The benefits of club membership

 

Subject: The benefits of club membership.

Imagine if you hold a position of power to influence the affairs of the country but in fact you don't care much about about the country in so far as its economic well being since you are well insulated from any economic consequences. Fore instance there's no fear of unemployment amongst parliamentarians, (at least for four years) and if you once belonged to the Bullingdon Club, that exclusive Oxford University illuminati club which naturally include a fair number of Tory parliamentarians and is also the perfect format for  a place around any glittering boardroom table in the City.

If we fail to come to any agreement with the EU, can we absorb the multiple tariffs on goods and services which will be imposed on everything  we sell to the Europeans, I doubt it. We are already in an uncompetitive position amongst highly competitive competitors in the EU and finding 10/12/25% on our manufactured goods (as rare as they are) or the increased cost of offering services in this the largest market will be problematic to say the least. Perhaps if we could import migrants from Asia prepared to work for a shilling a week but Mrs Patel (herself an immigrant and keen to pull up the drawbridge to her cousins) is preparing to make it even more difficult for foreigners, so it looks like cheap labour is out. We could of course revise our progress on securing such extravagance as a 'minimum wage' and with unemployment set to rise we might, through the blight of poverty and hungry children, even encourage our workers to work harder and for reduced wages to make our products competitive. It is unrealistic of course to hope that the profit  margins could be reduced or no dividends paid and in such an economically  divided county, that sort of proposition unlikely. 

We seem therefore, doomed to penury, doomed to a third world status, a comeuppance for our lack of diligence, in the days of Empire to treat the natives well. 

Will the symbolic feathers on the officers helmet remind us whilst the Company  Standard is lowered in deference to the crown during the ceremony of 'trooping the colour', that those past glories are gone.

It didn't have to be so we could have continued with that pragmatist Mrs May who saw the colossal price to be paid if we left without a treaty but instead, in our millions we voted for the clown 🤡.  Fixated on Reality TV, encouraged by fabricated cheering we watched as he tottered on stage, that dishevelled mop of hair, so opposite in disposition to the vicars daughter and having first been indoctrinated and mentally manipulated by years of Rupert Murdoch and Richard Desmond in the tabloids we chose, just for fun to have a change and chose Boris. We ignored his pedigree for blunder and short attention span and more importantly we hadn't realised we in fact chose his evil metamorphosis Dominic Cummings who's ideological hatred of civic structure and establishment thinking has led him, like Guy Fawkes to blow up, not only parliament but the country as a whole. Ideologues  are dangerous because the gap between reality and their reality is based on a premise that change, their change will be worth all the pain and suffering and that their new world will be brave, (to call on our friend George Orwell) and we will all benefit. 

Marx and Lenin were archetypal in their misuse of the Russian peasant  in a collective experiment to refurbish society with a different prototype. We don't have that Slavic appetite for suffering. We are raised in a 'claimant psychosis', a state of mind where an individual has rights and the State must provide for them. We are poorly placed to weather the storm of economic privation ahead never mind the travails of refashioning our lives through Covid 19.