Into the New Year

  

 

Subject: Into the New Year.

Another Christmas has passed and the new-year looms out of a fog of international and local chaos in which we have little or no say and are left only to examine the cards we are dealt.
Those cards vary with the demographic, age, sex, race, marital status, children, etc etc but most have your economic status tied in there somehow. Even with advancing age where frailty is the key, your ability to obtain help is crucial, house maintenance, gardening and eventually care in your home prior to seeking a retirement home are all economic question that only money can answer.
I was listening this morning to a phone-in program discussing the latest suggestion from the Tory's about completely abolishing inheritance tax which for some is always a threat  looming in the future, this wish a parent has to leave the kids some money on the sale of the family home. The philosophical conundrum of whether increased house prices, which have risen due to a political reluctance to build houses (a sort of status quo) is an  unfair reflection of a proper market and  leaves an ever increasing proportion of the population isolated and left behind, never able to own a home and caught in the double whammy of an overheated rental market. The lack of any plan to build social housing  has distorted this rental market as people with cash buy up what little stock there is and then rent the houses often with little regard to their obligations to the tenant.
''This dystopian Mad Max society is infused with television programs highlighting the work of the bailiff whose job it is to evicting people from their rented homes.  Admittedly the eviction is often after non payment of rent, sometimes stretching over months by people gaming the slow moving legal system which allows them to stay in the property long after the first non payment. A whole under-current between the landlord and the rent avoider breeds a dysfunctional ecosystem of which the children growing up in such a chaotic temporary environment can only lead to the sense that 'criminality pays'.
The children seem to be missing this year in our street, parading up and down on their Xmas gift bikes and scooters, perhaps it's simply timing, the young ones have grown into teenagers and are only too aware that there's no street cred' to be gained by the innocent display of "look what Santa  brought me this year".
The weather has been mild with no snow. The Weather Forecasters seem determined to try to scare us with notices of extreme weather and playing on the theme of climate change, announce the storms by name and a traffic light sequence of warnings. These warnings announce dire results for those who ignore them but the authorities also ignore the climate change scenario  by continuing to allow unscrupulous building on the flood plane and scrimping on flood defence. It was ever so.  Unprotected tenets and home owners are then unable to obtain insurance and have to bear the brunt of the disaster whilst the authorities sidestep any responsibility.

We are having a rest from the political jamboree which purports to be parliamentary governance, whilst the output from the ‘think tanks’ leak ever more ill thought through policy designed to titivate an ever gullible public into believing someone has a solution.

Its thrilling enough for me.

  

Subject: It's thrilling enough for me.

I usually wake up now a days at about 5am, not, as in the past, leaping out of bed in a hurry to get into the car to beat the traffic into London, those days are long gone and today it’s rather a question of laying in bed and opening my iPad to see what’s been happening overnight and crucially, from that news assemble my thoughts for todays blog.
Blogging has become increasingly important as the physical me slowly sizes up, the mind at least remains cognitive and combative seeking out my own interpretation of what’s right and what’s wrong according to my own precepts.
In the days before my ankle became arthritic and painful walking to the shop was a pleasure, it removed me from the cacophony of other peoples business portrayed on the television and concentrated my mind in a brief flirtation with the subtle goings on around me. Our suburb after experiencing living in Johannesburg has always been a non threatening place to saunter through. Its people receptive to a cheery “good morning” with one of their own, the traffic sufficiently far away not to be threatening, the terrain interesting enough and not challenging, the geography now made up of more houses as yet another farm has been bought and built over into little regimented boxes, each a microcosm of the next, each merging affordability with class.
The purpose of the walk is a trip to the shop to buy groceries, it’s not that we consume much and I even had to buy another chest freezer to keep the shopping from going bad.  The real reason is to get out from the four walls and meet people, other shoppers, the ever attentive supermarket staff, the guy cutting his hedge and also those imaginary people who I never actually meet but form an opinion on as I see them in the park or on the pavement. They are the chaff which lubricate the mind after hours of Netflix, they are the non cinematic reality who make my world go round.
It’s a far cry from Rome, Paris, Sydney or trekking in the Andes or the Hindu Kush. The glamour of an unknown address where for a week or so you could struggle to make yourself understood, the un violated beaches and crystal clear water, the quaint and the conform, living side by side, with only the inevitable mayhem at the airport as a hurdle to negotiate.
I’v been there and done that so it’s no biggie not to be able to comfortably get from A to B but it is annoying and I have considered buying an electric scooter, one which I can fold up and carry between the main forms of transport.

My enjoyment of driving, jumping in a car to roam further is still embedded in me and with my trusty steed, the Volvo 940 classic (1998 and running as sweet as can be, she’s actually weathered better than me) I can drive in reliable comfort to Swansea or Northumberland in style and take the scooter out of the boot for the last 200 metres.

The weather has never bothered  me and I am always a little frustrated by people who are always consulting the forecast before moving outside. I feel it’s such a fickle process in this country like playing chess, the plan was to capture his knight but suddenly you yourself were captured, so it is with the weather. I suppose years of cycling in Yorkshire hardened me to inclement conditions, it had to be pouring down not to set off under a cloudy sky.

Done that got the medal so a trip to Sainsbury’s, perhaps on my scooter (if I can be persuaded to part with the cash), some things never change and is thrilling enough for me

A mug of tea works wonders

 

 

Subject: A mug of tea works wonders.


There was a cold wind blowing from the east as the lads wrestled with the flapping tent. The clouds were scudding across the sky bringing a first hint of rain to the weekend which had started out so bright. The bikes were grouped together, like cattle in a storm as preparations were made for what was seeming to be a long disturbed night.
Each of the boys were fairly apprehensive, it being their first night camping together other than in the municipal camp site with its ablution block and hot shower, this time the ground sloped away to a stream which fed the lake about a hundred yds away and whilst they tried to secure the guy ropes as best they could, they instinctively knew that a real storm would prove difficult.
Still they were happy to be away from the constraints of parents and it seemed a great adventure to be let loose from adult control and have to fend for themselves.

