Buyer beware

Subject: Buyer beware.

 Imagine an advert for fast food (junk food), where the people shown in the advert, were overweight and looked downtrodden.  Imagine instead a fast food shop filled with slim, well heeled people (not the fat stressful people), who are shown rushing in to gobble the food quickly before running back to work.

Virtually all advertising is predicated on glamour, not only the ads targeted at women to improve their looks but the car ads to lure men to lure the women who have been lured to dress up in a world which clearly revolves around women.
The artificiality of life's needs are all around us. The impact of subliminal messages is immense and the psychology of engaging with people, 24/7 is well honed in this society. Our society, based on consumerism, has this important feature, a massive artificial stimulant, the need to buy and continue buying, ad nauseam.  

I suppose the Soviets propagating their need for industrial might produced reams of visual propaganda to stimulate people to work harder and make the nation great but somehow this propaganda that we should impale ourselves on the cross of consuming things for no other reason than we can. That we should be encouraged for instance to eat food that is clearly bad for us purely to enhance the stock market price of say McDonalds or drink liquids saturated in sugar when too much sugar is known to be bad for us, so we sustain the bottom line of Coco Cola. The ethics of big business always trumps the ethics of the health industry and we, the simple pawn in the middle, are played and forfeited at will.

There is little or no protection at government level where it is only at this level does the persuasive language of leverage come into play. Business of course would say it has no business evaluating the rights and wrongs of the products it sells, its loyalty is to the shareholder and the companies bottom line. The gun industry in America deny's it is complicit in the slaughter of children on a campus saying it's not the gun which kills but the man or woman behind who pulls the trigger. The gaming industry deny their complicity in gambling addiction and, at this moment are crying about the massive job losses which will ensue because government have cracked down on the slot machines reducing the £100 bet to a maximum of a £2 bet in the hope that the debts racked up will be minimised. The manufactures of motor cars in which they embedded devices to mislead the authorities about dangerous exhaust emissions. The banks who twist and twirl their products to manipulate the market and the real estate industry encouraging people to enter into a contract for which they have not a chance in hell of fulfilling. 

The list goes on and on. The capitalistic mantra, "there's a sucker born each minute" or as Lloyd Blankfein the boss of Goldman Sacks put it more prosaically when responding to the accusation that the derivative market was the sale of deliberately disguised rubbish for which the purchaser was being hoodwinked, his answer was that the trade was between adults who had a duty to protect themselves, 'buyer beware' and therefore there was no onus, in a free market for the seller to consider any ethical standard.
So 'buyer beware' but it's an unfair playing field when the seller spends millions of dollars or pounds each night pumping out adverts every 10 minutes on the TV just when our defences are down as we relax in the lounge with our children perhaps participating in some wildlife program and next second the screen is alight with adverts from an industry which wouldn't know the difference between truth and falsehood  if it bit them on the bum. Every 10 minuets the same adverts, the same manipulation of the facts, the same blatant untruths and all we can say is 'buyer beware'

Another nail in the coffin

Subject: Another nail in the coffin 

I'm always underwhelmed when members of the "great and good" are established on committees to investigate things which go wrong. When I heard a 'Dame of the Realm'  had been appointed to look into the building industry and its procedures I thought a glimpse at her background would be useful.

Dame Judith Hackitt has an ocean of engineering degrees to her name as well as being the ex chair of the Health and Safety body which is supposed to be one of the watchdogs to established good practice within the very industry she is being asked to adjudicate.  It seemed to me that whilst you needed an expert who understands the issues, her chairmanship of one of the bodies which clearly had failed to monitor the industry regarding its concern for overall safety she was a little too close to the flame.

We have a High Court Judge looking at the accountability of contractors involved in the procurement and fitting of what turned out to be a highly inflammable cladding which was installed at Glenfell and on buildings across the land, cladding which the specification illustrated was not fit for purpose.
The Judge's progress is leisurely as befits his status, 9 months have passed and he seems only to have got his ducks in a row but theses sort of things can't be hurried since we are in thrall of the Establishment and their figures of magisterial importance. Anyway the more he can string it out, time wise the more he can charge and his political masters are usually keen to kick problems into the long grass and if the past is anything to go by, these investigations often take years.
Dame Hewitt his morning was paraded before the Medea to divulge her own findings. She had found the obvious and rejected the obvious in consecutive sentences.
She illustrated the establishment penchant for observing the blinding obvious, by stating that the regulations were not being followed and that the organisations given the role of overseeing the regs were falling far short of their duty. The obvious corollary to this would have been to ban the cladding in which the flammable material is a constituent part but no, that's far too simple and what to us is obvious is less obvious to a member of the Establishment who task it is to clarify and provide leadership.
One has to ask why. Is it because she was too cozy with the industry and her task was being to act as a conductor and to present us with articulate waffle. Obviously we will never know but it has put another nail in the coffin of trust which the survivors of Glenfell have demanded.

The focus of the psychiatric's chair

Subject: The focus of the psychiatric's chair.

How do we square the circle. More and more people are claiming help from the government coffers whilst the economy is in tatters.
No one wants to acknowledge the fact that we can't afford to balance the books
properly without a fresh look at how we tax people to share the financial load, across the classes, rich and poor, a reaffirmation of the concept of paying, when you can to pay, for those genuinely unable to afford to live. Of accepting our own responsibility for our financial commitments and if necessary moderating those commitments to what we can afford.
When I was young and growing up, it was a far less affluent time, the country was economically broke, having fought a World War and had to repay the money it borrowed from the Americans to do it.  We witnessed in 1945 a different type of political bravery from the one experienced during the war from Mr Winston Churchill, this time by the unexpected new post war Prime Minister, Clement Attlee.

He propelled a new magisterial social revolution in the post war social contract which included,  amongst other things, the formulation of the NHS. and a massive home building program of social housing for ordinary people. 

It reflected a political philosophy which was inclusive and not exclusive. It was about different priorities and a new understanding that "ordinary people count".
In those days the ordinary man and woman in the street hadn't heard of "rights" but they had an intimate knowledge of belonging to a community. They recognised the implicit commonality between human beings and hadn't, at that stage been  encouraged to forget their social contract in favour of the self centred, striving, individualistic life style propagated by Mrs Thatcher.
The old was thrown out virtually wholesale and in its place a hybrid of the American philosophy of winners and losers. The spectra of a society in which people cared for each other was replaced by one where people who didn't ask who lived next door.
The inter social responsibility of caring as much as we could for the people around us was replaced by the competition to express our financial success in the way we consumed and it's most visible influence was and still is the car on our doorstep. It became a contest to outdo our neighbour not to care for them, to exclude them from our calculations and become mired in self-interest. The individual "rights" was the result of allowing ourselves to become isolated and having to ask a rapidly disappearing government to take the place of things which previously society had handled.  The Government have continued to distance themselves from their people and the malaise of ill health, often brought on by stress, especially mental health, has produced a plethora of notifiable mental disturbances each the brain child of the psychiatric industry .The sufferers now on first name terms with their affliction, often mentally defined,  which mother's of children who they find hard to control can now be categorised.  Mothers of limited education can reel off, chapter and verse on this esoteric subject, mental health. It's as if they seek some sort of  fame to go along with their categorisation along with their ability to pronounce long, virtually unpronounceable Latin terms as if having having a child with so and so, brought them closer to some sort reconciliation with their day to day toil.
Whilst it does not disguise the personal trauma but it's often a trauma which would have been handled so much better by being included within a caring society rather than the individuality and focus of the psychiatric chair.

