Subject: Fw: The deeds done by others.

 

We are in a loop of self examination.  When ever I turn on the TV I see the same old clips and listen to the same old cliches being spoken time and time again. It's as if time has actually stopped and we have to make the most of the terrible events of last night by asking the same questions over and over again.

As a nation we are prone to a mild form of exhibitionism, especially in our show of mourning the dead. From the solemn national parades for the fallen, to the dignified laying to rest of a monarch. The enormous outpouring of grief for Diana Princess of Wales to the flowers in Manchester to signify our solidarity against terrorism.

The country seems these days to have a penchant for wearing its emotion in full view. A far cry from the stiff upper lip of my generation and before. We seem these days to be in competition as to who feels the pain the most. Who's pile of flowers is the highest and represents a sort of morbid competition to 'out do' our neighbours.

The TV journalists are still at it on my muted screen, as they have been since 6am this morning, repeating ad nausea the same story the same phrases, each channel seeking to out do its competitor.

The great and the good, and the not so good, are trooped out before us each with a similar message to be vigilant, to be brave, to understand we are in good hands and the authorities know what they are doing and what is best for us.

Strong leadership, that Churchillian flavour of finding within us the resolve to dig deep. Margaret Thatcher taking on those pesky Argentinians for a handful of farmers and a few sheep. We rise to the bate each time but we rarely question the fundamentals.

We shy away from asking the hard questions since the answers would be unpalatable. Our raison d'etre has been lost in the image we gave ourselves, of being powerful and of leading by example in the world. After the Second World War we had shrunk and whilst we still had fond memories of Empire we simply couldn't afford to keep it up. 

 And so we did what we thought of as the next best thing, we crowded the Empire onto our tiny island, irrespective of what the locals thought since the establishment were "rulers" and "rules" wouldn't ask the natives what they thought would they ?

A bit like the motto of Tesco's founder, Joseph Cohen a market trader in his early days, "pile em high and flog em cheap" so our political masters, unlike Germany who rebuilt her industries from scratch and trained local Germans to work there, we in Britain decided that to compete, we would import cheap labour from the Colonies to undercut the wages we were paying our own local workforce. 

Today we have a polyglot island with little or no ethnic commonality. An island with competing ethnic claims. An island, unlike Germany which had to import over a million Syrians to recognise that culture and tribal affinity are stronger than the rules written in a parliamentary legal code. An island that has introduced the seeds of its own discontent if not destruction, by, as usual, not connecting the dots and recognising that money is needed to instil a sense of belonging, it's an artificial construct at its most simplistic. Leaving communities to their own devises might have been ok in the days of Empire but today the disparity is seen everywhere you look right across the multicultural spectrum. The inadequacy of a wage to provide for the family spreads disheartening consequences, especially the discontent levelled at "the other" be they white or black. Being poor is the common denominator these days and being poor inflames the raw edges of our social fabric to blame each other for the deeds done by others.