The wind picked up as the first spots of rain sprinkled the tent and they retired into the security of each of two tents, Bill and Tony were in one tent John and Ian were in the other. They hadn’t had time to cook something to eat when a nearby tree lost one of its branches just as the lightening lit up the sky and the thunder rolled in about a minute later. Crack, the thunder seemed right overhead only increasing their sense of vulnerability but at the same time increasing their resolve not to show fear. As the wind picked up so did the rain and what had seemed a quiet stream became an angry force of nature, swelling its banks and flooding the field. Already in their sleeping bags the water dripped from the canvas tenting and formed rivulets into the tent itself forcing the boys to try to find any dry section of the groundsheet in an effort to find somewhere dry to sleep.

The wind roared and the rain lashed down unceasingly until the darkness gave way to dawn and their sodden surroundings could be assessed. Let’s get the some water boiling and have tea. A mug of tea works wonders.
The field in which they had pitched the tent had been transformed by the storm into nightmare of twisted branches tossed about by the wind, the stream was a torrent twice as wide as the night before, swirling and eddying buffeting its banks as the water rushed towards the lake. The wildlife must have been deranged to see their nests broken and the snug burrows flooded. How many of their young survived the storm but then that’s nature in the raw, a constant need to adapt.

We on the other hand had homes to return to and parents keen to hear of our experience so packing away the tent we loaded the bikes and set off to Biggleswade and a cafe for a bacon, egg, sausage and toast breakfast.

Who will rule the roost


Will the fate of the US presidential elections, which take place in 11 months time be decided by the Gaza war. Will Joe Biden’s support of Benjamin Netanyahu be a turning point in Donald Trumps campaign for the White House.
There was always the assumption that the so called democratic make up of the US constitution to provide significant checks and balances in the decision making process to filter out the bad boys but the opposite seems to be the truth as the checks and balances cancel each other out and one is left with a stalemate.
Contrasted with the political dictatorship in China or Russia the voting procedure in America seems much better at providing a democratic result than either of the US’s main rivals but clearly the process is under attack when Trump refused to accept the election result and the on going polarisation of the main parties in Congress stymy the voting process. The electorate are so polarised that sound bites provide sufficient fodder to feed a great deal of dissent plunging the country into revolutionary conflict.
Political discourse is replaced by jingoistic slander and even the courts now seemingly are part of the partisanship.
The Founding Fathers had the idea of indemnifying the individual states from over weaning interference by the federal power of Congress such that they made each State partially automatous, each sovereign in terms of its interpretation of the law. Even the Supreme Court which is tainted by the fact that Supreme Court judges are nominated by the President, an immensely political figure such that the way the court reaches its decisions is potentially biased by the political leaning of the President, (conservative or liberal) and a judgement such the abortion, based on Roe v Wade has, since Donald Trumps insertion of 3 conservative Supreme Court judges, been reinterpreted and overturned in particular conservative States.
The Machiavellian intertwining at the top of British political patronage is a who’s who of the Carlton Club and Etonian Old Boys. As the plum positions arise so do the names of those who patronise the Tory Party. With the job, now well on its way to destabilise the Welfare State, the BBC and all voices who have critiqued the lack of transparency in appointing the powerful heads of quasi institutions which run our country.
I fear even a root and branch realignment will fail give the country back its institutions since the institutions themselves have become rotten by the use of patronage.

Transgender

 

Subject: Transgender

The issue of transgender and the right of a parent to know of their child's interest is a deep philosophical issue. My initial response when the transgender story arose was one of believing that the parent should always be made aware but then I assumed my assumption was based on the fact I that all parents fitted some sort of stereotype and that they would be understanding and supportive but what if the parent had been subjected to religious or sociological brainwashing, believing that the child would be in danger of going to hell if it went against the biology but of course this speaks much more about the imposition of the concept of a hell on people who are vulnerable.
The psychological understanding of ones gender and the imposition it demands on your lifestyle through law to people like Kemi Badenoch, the Minister for Equality who have the surety of the pulpit to opinionate on this matter has reasoned that a parent has the 'right to know'. It ticks many boxes regarding parental responsibility but what if the child is scared of the reaction if their mom or dad knowing of their decision to move across into another gender irrespective of their physical condition will be harsh and abusive. Rene Descartes famous dictum, "I think therefore I am", argues that the act of doubting your ones own existence serves as proof of the reality of ones mind to cogitate on such matters and must include the issue of who I see myself as. The chemistry which governs the act of thinking mustn't be hog-tied by the outcome and only if the outcome threatens others then the law is asked to step in as a protection. My own prejudice against the practice of same-sex coupling especially when it comes to men still remains with me but this is a generational thing and in many ways I accept the practice even if I acknowledge that I am prudish and feel uncomfortable when watching films which have, as part of their modern day setting explicit sexual scenes, even the over use of swearing troubles me and makes me feel uncomfortable. It is all part of a partially repressive childhood which prospered through my parents ignorance.
Today we must know everything but understand little. The mind and its parameters have much too much canvas for me to understand and yet without understanding I can hardly profess a judgement. I can judge on the misuse of changing my gender to allow a trans person to enter single sex space but other than my ignorance as to the way people different to me think, I must avoiding being labelled a bigot

But what happens when I'm gone

 Subject: But what happens when I'm gone.

