How to cure a headache

The morning after the night before we wake to the dull feeling of, "what have I done and how do I find my way home".
First and foremost one now recognises who ones friends are as the fair weather friends of yesterday line up to show their contempt at the democratic decision of the people with dire warnings and an unseemly desire to hasten us to the door. Overnight we have become the pariah the unclean amongst the European Bureaucrat who's contempt for the 'democratic ideal' is clear as they line up to disdainfully show us the way out.

Both Donald Tusk, President of the European Council and Jean-Claud Juncker, President of the European Commission are keen to show themselves as unsympathetic hardball players who fearing other members of the Union might follow suite are going to make our withdrawal as unpleasant as they can.
And so after chucking in the secure job to risk it all on a flight of fancy one has to quickly discover new skills. Fronting the general public with your tray of knick-nacks, it was all so different dressed in a suit, with the company parking place, shuffling paper around, knowing a cheque would be paid into your bank account, irrespective !! Now each sale is hard won and equally easily lost. The payments are often delayed and the cash flow a constant worry, one never knows for a long time if you are solvent and you dread a call to discuss your overdraft arrangement with the bank. Eventually you settle into a routine and the monetary situation becomes less dire but the days of cosseted security in an office on the sixth floor whilst a distant memory still has a glow around it.
I see Moodie's, the credit rating agency, have already downgraded our financial rating and the Americans reminded us that we are at the back of the queue. With our borrowing at such a high percentage of GDP any increase in the rate we are charged to service the loan will be painful. Perhaps like Iceland we can ask for chapter 5 and claim bankruptcy.
Loosing the Prime Minister, George Osborn's position becomes very shaky, given he and Cameron were joined at the hip in the "IN" campaign, I would think the whole cabinet are at a loss to withstand the European hostility and negotiations are going to be tricky to say the least.
Like the teenager, free from parental suppression they are content to sustain a couple of bruises before becoming street wise and find new and innovative ways to live in the world. Occasionally they will glance at the oldies, not necessarily to envy them their cluttered memorabilia filled existence and routine which stifles all but the nearly moribund, but rather eager to do things "their" way
The skills are there we just need a young, fresh minded individuals to apply their brains not to aping the past, not to tinkering around the edges but to start afresh as if the sheet was clean.    1. Everyone should understand what austerity is and how there are no free lunches.
2. Welfare reform must go hand in hand with banking reform.
3. Taxation must be the cornerstone of income redistribution.
4. We must get away from Friedman style neo capitalism.
5. We must find more modern ways to educate our young and reappraise our drift towards the feminist impulse to cuddle our youth.
6. We must be made to understand that 'something for nothing' doesn't work for a country needing to balance its books without the aid of the donor cheque book.  
We simply cannot afford to support certain aspects of what had become the norm in this 21st century.
7. We can not afford to support the single mother unless there are special circumstances arising from her condition.
8. A whole plethora of lifestyle treatments on the National Health should stop immediately.
9. People over a certain income should be asked to contribute to their treatment through compulsory insurance.
10. People have to learn again that the buck stops with them and they are wholly responsible for their actions and their condition.
11. Health tourism must be banished.
12. Economically affordable rented housing will have to be built on a massive scale to bring the private ownership market more into line with incomes.
13. Investment in property should make the ownership a national asset not a tax haven for illicit earnings offshore

They are making fortunes as we speak

We woke this morning to a different dawn as the airwaves shrieked the news of The UK leaving the EU and the implications of departing this family of nations.
The last thing I did last night was check the Referendum program to see how the votes were coming in. The main conurbations the cities, which over the years have become the melting pot of immigration with people from all over the world living cheek by jowl with the local inhabitants were the first to be counted and it was no surprise that the STAY vote was strongest. My own instinctive feeling was that it was the vote in the small towns and the shires that had not been taken into the equation which would be the measure at the end of the day. I was proved right and I woke up to the news of a turn around, with the LEAVE vote in an unassailable position.
People with a memory of a country which was not an experiment in multiculturalism, of a country which could define its own heritage and not make excuses by insisting the changes were to our benefit and made us stronger these were the people who voted to leave. The person from Poland, Lithuania, Pakistan, or Bangladesh have their interests and cultural ties still cemented off-shore and therefore the concept of taking back control never had strong resonance with them. Even the concept of democracy is relatively new with few of these citizens having memories of strong democratic governance at home.
The issue of being able to vote out a ruling party was hard won over many centuries but gives the man and woman in the street confidence that there is a political remedy where power can be withdrawn and handed to someone else without use of force.
Of course the Media are having a field day whipping up the audience with shock and horror. The repeated replay of crestfallen politicians crying "the end of the world" recycling the downside is all too prevalent. The positive beacons of hope who proclaim this to be "the beginning of a new world" are not repeated on our TV screens for public consumption since "crisis" has a far greater impact.

 Now the Prime Minister has resigned and another notch was carved on our historical totem pole as we search for ways and means, for answers to the questions which our dis-entanglement from the European Union will bring. Now without a head will we become rudderless. Can we draw on our innate ability to cobble together solutions which rely little on planning but make us experts at stitching something together !!

Scotland will be next to separate itself from the UK and there is talk of Northern Island also splitting away from the UK and drawing closer to Ireland. In such a little time we have busted the mould and will have to find new ways of running our affairs. That is no bad thing. Often a breakdown in affairs pulls one out of the lethargy which the continuance of the status quo can bring. The break is always followed by some anguish and soul searching it's never easy but eventually light is seen at the end of the proverbial tunnel and as the lights floods around one forgets the depression as new friends are found and new alignments made with people who were previously strangers. Strangers who were feared now become partners and old partners become strangers but the world continues to tick along hardly missing a beat other than in that artificial construct the financial markets where people are making fortunes as we speak.

