Yes sir, no sir, three bags full sir.

Subject: Yes sir, no sir, three bags full sir.

If you live in Bishops Stortford or Bishop Auckland's the world around is familiar and hopefully comforting. It's made up of people and their families, their ventures and adventures. We take it all for granted.  How else could we get through our day without the confidence that the world is a good place and the confidence which that implies.
This is true as individuals and is also true as a nation. As a nation we watch the changes which take place on the national stage assuming that the powers that be know what they are doing. We have to have faith in them much as, (in extremis) did the Germans in 1930 place their faith in Hitler's vision of the future.
The figurines on the parliamentary benches used to be drawn from the ranks of successful business people (including trade unionists and municipal councillors) people, with a few exceptions, from a class of skilled professionals, lawyers, accountants, of economists and social scientists.
Today there is a growing coterie of people who one can best describe as professional politicians, people who studied politics, becameadvisers to politicians and then become politicians themselves. Because they are the trained political class within the general intake of people who enter parliament to do and effect what they feel right for the country, this political class are trained to rise like doctors in a hospital or accountants in an accounting firm to the top. And so at the senior end of parliamentary decision making regime we now have  the opposite of what used to be an eclectic body of people who could draw on their wide and varied experience. Instead we have the 'prefect' who knows the house rules and how the game is played but little else.

This diminution of talent has gone unnoticed. We have moved through a time warp  where much of the parliamentary decision making passed to Brussels. The expertise for negotiating trade deals, the legal intricacies of formulating law to cover treaties is no longer in-house. We have become House Captains to a Headteacher who has bigger fish to fry. We have become parochial, inward turned and insular.

Our skills sorely missing we have had to turn to Jenkins of the lower third to lend a hand as we hand the chief negotiating role to a man from New Zealand. Thank god they have short memories after what we did to them when we joined the EU, selling the trade we did with New Zealand down the river so we could join the sparkling new school run by an intolerant French Headmaster, Charles de Gaulle. Swallowing our pride or what was left of it we said yes sir, no sir, three bags full sir and signed on the dotted line.

So we emerge like a newborn child, fresh from the womb, innocent of the world around and hoping no one will give us a spanking !!! Like any new child we will bruise our knees and bloody our nose but we can grow into something different.
I'm not holding my breath though since the effort to eradicate the rot in the foundations of this country will be stymied every inch of the way by the self interest of the Establishment and its Etonian classmates.