 

Many of you are planning in the next year to go on holiday or have that home improvement started. Those with a more far reaching plan might be planning to emigrate within a two year window or buy a car or sell the house. It's the status of our assumption about life and the part we play in it that allows us to be confident that we will be here but the plight of Esther Rantzem who is stricken with stage four lung cancer and her desire to be able to end her life on her own terms when the time comes highlights the conundrum we face when we get old. There's lots of information regarding frailty in old age, dementia, pain management and a host of unmentionable diseases which strike as the body runs out of puff but of the mental realisation that at sometime in the fairly near future you won't be around to do the many things you thought represented the 'you' especially to be amongst family and friends is a hard pill to swallow. The best that people can say of us is that he is remembered with warmth but the fact is  you soon become only a fleeting thought, an occasional random chemical interaction in someone's brain which presents a memory of an image which in no way represents the person.
This incomplete memorial, other than those who have done something truly memorable and have as their memorial a building named after them or a scientific discovery, a series of books perhaps that keep your thoughts and perhaps your personality fresh.
Your children perhaps and their ability to cleave out a path of their own is perhaps your greatest achievement since their achievement carries your gene and a sense of your story which they take on board in fragments when growing up.
It seems a poor result when we spent so much time applauding ourself for perhaps thinking well of others. This bubble we carry around is largely froth on the side of the glass, your substance, like the froth made up largely of air you are much the result of your environment and the time you were born into.
I have been watching a select committee sitting in the House of Lords who are debating the asylum arrangements in sending immigrants to Rwanda. I'm fascinated listening to the high minded legalities which are being discussed regarding the attitude and ability of the Rwanda government to absorbing the aspects of local governance regarding the  treatment the immigrant might receive once getting there. It reminded me of the debates which went on as we approached our leaving the European Union. Experts in the many of the matters concerning our future trade and the ability to even carry out trade in any meaningful way. People were invited to give evidence and almost one hundred percent, the experts were fearful that what we had, in our European relationship, would be frittered away and so it became true. On the other side we had the politicians who seemed to have skin in the game and were handing out sound bites rather than proper well researched argument.
The reason why I mention this is that, at the time not only did I make the effort to listen to the select committee debates but I wrote a regular opinion piece in my blog. Whether this was read or not it was at least a layman's effort to distil what was available at the time and pass it on. That's the task of a blog of this sort it's a sort of distillation of the arguments which have arisen each week and an effort to try to put the case and its alternative, forward for consideration.
When I'm gone who will carry on the job !!
One of the saddest reflections listening to the various select committees is the level of obfuscation which develops when the subject matter is represented by a government ministers. Swivelling  and sliding around like eels on a hook when asked a question, they are like snake oil salesmen (and women), following the party line, afraid to address the question for fear of falling foul of the Whips Office. One always feels they know the political brief better than the technical, departmental brief and it's been for some time a great weakness in our ability to do the actual business. They are more at home amongst their own type, perhaps propping up the bar in their club and rejoicing in their impeachable  mendacity.

The hungry mind

Subject: The hungry mind.

 

If we were to accept that the mind is who we are and the body simply an inconvenient necessity, it would free us up on so many troublesome assumptions. Much of our angst comes from our state of mind and the assumptions we arrive at by the sight of other people and their strange absorptions. Our world of yearning and entitlement would be countered if we could knew that we only meaningfully exist in our mind and that the solitude of our thoughts is a proper nirvana, not the illusion of finding a soulmate to trade them with.
Our thoughts are so personal and nuanced by our own experience, it’s impossible to envisage sharing them in their totality let alone finding someone to understand them. The independent and philosophical solitude of our thoughts, one person compared to the next, makes discourse often nothing more than a set of false assumptions as to what we are hearing  and even then in the telling, another series of mis-assumptions arises by the language we use.
Language is simply a conduit for the mind to express itself in terms of (in the first instance), danger or fear, a gasp or cry is not a product of thought but an instinctive response but language is often inadequate when it comes to the finer points of disseminating to others what we think and we only reveal a dearth in our capacity to explain what we think.
If the complexity of our minds is coarsened by the needs of our body, especially in the need of others to send us conflicting signals then it might be better to train ourselves to assume less about the people around us since their judgements of us must also be greatly flawed.
This mental island can be a lonely place on which we force ourselves to live but is sometimes made rich by the perspicacity of the self evident truths we bring to the table.

Just popping out to the shop.  I know you will think me mad but the existing mental constraint on what I spend is one of the few bridges where the mind and the outside world coexist. The comfort and sense of security which arises when I act within my budget would alter if I won the lottery and spending became just that. The value we place on things in money terms is fundamental to who we think we are, it’s a lifeline to anchored to our reality and relates to certain fundamentals in upbringing which make us think and feel satisfied as to who we think we are. 

Who to believe

 



Subject: Who to believe.



