Fragmentation becomes the norm

Subject: Fragmentation becomes the norm.

In a rapidly politically fragmenting world where old alliance's are being discarded and old hegemonies challenged, where and on who do we now put our money. As the influence of the US is openly challenged by the EU, China, Russia and other countries some of which a year or so ago would be thought ally's of the US, these countries now begin to search for new links with, on the one hand the old Cold War enemy Russia or the new kid on the block, China.  If the solidarity afforded by NATO and the security packs we have through NATO are called into question, by our insistence of the use of Huawei, how do we prevent the rifts from widening.
In the period of the Cold War things were perilous but so much simpler. The enemy was communism, be it in Russia or China and the ideological barriers were simplified. Now with the rise of globalism and the importance China plays in the functioning of the Global model of trade, we injure a relationship with an authoritarian power such as China at our peril. We blindside our distaste for the internal tyranny against the Uyghurs or the working conditions for millions of its own people, it's human rights violations, all for a piece of the China pie. Our moral compass is deflected by the lodestone, 'profit', it's the number one religion supplanting all previous considerations, including those amongst which an ethical component was high on the list. The impotence we feel in the throes of Trumps intolerance to any one who disagrees with him, matches our distaste for the monolith which is China. We have become the meat in the sandwich, the bit actor who stands in the wings off stage, watching the play unfurl, being a part of but reduced to a watching brief, insignificant but certainly effected.
Without the watching brief which America provided the playground is awash with unruly children scratching each other's eyes out. The Middle East, the Far East, the Indian Subcontinent have become hotspots of discontent each with an ability in settling old score to bring us all down eventually.
Macron wants to have closer links to Russia, we in the UK under our glorious leader Boris want to ditch Europe for America. China has bought up much of Africa, the Far East and now chunks of Europe, including, ominously ourselves.  South America is collapsing under right and left wing dictatorships who posing as popular movements, bring the people out on the streets, tasting teargas and water-cannon for their troubles
It's like watching musical chairs but what happens when the music stops. What happens when debt moves from trillions to quadrillion's. What happens when climate change becomes a reality and not simply the impassioned cry of a teenager.
'Money talks' goes the song in 'Forever in blue jeans'. It's taken over all other methods of measuring success or failure,  it's a discourse where nothing else matters other than, "how much is he worth" and of course we make the tragic mistake of mixing up worth with value.
Perhaps it's always been like this and only the magnifying influence of the Internet brings into focus the crass activities of our fellow citizens. The instinct to rush out in the playground and settle a squabble rather than letting old feuds be settled the traditional way with some blood letting. Another aspect of the nanny state of mind where it is thought that exposure to danger is bad and where we attempt to sanitise all human relations. Perhaps 80 years of protective custody has cast a spell over us and made us avoid the reality that divisions run deep and that whilst pockets of multiculturalism work in the hot house of politically correct pressure the instinct is to uphold ones own sense of unity be it culture, religion, class or tribal perspective. Fragmentation then becomes the norm not the exception.

Universal Credit

Subject: Universal Credit.