In or Out

'In' 'Out', "In "Out". It's like the commentary from a 1950s Oxford and Cambridge University Boat Race by John Snag. He counted the strokes In Out, In Out, In Out to see who was rowing faster, not always an indication though as to who was going faster through the water.
No, the "In" or "Out" today has a much more weighty outcome as we finish pondering the pros and the cons of BREXIT and have to place our cross on the ballot paper.
I walked down the road to the school which acts as a polling station, passing the cars and the gardens, into the playing field area and down a path to the school buildings. Should I vote In or Out.   Should I be ruled by my head or my heart.
The officials behind their desks checked my name against the list and I was given a voting slip with two options as if this momentous decision had only one of two answers. I could have given at least 20 reasons for staying In and another 20 reasons for staying Out. I could have weighted them with preferences and then allowed a computer to choose.
"Do you have a coin" I asked and raised a chuckle from the serious minded officials, I'v been ruminating for weeks now and I'm no nearer and answer, heads or tails, it was down to that.

I think "what done it", was the flashback of Wolfgang Schauble's face on the 'tele' telling us what was best for us. I was never good at being told anything by anyone, least of all by a German Finance Minister who had pronounced on the Greeks as if they were dog dirt on his shoe.
Funny eh, all the intellectualising and soul searching and it eventually came down to a question of a man's face and the emotional baggage I carried around with me as to his type and the seclusion they have generated from the rest of us. At least with our own home grown Schauble we have in theory the opportunity to vote them out and they must recognise this in their dealings with us..

So it was "OUT" and we will have to see how the world of 'finance', 'sovereign funds', and the 'doomsday economists' work through their bile if and when the other 'Outies' win the day. 

The Prodigal Returns

Going out to the airport is always a little stressful. One seems in unknown territory and yet you have to be fairly precise, arrival times, access to parking, and finding the car in the car park seem in retrospect easy enough but with the pressure of people and traffic, mistakes are easy made.
Gatwick Airport is a new new testing ground for me to go and pick someone up and last night it was not just someone but Andrew having been away for four years in Australia. That's as special as it gets so apart from tidying the house and making beds I needed to go to the shop. 

The car battery was dead as a door nail, oh oh is this the portent for an obstacle course !!
Having got the car started the dreaded M25 was up to its usual tricks with the 'sat nav' announcing "traffic event ahead" but where. Over the Dartford Crossing which recently change its Toll paying procedure to "on line", having done away with the convenience of paying as you come off the bridge. I don't know how someone without the internet copes, I suppose the traffic fines pile up behind the door,
Arriving in the fading light with eyesight that is not as good as it used to be in the dark, choosing the correct lane for short stay parking was my next mission. I missed it and found myself penned into a corral for buses. I could see the lane which I needed but there was a barrier between me and it. Bugger this, I turned the car around and drove back down the segregated lane, "in opposition to the traffic" and did a U turn into the lane I needed. On coming traffic were somewhat startled and no doubt, caught on a traffic camera, I will be the talking point of airport police but what the hell !
Gatwick is not as modern as Heathrow which itself is not as modern as most of the major airports around the world but then we are in a sticking plaster country where decisions are hampered by protest and indecision
The International Incoming gate was a scruffy affair, somewhat I keeping with the passengers trooping out. There was a time when people dressed up to travel but in these times it seems the fashion to appear as scruffy as possible. Maybe they were the homeless immigrants we've heard so much about.
There he was looking amazingly relaxed after a 25 hour flight, not scruffy, weightier than when he left but confident. We had a bear hug and then off to find the car and the traffic, homeward bound at last.

After the 'telling off' I received when I went to pick up Marie and Angela from Heathrow and forgot which parking bay I was in, this time I took a photo with my smart phone just in case. Perhaps it was the cool heads of "two men" but I retraced my steps without a falter.
I'd forgotten what it was like to have a Vegan in the house, "no this and no that". "That's bad for you and you should only eat this if you want to live longer". The question of what 'that life' is like without a sausage never gets aired !!
In the kitchen he had a run through my tins and packets already and thrown the must be used by 2013 out into the bin, apparently I had a toxic cocktail of goodies but he doesn't understand that I come from an era where if it didn't smell rancid you ate it. You cut the mould off what ever and ate it. You rarely threw away food, it was not a disposable to be treated lightly and the immune system coped with what ever you threw at it. If it was really bad you vomited, the bodies natural default position when you weren't kind to it.
The "A team" are arriving soon from Swansea and the temperature is sure to rise a notch or two as old sibling rivalries flare up and battle commences or the under laying "I'm the parent even if you are nearing 40" !!

Oscars Last Stand

It was interesting how the legal mind searches out the minutia to discredit the whole.

Listening to legal argument on the South African High Court ruling, that murder with a minimum sentence of 15 years should replace the Lower Courts interpretation of events leading to the shooting of Rita Steenkamp. The Lower Court ruled that the shooting had not intended to kill "her" (Pistorious thought she was in the bedroom) and that he thought someone else was behind the bathroom door.  Therefore it was argued, his action was in fact to protect Steenkamp from the potential harm from who ever was behind the door. Her murder should therefore be ruled out and that a charge of manslaughter should be brought which necessitated a much shorter sentence. The focus was on the "intention" to kill the named victim.

The High Court was having none of this and ruled that he was culpable of murder because he discharged shots through the bathroom door which would inevitably have the effect of killing someone who he deemed was on the other side of the door. This has been my (lay-man) argument all along irrespective of who was in the bathroom.

 This week the lawyer for the Defence tried to reinstate the "findings" of the initial trial saying that the findings of the Lower Court had not been overturned by the High Court ruling, in fact the High Court hadn't challenged the Lower Courts findings, only the determination of whether it was murder or manslaughter.

If the findings of the original trial still stood then his state of mind, remember he thought she was in the bedroom and that he feared for 'his' life given his incapacity and his emotional fragility that he was not culpable of her murder, only the murder of someone else, but crucially  under fear of his own life which of course would put another interpretation on the case.

The Prosecution on the other hand had presumed the High Court were in agreement with his guilt and focused on the trauma of Rita Steenkamp's family, particularly the fathers emotional testimony. Their aim was to eradicate from the judges mind that it was 'only' Pistorious'  pain and grief which  Pistorious had projected from the start, which should be  considered  but should also be balanced by that of the victims family.
It was interesting that the Prosecution were therefore rather thrown onto the back foot when the Defence cleverly supported Justice Masipa initial ruling and said that the High Court had effectively left her ruling in place and that his claim that the event was due to his reasons of personal fear and protection for Steenkamp were sufficient to produce a lenient sentence.