Everyone has an agenda. From Vladimir Putin to the person pushing their right to self identify as a man or a woman. Watching our television screens or following our media channel we are bombarded by view points which clash with our own and which it's impossible to even try to find sense if your attempting to seek accommodation. The impasse in the American Congress between the views of the Republican and Democratic Parties is so acute as to level a claim that, in reference to each other they belong almost to a non humanoid ideology so great is the gulf between them.
So, to all intents and purposes the assumptions we make as to our uniformity, the need to see each other with an almost divine like sanctity, is blown apart by that little box sitting on our shoulders, the brain, which lacks the subtlety to define everything from first principles. If your background, the place you were raise in is Asia or the Middle East, Peru or the Galápagos Islands, Serbia or the Hebrides. If you were born into Hasidic Orthodoxy, Amish traditionalism, Muslim monotheism or an Atheists disbelief, it's all in the mind and has nothing much to do with a proven  analytically structured proof. The mind, other than a trained scientific one with open peer review, thriving on submitting new discoveries to examination prefers to flow with the crowd and its multiple prejudice. Political noise alone is enough to wrong foot most of us as we listen to the latest plausible crank in full flow on a media channel. We have become a multitude of competing ideologies each supported within its own society each tuned in to what it wants to hear confirming its own prejudice.
There was a time when these ideological views were largely a private matter, views floating in the confines of your own mind and because they were largely singular thoughts, there was no sense of momentum in them, no collective conformity, the individual urged on by the numbers revealed to hold a similar opinion, that opinion gains weight
The young are happy to seek their news through 'You Tube' honing in and dialling up a specific news item and ignoring much of the rest they become mentally suburban. Their education is almost totally limited to what they already have an interest in the idea of reading a broad reaching, inter denominational magazine like 'Prospect', is an anathema.  Dipping ones toe into to multitude of hotchpotch opinion to gain some semblance of where the other opinion is coming from is too much trouble, especially if you are cursed with the current trend, short-termism  where the effort required to link one thoughts into the another viewpoint is too much trouble and cuts against a the scattergun opinion and counter opinion which is the daily diet of most people.
We are each unique as we travel down the short path of survival, coping with diversity and animosity in equal measure learning who and what to trust, like animals on the Serengeti sniffing the wind and the spoors, trying to stay just one step ahead.

Go East my Son

 

 

Subject: Go East my son.

If I were a doctor, a  teacher, a policeman, someone with skills I could use overseas I would advise them to go. The people who are in government now are in no mood to govern, their term of destroying the fabric of our lives is now nearing its goal.
The NHS, brought to its knees is waiting for Big Pharma to take the plum jobs, the Police force is made to feel, 'its the criminal', the Teachers are under the strain of years of under investment, government departments which were designed to regulate have been replaced by unelected quangos and what should be straight forward investment in for instance sewerage control is avoided by the people we pay to do that job (often by companies with their head office in a foreign country) the money going to inflate executive salaries and company profits which I predicted would happen when we left the stewardship of the EU.
When society is institutionally split between master and servant, upstairs and under-stairs then the needs of one is excluded by the other. The dismantling of essential  services supplied by the municipalities through a wilful reduction in central financial funding, turning the councils books into a sea of red and necessitating the councils to privatise where they can. Old people's retirement homes, now privatised are made unaffordable to the majority of people (unless you have a house to sell to cover the cost) are yet another example of deliberately dismantling  society from the helicon days of the socialism  brought in by Clement Attlee in 1947 which ran until Thatcher began to break it up with neoliberalism.
Will we descend back into Feudalism, that medieval structure of surfs and landowners. Will we hone down on the freedoms a little money allowed the holidaymaker to holiday offshore , the opportunity to dine out, or own  a car, which pre WW2 were largely the domain of a few. Will we finally be put in our place with AI taking over and making whole swathes of the populous redundant and given the prospect of a predetermined universal wage (IBI) sent electronically to the recipients address whilst they sit in their lounge, sitting room, bedsit, bombarded by media tripe and misinformation.
It will help solve the car pollution problem, the food waste and shortage problem, the issue of people living too long and costing a fortune to keep alive problem, instead life expectancy will shrink back down to 66 and provide the actuaries with better sums to ensure better returns and it will ease the need to teach 70% of the people since all they will need to know is where the television on/off button is.
It feels that our mental health would improve greatly if we switched off the media’s news, mainly made up of bad news and be allowed to shrink back into an independent self absorbed world of day to day occurrences in which our relevance is minimal then our heads would cease to overheat with the dire news of what might happen next.  Ignorance can be seen as a virtue since we can't do anything to ward off danger and we revert to a time when the news report was weeks, even months old and seemed historical rather than factual.
I would rather see the sudden flash of a nuclear explosion than worry about the political mastications regarding its launch and flight over.

Defining yourself by the rules of engagement

 

Subject: Defining yourself by the rules of engagement.



 Most of us live defined lives defined by income, education, and the place where you live. Those living in Syria or Pakistan will have a far different view of their lives than I will living in leafy Hertfordshire and even I will be concerned by different matters if I returned to live in Yorkshire.
An expansion of my ‘concerns’ has been massively increased by the introduction of web driven media bring us, minute to minute, stories of the woeful conditions that people are experiencing right now.

When I was growing up these stories were vague and covered regions of the world so far away they were largely outside our comprehension. There is only so much we can comprehend without feeling overpowered by the complexity of life in these far off lands and especially so now we are accused of being complicit in their plight so many years ago. The blame for actions taken when those actions seemed perfectly in tune with the master/servant relationship which was observed then seems so out of kilter these days when we hold ourselves responsible for so much. The daily call for donations to charity, charities which range from blighted children to blighted animals seeks to discombobulate us as to the enormity of our debt and the reasons for it. Talk shows indulge us in matters for which can never be held culpable and yet seem to challenge us to take on yet another responsibility. The complexity of our lives is made more so by reasoning that we must make a choice, perhaps between the effects of climate change in North Africa and the shift in population wishing to avoid it by coming here. That side of our willingness to to help and the sheer enormity of the task drives us back into the laager to seek protection. These days self protection and a stockade mentality is frowned upon as being somehow lacking a sense of humanity and yet, what is not questioned is our inbuilt sense of ‘self preservation’ which in my option should have some sort of parity with the kamikaze and self immolation so often opted for by our intellectual class.
Making self conscious decisions on what’s best for me is ok so long as the overall benefit to the population isn’t ignored. Our ideals are what sets us apart but the ideal of not wishing to do harm must not be obliterated by endorsing self harm. The weight of public opinion should never outweigh your own sense of what’s appropriate for you. Survival after all is the most basic instinct we have and so long as we recognise that everyone carries that sense of their own importance to exist and that life is only a contest with rules of engagement.

