So it's official...

... Britain is officially part of an alternative evil axis. The report in today's Independent on Sunday on how this government is campaigning to get around a worldwide ban on GM technology by pushing for one of its most abhorrent types (see here) sickens me to the core.

Food is food, a basic staple and necessity for life. So why are companies getting away with trying to develop crops that produce sterile seeds, so people have to purchase new seeds from the same companies the following year?

Please don't cite shareholders and the right to make a profit from just about anything - we're talking about a fundamental right, here. If I grow my crops and those crops produce seeds, I should be able to use those seeds again the following year - that's what they're designed for, after all.

But no: we sit here, smugly self-satisfied that we're the "good" and the "great", and yet we're as bad as any of our enemies. Sure, we may not be a completely non-democratic country (although our archaic electoral system means my vote isn't equal to other people's), but we not only tolerate dictatorships elsewhere, we encourage them (unless, of course, they're sitting on huge oil reserves). We've allowed our industries to move to China where they can bypass basic human-rights laws and produce cheap goods with sweatshop labour (I've seen how badly minimum-wage people are treated in this country - multiply that by a factor of 10 or even 100 to start understanding how poorly the people who make your cheap goods live and work). We abuse the environment every single minute of our waking lives, and have pushed ourselves to the precipice of disaster, threatening to drag all of life with us because we can't for a minute abandon our selfish, wasteful, frankly pointless lives.

So excuse me if I sit here fuming at the fact capitalism is cloaked in shrouds of white, when you don't have to look very hard to see glimpses of its black, corrupt heart. Christ, no wonder the likes of Marx came up with communism - it's just a shame his ideals are a poor fit for our selfish, self-centred, self-obsessed species.

So much for blogging about Doctor Who last night - another excellent episode, with an excellent twist at the end (even if it's been telegraphed for months - it was still satisfying to see it come to fruition). Sets things up nicely for the last two episodes...