The Prosecution quickly responded by claiming that the Judge had no room for manoeuvre and must at least sentence him to the mandatory 15 years, under South African Law.
I can't see how she has any option but it was interesting how the attorneys twisted and turned on what seemed at first a clear cut case, carrying all the weight of High Court reasoning.

Marrieres Wood

For those of you who are history buffs, especially who have read of the field battles fought as a segment of the great campaign battles such as the Somme, Ypres and Verdun battles which ring with both great bravery and deep unabated stupidity. 

The men in the front line were there not sons of famous families, carrying on as bearers of family tradition but ordinary men who had been caught up in the patriotic fervour which Kitcheners poster "Your Country Needs You" aroused. Men who a month before had been a labourer in the factory or leading great shire horses up and down the fields of England. They were no more equipped for the assault on the Passchendaele Ridge than I am for a trip to Mars and yet in uniform under the gaze of men like himself he combined with the others to exceed all expectations.

I wrote of the heroism of the South Africans at Delville Wood and now again of the same heroism by men from the same country at the battle of "Marrieres Wood" a junction point between two British Armies which had to be held against all odds. The South African 9th Division were chosen to plug the gap and hold on.  With the strength of the brigade at 500 men these men were to hold on at all costs. And so they fought against huge odds, gradually being whittled away slowly running out of ammunition but not flinching in their duty to hold their line. As the men around them fell under the withering hale of machine gun fire, they counted their bullets as the enemy got ever closer 250yds 200yds they could nearly see the whites of their eyes. For three bloody days the little troupe of men fought battle after battle. Giddy with lack of sleep grey, with fatigue, poisoned with gas tortured by ceaseless bombardment they were beyond human praise.

The Germans tried everything to dislodge them. The promised relief never came but still they held their ground.

One must pause here to think of these conscripts from the High Veld and the Low Veld, men from a sunny warm African country fighting a 'strangers war' in a strange land, a hell hole of unimaginable proportions. They must have questioned what the were they doing here, away from their beautiful open grassland and rolling hills, away from the birdsong and the night time cicada serenade, away from their families and loved ones fighting a war that was not of their making. And yet along with the Australians and Kiwis, along with the Gurkha these men were prepared to lay down that most precious thing, their lives for a a few hundred yards of French soil. 

At 3 in the afternoon with the ammunition well ne'er gone would they retire under cover of darkness, the shell fire was unending the casualties so high that the line was held by small pockets of men counting out the ammo and the time to darkness. Their spirit unconquered their  commanding officers entry into his diary before he to was shot "that it was better to go down fighting than to have failed to carry out orders". Tributes from the enemy include one from the German Emperor himself who on stopping some captured British Army Officers asked if they were from the 9th Division "I want to see a man of that division" he said, "for if all divisions had fought as well as the 9th, I would not have any troops left to carry on".

And so history once again gives us pause for thought in asking would today's sceptical populous be as courageous or would they have found some plausible reason for being somewhere else.

The wars of political leaders are no reason to give up ones own life, unless it to defend your own family and the fact that so many men from the far flung corners of the earth did so in our time of need must should make us cringe when we effectively turned away from them and the Commonwealth in favour of closer ties to that same enemy, all for the glitter of gold.

It was interesting how the legal mind searches out the minutia to discredit the whole.

Listening to the Defence Councils legal argument on the South African High Court ruling, that murder with a minimum sentence of 15 years should replace the Lower Courts interpretation of events leading to the shooting of Rita Steenkamp. 

The Lower Court ruled that the shooting had not intended to kill "her" (Pistorious thought she was in the bedroom) and that he thought someone else was behind the bathroom door  it was argued, his action was in fact to "protect"  Steenkamp from the potential harm from who ever was behind the door. Her murder should therefore be ruled out and that a charge of manslaughter should be brought which necessitated a much shorter sentence. The focus was on the "intention" to kill the named victim.

The High Court in its ruling was having none of this and ruled that he was culpable of murder because he discharged 4 shots through the bathroom door which would inevitably have the effect of killing someone who he deemed was on the other side of the door. This has been my lay-man argument all along, irrespective of who was in the bathroom.

This week the lawyer for the Defence tried to reinstate the "findings" of the initial trial saying that the findings of the Lower Court had not been overturned by the High Court ruling, in fact the High Court hadn't challenged the Lower Courts findings, only the determination of whether it was murder or manslaughter.

If the findings of the original trial still stood then his state of mind, remember he thought she was in the bedroom and that he feared for 'his' life given his incapacity and his emotional fragility that he was not culpable of her murder, only the murder of someone else, but crucially  under fear of his own life which of course would put another interpretation on the case.

The Prosecution on the other hand had presumed the High Court were in agreement with his guilt and focused on the trauma of Rita Steenkamp's family, particularly the fathers emotional testimony. Their aim was to eradicate from the judges mind that it was 'only' Pistorious'  pain and grief (which  Pistorious had projected from the start), which should be  considered  but should also be balanced by that of the victims family.
It was interesting that the Prosecution were therefore rather thrown onto the back foot when the Defence cleverly supported Justice Masipa initial ruling and said that the High Court had effectively left her ruling in place and that his claim that the event was due to his reasons of personal fear and protection for Steenkamp were sufficient to produce a lenient sentence.

The Prosecution quickly responded by claiming that the Judge had no room for manoeuvre and must at least sentence him to the mandatory 15 years, under South African Law.
I can't see how she has any option but it was interesting how the attorneys twisted and turned on what seemed at first a clear cut case, carrying all the weight of High Court reasoning.

Group think

Do we define people as individuals or as a definable group. Is he called John or is he a white man.
Of course both definitions are true but the consequences of defining by group as against an individual is that the group brings with it baggage.
The shootings in Orlando clearly were based on a group, in this case, the Gay community.