Inside the Ukrainian ring

 

Subject: Inside the Ukrainian ring.

Like a boxers we shuffle around in our corner waiting for the bell to clang. In the red corner our opponent glowers across the ring barely listening to the referee or the rules of engagement. This fight had long been in the offering since the purse is simply too high to ignore, it goes to the root of the fight game, once a noble calling for young men to convert their masculinity into a rule based system now dissipated by the huge rewards on offer.  
In the green corner, the corner which purports to follow the rules, sits an over weight contestant perspiring from the heat but also from a lack of confidence that he can get the job done. His trainer, an old man clearly going through the phases of executive power but wondering why he had allowed himself to be elected as the hope of the nation when all he wanted was to get his feet up. On the other side of the ring a lean confident trainer who has nurtured this moment, the reawakening of some sort of national Valhalla leans across his young, sparsely built protégé sensing his weakness he drives him on with clichés of past glories and potential reward. The contest, if it were ever such, slowly going his way so as long as he can find more young blood to spill.
There are many who find the fight game reprehensible, a denial of all that mankind has struggled to represent and yet it also represents the old way of sorting out a wrong. The contribution of conciliation and reconciliation, where combatants retire to their respective corners unbloodied having failed to land a punch but not having had chance to test the other in their battle and their right to reclaim a perceived grievance is now back in the promoters office, the money already in his bank. There’s nothing like an arms contest to make the tills ring and people are making themselves very rich as we talk.
Should all our grievances be resolved by talk or is talk simply too complicated to be left in the hands of the human rights lawyer or the divorce attorney. Are there somethings which can’t be translated into words, where passion out bids the rationality of the court room. The slow rumbling of passion, like lava flowing from a volcano is impervious to reason it  has to find its course and create new promontories, a new landscape on which to bolster its sureties, until of course the next time !

A divided world

 

Subject: A divided world.




Our world is divided into many parts. Religious, national, cultural, and of course people with wealth and people without. The factions that have arisen and divided the world are largely artificial. Gender and race are the natural genetic outcome and over many millennium of  breeding and cross breading, a slow assimilation has allowed some cooperation but still perceived differences in nationality and man made differentials, such as culture and religious values divide us. The most recent, ‘inequality and wealth‘ brought into focus through the antics of modern capitalism, the manipulation of markets and most recently, the market in essentials where, because the  trade is in essentials there is no real market.
Todays mayhem is that the status quo is threatened by an assumption that we are out of balance economically, that the proceeds of economic activity is being wasted on a underclass and only the wealthy can fix it.
Now one ideological reason for economic endeavour  is that a successful economy is one which provides for the needs of everyone, the other is that winners win and the crumbs which fall off their table can then be distributed to the losers.  Ronald Regens famous(infamous)Trickle down economics was based on this premise. His avid  pupil Margaret Thatcher who equally famously debunked the value of society over the  individual argued that ‘what god given right’ have the majority, (inevitably the poor), to the profits of successful money making combinations since winning is inevitably the whole point of the exercise. As individuals we isolate ourselves and our families in so many ways. We live in homes that segregate us from the neighbour, we drive our car through the rain rarely if ever offering a drenched person a lift, we squirrel our money away and rarely think to go next door to see if poor old Daisy has food on the table, and yet we are asked daily to contribute to help the poor and the sick thousands of miles away on the other side of the world. This latent call to help comes with our compassion for the weak and frail by recognising that our relative strength and prosperity could be shared as an act of humanitarian concern.

 Donkeys, elephants, cheetahs, emaciated children, all draw a quid or two from our wallet but not the down on their luck individual living a mile or so away who desperate, as winter approaches is at their wits end on how they will manage. Our compassion then evaporates when we see our own likeness brought low, perhaps we are scared that we will go the same way and prefer to bury our heads in the sand, perhaps we worry about the profligate use of limited resources and the  a poor choices people make preferring a subscription to Sky to insulating their home. The choice to have children when knowing you can’t really afford them, acknowledging that the children will be disadvantaged but ignoring this for the subliminal need to bear a child as of your right. The out of control social contract between state and citizen has broken down as mothers are forced to to go to work to pay the rent and put food on the table only by paying for childcare which amounts to virtually half of their earnings.

This dystopian ‘Brave New World’ where ‘values’ are subordinated by needs and outcomes are seen in the dysfunctional children and feral gangs roaming our streets. The balance between what we want and what we need to have, to fulfil what we want is driven by the market and consumerism, the indulgence of the credit card, and that we are influenced to think we are owed it.

First round to Trump

 

Subject: First round to Trump.