A foreigner in my own country

A foreigner in my own country

One could accuse Garath Southgate of being tokenistic by including a couple of white players in his England team to play in the World Cup this year. It's a defining moment when the make up of the national team begins to reflect the changing make up of our society.
Of course there will be many saying that the colour of ones skin has no relevance in today's colour blind society but one is drawn to question how embedded are the people who's parents came to this country 50 years ago who themselves still feel in part their deep  ties lie to the country their parents emigrated from.

The argument that the children growing up in the UK are unlikely to feel these ties, or that their ethnicity has nothing to do with say the West Indies, Pakistan, India, Syria, Lebanon, Nigeria, The Cameroon and so on is unproven.  It's certainly true of an Aussie or a South African that the ties are maintained. It's seen in specifically the cricket test matches in this country when Pakistan or India come to play, two thirds of the spectators support the visiting non UK side.

It's not a phenomenon which one wouldn't expect, our personal history is only part of who we are and since our parents and the aunts and uncles who make up the extended family, our kith and kin, are deeply embedded in who we think we are it's natural to feel that part of our root culture is 'over there'.
Meanwhile the society here has undergone a massive transformation, a sort of colonisation in reverse. Unfortunately we fear to offer any sort of opinion because of the backlash of being called racist.  Unlike the pillorying of our role in the colonisation of other countries across the globe, Political Correctness has shut down debate about the reverse colonisation of this country and the potential to upset the inherent equilibrium of a county inhabited by people who are recognisably the same.
Fostering all manner of foreign culture, religious and social on our unsuspecting society we have been made incoherent by the clamour  to say nothing, even to think nothing, it's all a bit 1984 for my liking.
These cultures religious and social are for our good we are told, they enrich us with new ways to look and experience new things, as if looking at different new ways of living was the precursor to "the good life". Our old ways are just that"old ways" and we must move on and integrate ourselves with the new. We of course have no say in the matter since others have a better understanding of "our" needs. But perhaps reminding ourselves that originally it was the economic determinant which encouraged people to come here in the first place perhaps the baggage they brought with them is the part we least understand and most resent.
Now I know I will be accused of being a racial bigot by some people but those who know me know this is far from the case rather it is placing on record the legitimate fears and in some cases resentment for being hoodwinked about the unforeseen outcome of mass immigration and the growth of different values from 'within' which resulted from that immigration. At no stage were we consulted, at no stage we're the ramifications of being changed from a monoculture to a multi culture explained. Today the insistence for further change to assimilate and change even further was evidenced on a popular BBC morning news and current affairs program, four different people of colour were extremely unhappy with their lot here and demanding swinging changes. It appears they can demand openly for change whilst we are shackled by PC to remain stum.
When I walk down Newham High Street later today I will not be angry about the row upon row of Indian shops selling silks and saris or the food outlets selling chapatis, I won't be upset to be one of the few white people on the street, I will accept wholeheartedly the women going around their daily business shrouded head to toe in a patriarchally ordained  costume which is designed to exclude me but I will ask myself, how did all this come about and has it in any way made me a foreigner in my own country. 

Within not without

Subject: Within not without.

Today the debate was about the intriguing concept of believing in the "essence" of god without "believing in God". 

The complexity of the biblical story and it's time line, set in a period so remote from our own current thinking, makes the telling of this unlikely and complex story, which includes concepts  such as the "virgin birth" the "resurrection" even the concept of "heaven", difficult if not unfathomable. 

There are of course many religions. Some of them thrive on sticking firmly to the text and believing every word,  others try to manage their belief in "something" with a nagging doubt about the bibles specific veracity.

The Quakers, who were members of the audience are currently undergoing a re-evaluation of their teachings with a pragmatic sense of trying to put greater  emphasis on the 'human experience' on earth than with the god described in the Testament. 

Their personal striving for understanding through human love and human reconciliation, is reflected in their congregation being called "the society of friends" and that there is something of god in everyone, each human being unique and therefore their belief in god is tempered by their belief in their fellow man. 

This emphasis on humanities role in the practicality of founding a better place on Earth rather than the carrot of life beyond death is more atheistic than faith bound, although perhaps the Quaker would balk at the comparison. They belong to a pantheon of faiths which strive to understand the basis of humanity without mixing the image of God with their own, other than the belief that God lies within us.

Meghan Markle

Subject: Meghan Markle. 

Why do we feel the urge to undermine other people. In a typically unedifying scene, four British showbiz women harrying Samantha the half sister of Meghan Markle, who is marring Prince Harry this weekend.

I'm not in any way a royalist but I am a humanist and to see these four British soap stars the sort of mini celebrities who parade our tv screen appearing on a talk shows such as "Loose Women", a show designed to celebrate gossip.
Samantha Grant has multiple sclerosis and is confined to a wheel chair. She has been interviewed before by the media defending her family, as any daughter would. The family, not born in the bubble of aristocracy, are normal with a history of at least one black sheep in the guise of a brother who has been off the rails with drugs and violence.  
The press and media have had a field day exploiting the Meghan's family history for any dirt they can find. It's a pity they don't spend half as much effort in exposing the skeletons in the aristocratic cupboards, including Harry's family as well as the proprietors of the newspapers and media outlets who publish salacious title-tattle, but of course who are strictly protected.
As a nation we seem to have a penchant for the salacious, we burry our noses into the dirt and the pornography of our time and then seem surprised to find it exists in ordinary families right next door. The moms and dads, sons and daughters who have misbehaved  and strayed off the beaten path, a path which few would actually recognise but which is held up as the gold standard if you wish to marry a Royal. It's so disingenuous since 'The Royalty' are mired in a grimy family history, hushed up inconvenient episodes which would be embarrassing if they got out. In an age of smartphone reporting where a party episode is snapped and the papers have it all over the front page the next morning often blown out of context there is I'm sure, plenty of inconvenient footage if needs be.
The news hawks have railed at Meghan's Dad for being a bit of a recluse living in Mexico having been declared bankrupt and probably escaping from family and friends because of his shame. He had supported Meghan as she tried to break into the world of acting and it is suggested by Samantha that a little bit of "payback" from the wealth garnered by Meghan wouldn't have gone amiss.
My disenchantment yesterday is aimed at the shrill accusatory tone taken by these harridans of our small screen, these righteous women who's own lives might not bear too much scrutiny going into full pit bull mode demanding to know the why and wherefore.
I thought Samantha handled them with grace and patience. She was calmly informative and seemed to have a perspective on her family which was supportive even under the prying, disdainful, accusatory line of questioning she had to undergo.
Robert Burns comes to mind more as more as we watch the attempted demolishment of people growing up and living this hectic, often narcissistic life in the 21st century where probing for morals and virtu, which disappeared at the turn of the century is a lost truly cause.