One of the disadvantages of reality television is that it's depressing, it's depressing to see how people are forced to live in quite acute stress, often through circumstance outside their control. It also reveals how financially inept people are unable to budget, unable to limit their expenditure on non essentials, unable to curb the desire to blow what ever money comes their way and let the future take care of itself.
For a whole set of reasons (including indigestion) I switched on the television  quite late at a time when usually I'm sleeping and enjoying the good life of my dreams. BBC 2 were showing a program which attempted to tell one side of the story of Universal Credit, how moving onto a single monthly benefit payment has effected the claimants used to living on a weekly paid benefit.
The issue of why people use and depend on benefits plagues this country. A system of low wages and now, the gig economy, in which employers offer employment dependent on the business need with no contractual responsibility towards their employees, has made the workplace at the bottom end of the job spectrum extremely precarious. Rent is the largest expenditure, the rest, food, clothing and transport plus entertainment, the television, a packet of fags, beer and drugs and that's your lot in this pared down analysis of what it takes to live on in 2020.
Clearly many of these people are not particularly bright and have few opportunities to improve themselves. They are the children born of claimants to Welfare a state who were themselves claimants two generations ago. They live a life (sic) in a state within a state where the sheer impossibility to live a normal life is denied them partly  through an educational system which ill-equips them to find proper contractually secure work. It's a subculture where the responsibilities we imbibed from our own parents which we take for granted is missing. It doesn't make them bad people, just financially incoherent, unable to budget because their income is so variable in an infamous zero hours contact system, a never ending Helter Skelter having to adjust their financial spend from month to month because the safety net which welfare payments are supposed to provide, now takes a month to five weeks to adjust and bring into line the income fluctuations when set against the minimum income calculated when they went on Universal Credit.
Of course it's easy to disparage this under class, especially when the real dropouts often the husbands are seen in the shadows hovering up the scraps. Perhaps for them two years national service wouldn't go amiss, especially if they were trained into some sort of useful trade for when they return to civilian life. The women, usually mothers, often with quite large families have a different profile and given it's apparently their human right to fall pregnant and have kids, maybe a financial incentive to limit the family might work.
What ever the cause it is pretty soul destroying watching these people buffeted this way and that as they try to make ends meet. It's all a far cry from "Angela's Ashes" the horrific story of growing up in a tenement in Ireland but never the less it faces us with a view of life which is so mentally disturbing, removed as it is from the one we know and yet maybe living only a few doors away.
The act of providing a social catch-net was what was envisaged by Attlee's Socialist government in 1947. Temporary financial assistance to tie one over whilst you found another job or recovered from sickness. It has these days become a lifestyle for many at an enormous cost to the taxpayer (as much spent  as on education) and a worrying fiscal drag in an economy which struggles to find its role in modern economics.
It's another one of those moments when you think how lucky to have been born in a different era.

Into the unknown

Subject: Into the unknown.

What would it have been like if I had been born with a black skin.
The organs under that skin, the heart and the lungs, the stomach and the intestine are common to us all as is the brain but the colour of the skin identifies the person and sets in train the prejudice which bedevils their lives when living as a minority in a country to which their ancestors knew little or nothing and because they are visible as a minority the majority are given a chance, for good or bad to interpret this prejudice in what ever way they wish.
Generally speaking. a white person is free from the evil of the collective stereotype, (unless of course living in Nairobi or Tokyo), we may be categorised in terms of nationality and gender, we might presume to believe we know the characteristics of a Frenchman or an Italian and be prejudiced towards them but, until the speak, we are blissfully unaware of any difference between us and we soon come to terms with the difference since we conceptualise the image we see with the images we have of our own kith and kin.
When a person is black. Immediately there is an instinctive mismatch, (as there is when we see the Burka) our brains don't compute in the way it does when we are face to face with with someone who is tribally familiar, because  we assume the person doesn't belong to our value set. The Colonial prejudice lodged in our minds,  the films and the novels written about tribal insensitivity, characterised by at worst the white man being boiled in a pot to the sound of drums or alternatively the subservient native dominated by the white bwana.
If I were a black man or woman, the narrative would be very different. A back story of oppression, and suppressed and the traditional assumption of subservience, these days is replaced with outrage.
It's a similarly narrative if I had been born a woman or a Muslim or a Hindu.  Born fat, instead of thin, tall instead of short all these birth chances would plot a quite different journey through life.
In today's world, shrunken by the realisation that in cities, people, right across the world have at one level a remarkable similarity with each other and it's only the politics and culture that divide us. Unfortunately politics and culture make up a large component of how we behave and our assumptions are based on this cultural religious and political divide.
The modern assumption, that being fat, thin, tall or short, man or woman, black or white, makes no difference, we cry when upset, we laugh when happy, misses the point that in many societies the cultural demand outweighs the ideological standpoint and carries less weight.
Life's experience is personal, it's different for each of us. The edicts from the European Court to act out a remit, set in an artificial paradigm does not match what is happening in Rawalpindi. A black man living in Marseilles experiences a different set of values to one living in the Sorbonne. A woman growing up in Ghana lives a very different life to someone in Manchester. All attribute factors inherent in the specific community or sub community in which they live and which has little or no reference to Laws made in Brussels.
The exclusion principle is at work, be it the Orthodox Jew in Stamford Hill, or the gang of black youths in Streatham, the door leading into the Ritz Hotel, its the 'them and us' principle which holds us back in an act of self preservation we shrink from knowing.