 Representation of a 'collective' is a messy business. If I go to watch football how do I differentiate myself from the soccer hooligans in Marseilles. If I am a black person how do I liberate myself from the image of what goes on in the South African Parliament.

For the onlooker who is too lazy to differentiate, the group gets tarred with the same brush and antagonism becomes rife. The cliché that covers the group builds resentment and becomes a self foretelling prophesy whereby normally confident, intelligent, rational people become twisted with prejudice. There's no shifting the prejudice by reasoning because of the overwhelming hatred displayed against all aspects of the group and sensible people simply close off any sort of accommodation.
As individuals we normally seek out 'like minds' such as other people who support our favourite team and in so doing innocently ghettoise our responses to the opposition. Even the word opposition carries the seeds of conflict. We become prejudiced, even partially psychotic under certain conditions.
The Sunni hatred of the Shia, and on a lighter but no less worrisome note, Arsenals hatred by some fans of Tottenham appears totally irreconcilable. The particular is lost in some sort of blanket cloud resentment based on a historical grievance. The individual Sunni or Tottenham fan are lost in a craving for revenge which has as its basis events which played out long long ago or slights which are amplified by an aggressive football fan culture.
The individual is lost in the mist of the smoke drifting over the battlefield, he/she just collateral damage.

Philip Green

It's rare for one to be totally confirmed in your belief of the under laying ugly nature of a tycoon, his wealth, creating in his mind the special place he holds over ordinary mortals such as us and the bulling nature that ensues when power corrupts. You had only to watch Philip Green, the previous owner of BHS in his appearance before today's parliamentary committee to know you had seen one.

 The man exudes contempt. He has an ego to rival Donald Trump and his frighteningly thin skin takes offence at any sort of criticism. He must have been horrible to work for as he rounds on people questioning his motives with verbal contempt. At one point he accused one of the MPs sitting opposite him of staring at him. It was like the confrontation you might get in one of those less than salubrious bars where the local thug challenges you for looking at him. I have never seen this at the level of a professional hearing and it is probably indicative of his overall mental attitude towards other than a small group of similar minded power hungry individuals.

His confrontational attitude was acute from the get go. He was not there other than on his own terms and although he apologised for letting down his employees at British Home Stores he clearly did not believe he was at fault in any way, including the choice of the new owner who had little or no experience of major retailing and still less the cash to run the business.
He left the business of due diligence to others which I suppose highlights his interest in saving the business, a business he had put up for sale for a £1.00 but with a pension commitment shortfall of millions.
His apology to the employees was pure window dressing as he sat and in a sense humiliated his inquisitors by demanding to be questioned on his own terms and in a way that did not incriminate him.
Behind sat his impassive faced assistants, like the hard men supporting their Mafia boss in the traditional 1920s New York setting, these financial and legal hard men were the backdrop to what money can buy to insulate you from reality.
Green is a wealthy 'wide boy' something of a psychotic streak runs through his demeanour as he barely hides his irritation and contempt. Easily roused if the questioning became too pointed, he feigned the oldest defence, that he left 'that aspect' of the business to others and therefore could not be expected to know. When reminded that he was responsible as head of the business and signed off the financial statement it appears that was not the case, he had a firewall and others predominantly his wife signed and fulfilled the legal requirement for shareholding and ownership.
Before creating his wealth he had moved to Montecarlo because of health reasons and set up home there. It was incidental, he would have us believe, that the Monaco Principality was a tax haven and that leaving his wife and children there whilst he returned to the UK to set up his business was part of any plan. His shifty eyes glance around the assembled MPs as if to challenge any disbelief that not only does his wife have complete control whilst living outside the ambit of the British taxation system or that we should question the fact that the UK properties which his company owned were sold to a company in Monaco which his wife owns and are then leased back to the UK operation which pays a hefty rental to Mrs Green free from any obligation to pay tax.
He has no responsibility for the financial aspects of the company which he leaves to others.
He has no responsibility for the pension fund which he leaves to others.
He has no knowledge of the affairs of the Head Office in Monaco which his wife runs and where the profits of the UK business end up.
Sitting there batting each ball away with the aplomb of a "not me gov" East End barrow boy trader one is again left speechless, as I was listening to Mike Ashley the boss of Sports Direct at the lack of any sense of the common touch or of any moral integrity towards the employee, in Ashley's case the indiscriminate use of labour to meet the day to day vicissitude of weather and trading conditions and in Philip Greens case the bleeding of cash through dividends and the total lack of responsibility to fund the company pension fund which his employees were contributing 5% of their monthly salary whilst he shorted his legal responsibility for the companies 10% contribution leaving a shortfall, at the time he sold the company for a £1.00, of over £200 million of which he has offered to pay £10 million as a gesture.
Where was the Regulator in all this you might rightly ask, where indeed.

Care and contribution

One of the most pressing problems which lies behind a self imposed smokescreen, for people of my age and not particularly wishing to think about it is, what do you do when you can no longer take care of yourself.

This is particularly acute in the case of someone living alone and even in the case where a partner lives with you, one or the other dies and the remaining one is on their own.

Whilst you are in good health and of sound mind life goes on but when we begin to fail, as surely we will as we grow older then the trauma of sickness and old age takes its toll. Hospitals fix you up, if possible but as we live longer and become more feeble we are evermore in need of assistance.

There was a time when it was the acknowledged responsibility of the 'local municipality' to take care of the elderly and it was assumed that the state, in some form or another had the job in hand. 

Listening to another of these Parliamentary Committees, it is clear that the job of caring for the elderly through general taxation and even the 'assumption', that it is the "responsibility" of the general tax payer to look after this most vulnerable section of society it has now become a matter of 'pass the parcel' as each segment of the health service and the ancillary segments of that huge service have no clear idea of how to cope and organise the problem of old people, bed blocking because there is no adequate alternative for placing the old person who need care when they leave hospital.

I mentioned in a recent blog the scandal of how the London Borough of Newham had sold off a perfectly respectable "old peoples home" the site, now an office block !! When I ask the simple question where have the old people living there gone, there is a stony silence.