Self worship

 Fw: Self worship

 

The concept of a pure unadulterated mind, a mind which becomes clouded by thoughts and actions which are alien to it and which can be rationalised  and therefore to a large extent eliminated through the discipline that meditation brings is a useful employment of ones time if it is true that the mind has a kind of duality, the pastoral and the reactive.
Neuroscience would have it that there is no Garden of Eden no underlying purity of mind  and only the conflict of environmental experience to tutor it.
The distraction of facts from experimental knowledge gained through years of immersion is a dangerous area since the action can often out weigh the theoretical, especially when we are dealing with the essence of who we are. The mind is the mind and the brain is the step-parent to the mind, the outcome of all those electrical synapses and chemical formulations which in themselves are pinprick moments in time but which collectively form the essence of who we are.
Do we need to police these random stimulants to make something more benign, more social, more constrained by philosophical codes of social structure.
It has been the work of religion to codify what is good and bad within us as it pertains to the common good. There has always been an impress of authority on the common man to conform, to fit a social structure not of his own making and one which seems to be coming apart at the seams with the globalised mechanics of economic efficiency.
The search for inner peace and the realisation that we are in many ways alone even as we seek the close affection of someone else leads us to institute an audit of our place in the universe and here on earth. This tiny blob of matter so insignificant in terms of the universe we seek, like the Catholic Church to make ourselves the centre of everything meaningful, a last 'hurrah' before we obliterate our species in a final bout of narcissistic self worship. 

O wad the giftie gie us to see oursels as ithers see us

Fw: O wad some power the giftie gie us to see oursels as ithers see us. It wad from many a silly notion free us.

What is it about Monday morning that for millions of people, not only is it a watershed for the week but is also a regular crisis moment when as you break through the sleep and realise that life is serious again. 

Friday of course has the opposite effect as the weeks problems usually begin to melt away as the weekend loom with its lighthearted effect on where we will be and what we will do for the next two days.

The psychological effect of a Monday, or a Friday is lost on the 'retiree' since as the five day cycle merges into seven the signposts for our physiological and emotional tension are removed and unfortunately, rarely replace. We begin to settle into a sort of benign, unspecified coma where time has no substance and we are cast adrift in an ocean of irreconcilability where time begins to lose meaning and of course, we with it.

Most of our lives are spent reacting to things. The drive to work, the questions asked of us at work, our instinctive bonding with people who we need to combine with to get the job done. Take away this active backdrop and we are in danger of sleepwalking in and out of consciousness as we drift in and out of the kitchen or on a health giving walk which doesn't have any destination other than to keep healthy.

The resonance of our solitude and the inevitable conclusion that we are finally alone, with time on our hands but incapable of appreciating this gift because of the noise in our head of being solitary and the implication of a landscape, freshly wiped clean, without any 'familiarity' for comfort. No longer the artificial deadlines or the task orientated lifestyle but rather a dangerous freedom to make it up as you go along or, as is often the case,  not to bother. 

The bounties having become personal draw you into self analysis at a time when you are vulnerable. The ageing process draws attention to your vulnerability,  but that apart, the questions of a life are brought into perspective by its drawing to a close and the rational of questioning of your past has  to be resolved. 

Your definition of success and failure is important. There is a danger that you will rationalise your failure, especially if you uses the yardstick of money to evaluate success and begin to make unnecessary excuses. The quality of your reasoning has to have a secure footing but often there is no secure footing in a life of haphazard decisions where whim and irrationality were more usually evident. At least you say "I was my own man" but this could be a cover for many irrelevances. Perhaps the best surety you have for finding peace of mind is the way you have treated other people, your kindness and consideration. Your striving to understand the world around you and not treat it as a plaything. Your ability to put yourself in the other man or woman's place and attempt to see the world from their perspective without losing sight of your own.

Making sense of what we can not know

Making sense of what we can not know

It always amazes me at the surety of opposing political opinion. People with diametrically opposed views battling it out in debate, each believing their view is correct and the other false.
I have been listening on the BBC World Service to a group of so called experts evaluating the outcome of Donald Trumps move to pull out from the Obama negotiated deal with Iran regarding Iran's termination of trying to attain nuclear weapons.
The dangers of relighting the fuse in the Middle East by imposing fresh sanctions  in an effort to bring to heel a rogue state who's paramilitary excursions (through Hezbollah) are everywhere in, Syria, Yemen, Lebanon and Israel, or to maintain the status quo in the hope that more prosperity in Iran would swing the popular vote and make the state more compliant
The agreement signed by Obama allowed the funds to flow again to Iran from oil sales, funds which it was hoped would bring back some measure of prosperity but funds also which allowed Hezbollah to prosper.
The balancing act of preventing the growth of Iranian nuclear power which ostensibly is aimed at Israel, against the proliferation of guerrilla warfare in the surrounding states of the Middle East but also further afield is a delicate one. The mayhem in Yemen where the (Shia) Hezbollah is at war with (Sunni) Saudi Arabia, and also any state with a significant Sunni population, Hezbollah stirs the pot in this centuries old, fratricidal conflict between Sunni and Shia.
There are no solutions to religious bigotry and it seems as if Obamas treaty with Iran was as much a holding position to balance the fears of Israel as to have any lasting hope of a solution in this troubled part of the world.
The eloquence of each participant and the perspective of four different views expressed this morning on the radio, on the perceived outcome of Trumps unilateral dumping of the treaty created by his antithesis, President Obama,  was for me illuminating and fed into the confusion we westerners have for the conflicts in that part of the world.
Trumps threat to impose sanctions not only on Iran but on any nation doing business with Iran which includes France, Germany and the U.K. has resulted in a great deal of  hyperbolic rage towards the Americans, as much because Trump, unaware of the sensitivities  of diplomacy says he doesn't care for such niceties and would rather get the job done being more in thrall to Netanyahu the Israeli Prime Minister than to Macron Merkel or May.
The power of the American dollar, which lies in the vaults of most of the nations of the world as a source of economic stability and is at the core of Global economics, this Trojan horse to which we all pay homage is, when in the hands of 'wheeler dealer' such as Trump, a frightening weapon.
We will see what we will see. Perhaps this maverick will rewrite the history books of non diplomatic achievement since he seems to have no boundaries in his self belief for  getting things done and we await his meeting with Kim Jung-un with great interest.
His non pragmatic approach is a break from the smoking mirrors of diplomatic intrigue where the general public lost faith in the political system because,  as much as anything else, the name on the tin bore no resemblance to what was inside and all politicians became to be seen as charlatans.

