Not belonging to that lot over there.

The term "working class", "middle class", "upper class", aristocracy, are great reminders that the term "we are all in this together" seems pitifully inappropriate. 

The term "divide and rule" is a qualified tactic used to destabilise the population by differentiating between sections of society,  pointing out the differential, dividing us modulating our opinions towards each other so that you don't  recognise each other as being members of the same society.
 Once again today being encouraged, by an ever narrowing political conglomerate of the powerful news gathering groups, disseminating opinion to us for us to believe what we believe, because we are fed what they want us to believe.
The crux of the matter is how people, now a days see each other.
For instance. One view is "A strike is crisis which must be fought with all the tools in the toolbox".
Another view is that the Dickensian employment conditions in some of the largest most well known companies in the country are a matter of 'market conditions'.
The stress and under manning of our Prison System (budget cuts of a third) leading to prisoner rebellion, is a political question because the Unions are not allowed to strike and have to wait, or leave whilst the matter is sorted out.

What is the bottom line, what are the emotions which govern our leaders, what class of people do they really represent. With all their sangfroid who do they most identify with, and will the "working class" ever get much more than a mention in dispatches. Has it become imperative that we need representation other than from our elected Parliament.

The vilification of unionism by Mrs Thatcher was retaliation for the Socialist concept of a "fair day's pay for a fair day's work". A view well advanced in Germany before the 1st World War

The British political elite were reticent. Using all kinds of parliamentary jiggery pokery they lulled the voter into believing that their future was in good hands whilst, tied up in the small print, lay the truth. Their hearts were never in it and so it is today.  A holding clause here, a diversion there whilst the Globalised machinery marches on, diminishing the few hard won provisions on labour protection for the benefits of "flexibility". 

The Germans are in accord with their society. The leadership feel a part of that society and seem to work in conjunction with the German society as a whole, whilst we in Britain seem keen to be seen as "not belonging to that lot over there"!!!

Getting to work

It's been a "braw bricht moonlicht niche" and the ice had to be removed from the windscreen before I could get going this morning. The sky is cloudless as the sun come up from over the horizon nearly warming the air but at least making us all feel more cheery for the light it brings. 

It's a feature of living in a warm country, those bright mornings to uplift the spirits on your way into work. Normally at this time of year it's a cloudy overcast sky and a drizzle sufficient to keep the windscreen wiper going. Squish squash, swish swash, as you join the queue of cars down the motor way, inching forward picking up a bit of speed and then on come the brake lights slowing to a stop. It's a 30 mile trip down to London. On a good morning, three quarters of an hour, with traffic, at least twice as long. Intertwining your route, depending which part of the city you want, its always question of potential hold-ups, delays that cause you to fret if a deadline is missed and people kept waiting. The police car or ambulance speeding down the emergency lane is not a good omen something has happened up ahead and the emergency services are no respecter of my schedule. Heavily imbued with their power, they close off the road at a moments notice and the rigmarole of an investigation starts quite oblivious of the hundreds, perhaps thousands of cars held up and its cost to commerce.  It's as if the police belonged to another universe.
I remember in South Africa, after an accident vehicles pulled manually to one side as soon as the cops arrived (even before) to get the traffic moving. Unfortunately litigation has demanded that no stone is left unturned and the investigation must be made forensically watertight or else the police are in trouble.  More trouble in fact than the people who caused the accident in the first place.
It's a funny old world, this blame game culture where the legal fraternity are forever casting around for a reason to sue or searching for an escape clause for their client to get away with it. It seems guilt is a finely textured concept with many opportunities for doubt, and doubt to be easily manufactured.

Prerogative Power - part 2

Rejoining the hearing on day 2.

The elephant in the room was that in 1973 not only did the legislation admit the UK into the thorny arms of the EU but it also permitted European Law and statute to supersede English Law. In so doing the European based laws it ushered in became the "legal rights" of the people and only Parliament can annul those rights. It is not in the gift of the Prime Minister to remove those rights which is in effect is what a Prerogative Decision would do. Mrs May may have egg on her face. The hubris of power has perhaps gone to her head. "Brexit means Brexit" means I am in charge and her argument that the government called the Referendum and having heard the voice of the people she was duty bound to effect their wishes as promptly as she could overlooked the significance of who can change the law. Only Parliament can do that and since when the door opened in 1973 and ushered in the acts of another institution (the EU) making ones own laws if not irrelevant at least lose their primacy, then only Parliament can reinstall the English version.
Mr Eddie had worked hard on the first day to create the impression that the Royal Prerogative was perfectly justified because it would be used only following the explicit will of the people in its Referendum instruction. No one on the Government side had thought to consider the implications of the mechanics of unravelling our legal code of practice.

