Misinformed

Subject: Misinformed.

As the labyrinth argument drags on about our future arrangement with the EU, a series of articles were commissioned by the magazine Prospect from writers putting a perspective on the UK which is not often found in the commentators who report the party line as it were. The writers sometimes Europeans, who had spent a number of years living in the UK and had a pan European view of this island and its people.
It's not been an easy read since we often dress up our existence with fantasy, a balm to reality.
All nations and nationalities do it, they concoct an image of themselves which is flattering and then proceed to sell this image to the population as a whole. It's not quite Orwellian brain washing rather it's a process of endlessly repeating the good and turning a blind eye to the bad.
The structure of our establishment, its reflection of the same old faces from the same old school illuminati has been our social downfall. Our basic insensitivity, describing elite schools as 'public schools' when nothing could be further from the truth. In describing society as egalitarian when your whole future prospects is tied up in the type of school you attended.   (It's interesting to note that in Holland, schools are not ranked against each other but share a common platform that of educating all children in Holland without preference.) The great tragedy is that we have been inculcated to believe that this discrepancy, that the rich can buy their education, is some sort of norm. That its right for money to be able to get away with tax havens by employing expensive accountants, that the rich can buy anonymity and justice by hiring highly paid lawyers to distort a law which is applicable to us. We have been told that having money places you outside the norms of society and we have swallowed it, hook line and sinker.  

The poison which permeates the tabloid press, the public schooled billionaires who own these papers and seep away at our common decency with rabid trash, day in and day out such that the man and the women in the street doesn't know right from wrong, truth from falsehood.
We are conditioned from an early age to respect our elders a view which is all well and good so long as the views come from a wide spectrum but if our opinions are formed by a half dozen or so of powerful men, each with an agenda unaccustomed to the life we, the ordinary person live,, then we are at risk of being led, like cattle to the slaughter.
It's a convenient metaphor today. armistice Day when wreaths are laid at the Cenotaph to commemorate the hundreds of thousands who have fallen in battle. They too were led to believe "your county needs you" until the bullet made them superfluous.