Who said life was easy

Subject: Who said life was easy.

There’s a definable lethargy which begins to creep into our lives as we get older. I am not so much referring to our dissipating energy levels rather I’m talking about our mental commitment to keep on performing.

This lethargy of purpose, of finding routine so bland and underwhelming that we begin to question our need to continue with them and therefore plunge into a spiral of laziness. From the heater skelter existence of commitment and deadlines,( usually someone else’s ), to an oasis of not having anything to do except the mundane housekeeping. One starts to fall back on the search for a reason. Hamlets forlorn cry “To be or not to be” rings in our ears.
It’s not depression I'm describing since one can find plenty of mental solis in reading and writing. The trip to visit friends or see a place you had wanted to see are the stuff of the retiree but the instinct to seek 'fulfilment' is missing.
When young fulfilment was about the girl next door, the opportunity to make money, the new car and progress at work. Ones children gave immediate fulfilment as they succeeded navigating their own obstacles and became rounded individuals. You were an integrated part of the surrounding world and the interplay made you a member of the human club
Retirement and old age takes away in large part your membership of this club and as you see them slink off in the early morning light you reflect on the silence of an empty street.
I'm urged to join a club, make friends with people of my own age, perhaps go on a sea voyage designed to accommodate the oldies. All these solutions miss the point, they are alternatives they belong to a world of the past not the future. The talk is of past achievements, not tomorrow's opportunity, for many, tomorrow is a dark and frightening place as they consider their mortality.
Ageing and retirement was always seen as an opportunity to reignite self interests and hobbies which work had denied. Trips taken at leisure, without deadlines which were implicit in the return to work, this social freedom would fill the space of work. 

Perhaps because we have become so conditioned by routine during the time we spent working and made us oblivious to our own spatial needs, indeed it seems to have blunted our ability to reinvest the remaining energy when the opportunity came around. Holidays were always prized because we saw in them a release from work and it's arcane responsibility. The ability to get up when you wanted and to saunter into a new holiday environment was the classic antithesis of the routine of daily employment but when it came you were swamped like Willy Wonker in the chocolate factory, there was just too much time on your hands and you become lost in the ways to fill it.
There is also the lingering Presbyterian guilt tied up in 'idle hands'. To be busy is to avoid self absorption too much contemplative me time which skews the productive person you have been trained to be. Guilt and a lingering concern that not being gainfully at work is somehow immoral is difficult to shake off. 

And then of course there's the money angle where the value of what we do is measured in terms of the money. Money that alternative kudos for much of life's activity, the wealth we create and the ostentatious buying which often accompanies it are important drivers as to why we devote most of our lives to earning as much as we can to the detriment of much else. 

These lessons learned through life are hard to put aside and unless the income from ones investments is, in Mr Micawbers definition of "happiness"  (annual income 20 shillings, annual expenditure 19 shillings and 6 pence, result happiness) then a dwindling balance and the need to provide "now a days" for expensive old age care, the dreadful arithmetic of the pension pot, (if you are lucky enough to have one), becomes ever more important.

Retirement then is a two edged sword but then who said, life was easy.

A Mongolian Emperor in waiting

 

Subject: A Mongolian Emperor in waiting. 

Are we seeing the result of the last American election, an election which kicked out the pacification policies of Obama and the Democratic for the hash reality of the right wing Tea Party politics which culminated with Donald Trumps success in winning the Presidency.

Hoping for a creative reasoned dialogue which signified the Obama Presidency seemed a  civilised way forward. Jaw jaw rather than War War. Talking and finding commonality between nations seems infinitely the better way to conduct international diplomacy and strangely this in a sense comes from the development of nuclear power and the impact of mass destruction. 

Anything was better than war, unless of course the finger on the button is the extension of a mind honed on ruthless negotiation in his business affairs which usually relied on his powerful financial position and a contempt for any sign of weakness from opponents.
Trumps posturing seems less of a posture and rather a position in which his blatant disregard for the art of diplomacy makes his method of decision making, reliant as it is on the might of American arms and seem straightforward in dealing with the "bad guys".
Obama was always full of optimistic hope that the bad guys were not altogether bad.
He shrank from decisive action when his red lines in Syria were breached when chemical weapons were first used by Assad against his own people and his weakness allowed Putin and Russia to move troops in to Syria and become the only power broker within the region.
It has been suggested that Trumps bellicose warnings to North Korea have made Kim Jong-un think twice about continuing their nuclear missile program, although I think the Chinese have played a crucial part since without Chinese economic support North Korea would crumble.
Any student of history would acknowledge the part conciliation plays, when the reparation for past deeds is not yielding the outcome you expect. In a world of equals, this counting the cost is sensible and we draw a line under what is in the common good.
In the period prior to the First World War the nation states of Europe saw themselves as equals and if not equal drew alliances to make themselves more so.
The combination of Teutonic states to make a nation, Germany tipped the balance in Europe, which lasts to this day but after the culmination of World War 1. with Germany ostensibly beaten but not outright defeated, the exhausted allies had had enough of the blood letting and decided not to pursue the German army onto its home territory and instead an 'armistice' was agreed whereby reparations in money and territory were exacted, the purpose to hobble the horse so it would never gallop again.
History tells us it didn't work and the seeds were sown for a National Socialist Government which garnered the ill content to strike and eventually forge the Nazi Party.
History reminds us that doing things in a half hearted fashion does not breed conciliation or thanks but rather the reverse.
The Treaty of Locarno and the formation of The League of Nations was the linchpin pin which held the national powers at bay between the World wars, it considered many things, placating some for the time being, kicking the can of repatriating German nationals living in land which Poland had claimed as part of reparations and which German public opinion never accepted. The alliances between France, Britain and to a lessor extent Italy, offsetting the Germans in a complicated set of treaties were a diplomatic masterpiece so long as the signatories were content. Time heals the bruises of conflict and memories fade on the bestiality of attritional warfare. The politicians eventually get into their stride, whipping up discontent to win votes and in no time at all all the high flown phraseology vested in the treaty document are as straw in a wind.
Trump is no diplomat. He sees things in black and white, good and bad, innocent and guilty, he has no time for the nuances of looking for conciliation through the recognition that we all need to win and so long as you can convince everyone that they have, in part at least won or, if nothing else, sat at the table then some sort of equanimity  can be reached. Trumps definition of putting "America first" defines his agenda and makes us all, if we have the sense to realise and understand, his is not a world of equals. His admiration of Putin is born of his craving to have the power Putin has without the restraint of party politics to hold him back. He is a Putin without the cold surety of a Mongolian emporor.

Moscow remembers

Subject: Moscow remembers.

