It's always
dangerous to announce to everyone that if such and such happens "I will
eat my hat" or when the Australian Formula One driver Daniel Ricciardo
promised his fans "I will drink my champagne
out of my shoe if I win" and having won' proceeded to do so on the winners podium.
One English speaking nation the USA has elected a clown as its leader and now the theme music around the political corridors of power in this country
is that Boris Johnson is pulling ahead in the race to supplant our current Prime
Minister Mrs May.
Have we as a nation lost our marbles or is it just fake news. Influential newspapers with respected editorial staff
are printing the
story today. "Boris is ahead in the PM stakes". How can it be true that
this buffoon has won over the minds of so many people when he has left a trail of unfinished, ill thought out projects
whilst he was Mayor of London.
That currently sitting behind one of the most august desks in Whitehall, that of Foreign Secretary, we have this grinning, shambolic
man who's utterances are without fail, juvenile, punctuated with banalities, transparently inane,
our countries representative, face when dealing with diplomatic leaders of the other nations of the world. This is the man I am told is the
person the Conservative politicians, (it is they, in our system, who chose the leader since
the electorate only chose the party from which the leader is nominated), are forming behind as favourite for PM.
Do I inhibit another universe. Can what I see and hear be so off the spectrum that I am blinded by what my eyes
and ears tell me.
We
imagine that there was a time in the past when our leaders had more
gravitas and seemed to have the wisdom for this high and important
office.
Or was it a sham designed by the educational system to give the leader
the
classical eloquence to bewitch us, the
plebeian masses. Was Askwith or Lloyd George, or Chamberlin and
Churchill better equipped for decision taking with their high flown
phrases than the working class voice
and working class education of Ernest Bevin or Nye Bevan. Was Harold MacMillan better or worse than Harold Wilson.
We are persuaded by image and we are educated as to which image is acceptable by the media. We doff our cap to pageantry and genuflect to monarchy
and yet behind the uniform or the crown, history tells us that it is littered
with fools and despots.
And
so with Boris and his wealthy background, which bought him an education
to thrust him into line of Office, are we willing once again to bow to
a privileged few who come from an elite, inter-bred coterie which, if
they were
subject to kennel club rules, might be banned for genetic reasons.
Given
that in our form of democratic choice, where the political leader is
not even chosen by the electorate and instead is chosen by political
pals from which ever political party was successful (if we were lucky we might have
even voted for
them), and given he/she has unbridled power for 5 years, if they have a
decent majority, you would think we could come up with something less
incestuous. Your airline pilot is not guiding
the aircraft into land because he was chosen by his mates from school, even if the school was Eton.
Politicians are chosen by the voters without any sort of criteria for the job, other than the bewitching art of
oratory. What
they say captures the heart and minds of the electorate and little
sifting is done to discover what we are told has any truth in it, other
than by the self interest of powerful people who
run the media. There is no limit
to the lies and deceit propagated by a political campaign, there is no
legal contempt which can be brought against them, the sort of law which
protects consumers from
dodgy goods. When sitting in parliament, Parliament protects
them from legal proceeding, from writs or affidavits and, by
supposition, the very legal protection they assume, that what they say
is beyond
the rule of law, should warn us. We on the other hand have to be very careful
as to what 'we' say, for very good reason.
It should be a warning but we continue with the charade. "A mad hatters tea party" where language is turned on its
head and Alice is confused.
The electorate should be choosing people for their knowledge and experience to do a specific job. The MD doesn't
choose his finance director from marketing and visa versa.
It's as if the only people who we would choose to run our lives, or at least make decisions which effect the way we
run our lives, would be from members of a university debating team.
It's the mad crazy assumption that because a person can argue a point of view, either way, that we should have
faith in him or her to choose the right path since all paths to them are purely an academic exercise.
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