Rushing to minimise Government, along the lines of our cousins, 'across the pond' we politicise the message to catch the political vote , enticing the public with the messages, "look how good we are, we have taken you out of taxation. They never speak of the blighted services due to underfunding and like children in a sweet factory, the general public are fascinated by the sweets ignoring the damage to their teeth.

So what happens when the "oldie" falls over. If it's acute dementia I suppose the poor old bugger doesn't know or care but if it's a slow decline, the person is going to need care. 

As the Treasury continues its cuts on Welfare, as it must if we still need Trident or feel it necessary to hand out financial assistance to nations such as India (who have the equivalent of their own Trident), on the assumption we are aiding the impoverished people of the world.  

If we continue to insist that people should keep more of what they earn, believing the individual will be as 'far sighted' as a properly funded government scheme. If we continue to think that the individual who has been brought up in a society which spends today and let's  tomorrow take care of itself, then we are going to hell in a handcart.

People need protecting "from themselves". The future and planning for the future is obscured if people don't understand the value of money. The credit card has disconnected the function of paying off a debt before raising a new one, of producing a mystical, 'never never' land in which reality is for ever swept under the carpet

The States job was to ensure that the books balanced, our role as working citizens was to contributed fully on the assumption that one day we couldn't !!!

 

The "R" Day gets closer.

We are now entering the final phase of the Referendum campaign and in a few days the people will troop out to vote.
With all the noise of claim and counter claim people are still as confused as to where to place their cross since in the need to scream the loudest there has been few cold facts,only prophecies from people who we feel have an hidden agenda. In this age of scepticism of leadership, distrust of official statistics, from which ever source has left us bereft of any support in making this, our once in a lifetime decision.
Emotion is the fall back position for many. Do we wish to fall under direct  German hegemony  or do we wish to kid ourselves and think that we can avoid the economic power of Germany by staying out. The Kaiser, Bismarck even Hitler must be smiling in their graves to think that without a round fired, the war was won.

 Wolfgang Schauble  has issued a dire warning and we refuse to take heed of what he says at our peril. Ask Greece what happens when Schauble is crossed as he was by Yanis Varoufakis. The plea of the then Greek Fiancé Minister, the IMF, national leaders across th world fell on deaf ears and the concept of writing off the Greek debt to allow Greece to recuperate under bankruptcy law was given short shrift by the authoritarian German. It's his world we are choosing to enter to play by his rules and one has to ask was the Dunkirk spirit all for nothing. Did the Churchillian call to defend ourselves against the big beast Germany not recognise that Germanic ways are not British ways and that we pulled out all the stops to prevent our being subsumed by Goliath. 

Of course an armed invasion is very different from an economic one. The second one is largely based on emotion and the difficulty of coming to terms with being second best and under the financial control of the old nemesis. Is this enough to fight on, trying to maintain our individuality, struggling to find alternate markets when we have let our export industries decline during the period of the softer option of a guaranteed 500 million consumers. A market protected by tariffs erected against outsiders of which we would choose to become one.
Have our people become too soft, not able to roll up their sleeves any more, enamoured by a Welfare culture, inculcated by their demand for "rights" which include living standard, without considering that everything in this life has to be earned.
The wooden rifles our 'home guard', (yesterday's Territorials), trained with didn't fire bullets. We were ill equipped to go to war but against the odds we did and with the help of our relationship with the Empire, soon to become The Commonwealth and the belated entry of America we won the battle. It's hard to say if victory provided us with anything other than our freedom but that freedom, so hard fought, must not be given away easily.

Oscar Pistorius

Back again in the South African Court in Pretoria, one again is faced with conflicting emotions that of having lived there and my fond memories of that time, with the changes in my current mental approach having now lived in another society, namely the UK.
In the original Oscar Pistorius case I was struck by the colloquial nature of the language used by both the defence and prosecution lawyers and the rather homily nature of the Lady Judge. She seemed diminutive and rather than representing the State with its assumption of having the final word she was in my opinion too sotto voce.  
Given that her ruling, which also astonished me, that he had committed 'manslaughter' rather than murder, even though admitting  firing his powerful gun repeatedly through a door into a room so small,  the chance of his bullets missing who ever was in the room was unlikely.
I was also surprised that the same Judge was again sitting in charge of the court, to deliberate on a matter which she had deemed not to have taken place. Surely she must be prejudiced.
The esteemed, highly certified 'clinical psychologist' has just run through a long list of clinical rationality, dealing with the in's and out's of the human mental condition. We all fit a profile and in many ways, other than the deformity he had suffered much of what we heard would fit many ordinary people.
The psychologist is in the business of analysis, separating the minutia  of what the layman would call "life" and the events we experience and cope with every day, by providing each aspect with a weighting and an importance that is technical and to my mind questionable. In my opinion one aspect in isolation is countered and coped with by other counter posed experiences. The mind is continually balancing its opinion on a range of matters and we do justice a disfavour when we itemise things in the way the clinical psychologist is currently doing in court.
Of course it is a strategy to limit his sentence but in seeking to highlight his "contrition" for does not explain how a man could unload so many bullets into the small bathroom other than the "conditioning" which has occurred within South Africa towards life and the prejudice within the nation towards its fellow citizens. Values were eroded within the Apartheid era and have become even more eroded as crime has escalated. The shoot first psychology which scars America has its reflection in South Africa where the assumption that I am not only at risk but my oppressor does not have the rights I would wish for myself, makes it open season in the killing field that much of society has now become..
This was sadly revealed yesterday in Orlando when someone feels it right to unleash shot after shot into a crowd of unarmed people, people who he felt were lessor people in that they were gay and somehow, it was his mission to kill them.
It's also interesting how my remark against the psychological evidence, that in it's too forensic and misses the big picture, is equally placed at the foot of the lawyer who disentangles the overall meaning of a sentence and deciphers each word into is specific meaning, a meaning which taken out of context can mean one of many things. The Prosecutor immediately turned on the expert witness in his interpretation of whether, in his interview with Pistorius, Pistorius had redefined his acknowledgement of firing his gun at the door and admitted the implication that he 'knew' he would kill who ever was behind the door. 