Yesterday there were thousands on the streets of Moscow ordinary people walking in procession through the streets, celebrating an anniversary of the Russian defeat of Germany.
The contribution of the Russians in defeating Germany was immense and it was the numbers of ordinary Russians who laid down their lives in the millions who were being remembered. It’s almost impossible to imagine the trauma for the average Russian during the war. The attrition of Stalingrad where the German and Russian armies laid into each other with a ferocity which was almost unbelievable. In open warfare the conscripted Russian soldier ordered to march through minefields in front of the tanks to explode the mines before the tanks arrived. Used as cannon fodder, millions lost their lives as they slowly repulsed the German army and even many more millions of civilians whose villages were plundered, the women raped and the men shot. In total 11 million soldiers and  20 million civilians died and such was the megalomaniac mind of Stalin the soldiers captured and interned in concentration camps in Germany and Poland were, when released after the war ended, re-interned in soviet camps in Siberia for the crime of being captured in the first place. Kafkaesque in the extreme.
The stoic nature of the Russian, an outsider as far as continental Europe was concerned,  laid the invincibility of soviet arms at the doorstep of the western coalition and  the need for a nuclear deterrent which sidestepped the implicit life force which was Russia.
The Gorbachev years, as he dismantled the centralised planning of the USSR and the Yeltsin years, when a free for all sale of all methods of production and mineral rights turned the upper echelons of the society into a casino where the nations wealth  was traded by a few corrupt oligarchs. 

Putin has reestablished self belief into the Russian people and made them proud of their heritage by returning the nation to centre stage in world politics.
The people streaming down the streets of Moscow under a cloudless blue sky each carrying a placard showing the face of a family member lost in the war was a sombre reminder of the carnage which comes when hubris takes the place of common sense.

Testing testing testing

Subject: Testing testing testing

There was a time, before predictive testing, when dying was a process we knew little about until it just arrived out of the blue.  People lived to be a certain age and then, with few exceptions they fell off their perch, more or less on time. People died of predictable diseases,  understandable mortal generalities written on the death certificate. They were not a precise traceable event, rather the slow break down of an ageing body, or at least that was what we thought.
Age was the crucial thing, 70 years in men 75 years in woman and with few exceptions, these actuarial signposts were pretty accurate. 

Now a days we know so much more because we have become watchful. We watch our diet, and we watch our exercise. We go for tests and we become, 'category conscious', we ask the question how well am I and ultimately, how long do I have to live. We try to cheat the Grim Reaper out of his scheduled by availing ourselves of the latest medicine has to offer. And medicine in its blind scientific surety will continue to find new and more expensive ways of keeping us what is called, alive

And so dying becomes complicated, drawn out and more stressful than it need be. The diabetic, the weak heart, the person with lung disease and the feared Big C are all flagged up in advance of actually killing you and a set of procedures put in place to keep you alive no matter how intrusive or emasculating these procedures are. The quality of life is supplanted by "life" itself, eking out an existence of days and months largely because you let the medics in, unknowingly, through an innocent blood test or a sample of flesh to examine under the microscope. Through the microscope the process of dying is revealed in all its gruesome efficiency. It's been a part of our living and has been going on since birth as cells began to replicate themselves with a lessening efficiency, slowly introducing misalignments, malcontents to challenge and replace the good with a variant of bad.
Throughout our lifetime we churn out trillions of cells, all to a chromosomic template in a replacement process which even the Chinese could not replicated. This replication process has its limits and starts to produce, on the conveyor belt, goods the "fat controller" shouldn't pass but because the consumer (our body) has become lazy and starts to accept everything  with an "it'll do" attitude, prevalent in a routine that has gone on too long. The floor around the production line becomes knee deep in rejected components and it's at this stage we do the 'test' and find all kinds of mayhem.
Perhaps without the test we would be wonderfully ignorant of the chaos in the cell factory or of the Sword of Damocles waiting to fall.
Life has at least two components. The beat beat beat of the heart and all the wonderful contingent processes which accompany it, and that other quality which the mind lends itself to fabricate and on which we base our claim to be living. Tamper with either and life actually ceases, life in the sense of a quality we apprehend as actually being alive. Without the test and our inquisitive need to know maybe we would pass into a state where death is a reward.

Minding our own business has its attractions

Subject: Minding our own business has its attractions.

I am currently struck by the massive, inter-connective web of business and national affairs over which we have little or no control, control relinquished as we reclined for 40 years in a comfortable club in which the committee ran the clubs affairs whilst we, the members sat at the bar dreaming of our past achievements, willing to allow the processing of all future affairs to go on behind closed doors.
If it were acceptable for 40 years, why now the need for change. Put simply, "Because the people wish it".
That phrase "the people" is a misnomer since the voter has become, in the 40 years of European tutelage, a benign repository of media misinformation. Where from the torrid headlines of the leader writers blurb and the editorial commentary, (these purveyors of self interest) have fed the electorate a steady gruel of an anti EU information. Given the chance to vote is it any wonder that the Sun, Daily Mail, Daily Express readership, by far the greatest in number of newspapers bought, placed their cross to pull out of the Union. 

As did I, you no doubt hasten to remind me but for different reasons. My reasons were mainly reasons of unaccountably especially as regards the German handling of Greek debt crisis.

It seemed to me that the jackboot of the Fourth Reich, under the leadership of the Finance Minister Herr Schauble,  deliberately squashed and ran riot over the people of Greece punishing them en mass for accepting the titivating financial prospect Goldman Sachs contrived to offer the German Banks, a false prospectus of the Greek financial position on applying to join the EU. This dreadful, deceitful financially corrupt bank who's place-men sit at the helm of so many national institutions in the West, including our own, The Governor of the Bank of England, have blood on their hands. 

The Germans, once out foxed were in no mood to consider the population as a whole but have relentlessly  punished, not the instigators of the financial charade, (they have shifted their money out long ago) but the innocent ordinary man and women in the street, people for whom the German financial machine had no mercy. Perhaps it goes too far to equate the German banks and their financial governance with the inhuman acts of the Third Reich but the lack of any sort of empathy seemed to me to be  contingent with a 'totalitarian force' and for that reason I wanted out.
It seems as if my faint hearted tolerance for fair play towards the Greeks has sown a more impoverished future for my own people as we unravel the complexities of living all this time with grandma. 

The world is no longer a nationally based free trade area but a collection of powerful financial units which dictate, through the global market what the nation state does. 

Having relinquished much of our individual industrial know how, having modified our population to be consumers rather than producers. Having signaled to the world we back the grocer above the industrialist, we are bound to take a thrashing when we start to compete at the margins. 

Our politicians are as usual mendacious prevaricators when it comes to telling the truth. They shift and happily lie about anything and everything if it politically suites them and sadly we are in their hands when it comes to negotiating the deal and the truth of the matter is lost under the bluster of political cant.

Our future will not, I fear resemble our past but whether this is a bad thing, only time will tell. Influence comes at a cost, even the Americans are beginning to balk at the expense of being a world leader. Small nations such as the Scandinavian group, the antipodeans, Australia and New Zealand in fact most nations who stay and mind their own business seem happily prosperous. Minding our own business has its attractions.

