Subject: Oratory and persuasion.

 

Oratory I a powerful and emotive tool in the hands of impassioned people. The House of Commons is currently debating the proposal to remove of hereditary peers in the House of Lords.
I have grown up querying the nature of the English Aristocracy and its place in the running of the country. The idea that the act of ennobling  a person and to give them a title is anachronistic, this extension of privilege is out of character in a country which seeks to establish the principle of egalitarianism. In the days of noblest oblige a French term which dictates the idea that noblest dictates their efforts towards the community around them has as in most dictates not taken into their opinion the frailty of mankind.
Our political history unlike the French has sought to find an acceptable key for that class of people who can cast their lineage back to powerful families who name was the stuff and consequence of who we are, their education and their provenance in history with the power and opportunity to give thought to politics as it pertained to them.
Many of the peers are trained in law and therefore trained in the minutia of law and the need for controls to enable a country to act as one and not be riven by competing forces. The establishment was formed by this need and whilst it did not always exclude the needs of the people the priority of the establishment has always been self preservation.
The nature of the Lords unlike its unruly plebeian cousin the Commons was adroit debate rather than the excitement of political name calling. As the Commons has become more ideologically self censoring with the Whips Office driving and calling the tune along party lines rather than individual political opinion. Political parties are agenda driven and choose to draft laws which are popular thereby enabling the ensnarement of the public and their vote.
The Lords not having to rely on the dictates of the voter is far nor free to broaden their view as to the suitability of a proposed act which will become law. They can push the boat out to examine eddies in the deeper current of welfare especially those of unintended consequences. The Commons with its large Labour majority seeks to push ahead with reform of the Lords believing the chamber to be anachronistic, but perhaps it’s this anachronism that is its main benefit since not only does it approach issues from a different point of view it’s not tainted by the pork barrel politics of rewards for your vote.
I think we are unique in having an unelected body who’s purpose is to examine legislature because, as we have seen in so many areas of life, successive governments fail to address failure (as was seen in the Post Office scandal and the Contaminated Blood scandal) to name but two. The forensic evidence gathered by experts and presented, line by line in a quasi courtroom has uncovered the depth of corporate corruption in the Post Office by setting legal minds to the job of unearth the facts.
The Commons is not equipped technically to do the job of vetting each clause of a new act which they wish to become law even though they are the originators of the new legislation. It’s often only through the fine comb of an alternative view that the short comings appear. The Lords, being released of the need to do constituency politics, which takes a lot of time and effort of the ordinary elected politician, have the time to pore over each clause before it’s handed back to the Commons to be passed into law.
Political ideology haunts the Labour Party on such matters as hereditary peers and there is a fear that it will obscure the benefit they bring. 

 Subject: The oppressors wrong

 

Watching the latest video stories out of Gaza I am reminded of the warnings from friends and family about the bias in the video clips  I received watching Aljazeera.
It was the same warnings from believing BBC footage from people who people had come to label as ‘Woke’ ie too soft in its reported  news about Gaza and the coupling of that with the imagined terror we have of  illegal immigration and the fear they bring of co-opting our culture.
The visual picture of doctors working amongst the bombed out ruin of a hospital and the subsequent arrest and disappearance of more than one of these doctors invokes a Kafkaesque  picture into the mind of the Israeli defence force. Why would they allow their leaders to be apparently without mercy especially since the horror of the concentration camps is still within living memory.
The need to survive is a deep human resource, fight or flight is instinctive and therefore Israel's stated fear of being defeated and overrun by the Arab is paramount but the thoroughness of the destruction of Gaza must point to a biblical blindness, on both sides which obscures any sort of humanitarian sense of proportion.
The Germans thought the Jews subhuman the Jews appear to think the same of the Arab, it’s an anomaly that only humans could assume normal but then normality plays little importance when survival is at stake.
The feral child comes to mind, their concept of life normality lends us to walk carefully when blaming them for their actions. A feral nation is a different proposition in the assumption that people in that society have an effect on the potency of retribution. A nation is measured by the humanity it shows in dealing with its enemy’s.  The Germans are remembered for their harsh treatment of opposition in the towns and villages who rebelled against the authority of the German state. A nation of great composers and philosophers could condone the dreadful practices which went on in Auschwitz.
I watched a film made in Germany depicting  family life whilst living in the shadow of the camp. The Commandant walking to work each morning emerged in his plan to improve the industrialised killing whilst showing his own family great tenderness. That these two grotesque alternate concepts could coexist in the brain of a man illustrates how we  compartmentalise so many things as part of a survival mechanism.
As the world trends it’s way towards more confrontation with the frightening result of global extinction trough nuclear war or man induced climate change we  are also contemplate carrying on much as in the past. The alternative is too grim and knowing that the odds of winning the lottery are tiny, we still buy a ticket, and rather would shuffle off the contumely of modern life.

