Inexhaustible assiduity.

 Subject: Inexhaustible assiduity.







Inexhaustible assiduity, what a compact with the devil, a doggedness of being right (in one’s own terms of that word) and an undeniable willingness to pursue a cause irrespective of its permissibility..

Isn’t that the definition of many of todays political imperatives, some goal which benefits a few stakeholders and leaves most of us imprisoned within the straitjacket of a minority expediency without any recourse for redress.

There are many examples in today’s Parliament where policy becomes a ‘wonk tank‘ exercise with little call by the general public in the first place. We ‘the public’ want affordable housing, a reduction in waiting times when visiting the NHS, more teachers in better equipped schools, a modernised infrastructure in our utilities, a joined up cradle til grave social responsibility and affordable care for our elderly, more prisons to hold our burgeoning criminal population along with police whose job it is to uphold the law not act as an arm of social services. They seem to want to lay low tinkering whilst the ship sinks.

At every general election these and other similar manifesto promises raise their weary heads only to sink down again when the election razzmatazz moves on and its a crime that so much is promised without any accountability for the manifesto promises. Perhaps if we reversed the scales and we the public offered our list of demands which could then be addressed by our political masters as to timescale and taxation demands on us. Instead we are assailed with sweets from smooth talking snake oil salesmen, out bidding each other and non of them responsible for the dentistry afterwards.

These perennial needs which any general population demands are, election after election, pushed away into the long grass when the votes are counted. It’s a symbolic deceit which goes on at each election, the politicians treating us as children, fearing, if we knew the truth we would gag with fear.

The economic shenanigans of the Osborn years is over although all the effects remain, the nil sometimes minus interest deals are over, the cheap money borrowed to roll over an economy which wasn’t squaring the books because the god of consumerism. That party is well and truly buried but with careful borrowing for essentials we can still improve the stock of the country and the wellbeing of its people but we mustn’t allow the cash in the bank to be squandered on vanity products or the inheritance of the past and its legacy on the present day. The past is past and it’s difficult living in the present unless you live on an enormous pot of oil or have a population cowed by a military style police force a population who’s willingness to accept their harsh history as some sort of ideological goal for the future.

The crime of running the country down, its services, its infrastructure its people can only come from a class who hardly felt the pain and in many instances benefited from the short term contractual nature of business, a labour force on short term contracts, projects which were also short term and didn’t meet the needs of the countries future.

The educational objectives of Blair made pointless by the privatisation of everything regardless of the lack of market forces to provide competition.  The insistence on the jingoism of Brexit regardless of the economic consequences were examples of in-house Toryism where the equations were too much trouble and the flag and Agincourt were too attractive, regardless of their irrelevance.

We have to start again with an assessment of our strengths and weaknesses, we have to choose our battles and not be swayed by emotion and the need to be seen. The Scandinavian countries, are an example of finding a balance between the needs of the people and the need to be heard on the wider stage. Their creation of a wealth fund when gas’s was found exemplifies them and us. The proceeds of our oilfields were spent bolstering the exchequers current account whilst Norway sits on a savings/current account which will filter into the countries economy over many years.

When Osborne said austerity he didn’t envisage his own class of Etonians having to suffer and so it turned out with the only indicator of financial improvement coming from that cohort and as their train rapidly draws away into the distance and we are left in the sidings.