The psychologist had been trying to impress on the court Pistorius's remorse for his actions but it was argued, Pistorius had never spelt out in detail his understanding of the causal chain for which he was responsible.
Words and testimony, meanings and subterfuge are the ingredients which the legal system use in their baking of the cake. Their ability, to throw out a 'verbal aside' which like a bear-trap lies in wait to snap shut on a careless foot fall.
But is this justice or merely verbal gymnastics.
Is in fact 'truth' served by a clever lawyer or are we all the worse off by professional competence, as we are when a team of accountants screw the HMRC.

The Stickleback

Today I awoke to the story of the Stickleback.  That tiny fish which we as lads and before you accuse me of being sexist, it was mainly lads who would trail the ponds and streams to catch these little fish, pop them into a jam jar to take home or at the end of the day or pour back into the stream.
Following from my plea to watch, with ever closer attention that 'political parasite', the member from Maldon who has his sights on the BBC I was intrigued to begin my day listening to the life of the humble Stickleback.  Amongst other things I learnt that about 20% of these fish carry a parasite in them which often grows to a size equalling the weight of the fish in which it lives. Although the parasite, a type of ring worm is a hermaphrodite and breeds with itself, it needs the body of a bird to fulfil its own cycle and therefore it alters the fishes colouration and makes the fish sluggish to enable the bird to catch and eat the fish ensuring the parasite can prosper.
The dramatic script by which nature evolves is indeed Machiavellian.
The male Stickleback is a handsome chap having distinctive colouring by which to attract the female. He builds a nest in the gravel of the stream or pond and then begins the fickle job of enticing her into the nest to lay her eggs, which he promptly fertilises. She then scarpers leaving him to care for the eggs and the offspring until they are ready to leave the nest by which time, after a year of slaving over the stove, it is time to die.
Now if I were a misogynist I would point out, the male is not 'just for show' but carries virtually all the burden. He has to compete with his mates for the hand of his chosen, he has to swim through hoops to attract her attention, lead her into his specially decorated bungalow, built I might say working his fins to the bone all for the joy of procreation with a 'one off' orgasm. She, bless her, then takes off to  let him to pick up the pieces of their wild one night stand in the firm knowledge that he will protects the kids until it is time to "kick his clogs" !!
It says something of Homo sapiens  that the male seems to have turned nature on its head and he has become the "scarperer".
Only the BBC could have enticed and teased, at such an early hour, the story of another of life's miracles to marvel and comment on. Not only is it an example of the way some people devote their own life to painstaking research, in this case the fishy world of ichthyology, but even more to the point, an example of the rich varied, "something for everyone"  content of this working marvel, the BBC which we take for granted at our peril.

Excess is a garment

It's hard to find your feet as you drift in and out of the TV channels showing  perhaps how the mega rich spend their time and money on holiday and the next moment you are in a grotty run down house being appalled by the emotional 'sink hole' in which some of our dysfunctional families live their lives.  On an even different scale one sees a documentary of people living/dying in a hell hole like Somalia and the scale of human suffering rises like some seismic event on the Richter Scale.

From a hotel suite in London costing £25.000 per night to people boiling grubs and leaves in an effort to stay alive.

Decades ago the life style of Mr and Mrs Rothschild was as opaque as a black hole event in the universe. We were oblivious to the disparity in our lives and when perhaps we read in a magazine of the opulence of a class of people who we would never meet, at least we had the option of not buying the magazine.

Now a days sitting in the corner of our lounge, beaming out its mirrored views of life in all its gory detail, we are like moths to a light, attracted by the opportunity to peek in at what others do, how they live and instinctively, measure the contrast between us  and them.

The thought of spending over £25.000 for one nights accommodation seems surreal, it's beyond our comprehension that people can spend money like that. We all at times fantasise what we would do with a decent Lottery win but at £25.000 for a room, for the night, your Lottery money wouldn't go far.

The rich middle to older people who revelled on the exclusive high roller cruse ship or spent three weeks in a private resort on one of the islands in the Seychelles, all seemed to have  the same criteria, their money bought "exclusivity" and demanded that they got "bang for their buck". Their thrill came from the sound of the champaign cork popping and a swig of bubbly to wash down the caviar, that and the attendant obsequious service from the minions, attendant to their every whim.

It's like a passport to another planet. The opulent are stereotyped with their watches and handbags, their caviar and their total disregard for the real world around them. It is as if having made the dosh you are petrified of anyone not knowing you have it. Excess is a garment never to discard for fear that people will see how shallow and inconsequential your life has really become.

The battle of Delville Wood

In writing to my South African audience i wonder who knows of the Battle of Delville Wood. 

An epic story of courage and perseverance from the annals of the First Word War when a Brigade of South Africans took and held, under tremendous odds an important strategic position which although terribly exposed they held under not only continuous sniper fire but a bombardment which registered 400 shells a minute, minute after minute hour on end. It's hard for us these days to comprehend the conditions under which the men, many of them conscripts  with little or no experience, ordinary working men one day, the next fodder for the machine gun.

The call to arms on the British side reflected her role in the Empire and its a strange thing to reflect that in these days of condemnation and remorse towards the Empire and the supposed wrongs of exploration and mistreatment, people in there thousands volunteered to fight for Britain in her hour of need.

The South African Brigade, which composed 15% Afrikaners of whom many had fought fairly recently for the Boars against the British and the rest, the bulk, English speaking South Africans who were described as "men of the right kind of experience, troops of a high physical standard plus a high level of education and breeding". For 6 days and 5 nights this shell shocked, ever reducing group of brave men held one of the most pivotal positions on the Western Front. 

Of a total of 121 officers and 3045 men only 147 marched out. It's hard for us to understand in this age of questioning and evaluating how that generation gave of themselves unquestioningly.

Who guards the people

Listening to the business plan, which the owner of Sports Direct, Mike Ashley outlined to one of the Select Committees, one is struck by the desperate need for a method of better protection for "worker rights" in the UK. Of course the word "rights" is a tricky description since we see people claiming rights where one might think there should be none and the claim is preposterous.