 Subject: The Laird in his counting house.

 

For my own mental health I have to continue to issue blogs to gain some sense of my reality. The claims and counter claims by the farmers, politicians, media operatives and the general run of disrupters who flood our minds with fabricated truth regarding for-instance the ability of farmers to pay a tax on the inheritance when a farm is passed on to a son or daughter and the advantages of a continuance of keeping the farm running within the family is threatened. To be persuaded that, the removal of the winter fuel allowance removal and making private schools pay VAT like the rest of us, the Labour Party have a challenging task to persuade us that when they came into power the nations coffers are almost empty and the Tories plan to greatly reduce public services was well on its way to completion.
It’s a long tradition that farming is largely  an issue of inheritance rather than a traditional business of selling the farm and equipment on the death of the owner. What is remarkable having listened each year to their life of increasing costs and tight margins they any parent would wish to bequeath the dead hand of a farm onto one of their children. There seems to be a romance in the ownership of land much as there is in the ownership of house, a sort of status signal, akin to the Manor House in feudal times. Our home is our castle in which its ownership to some extent insulates when we close the door.
Farming is a clique and offers status and so when it is suggested that a reduce rate of inheritance tax should be paid tax as part of the revenue required to run the country, everything kicks off. Not only is the tax levied, only on an estate worth more than £1million (for me I pay inheritance tax on anything above £350 ) going up to £3 million for ‘ a couple’ they are granted 10 years to pay the tax off whilst the beneficiaries of of my estate have to cough-up in a few months
If there was a clique to describe plumbers and electricians who had grown their business to be valued the same amount, no one in society would claim they need exception from the tax. The farmers like the rest of us use the NHS and the schools, they rely on the armed forces to protect them from invasion, they depend on the infrastructure of the country but want to cry foul when asked to pay what others accept as their collective burden.
As with most things there are trade offs to consider. The strategic place of food in our domestic requirement, the reduction in the number of farms producing that food and the cost of having to buy in food from overseas, plus the choke-hold of foreign interests if we rely on importation has to be considered.
There is already a drastic withering away of ‘productive land’ by wealthy people buying land to included it as part of their business portfolio with generous allowances. 
Jeremy Clarkson who stands with his plebeian beanie claiming that the tax is unfair but forgets to mention that he invested 4 million of his wealth into a farm 3 years ago to benefit from its preferential taxation

 

Subject: The case for ‘Assisted dying’.

 

The debate in the House of Commons regarding Assisted Dying is about to start with parliamentarians voting on the matter soon. The question Comes to mind, who gives this discredited body of politicians the right to be the arbiters of whether I can decide what to do with my own life. We are not talking of the right to kill anyone else but the fundamental right to end your own life.
Lives are cut short in their  thousands/millions when politicians declare war and not a murmur  but if I wish to end my own life then all hell breaks out. Is due to religiosity and the sanctity of life in terms of “god giveth and only god can take away" but surely in a world where many people are atheists then religion proclamation should not be a deciding factor.
A private members bill seeks to question the idea that you are limited in how you seek death, especially if life has become intolerable because of pain and acute discomfort. My own view is that an individuals life is theirs and should not be beholden to political or religious whim so long as safeguards are in place to protect those who might be encouraged to seek to end their life because of port unary  gain and even then if the person wishes to die because they feel they have reached a point where they don't want to be a burden then that decision should be theirs.
If we can abort a foetus why not ourselves, if we can kill chickens and cows in their millions why are we so discomforted by suicide which up to 50 years ago was a criminal offence. People are living much longer these days and as they do they become prone to a range of maladies which make their lives intolerable.
End of life sanctuaries such as Hospice rely largely on charity to offer help to the dying and face difficult financial difficulties in the task of coping with an ageing population, people needing pain medication and compassion in their last days, often years of suffering. The national plan to relive hospitals of aged bed blockers by encouraging them home only works if the medical services are comparable with hospital. Little or no attention during any of the last 20 years of government has been directed at national or government funded “old peoples accommodation “. The municipalities close the existing ones down and sell the site to housing developers who then build unaffordable housing. It’s disgraceful, the closing  of social retirement homes  just when the hospitals determine that there is no space and they have to sell their only valuable asset the family home to cover the cost of accommodation in a private retirement home. The ditching of social owned assets in favour of privatisation is a middle class endeavour pursued by all governments, yet another example of the growing divide in the country.
Asian families seem to assume the mantle of responsibility by proving a place for the old mother and father in the family home, just as they would for a child and are clearly more civilised in so far as this particular aspect is concerned. Our fragmentation of family, children rushing off in their early twenties to make their own lives has a profound effect on later life support mechanism especially if the government and local authorities have, over the last decade or two washed their hands of social care.
Much depends on location and the dispersal of family is much less evident in the North of England than in the South. The push to go off and make your fortune is part of being in areas where individual success is important and the sociability of one’s surroundings much less so. Those who skedaddle off to the four corners of the globe used to cut their ties to hand written letters and an annual phone all but at least today the internet and video links make up for a great deal of the loss.  
It’s only when frailty and illness rears its head that the family is stretched by concern as to how to handle the matter. Its worst these days, my parents generation conveniently died before their needs became apparent, today’s oldies cling on well past their best and become a sorry sight of their children to behold.
A bright orange pill in a box on the mantle place with the ‘will and testimony’ and the keys to the car not far away