So the first round seems to go to Trump and those who support him. The antic's  of the legal establishment in New York appear to have scored an own goal by bringing Trump to court on what might be judged as minor misdemeanours rather than substantive crimes and given the hysteria the ex president develops in his followers it was never going to fly for them. They are a significant block vote in the next presidential election and irrespective of what he actually does they will forgive him and blame the Democrats for creating as they see it a witch-hunt which then only serves to drive the American electorate further apart into ever more extremist positions.
Isolationism has always been a component of the American psych. Having come in many cases as outcasts from Europe their entrenched reticence of European ideas and their sense of isolation ‘out west’ made them uncomfortable bed fellows and the more recent newly found cosmopolitan attitude to neighbours on the continent, somewhat baffling for the run of the mill Wisconsin who hardly pokes his nose over the State boundary line.
Make America Great says it all to the chap from Idaho. I’m sure Vladimir Putins Muscovite  feels the same about Russia as does the citizen of  Xi Jinping’s Beijing, we went through the same death throes as the rhetoric spewed out by the Brexiter’s huge  misinformation plan took hold.
Alliances are fragile and the great achievement after the Second World War was the American Lease Lend scheme which allowed both the victorious and the defeated to get back on their feet. It came at a cost of course America spent billions being the worlds policeman whilst at the same time cementing itself as trading depository for goods and services and most important of all, a world currency. Now with the rise of China, a  more compliant  and disciplined nation, dictated to by an authoritarianism the Free World wouldn’t countenance.
So Trump posed the important question “why us”, “why do we have to do all the heavy lifting”.
The sight of the garish, flag waving Trump supporters pumping out  xenophobic images is mighty unsettling but is it unexpected. Would we all not qbenefit by a bit of nationalistic tub beating especially in a class riven society like ours where the divisions run very deep and the establishment are emboldened to ignore the needs of the majority. It’s hard to imagine the marching bands of the American proletariat in Downing Street (now conveniently gated off but in my day accessible) wrapped around in Union Jacks blasting out their call for revolution from a bullhorn. We are much removed from the wild west frontier, sedated by centuries of forelock tugging, we even make a fetish out of our docile nature, defining it as genteel and to be admired and therefore we don’t seem to mind as the fabric of the nation is dismembered by the present government.
My distain for the EU came with my disgust at the way the bankers, mainly led by Germany destroyed Greece and the rickety financial pyramid that Goldman Sachs had created for them in one of the biggest financial cons ever manufactured. The collective European banking system were in on the deal and the Greeks were, like embryonic cells in a Petri dish, just part of the stress test that Frankfurt had authorised. So when in the voting booth I voted to leave. The assumption that my vote carried little weight and that the majority of people would vote to stay (David Cameron et al) was confounded by the confusion sown in the minds of the voter by Boris Johnson. Very few people were prepared to weigh through the debates in committee in parliament, who drew on the expertise of experts in the fields of trade, finance, scientific collaboration, regulatory provenance regarding our water purification, statutory impediments to companies like Monsanto, there were so many influential doubters as to how it would work to  maintain standards which cost money (the English hate spending money) but were thought of as a line in the sand to the Europeans. Our own companies we distinguished as always brought struggling to the party, preferring profit to the welfare of the people.
The embryonic schism which runs through our country, that of wealth prestige and the old school tie made it impossible to envisage a fair deal once we had left and so it has proved.
So you don’t need a Trump if it’s been established before hand that you can “hand it over to us, we have your interests at heart”

Dismembering the social services

 

Subject: Dismembering the social services.



I had been on the point of questioning the fiscal black hole hanging over us when a report emerged from a think tank of economists also questioning the figures.
Those of you who use an accountant to present your finances to the Receiver of Revenue must always question how, to a layman the income and expenditure can be legally manipulated to present a different picture to your common sense. How that income stream is generated  or which bracket to enclose a particular expenditure around is a potent mix of fiscal assumptions, deduct this, add on that and the outcome becomes a blur.
The nations balance sheet is a many coloured pallet and very much dependent on how it’s perceived by our overseas lenders and it puzzled me that in the short space of time Liz Truss was in power we went from ‘good boy’ to ‘bad boy’ almost overnight.
The machinery of state continued to turn, the widgets continued flow, people went to work but suddenly it wasn’t enough.
The fiscal crisis brought to a standstill the nation and like the pandemic allowed us to stagger on like a boxer receiving a sucker punch.  The effect of the disruption of gas from Russia, an event which could have been long foreseen because the invasion of the Ukraine has been on the books for decades and was simply another destabiliser to the cosy global economy. But these events didn’t broadcast the dire straights we were in, printing money when ever we were short (quantitive easing) not investing in projects which could have instilled confidence, not only in our own people but in the world economies as a whole.

It wasn’t until Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng took us on a financial neoliberal helter-skelter, placing their  trust in the Market, whilst planning  to dismember much of the Welfare State and also the unique social and economic pact it holds on the UK population.
The Market was spooked whilst, in its heart of heart it liked much of their plan but knew it was politically unsafe and said no.  All this though didn’t change the composition of the financial books, the red and blue ink was still there but suddenly the taps on credit were turned off, confidence was gone and the pack of cards which supports international finance came tumbling down. It is so reminiscent of the financial crash of 2008 where it was a glitch in bankers confidence that caused the overnight position of Lehman Brothers to be  rejected and everyone shut up their financial swap shop.
Our indebtedness and our ability to pay our debt is only questioned in parenthesis, the mechanisms were and are there to shuffle the Monopoly Board around, you roll the dice and sell off Hyde Park, (or at least the bits not owned by the Russian oligarchs) and with a change on the tiller  financial  health is qualitatively resumed but with even more red ink.  Unfortunately theirs is another game afoot, a game which has been in the long grass since Thatcher, ‘the dismemberment of our Welfare State’.
The mantra of low taxes “keep the money in your own pocket” has some merit but what of the discipline required to put money aside to provide for a rainy day, the police, the nurses and doctors, the humble household refuse collector not to mention the teachers and the administrators who guide us through this labyrinth of modern living. The nature of people in general doesn’t give me much faith that they will stump up for a service given the option not to and it’s sensibly left to a central authority, paid for through taxes to do the job for us but if you are not a user of those services and prefer to rely on the private contractor, Eton College to school the kids, Bupa medical insurance to provide the doctor, security firms to provide your security, that only leaves the refuse collection guy and when push comes to shove you can hire someone to take the bags to the dump.
The Welfare State was designed to protect the sick and unemployed, not act as a State support for those employers who plead that their profit is too low for the business to survive without paying their employees a wage below the cost of living and therefore have to rely on the taxman, (you and I), to support these businesses by all kinds of ingenious support mechanisms. We support the rental market, we pay subsidies to the farmers to offset the low prices the supermarkets pay and so subsidise us at the checkout. We top up the minimum wage, acknowledging it’s not enough by providing free school meals, free prescriptions and subsidies for many essentials all now paid for by the state.
The State has its fingers in all those transactions whilst still failing to address the shortfall in the minimal tax it collects from the profit and dividends. We have in effect a Ponzi scheme where the State becomes a non for profit shareholder to thousands upon thousands of businesses through the misuse of institutions like the Welfare State acting as lender of last resort. It’s a scam deliberately engendered to empower the Tory rich but it also attracts those befuddled, so called “red wall voters” who feel they have an affinity with the scam. To wear a blue rosette is apparently to wear a badge of exclusivity, even as you negotiate the broken paving and potholes outside your council house.
It’s a funny old world !!