Worker rights are not the sociological dream of people who feel that, in areas of human interaction, minorities in particular need protection. Worker rights are not a minority subject they effect us all in one way or another. They were won over decades of struggle and one only has to go back to the practices of 1930, of workers turning up at the gates of the shipyard or factory to learn if there was work for the day to realise how important respect for ones fellow man and woman is, especially if you employ them.
Mike Ashley along with others, operates his business on the 1930 precept that my profitability can be increased if I do not acknowledge that any of my workers (other than the managerial staff) have any but the most tenuous link with the company. 80% of his workforce are on a  "no guarantee hours contract" which means, as Mike Ashley wakes up in the morning and sees the sun shining he boosts his employment take on for the day and if it's raining and customers are more prone to staying away, he takes on less. His workforce are dictated by the contract to stand by and await his call, they can not fulfil other work opportunity or obligations, they are tied, on no pay to make themselves available.
I did a blog yesterday on Philip Greens role in bringing BHS down. His movement of money, his drawing of large dividends when the business needed the cash his disregard for the people who worked for him. The UK like any capitalist country is governed by people who wish to extract the maximum from the workforce with a minimal obligation. People who grow rich and powerful do so usually at least in part on the back of others. It's a natural law of commerce that for every winner there has to be a loser and this is where society and its governance comes to the rescue to ensure that the loser is not impoverished.

One of the major questions which has to be asked is, would our Parliament better protect the works and their rights than a "Union" of nations who drawn from a combination of backgrounds which not only define each nation but a cumulatively make the singular stronger. The regulations which emanate from the EU and the legal requirements which are binding on our Parliament also protect us. The question of whether our own blend of slow burn, hard won democracy won by the establishment giving ground slowly, under protest is more likely to advance our cause. 

Like our common law legal system it is based on the accumulation of previous judgements which then become an evolution of legal precedent. There is no written constitutions,  no set of constitutional rights on which to formulate the precedent only the slow acknowledgement of giving way when push comes to shove.

Would we were ruled by a more benign system but we are not and I wonder if the European Union isn't a better judge of what a citizen needs and should expect, than an Etonian elitist clique.  

British Home Store

Listening to a Parliamentary Committee investigation the sale of British Home Stores from Philip Green to Dominic Chappell, purportedly for a £1.00 , the murky world of finance and business is exposed. As an ordinary man in the street one is amazed at the nefarious routes, the complexity and the extent of the obfuscation that goes on in these deals. 

Before the sale, for a £1.00, a large property was to be sold for £30 million but was actually sold for £45 million and the difference appeared in the account of the person who had paid a £1.00. This is the opening salvo to explain how a man Dominic Chappell, who was in many ways a man of straw, was financially groomed to become the new owner of BHS by Philip Green.

Within weeks of the sale the BHS is put into receivership and thousands of BHS workers have lost their jobs and their pension rights. 

People who had worked for years at BHS were putty in the hands of Philip Green and his cohorts. Shifting large amounts of money around the Monopoly Board, which for the movers and shakers of The City, is their plaything.  Mr Green had over the years awarded large dividends payments to his wife who just happened to be domiciled in Monaco to avoid paying tax on the dividend, whilst not fulfilling his financial responsibilities towards the company and particularly towards the companies pension fund. No one is indictable, no one broke the law, no ones collar felt, it seems everything is normal, in the City.
My mind keeps returning to the reality of Mrs Wright , a 65 year old pensioner who is being charged a levy tax on her third bedroom which became vacant when her son moved away. 

The intensity of the investigation and the surety of the Chancellor of the Exchequer that he is doing the country a favour as he roots out these "deviants" (Mrs Wright not Mr Green) who won't face their responsibilities towards the State  seems strangely unfocused when it comes to that segment of our society, 'the money men'.
We return time and time again to the inability of HMRC to pursue the Big City Rollers in their devious ways. The cosy deals between HMRC and Goldman Sachs, where the bank "agreed" to pay a minuscule percentage of what they owed the Exchequer and HMRC caved in and accepted the banks terms. 

I see the French are made of sterner stuff and are taking the same bank to court over unpaid taxes. The French always used the term to define us in our dealings on the international stage, "Perfidious Albion".

It was always so

On June the 5th "1975" the UK had a Referendum, whether to stay or leave what was then called The Common Market. Listening to the debate in the Oxford Union and the television coverage trying to convince the public of the arguments one way or the other one is struck, no amazed that if you had put a template over the one it would fit the current referendum debate to a tee. The stated hopes and the fears are identical.
The glib politicians, then as now, willing to exchange truth for half truth, or worse, without a smidgen of shame to discard honesty. Honesty was and is, not in vogue since we seem to be able, as Homo sapiens, to convince ourselves through sentiment that what ever the brain has convinced itself of, is sufficient.
Truth over such a complex landscape is variable. One man or woman's experience is different and the importance of some specific aspect of the benefit or loss to A, is less so to B.  
Intelligent men and women who engage in the business of persuasion, such as the politician should be discounted in a similar way one should always discount the work of the 'adman' or the public relations person when buying anything.
It's a sad fact of life that we can't be more even handed in our dealings with other people, we often become both defensive and antagonistic at the same time if our cherished ideals are brought into question. Lying to prove a point seems par for the course rather than re-examining the point you wished to prove. In setting out your case for convincing someone there will always be areas of weakness in your argument and we would do well to acknowledge them as weak-nesses and consider why they are weak rather than wish them away.
In this current Referendum "argument", since that is what it has descended to, an argument not a debate, I have yet to hear either side consider the other persons point of view.
Be it the economic argument, immigration and the stress on resources, the sentiment of being in charge of your own destiny, none of these complex arrangements are discussed in a rational balanced way. It's either black or white, no shade of grey, whilst in fact virtually all of it is 'grey' with elements of both effecting the outcome.
We do need immigration to keep certain of our services going but not the un-targeted,  un- controlled immigration that Schengen produces.
We do need to trade into the large population block which Europe represents but not to the exclusion of other markets. Britain has historically been a part of a commonwealth of nations and traded in what was known as the sterling area with countries across the globe. Other countries in Europe have not had this global reach and we suffer more than others in the EU from the enforced isolation which the rules of the EU impose on us.
Whilst the "Stay" Campaign claim that the BREXIT group can not tell us what economic  life will like in this country when or if we leave, it is equally true that the "Remain" 'status quo' people can not convince me that hitching our star to a shaky assembly of economically disparate nations, with clear structural economic fault lines, unless closer political union is sought (which of its self opens another can of worms), their proposition is no clearer as to a view into the future.
There is also the rights of EU citizens, especially the ones who are now being granted asylum from the war torn Middle East, to move freely from country to country which will, over time, distort our already distorted society.  