Decades of hard won assumption

Subject: Decades of hard won assumption 

Part of the reason for starting a blog was to set down the ideas and prejudices of a person born in 1940 who is in some ways struggling to come to terms with the ideas and prejudices of of the world today. How our views have changed, or in my case have remained stubbornly fixed in those formed during the period of my childhood struggle to make sense of the world around.
It's a changing and challenging progression from the days when this small island punched above its weight, when Empire was still mentioned by my teachers as a proud establishment the map of the world coloured red showing the countries where our influence and administrative clout still mattered. It was a powerful story embellishing a do or die effort to hold our civilised views against indigenous savagery.
Today the boot is on the other foot as we seek to uphold our views and our way of life against those very people about who we held such prejudicial views.
When I had the opportunity to travel I used to marvel and feel proud to see the structures, the architecture, the railway lines, the cranes standing at the dockside, the nameplates on the machinery, household names in U.K. engineering, Compton Parkinson, English Electric, GEC, still standing strong in good working order, the ruminants  of Empire still performing the task allocated to them in the days when we set the seal of good workmanship on what we designed and produced.

With this heritage in mind I now listen to people who's lives have been encapsulated behind a computer keyboard assuming a mantra of "rights", decrying not only the concept of Empire, with its administrative order, a legal framework of contractual business as well as the structural framework of democratic responsibility. 

These young people articulate a frenzy of the individual, atomistic view of the world where people's rights are mixed up with utopian ideas of equality and racial and religious harmony. It's a fervent dialogue in which the practice's carried on outside the protected bubble of living on these islands is ignored for a welter of criticism at an easy target.  These young men and women are very articulate but forget that their ability to speak out with such viperous freedom would be forbidden in the homeland of their parents and grandparents. It occurs to them not a fig that the rights they demand are the very rights denied in the far off home where their relatives still live. Their excitement is that of the child released from the nursery who's presumes the security therein is there of a right and not hard won over decades of struggle.

Alex Furgurson

 Alex Furgurson

 

The tenuous nature of life is no where better illustrated by the sad news this morning of Alex Ferguson's brain hemorrhage. Only a couple of days ago we saw Ferguson and his old rival Arsenal Wenger laughing together at the pitch side. The old rivalry which was portrayed as intense dislike for each other had healed as the intensity of football management was peeled away and the men could resume something akin to normality.
Laughing and joking one day, the next at deaths door it signifies the improbability we should attach for looking too far into the future.
The Buddhists call it "Attachment" a false preposition for understanding our lives and the seemingly silly proposition on which we pin too much on the future.
How can we know what is in the 'future'. We only have the 'present' and can only reflect on the 'past' in a non subjective way. The past is gone and whilst we sometimes bathe in the glow of memories finding both pleasure and pain in them, we only have the present to grapple with and find relevance.
Alec Ferguson had not the slightest inkling that his days were numbered. His appointment book was full, no doubt with speaking engagements well into the year, holidays booked, plans to do this and that, money no object, adulation all around him what could go possibly wrong.
It seems a chilling thought that our plans are dependent on fate. That the ability to fulfil our plans are out of our hands, we are simply pawns, not in some celestial game but in the organic frailty of our bodies. The assumptions we make each morning or at night as we go to sleep rarely takes into consideration our health, why should it when we have become immured to to the thought that everything is tickity boo. The heart pumps the blood and the organs perform the job they have been performing for 70/80 years.
What caused his aneurysm, was it the whisky the food or the stress of winning so many championships. Without them he would not be the man so many people revere. His willingness to banish thoughts of loosing and his drive to make his players and staff perform for so long at the top of their pedigree possibly took its toll. He certainly didn't look to the moment to find his answers other than the moment the ball burst into the back of the net. Tomorrow's game and the game after that was what mattered. Last years triumph stood on the mantelpiece and this years success was the measure he placed on living his life.

John meets John

 

Subject: John meets John

What is it in the physiology. A man for a man or a woman for a woman what attracts Gay people towards each other. A man may be attracted by so many different physical aspects or features which make a woman a woman and equally the woman is attracted to attributes such as his looks or masculinity, the cut of his jib, to use a sailing metaphor. Perhaps there is no outstanding physical attraction other than a concoction of the mind where humour or wit, sensitivity or a projected positivity make the person attractive.
The attraction of a male towards another man, or female towards another woman such that they would wish to be intimate, to kiss (other than a gesture) is beyond me and yet it seems to exist in growing numbers. Is this because the procreative commitment with all its responsibility is missing and the coupling remains purely sexual. Is it because the gender differences are quite profound and the same sex interconnection is starting from a like meets like position where emotions are more akin to each other and do not have to bridge the gap of expectation which lies between a man and a woman.
That intolerable enigma where the brain assumes it is understood by the other party but years of cultural modification has meant the receptors in the other persons brain are programmed to reject or further modify what seemed a simple proposition.
One can assume that two men or two women are on the same wavelength regarding so many assumptions we make when talking, perhaps the instinctive protection we seek to find a safe mental harbour without the conflict of inbred misunderstanding is the draw.
One of the phenomenon of this age is the "outing" of men and women in their sexuality their preference for someone of their own sex to find a partner. Even given that in my own childhood the homosexuality laws made it virtually impossible to have a same sex relationship, non the less one can search ones memory in vain to remember anyone who was, as we would in those days describe as "strange" or seemed overly effeminate or overly masculine. Today one has to tread carefully not to miss the signs as men and women line up to proclaim their predilection. This bias can be even more difficult as some people seem to want to have it "both ways" a term which again, in my youth meant something far more innocent.
Has the rise of sex for sexes sake made an impact.  The old fashioned "I'm keeping myself for my husband" had its backlash on the male, reminding him that the implication of gaining the sexual threshold had ramifications far beyond his intent, tending to throttle back the natural impulse. With the pill and abortion available as a backstop the sexual advance is often de rigueur for a good night out and so the mystique of the opposite sex  is lost on the back seat of the motor car or whether both participants are called John.

Boy meets Girl

 

Subject: Boy meets girl.

It occurred to me this morning that it would be a good idea to call  boys by girls names and girls with boys names. The confusion would seal the ongoing feminist clamour for equality since gender would become transparent in terms of the written and spoken word. The ambiguity of who or what a name represented would be complete, the growing sexual smorgasbord board on offer would disappear, other than for the participants, and the boardroom crisis would be resolved at the stroke of a pen since no one would know who was who without the furtive hand on the knee, which is now banned anyway.
Imagine the confusion as the 'year end report' is read out. Jane, (who is a man) takes over the chair and John pours the tea.  The stereo typing, which the feminists claim is a barrier to their promotion, is broken since John could be either man or woman which on reflection deals nicely with the Gay scene, amalgamating two confusions into one.
The tag or label we attach to everyone at birth, including the preconceived route we set each child upon takes its gender influence from the gender specific name or label we attach. Take away the surety of the name and we evolve a new way of looking at gender differences.