Staying Schtum

 



Subject: Staying schtum



In the process of ‘child care’, men generally are far too contrived to forgo their self analysis of the world around them to give more than symbolic attention to the job of looking after the toddler if they have to forgo the footie.  Women on the other hand, normally extremely self absorbed, even borderline neurosis  regarding their looks and presentation, seem, at the stroke of a pen,(in this case giving birth to a baby) to cast aside their narcissism and lend themselves 110 % to the child 24/7.
Why is this, is it genetic or is it that having carried the grommet inside, each embryonic kick reestablishing their presence, the links are formed maternally not just sociologically as in the case of a man. He only stands on the proverbial touch line whilst the game is in progress, shouting encouragement but hardly understanding the rules of the game. As a father he is already nine months behind at birth playing catch up and given his position as reserve, his role of carrying on the water bottle when asked, this inferior psychosomatic interaction instils a servant/master relationship between husband and wife not a collaborative one. For most men this isn’t a worry as they scurry off to work, much more attuned to its rigours than nappy changing and return at night to a confusing world where the little bundle’s needs have become paramount.  Turning on the tele as normal, “it’s too loud”, the room is too cold, or too hot, bugs attain a new significance and sleep is rationed. Each whimper from the bundle electrifies your wife and, as if by osmosis, you. The cough becomes life threatening, the rash the start of something unpleasant and one is forced into thinking how do children survive in the insanitary conditions of Africa. Of course the short answer is, they don’t !
Doctors in this country are fast becoming a rarity and doctors on ‘call out’ extinct so the child is brought up on the internets wide reaching prognosticationary analysis of ills and illness which covers the writer of the journal with dozens of sub-clause’s when dishing out remedy’s. Rather seek the advice of a doctor it reminds you, forgetting of course that the reason you are poking around in this frightening world of paediatric medicine is you can’t get a doctor in the first place.
Sitting in the car with a fraught wife by your side, (the match side lined) dark streets swish by you watch out for the sign, To the hospital. You pull in as near to the entrance as you can, ignoring the ‘don’t park here sign’ you march purposefully in clutching your precious bundle to find medical attention.  At least in moments like this you really feel part of a family. “Who is the father” lays down a marker, your first in months and even if it’s only where and to who the invoice should be sent, at least it’s a start.
The brightly lit hospital corridors flash by as you trail along once more relegated to the end of the procession, but already feeling a little discounted (even with your credit card in hand), the hospital procedure takes over and the Mom becomes the de facto definitive parent one’s again. 
Not for the first time and having learnt your place to be patient, you stay schtum

Our sense of morality

 

Subject: Our sense of morality



Most people's lives are governed by multiple experiences and partially related objectives. We run between the highs and lows of emotional and physical stress as we veer between our dreams and actual reality
Sometimes these experiences, place a great weight on individuals, expectations are temporally blown apart by misunderstanding as the bias which we hold in our hearts and minds rises to the surface. More and more we are corralled into group think, part of the need to collectivise our thoughts in an attempt to have people assume their thoughts are part of a general consensus which easies any unpleasantness in holding isolatory views when for decades we have been encouraged to think only of the need for human collaboration.
Collaboration has to be based on some sort of conformity, once we were told that the very fact we bleed when injured, feel pain when hurt, distress when things go wrong was enough to register our commonality but this symbolism of  belonging to one family, the human family, is put into question when we explore differences in culture. Culture that underlaying cooperative sense of belonging.
Does culture divide us more than race and skin colour. Is the elemental system of beliefs and our understanding of those beliefs,  not only religious beliefs but our sense of fair-play and of justice which provide a bed rock vis a vis our reaction to the events taking place around us. This subculture of thought and understanding provides the flexibility to respond to unpleasant reality as well as our confirmation when things go well. Culture is the shorthand by which we react in a different way and how we define ourselves as different or apart if we sanction our reaction by suggesting ‘we are right and they are wrong’ when in fact we are simply reacting, like Pavlov’s dog to stimuli.

 

Suella Braveman the Home Secretary gave a speech yesterday in America setting out her view on immigration and and her definition of Illegal immigration in the context of asylum seekers to this country. Her speech was provocative in so far as she questioned the basis of asylum in the context of the numbers now potentially seeking to come to the UK given the ease of travel and the tools now  available to navigate a way here.
I was part of that first wave of mass emigration when the common man and woman was invited to move to another country. I never availed myself of the £10 passage with work and accommodation promised and it was a million miles from what is on offer now. The participants both those welcoming the immigrant and the immigrant themselves had been well prepared for the move and it was not fostered on a community who would have to bare the brunt of the inflation in school places, health care and jobs. It had previously been the privilege of the rich to travel in the world, a world  which had become dotted with exclusive hotels in cities who could command their interest but for  people from the working-class much less able to afford it, it was a  rare experience.
Today all our cities are now made unrecognisable by the influx of foreign people who do not seek to change their habits or way of life and become absorbed in the new society but rather who demand to be recognised for what they are, a fully fledged an import. They insist to be embedded with full rights as if this little piece of Britain were theirs, an outpost of Bangladesh, Damascus or Tehran. Yes it’s a variation of Colonialism reversed an imposition not fully countenance by the local.but sold as a lie, as reparation to cleanse our sense of a debt needed to be repaid.
I thought her blunt exposition of the threats needed to be spelt out since we have become a soft touch to all the worlds ailments. This mornings press has sort to ignore her message seeking instead to appear to condemn her warnings as blatant hypocrisy
and out of character with our national temperament. I wonder if the journalists aren’t themselves peddling their own type of hypocritical nonsense refusing to believe the conundrums facing those on the streets of Bradford and Burnley and pandering to an old fashioned sense of morality for which we can ill afford these days.