Big business trumpeting the claim of the EU is not a good omen for the ordinary man in the street. Globalisation has not been to the advantage of "the working man and woman".  It has divided the world into ever greater disparity and the national attempt to find solutions finds little or no support in the trans global boardrooms which now call the shots. Neo Liberal Western Capitalism seems to have won the day, until we have another seismic shock such as we experienced in 2008. The banks will fail because all the precautionary bullets have been fired and whilst we continue, unabated to leverage debt as if it were a positive commodity the day of reckoning is due to ravage what we assume is our entrenched entitlement.
It is my view cutting our cloth and relinquishing our historical position. Acknowledging our size and our mistakes, for instance in not keeping abreast with education, leaves us no option but to reappraise who we are. Our lack of economic clout (other than in the field of dodgy finance) and the perilous borrowing we undertake to appear solvent, must be brought under control. We can prosper, but as a nation with aims which fit us for our place in the new global dispensation. 

The transition that never happened

Countries such as South Africa have changed so drastically that there are few intrinsic  land -marks left. The iconic buildings are still there, the grand structures of government in Pretoria and Cape Town, the hideaways of the rich like Plettenberg Bay, the ribbon developments along the coast still have their occupants living the "good life", the food and the restaurants as good as anywhere in the world but the foundations of good governance have gone and with it the criteria that defines a country.
Of course it was always a false premise to judge the country on its predominantly white experience. The country we never saw, or never wished to see was all around but somehow we decreed the proclivity of its people was different to ours and so the standards in virtually everything was vastly different. There were no touch stones other than the relationship in the home where the domestic worker and the family was a small window into the heart of Africa.
Now with Government and the Parliamentary caucus behaving in the way they do,the last vestibule of a common cause is broken. The confidence and optimism that Mandela laid out has  broken, first by Mbeki and his denial of the cause AIDS, and his support for Robert Mugabe which seemed to denote a backwoods element in his make up and currently, President Zuma who represents a step back to the traditional tribal patriarchal chief.
"Africa for Africans" has become the realisation of many of the indigenous people and by that I mean the traditional construct of a tribal hierarchy and a bequeath mentality which demands unalloyed support.
The dream of western capitalism rooted in the foot of the African continent has perished. The dream of Cecil Rhodes and his mission to inculcate a political structure which moulded commerce with the rule of law and Parliamentary democracy has proved a mission too far.
This is not to say it is a wholly bad thing for Africa to Africanise itself especially if the people are willing to accept the functioning of omniscient rule in a tradition their grandparents and especially their great grandparents were fully at home with. In its day it created historical memories when African tribal leaders such as Charka took on the rule of the white man and defeated him in battle. The road to subjugation and a tin shack followed, especially during the Apartheid period when the African was belittled and besmirched by a system of governance which was totally alien to them. It was not a happy constructive time and in the sudo democracy represented by the pomp and circumstance of Parliament cheap words replace actions and the symbolism of a white man's construct never quite worked in their favour.
Perhaps it is better to tear it all down (like Jesus destroying the money changers tables), a revisionists move that takes into account the condition of all the people not just the successful.
Sadly like the poorly educated native in this country, the population is bewitched by elitist power and continue to support a clique who have the utmost contempt for them and only pay lip service to democracy when it suits their purposes.

The "R" Day draws closer

As we draw closer to "R" day we seem no closer to a decision as to "why" to stay or "if" to go.
Some people have been in no doubt from day one, they instinctively held a view and have remained firm. Their view to stay or go was based on a strong sense of either believing in the status quo or wishing to try something new because or a resentment of outside interference.
If Cameron hadn't offered the option I suppose the bulk of people would have continued with their lives immune to the arguments which have thrashed too and fro with ever more heat as we approach the day of the vote
This being a referendum its a binary decision taken with equal weight on each vote, no constituency weighting, no first past the post distortion simply a vote which the pauper and the captain of industry has an equal say.
One of the things which has become clear as we listen to the claim and counter claim, no one has a clear picture of the future effect one way or the other and everything is made opaque by the rashness of the competing claims.
If we come out the British as a nation will "not" fall apart. There are arguments to suggest she might even perk up and get about her business with a little more vigour. The spirt of the nation might coalesce around the sense that being independent, released from the parental strings, the decisions and the esprit de corps might, as it does in wartime rise up a notch or two and become competitive in a very competitive market place.
Watching Jamie Diamond that icon of Wall Street threaten us with pulling his bank out from the UK and moving it to Europe reminds us who we currently share a bed with. Global markets and Global market makers such as Diamond have in many ways made small nations like ours impotent and the thrill of the Brexiteer for gathering the leavers of our destiny into our own hands has to be modified by questioning which leavers and what destiny.
Can we be an outward looking nation on which the strength of our past success has rested and an inward separatist nation frightened of the changes we see happening to our nation and which will continue to happen in or out of Europe.
Is it worth the effort to swim against the tide of the collective market and multiculturalism or should we go with the flow and absorb a new parenthesis to describe what we have evolved into.  Nothing stays the same and I have no more faith in Boris Johnson as I have in David Cameron to fight our corner, so maybe we should define a new shape for the ring no right angles where we can get caught and have to fight it out, round all the corners so we can continue to slip and slide our way forward never needing to face our nemesis.