John is already doing the cooking and Jane plays rugby. If we didn't have preconceived ideas about what a Jane or a John should do, the the resultant 'mishmash' would fit nicely into a multicultural society where identity becomes irrelevant and the individual homogenises to become a 'social token' available to respond to what ever task is required by the economic needs of the society.

A profound difference of opinion

A profound difference of opinion 

 

The word oratory usually conjurers up memories of Churchill or a debate in Parliament where "our finest public school boys" trained in the Machiavellian art of debate toss words to and fro as if in a joust, the formulation and delivery of the words more important than their meaning. Clear enunciation aided by an upper class accent does wonders in confirming the mystification we have in this country of the importance in our lives the upper class have if only to be able to listen to the musical intonation of a speech well delivered.
This morning I was brought up short as they say. The man speaking on the radio, clearly no Etonian, his accent placed him from Liverpool was speaking from somewhere within his mind set, his truths were his own and his wife's as he articulated the case for obtaining the release, from Alderhay Hospital of his baby boy to be brought home and be cared for by his Mom and Dad.
Alfie Evans a baby over who's life the Courts have pondered and pontificated their judgement, refusing the parents the right to go aboard and seek other expert medical help from other doctors who are perhaps less rule bound and more willing to try other alternatives as a last ditch chance to save the baby.
It's a rerun of the scandal where the parents of Ashya King were refused the opportunity
to take their child to Prague where a Proton beam machine would it was claimed give the 5 year old child the opportunity of delicate brain surgery not available at the time in this country. The parents of Ashya took matters into their own hand and secreted the boy onto the continent. The harrowing and disgraceful attempt by British police to have the parents arrested in Madrid turning them into criminals was finally overturned and the boy allowed to undergo surgery in Prague. He is now fully recovered from his cancer and one wonders what the high and mighty medical authority  in the U.K. now think when they consider their actions, especially since the first Proton beam machine has now been installed in one of our hospitals and another due to start soon.
Once again unedifying sight of the 'might' of our medical establishment  preventing a child from receiving treatment, not available in this country but available in another, especially gulling since the treatment would not cost the NHS anything.
Unfortunately they have the power of God Almighty, once you are in their hands. The 'risk averse conformity' which seems bred into all professional services here, doctors, teachers, civil servants, invested as they are with the fallacious story that "we are the best" and "know what's best" only magnifies their blinkered short sightedness and can cause untold grief when the parents are hamstrung and impotent, unable to seek help elsewhere for the thing they love most, their child.

In this mornings interview Alfie's father Tom had an eloquence born of this love. His clear sighted dismissal of the sanctity of the medical opinion and his belief in what he thought was best for his child was concise and spoke volumes where the professional could only pontificate.

Being disgarded

 Being discarded

Economics and economists have of recent times got a bad name. Their failure to spot the banking crisis and the wild claims regarding the effects of the Brexit vote has led them to be bracketed with the 'false news' artists. They are now seen as part of the manipulative process which, through government and media, is more about persuading us along a course of action rather than as an academic analysis of what will happen if so and so become the norm.
One of the recent and interesting claims is that the text books which the economists receive their training are stuck in a paradigm, more fitted to a classical economic theory where value was largely seen as measuring productive work based on the making  of widgets. So often these days widgets are made thousands of miles away and irrelevant to the sum of "our" actions and without the source of economic activity being based on our own doorstep it has forced economists to question the "other " work which our society does but which was never counted as productive. The housewife, adding value to society by looking after the family and the children, perhaps caring for the elderly, the musician who provides pleasure, the artist who cements our understanding of the human condition under which we live, the writer who allows us to see outside the box. All are undertakings which escape the economists gaze and lie at the periphery or outside his or her calculations. The problem of how to evaluate the the impact of a classical concert, how to weigh the impact of wellbeing on an individual or a society and how to place a value on its effectiveness and importantly our happiness.
Of course it could be argued that none of this pays the bills, none of this can be counted as a form of Gross Domestic Product, and placed in a ledger of income and expenditure and yet in our reality it's more and more, "what we do" as the widgets get fewer and the robots become more human.
'Value' has to be reexamined otherwise we, the majority will become worthless, in the economic sense  and  the fear that being worthless is we will feel worthless, eventually reaching a stage where we will be discarded.

Getting it wrong

 

Subject: Getting it wrong.

Guilty or not guilty and the calamity which lies in between.
Rule books are written by or in an academic atmosphere, an attempt to be a catch all in the interplay between humans. Written in the cold heart of day they set out on a presumption that something is or can be wrong or that a vulnerable person needs protection at all costs, and in this, most of us would agree. Vulnerability is of course a two edged sword in that the vulnerable make others around them vulnerable to stand accused of doing the wrong thing and the arbiters or the people gifted the job of enforcement often see the unseemly, unpleasant side of life on a daily basis and become accustomed to judging in an atmosphere of disintegration and perversion.
Social services acts in an area where most of us thankfully never have to go. From the  old, suffering dementia to the child who's parents can't cope and place their own child in danger. It's in this uncomfortable, complicated make up of human relations where the Social Services on offer can be distracted by a draconian reading of documented rules which are supposed to cover an extremely complex area of human care.

We all remember our horror of the story of Baby P, a little boy subjected to terrible acts of infantile torture which went unnoticed despite repeated opportunities for social services to pick up the abuse. The bruises on the child were excused by the mother of Baby P in a complex web of lies which were accepted by the social workers and the medical staff who examined the child. The woman in charge of the local social services office was dismissed from her job but amazingly reinstated because the politician who had dismissed her had breach employment protocol. The women became the most hated person in Britain for a while especially so since she subsequently sued the service for over a million pounds for wrongful dismissal.  

Yesterday I listened to a panel discussion over the dreadful trauma a mother had undergone when, what were taken to be bruises on her babies body, social services took action to demand that at 8.30 in the evening, not withstanding the mother had only just returned from the hospital that afternoon, voluntarily taking the child in to ask the professionals what was causing the marks on the babies body they demanded she return the baby to hospital to begin a traumatic tug of war between the mother and the authorities as to the supposed best interests of the child. Eventually it took the expertise of a dermatologist to recognise the discolouration was a normal skin disorder. The reading the rule book got in the way of common sense, it didn't allow the joining of the dots, and presumed guilt under the guise of child protection.
How do we, can we in fact draft any legislation to cover the multitude of extraneous reasons for anything. The law is, dispute its high flown academic refinement a blunt instrument when getting to grips with the human condition. Placed in the hands of people who often only see the downside of the human condition, can it be any wonder that we get it wrong so many times.