 

Subject: A trip back into the past, curtesy of You Tube.

 



As I think I have mentioned in previous blogs that I’m an enthusiastic latecomer to ‘You Tube’.  It’s store of archival video’s are a delight, threading, you back in time to when you were a person another person living your life under very different circumstances.
It was 1961 and I had just arrived on Christmas Eve in Cape Town, in the land of Apartheid "Separate Development" and moral and ethical exactitude. I was forced into many generalised political arguments based on my assumption, growing up in England that truth was on the less totalitarian side, (sadly I wouldn’t be so sure today). 
Today on You Tube  I have been watching Mr Johann Vorster, the then prime minister of South Africa interviewed by the well known American conservative intellectual W F Buckley. You couldn’t get two individuals with greater diversity. Vorster the blunt spoken Afrikaans politician  known for his strong views and the effete Buckley, the former Doyen of the American news channels known for his forensic questioning.
Vorster was defending the indefensible , the separation into racial camps of people living in his county. In the world at large South Africa had become a detested state with few apologists and yet in many of her detractors countries a similar code of conduct was practiced without being formalised. My personal experience whilst living in 1960s CapeTown, set as it is in beautiful surroundings I willingly succumbed  to a higher standard of living than I would ever have had in England, a country which continued to pursue a different type of Separate Developmental, one in which Class did the job of Apartheid.
I argued the unfairness and the lack of any moral opportunity cost, the beastliness and the injustice but, like Isreal today, the sheer necessity was conveniently overlooked when a nations back is to the wall, in South Africa’s case the face of communist aggression, communism was becoming entrenched in African countries to the north. The ideology of communism projected by Russia was an anathema to the Western way of life  and South Africa had become a buttress to the Russian influence and the threat it imposed towards the sea route around the Cape.
This was in an age when division in the world were clear cut.
It was before 'Globalism' and 'Multiculturalism'  (a necessary Corollary to global trade) had dislodged the white mans footing in countries which had felt the yoke of colonialism. The carefully crafted propaganda issued by the South African government was clearly one side of the argument and survival, (as it always is) was paramount.
Listening to Vorster I couldn't fault his logic, the logic of who ‘represented the enemy’ of which racism bundled people into the ghetto of "them and us".
It was before perceived surety that minority voices could be brought to bear on fairness and equality, irrespective of the potential diminishing of loss your own values.
Values instead were seen as ‘universal’, part of an inherited culture all humans should have but as we increasingly see this is an illusion. It's not a case of right or wrong but rather the interpretation we place on many aspects of life and the way we wish to live it. Religion says we are all Gods children but as children are motivated by parents and the community they serve, these communities, were then representative of a area and a culture (often formulated through religious doctrine) the politics  and values disparate largely because of the local conditions and challenges which form them.
The conundrum is why then assume the ‘commonality’ which the global order demands especially when the world order is transcribed into town and village and fact that there does appear we have little in common, other than we all bleed.
Pain and sorrow, hunger and adversity we all suffer but our reasoning behind each affliction is different. Even the similarities between our so called cousins is blown away when a demigod like Donald Trump arrives on the scene and preaches a type of politics which we should all fear for its crude naivety and bully boy tactics.
I’m sure in 50 years time (if we live that long) the equivalent of You Tube, will probably be a news related psychedelic implant we receive at birth to control any impulses not presumed seemly. Conformity is the mantra, conformity of purpose and the erosion of any sense of individuality

 

Subject: The Parliamentary debate on assisted dying.

