Subject: Messaging the electorate.

 


It seems to me at least that the vote for Donald Trump is based on a voter who sees the principle of “putting his/her own country first”,  as a natural shared affinity. It’s a national affinity we in Britain seem to have misplaced in our sorrow for the tragedy of what is happening in other countries across the globe. We rate ‘humanities heart beat’ above our own and take on board customs and attitudes, foreign to ours. We would rather give our last crust of bread to ensure a foreigner survive than ensure that our attention is placed on our own economic woes.
The Trump, doctrine “America First” has yielded opprobrium from the democratic world. Happy to see the continuance of American ‘heavy lifting’ in democracies fight for survival against totalitarianism, we, along with many of-the European nations are less willing to share the financial burden.
With our legacy of historical ‘profiteering’ from the ‘Empire’ of which little is said of the infrastructural legacy, including transport, buildings and contractual law which we left behind and which enabled many poor countries to subsequently prosper.
No ‘debit/credit ledger’ was drawn up, only an emotional call based on ‘norms’ which were not current 200 years ago, for reparations. I wonder would the inhabitants of Bradford and Burnley, for whom the ‘Industrial Revolution‘ bequeathed the grim blackened streets and a greatly a shortened life span, be a reason for reparations. 
Instead our sights are set on Africa where the many Africans of Arabic ethnicity rounded up the men to be transported to other parts of the world as cheap labour, and were just as implicit. Would the Arabic African diaspora also be chided 250 years later or is that the sole  provenance of the white man. 
African nations whose tribalist structure has largely benefitted the chieftain class have not been kind to their tribe. Must we perpetuate unburdening our guilt by pumping more and more Aid money into the pockets of a dodgy African hierarchy whose grounding in democratic civil society is strictly limited.
The economic infrastructure erected by the colonisers continues to stand although heavily over burdened and greatly  deteriorated through a lack of local investment and maintenance.  The ‘Aid’ helps keep the Presidential  jets flying and their executive homes in reasonable upkeep but little filters down to the grass roots in the African community.
Perhaps we should be like the Chinese, undertake infrastructure projects but managed by us, contractually ensuring we retain ownership until the loan is paid off. So long as Aid is seen as a gift no real value will be attached. Also long as we continue to side step the people of Burnley and Bradford who still wait for descent amenities, whilst our newspapers remain scathing about the issue of a financial black hole left by the last government and don’t have the sympathy for the Third World, many of whose citizens now reside here alongside us then, as we degenerate into becoming a Second Rate economy then the tolerance for each other will break down.
A society like ours has limited land and needs to raise taxes to pay for the previous government's inability to make increased provision for urban finances. The danger is we reignite a class war where the participants are drawn not from the fields of Bodmin but rather the Punjab
Nationalism is both short and long sighted. It heals the immediate pain by instilling the sense we are all in the same boat but if that sense is evaporated by cultural and religious shifts then what was deemed a nation disintegrates.
We need a period of financial probity where truth replaces the smokescreen of politics.
In the 1930s  we were scared of the might of German fascism but by ignoring the crippling debt of war we fought to present another face to totalitarianism based on our national fortitude.  To see it defaced by the salad dressing of conflicting ideals must be avoided at all costs.