Two wrongs don't make a right

 

Subject: Two wrongs don’t make a right.

Al Jazeera appears to have been taken off air and none of our local news channels see fit to report it.
Israel had threatened to impede the broadcast of any of what it sees as biased, misinformed news that misrepresents the ongoing war in Gaza.
Remember RT the broadcast arm of the Russian state which was shut down in this country and robbed us of insights into Russian thinking if not so much investigating the conditions in Russia.
Al Jazeera is a 24/7 day broadcaster with its head office in Qatar it also broadcasts an English language service from London. This morning as I went for my News round up the screen where I usually tune into Al Jazeera was blank and when I searched Google for a reason it said that Isreal’s were finalising the plans to shut down Al Jazeera’s Gaza office from where we gain most footage of what’s going on there.
There is always the issue of bias in reporting any story but unless Al Jazeera have replicated some sort of Hollywood style screen set  the pictures of bombed out neighbourhoods or the constant stream of wounded people, particularly innocent children rushed into partially destroyed hospitals then we must be allowed to believe our eyes, no matter how disturbing it is.
I always believe on making up my own mind by simply watching and listening to the full range of media outlets, some you weight with more prejudice than others. The new kids on our block, ‘Talk TV’ and its competitor GB News which started about the same time both encourage the political right wing  and are not limited, as the BBC is in remaining factually impartial with both reporters and presenters inhibited in expressing their own view. Some high profile BBC veteran presenters have been fired for appearing to support a political opinion, unlike their adversaries on GB News and Talk TV the who openly criticise the news depending on their own bias. It’s part of a move to emulate media channels, such as X by encouraging  a free-for- all by bringing commentary from every spectrum irrespective of how disabling it is ‘in the cause of freedom of speech.

“Al Jazeera has just come on air” so I don’t know what happened but there was a significant break in service and my twitchy antenna feared the worst.
The channel resumes its expose of this humanitarian disaster, especially in the hospitals but also in the deprivation of food and water to the Gaza population as a whole.
Your mindset must allow, historically the sympathetic cultivation of support for Isreal as a state for beleaguered Jews to settle in after their terrible experience as nation which experienced the Holocaust but in allowing Israel to break international conventions in its fight for survival it risks losing that support.
Thats not to condone Muslim extremist’s, such as Hamas, Hezbollah, Boko Haram, ISIS and many other groups who commit atrocities in the name of Allah. But the old adage “two wrongs don’t make a right” is never more important than now.  

A long standing dispute

 

Subject: A long standing dispute.



What is it that bonds the Arab citizens in the Middle East in their hatred of Isreal. What is it which brings them out on the streets of Europe and other capital cities across the globe to protest so vehemently.
The Arab in Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon have many differences but seem United over the issue of Palestine and Isreal. Biblically they come from similar stock but are separated by a religiosity which intensifies into an ideological sense of unique individuality. Much like Isreal’s sense of individual superiority “a chosen race” the Islamic cause instinctively creates a first and a second class sense of entitlement which naturally creates deep divisions. Mohammedanism, the bonding religion of most Arab countries has its own sense of religious superiority and religion being what it is, the manifestation of ‘gods word’ then the fervour of the manifest goes beyond rational thought.
The depth of feeling and sense of surety is frightening when you hear the Israeli spokes person laying down their interpretation of what is right and wrong, there is no equivocation, no sense that compromise is on the table, only a surety that they are right. And of course they are in their determination to see an end to Hamas who represent not only Palestinians but also a historical division between the religious options available to enfranchise people in the name of god.
Hamas, Hezbollah, ISIS, Al Qaeda are all integrated in the jihadi threat to non Islamic people and try as we might we have to come to terms with it and the sight of untold numbers of unidentified immigrants from Pakistan, India and the Middle East only re-emphasises the danger we are placing ourselves in.
The unspeakable acts of genocidal force acted out on the young Jewish people enjoying an innocent music festival whilst simultaneously raiding of the homes of Jewish settlers was barbaric.  The Israeli response to bomb close knit Palestinian homes in the hope of inflicting damage on Hamas is also unforgivable when seen from any rational persons eyes. If they had launched a ground invasion surgically targeting known Hamas centres with their powerful army there would still have been much collateral civilian damage but to rain bombs, rockets and shells indiscriminately on such a densely populated area is equally barbaric. Cutting off the power, water, food and medicine, effectively starving Palestinians has to be seen as a humanitarian crime.
I sent an interesting historical perspective going back to the ‘Great Powers’ carve up of the Ottoman Empire which included a division of the Middle East (the Levant) into a number of spheres of influence which included Palestine. The area of Palestine which also included a small  contingent of Jewish people was seeded into two areas by the Balfour Declaration in 1917 and what then remained of Palestine was designated to the creation of a Jewish homeland in 1947.
From such Great Power tinkering Middle East tribal history lay the seeds of latent rebellion and the emergence of Muslim fundamentalism in the form of jihadi intolerance
We are by far the newest kid on the block and when you challenged the old establishment don’t be surprised to receive a bloody nose.