Downright disingenuous

 

Subject: Downright disingenuous 

I don't get out much in the sense of night time entertainment, happy with my own company after 7pm, the tele a book and bed.
Part of watching current news is the repeated call by women's groups highlighting their inferior position regarding wages and advancement in business whilst the other major theme is their exposure to unwanted harassment from men.
From Harvey Weinstein's casting couch to the unwanted hand on the knee or a salacious pat on the butt the air has been so shrill with their cry of indignation and men seem cast in an aura of shame and perversity.
On Sunday, having been to Sainsbury's for some margarine and a loaf of multiseed bread, such is the domesticity of my life, I thought it a good idea to pop into the local pub and watch the second half of the FA Cup semi final between Chelsea and Southampton on the pubs  TV.
It was another hot day, I ordered half a pint of shandy and having said hello to a couple of Andrews friends from his school days I settled down to watch the game. There were the usual crowd, a mixture of old and young, predominantly men here to watch the match. The chatter was of the match, a groan or a cry at a near miss and the usual punditry and advice to the Ref.
Suddenly the door burst open and in crashed a babble of young women who's interest was certainly not the football but instead the young lads watching the game. With shrieks of high pitched self assured narcissism  they announced themselves, oblivious of the match, to focus solely on the young men watching the game..  'We are here' they cried  as they paraded themselves in revealing cut away skimpy clothing, (leaving little to the imagination) in the rush to grab their particular boy fancy. There sexuality subsumed the game, their targets, sitting as a cohort of young masculinity quietly watching a game of football was corrosive. The atmosphere was electric with pheromone  as these young women sought to wrest away from the men their interest in the football for an interest in them.
Would this overt display counter or be countenanced by the women who are so damning towards men. Would these young women be appalled by an improper comment or is their impropriety leveraged by who is doing what.
Of course it has always been so but the undisguised nature of women who apply their sexuality when they want to and yet seek favoured nation status at other times is confusing, if not downright disingenuous  

Enoch Powell a prophet or a demagogue

 

Subject: Enoch Powell a prophet or a demagogue. 

The anniversary of Enoch Powell "Rivers of blood" speech has awakened the condemnation, freely expressed in the media and the middle classes of the damage to "race relations" the speech made.
Britain had embarked on a mass immigration campaign, not only from the West Indies and the 'Windrush' but also from India and Pakistan where many thousands of people were being encouraged to come over to fill the jobs which it was said were made vacant by the toll on the indigenous male workforce due to the carnage of the War. An alternative view was that the Establishment were using the manpower shortage as an opportunity to import cheap and easily manipulated labour to enable and procure higher profits for the owners of industry.  There was also the growing competition from Asia, especially Taiwan in the production of cotton and the alternative, artificial fibres, not only because they had the cheap labour but had invested in new factories to produce the yarn at half the price the labour intensive mills in the North of England were able to produce. Investment has always been the Achilles heel of British thinking. The factories were traditionally running on manufacturing practices invented fifty years and more before. The market for wool and cotton in the world was thought largely to be sown up and that the 'quality' of the cloth, unsurpassed anywhere, would continue to provide a market for all we could produce. The advent of synthetic fibres and the durable cloths they produced turned the mill owning world upside down and they were of a mind set unable to respond and move forward with more mechanisation.
The solution was to cut costs and try to bring the finished product in line with the foreign competition  by introducing cheap labour and attract labour from the Commonwealth. We tarted it up with the rhetoric that we were doing it to thank these nations for standing by us in the war but it was capitalistic forces within the nations decision makers which held the actual sway.
The decision was met by a great deal of natural hostility from the working class who's jobs and pay packets were to be undermined but when, if ever, have the working class been listened to.
Powell speech represented what was on the majorities mind the people who lived in the areas most effected by immigration. What upset the Establishment the most was that one of their own was voicing the fears of an aggrieved populous.
His words are still an anathema to the liberal conscience of this country who abhor any sense of racism. As a country we have apparently grown, or been coerced into acknowledge the importance of multiculturalism and the indifference we must show to different cultures as they line up in competition to our own. Our persuasion that "all will come out in the wash" and that our own culture has much to make us feel apologetic about has grown traction by what could be termed, propaganda.
Today we are coming to terms with the problems of fake news especially if propagated by a foreign power but think how so much more insidious when the false news and the propaganda comes from within, from the very people you were brought up to respect and trust your very governance to.
When I walk the streets of East London today I am very much in the minority. It's the same in Birmingham, Wolverhampton, Bradford and Bolton. The white skinned so called indigenous population are now in a substantial minority and the cultures and dress code could excuse you for thinking you were living aboard. None of this would matter if the cultures which accompany the immigrant weren't so oppressive and at odds with our own. It's at odds with the star struck, multiethnic paradise envisaged by the modern view of society, a society of individuals, each with rights for which it is our, the indigenous populations responsibility to up-hold, irrespective of the fear that there would be little reciprocation  if the proverbial boot was on the other foot.
So was he right, or will our propensity to muddle through prevail. Our kids have rightly become colour blind. For them there is no issue since multiculturalism has seen their own culture modified to such an extent that they would be hard pressed to articulate what their intrinsic culture is. Not so the immigrant who more and more demand recognition of their cultural space and tradition. Theirs  is a forward looking policy to reinvent their culture on foreign soil and never, never to dilute their own ethnicity.
I sight the Jewish uproar at the moment in Parliament for protection against as they see it racialistic slurs and the increasing hold of Muslim rights in our inner cities with their demand for the recognition of Sharia law and the observance of their faith above all else.
It's seems "we" the Englishman who dates his family in terms of not more that two generations have no rights, other than to apologise for our past.
The under-laying charges made by Powell  are contested by opponents of Powell in well rehearse appearances on mainstream TV by people who come from and represent the immigrant population. As I write a man has just been proclaiming on Sky News that the immigrant numbers which Powell said would swamp the indigenous population have not taken route anywhere in the country and yet when we walk around the streets of these inner city wards our eyes tell another story. It's the old old story, if you keep on repeating a falsehood and importantly given the media time to do so then the lie will stick. His opposition the 'Far Right' are banned from virtually all media outlets and so his comments go unopposed since it's more than the media presenters job to get into an argument about minority claims.   His smug remark, that the current sitting MP is a black woman, as if that were the end of the claim of racial preponderance or that the destabilising effect of large numbers of people who are naturally attracted to move into areas where their brothers and sisters live, skews the electoral make up of what once was a predominantly white area and has been an important element in her election. The very fact that a black person has been chosen to represent them in Wolverhampton or a Muslim man represent predominantly Muslim areas is proof that racism is alive and well but of course it's not called racism rather the normal will of the representative process of people electing their own ethnicity in the hope that they will have a fuller, better understanding of their particular needs.
It's this wholesale 'slight of hand' when discussing the effects of immigration which gets my goat. White people are always portrayed as being either apologists, on the back foot or as members of a far right neo-Nazi group. The immigrant or first generation black or Asian is seen as down trodden, deserving of our hospitality irrespective of our abhorrence of the black gang knifing culture rapidly expanding across the country or the abhorrence we have of the way Muslim women are treated in a patriarchal society. These institutionalised norms are waved away as being outside the cohort of white people to comment and a voice like Powell would today be in danger of imprisonment for racial instigation.