Our own brand of idolatry

 Our own brand of idolatry

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The description of China and its relationship with Covid and the draconian efforts to eradicate the virus altogether make them totally at odds with what most of the world is doing. In the West we have got used to accepting that there is no way to escape the effects of catching the virus and we must learn to live with it, that a number of casualties are acceptable and must not be overwhelmed by fear.

China on the other hand seem to become paranoid by the danger and has the practice of closing cities with a populations the size of Australia virtually overnight on the evidence of a dozen or so instances of Covid . Given that China’s Wet markets (markets where live animals are sold for consumption) appear to be the initial source of a virus, (unless you believe the virus was deliberately let out from a laboratory) and where it seems to have jumped species from bats to humans, the Chinese  are much more volatile in their actions to minimise It’s contagious effects.

Is there something they know that we don’t, since the economic cost of closure seems to far out weigh the medical cost. Is it simply a case that they do it because they can in an authoritarian State which brooks no dissent.

Out of step with the West in so many ways they now they sidle up to Russia in its war with the Ukrainian, seeming to propose an alliance in an effort to defeat an opponent, the whole of western democracy. This question of opponents and the need to aggressively defeat them is part of man’s strategy throughout history, never has there been total peace, always some conflict somewhere bubbles and breaks to the the surface. Conflict then seems our fallback position. We see it in town planning even the funeral arrangements of our late Queen where a spasmodic outbreak of Republican protest and people disagree feeling  they must make their point of view in public.

Are we nihilists at heart, rejectors of any type of collaboration, incapable of setting aside our differences for the common good and instead rely on sophistry to weave a special brand of  capitalist idolatry.

War has never been the choice of the common man they have too much to lose, their lives !  The general in his bunker the capitalist in his factory or more likely these days holed up on a remote island far away from the action. The spectre of hunger and deprivation, such as in the Ukrainian, are not keeping the protagonists awake at night. Safe in the ideological surety they consult their maps or their business plans without a thought to the destitution they are unleashing. It’s a strange mindset that can propel your own kin towards destruction and penury but of course, like the gambler they only have ‘winning’ in mind. And why are we, the cannon fodder so willing to go along with it all. The gains will not effect us to any appreciable degree the spoils are not ours and yet we queue up to take the Queens shilling. Handed a gun or coopted into a strategic industry, unsuited for our skills or temperament we conform, like animals in a circus forgetting our own ideals to perform a task for others.

Why do we capitulate our own concept of what’s right or wrong, our own rational, for the jingoism of the ring master.  People are still blind to the economic damage inflicted on this country by Brexit, they are still wedded to the gung ho Brexiteers call of independence in a world that is more and more interdependent, where our wish to recall our 1910 independence and its commercial reliance on empire to trade across the globe, to once more assume the white mans burden of independence at any cost. The books of account are starting to reveal what was clear then, that we had been profligate in the years when we could have done what Germany did twice, rebuild industry and train a workforce. We did nothing, we talk the project up but are unwilling to invest. We talk of low skills and poor productivity but do little to amend the situation. The reawakening of a need for skilled apprenticeships has had an abysmal take up in industry partly because industry these days consist of small organisations unwilling to risk their cash flow, or the trice yearly holiday in Marbella, with the national delusion that an apprenticeship in hairdressing is the answer.

The ‘gig industry’ which has blossomed under the Tory’s is nothing more than old fashioned industrial servitude fashioned to exploit labour and offer no security. The proud proclamation that it suited our transient, work shy, work force with an hour or two here and there, with no sick pay or holiday provision but to be on instant call was the mindset of any fly-by-night business but now, as we enter recessionary times, the minimum wage and little or no savings leaves so many people facing  economic purgatory.

We can hardly expect Liz Truss to understand. She is wedded to Milton Friedmans far right, low taxation, trickle down economics in an economy where vast numbers simply don’t earn enough to pay taxes. The great Tory experiment of a disenfranchised sector of society who wouldn’t enter into the mathematical ratios of being counted, even as a sub set and who have been demonised as lazy, is truly Orwellian and I fear for our society.

Hunger and debasement brings out the worst in people and with a slimmed down, much pilloried police force, the bulk of whom are out in London protecting the Establishment,  I hate to think of what happens when mothers and fathers turn to crime en mass  to feed their children.