finale, as the two kings throw their opponents around and get thrown around in kind. And to have the first round of the fight take place in zero gravity is not only ridiculous, but completely awesome, and I never expected to see Godzilla hopping around in zero gravity, getting assists from Mothra as he floats angrily in the direction of his foe. GXK is very much a monster driven film, and in that regard, it's a contender for best in the series with how inventive and fun its fights and storytelling are. It's been said a lot already, but it really is true, that this film feels like a Showa Godzilla film; it's a stylish, inventive and way over the top monster movie where fun comes before everything else, and the film is undeniably a lot of fun. Like those Showa films, GXK's monsters are dripping with personality and charm and get to do some crazy shit, to hell with collateral damage. In that, if you go in expecting Godzilla Minus One, and come out disappointed that you got Godzilla vs Megalon instead, you're the problem, not the film, and that's the one time I'm mentioning Godzilla Minus One in this review. But like all Monsterverse films, GXK is not perfect; I've already mentioned how the film disappoints with how it uses Godzilla, but there are other issues that hold the film back. 

While criticising the story in a kaiju film is like criticising a porno for the same reason, there are a hand full of conveniences and contrivances in the film, and like with all the Monsterverse films, these issues are exclusively human issues. For example, it's mighty convenient that the power glove they need to help Kong just happens to be stored at the outpost right next to the Iwi settlement, in it's conveniently not destroyed secret armoury, and it's mighty convenient that it fits the hand that it needs to fit. Or how about another, the Iwi need to summon Mothra, but no one in their settlement can do it, it needs to be an Iwi from Skull Island, and there conveniently happens to be one left, and she just so happens to be in our party, and the telepathic Iwi knew about her and were sending psychic signals to her so she could come down and wake up Mothra. The Godzilla franchise is no stranger to these kinds of contrivances, and like with those other films, how much it bothers you depends on how much you let it, and in a film where big monkeys kick the shit out of each other in zero gravity and a big dinosaur has a nap in the Colosseum, aspects of the story being contrived seems rather insignificant, the absurdity is clearly a feature, not a bug. There is a bigger issue I have with GXK, and its an issue I also had with GVK. 

Like Kong: Skull Island and GVK before it, GXK's music choices are consistently on point, with bangers such as Turn Me Loose by Loverboy, Twilight Zone by Golden Earring, and I Was Made For Lovin' You by Kiss, but unfortunately, like those two films, its soundtrack leaves something to be desired. After Alexandre Desplat and Bear McCreary's god tier soundtracks for the first two Godzilla films, Junkie XL's scores for GVK and this film feel kind of bland and unremarkable, though the film's inclusion of Mothra without the inclusion of Mothra's song really highlights this issue. There is a hint of Mothra's song in Junkie XL's score for her, but when put up against McCreary's version of the song, it's pathetic. Like his score for GVK, Junkie XL's music just isn't as thematically rich as McCreary's or as intense as Desplat's, and doesn't compliment the action as well, which isn't even to say it's bad, it's just a soundtrack that does its job, whereas Desplat's and McCreary's soundtracks were beasts all their own, they were part of the magic. And like GVK before it, GXK strips back the thematic elements that the Monsterverse started with, we are now a long way away from a living God awakening to humble humanity and restore balance. Does that really matter in an over the top kaiju film though, or is it enough to just sit back and watch the madness, I'd personally say it is; it's a bonus when Godzilla is deep, heavy and thematic, but a Godzilla film that's completely unchallenging, that exists to just be a big, silly, fun movie is only bad if it fails to be fun, and GXK is really fun. When approaching Godzilla in general, you have to judge the film for what it is and what it does right, rather than criticising it for not being something it never tried to be in the first place, and while there are problems with the film, it's on the viewer as to whether those problems are big enough to spoil the fun, and I honestly don't think they are. 

You Can't Have A Titan With A Tooth Ache

Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire is a fun film, it's big and colourful and stylish, it's silly and occasionally contrived, I have my issues with how the film uses Godzilla and how the film's soundtrack underwhelms, but the question at the end of the day is was it a good time, and that's a definite yes. The film is nothing new for the Godzilla franchise, though it does mix things up with some genuinely unique and creative monster sequences. The film does make the mistake of side-lining one of it's title monsters in favour of telling a very Kong-focused story, but that story is the heart and soul of this film; Kong's journey to find his people and his conflict with the Scar King is fantastic, and the Scar King is a fantastic and wonderfully hateable villain that makes a perfect foil for Kong. The film's other monsters all deliver the goods as well, with Mothra being as wonderful as ever, and newcomers; Suko and Shimo each getting their moments to be charming, tragic and ultimately very lovable. And while I'm disappointed by how little Godzilla there is in this film, he still delivers as he always does in the film's ridiculous finale. The monster story is well complimented by the human story, and Trapper and Bernie have some great moments that keep the human story entertaining until we can get back to the monsters which, just like in Godzilla vs Kong, is where the film hits it's stride. Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire is an unchallenging monster mash that confidently does what it sets out to do, and never strives to be more than what it is, it's a great time and it's definitely worth watching.