Backwards and forwards the debate rolled on, each member eloquently putting forward their opinion since on this matter it can be nothing more. I’m sure most of the politicians have already made up their own mind on the matter but it seems to me that the question is for the person dying, not the philosophically opposed, not the diktat of religious opinion or parliamentary opinion, the only opinion which is worth considering are those of the ones who are experiencing the onset of death and death who are in acute pain or distress.
Undoubtedly palliative care is ‘not’ sufficiently available in our county and whilst underfunded by the government and reliant on charity, in some circumstances, even the palliative services cannot provide a relief from the pain and distress when a person dies.
Who are we kidding listening to the parliamentary ‘legal eagles’ pick holes in the definition or wording of a clause in the bill, this is not an exercise in definitives it’s simply placing in the hands of someone dying the option of avoiding intolerable pain. It doesn’t question their morality or their ethics it simple states that their life can end and the pain brought also to an end.
The implications of others interfering and influencing the person dying can be dealt with by providing safeguards but shouldn’t preclude the principle of right to choose the ‘time and place’ of my death.

 Subject: Messaging the electorate.

 


It seems to me at least that the vote for Donald Trump is based on a voter who sees the principle of “putting his/her own country first”,  as a natural shared affinity. It’s a national affinity we in Britain seem to have misplaced in our sorrow for the tragedy of what is happening in other countries across the globe. We rate ‘humanities heart beat’ above our own and take on board customs and attitudes, foreign to ours. We would rather give our last crust of bread to ensure a foreigner survive than ensure that our attention is placed on our own economic woes.
The Trump, doctrine “America First” has yielded opprobrium from the democratic world. Happy to see the continuance of American ‘heavy lifting’ in democracies fight for survival against totalitarianism, we, along with many of-the European nations are less willing to share the financial burden.
With our legacy of historical ‘profiteering’ from the ‘Empire’ of which little is said of the infrastructural legacy, including transport, buildings and contractual law which we left behind and which enabled many poor countries to subsequently prosper.
No ‘debit/credit ledger’ was drawn up, only an emotional call based on ‘norms’ which were not current 200 years ago, for reparations. I wonder would the inhabitants of Bradford and Burnley, for whom the ‘Industrial Revolution‘ bequeathed the grim blackened streets and a greatly a shortened life span, be a reason for reparations. 
Instead our sights are set on Africa where the many Africans of Arabic ethnicity rounded up the men to be transported to other parts of the world as cheap labour, and were just as implicit. Would the Arabic African diaspora also be chided 250 years later or is that the sole  provenance of the white man. 
African nations whose tribalist structure has largely benefitted the chieftain class have not been kind to their tribe. Must we perpetuate unburdening our guilt by pumping more and more Aid money into the pockets of a dodgy African hierarchy whose grounding in democratic civil society is strictly limited.
The economic infrastructure erected by the colonisers continues to stand although heavily over burdened and greatly  deteriorated through a lack of local investment and maintenance.  The ‘Aid’ helps keep the Presidential  jets flying and their executive homes in reasonable upkeep but little filters down to the grass roots in the African community.
Perhaps we should be like the Chinese, undertake infrastructure projects but managed by us, contractually ensuring we retain ownership until the loan is paid off. So long as Aid is seen as a gift no real value will be attached. Also long as we continue to side step the people of Burnley and Bradford who still wait for descent amenities, whilst our newspapers remain scathing about the issue of a financial black hole left by the last government and don’t have the sympathy for the Third World, many of whose citizens now reside here alongside us then, as we degenerate into becoming a Second Rate economy then the tolerance for each other will break down.
A society like ours has limited land and needs to raise taxes to pay for the previous government's inability to make increased provision for urban finances. The danger is we reignite a class war where the participants are drawn not from the fields of Bodmin but rather the Punjab
Nationalism is both short and long sighted. It heals the immediate pain by instilling the sense we are all in the same boat but if that sense is evaporated by cultural and religious shifts then what was deemed a nation disintegrates.
We need a period of financial probity where truth replaces the smokescreen of politics.
In the 1930s  we were scared of the might of German fascism but by ignoring the crippling debt of war we fought to present another face to totalitarianism based on our national fortitude.  To see it defaced by the salad dressing of conflicting ideals must be avoided at all costs.