One wonders if it is not the same old failing which we all suffer, we take advice from sources where it most fits our desired course of action. We are either deaf to warnings of the alternative argument or blindly hope that these warnings, will be argued away  by your own council. They have a job to do, to win your case and it's bad practice to be overly concerned with the oppositions case.
David Pannick QC was in my opinion very convincing in his attempt to demolish the Governments case and seemed to carry the sympathy of his Lordships. Mr Eddie for the Government had made hard work of detailing his constitutional argument and on the balance,

                             Perry Mason won by the "flamboyance" of his argument.

Prerogative Power

The Law is an ass, well a complicated and convoluted ass, a wordy ass, an ass that is fed on statues and common law, on decisions reached in the past, dealing with similar issues, decisions which when reached become another brick in the legalistic edifice which we rely on to frame our legal practice, and in essence the justice we cherish.

At the moment the barrister leading the Governments case is pleading with the High Court that the Government can make decisions using its Prerogative Powers to start the Article 50 Brexit exit. Prerogative Power is a concept of legal precedent which dates back into antiquity when the King made all decisions and which filtered into the early days of Parliament where the Royal Prerogative became a way of passing law onto the statute book bypassing the need to gain the consent of parliament as a whole.
Because we have no written constitution the law is made on the hoof with decisions reached by considering decisions made in other courts which then became part of common law, itself the basis of all legal judgement.
Statutory Legislation concerns "legislative acts" which pass through parliament, and, after debate and a vote, become wholly the business of Parliament and not the Prerogative of government.
Statutory Legislation in 1973 secured our passage into the EU, and it is this legislation that is being in effect challenged by government through a Royal Prerogative.
The people who brought the application to the High Court today challenge the legality of using the Prerogative powers to overturn an act which originally saw life in Parliament and which they argue is the job of Parliament to overturn.
I must be a wonk because I love the arcane argument and the delicate judgement based on interpretation and language. It's the intellect working at 110% and just listening makes you up your game as you try to follow the logic of what is being argued.
I have been to the Old Bailey to sit in the public gallery and listen to Applicants who have brought a hearing to the Appeal Court when their cases, having been tried in a junior court, feel that they have been unfairly judged. The barrister leads his case and three judges listen and question the points made. The thrust of legal opinion is quite cutting between these "high minds" and their Lordships can be damming towards the QC who is poorly prepared. In some ways it's theatre, a contest of words and meaning set in the arcane setting of a court room where no allowance is made for misinterpretation. At this level no accommodation can creep in to the affair, the finite meaning is all that can be allowed, dotting the 'i' and crossing the 't' is the life long business of these people and, like jockeys in the final 100yds, the whips are out and no holds barred.
Of course the issue won't make any difference to the triggering of Article 50 but it will ask much more of the Government since it will have to present a case to Parliament covering not just the motion to trigger Article 50 but the much more thorny issue of when triggered what the Article means to the economy and the standard of living of the people living here. Speculation which has been smothered in conjecture and hidden away for another day.
For the legal eagles it means even more as they feather their nests on the minutia of constitutional law. For them "form" means more than "substance" they have squirrelled enough substance to get them through many a winter. Much more important is the procedure and president of law, unearthing the meaning which lies behind any or all of man's historical acts and interpreting them in today's world, which I would contend is nearly an impossible act.

Irish Home Rule

Reading a fascinating book by George Dangerfield written in 1935,  called "The Strange Death of Liberal England" I am struck by the prose and the lofty, somewhat supercilious air that this man of letters has towards the movers and shakers of the period he writes about at the turn of the century (1900) and the great issue of the day, "Home Rule for Ireland".

The justification for granting Ireland Home Rule and the outrage this produced in Protestant Ulster, as well as the subsequent rage amongst the Tories towards Asquith's led Liberal government infected the relationship between the two parties. The Liberals had made pledges to that rump of Irish politicians in the British Parliament which made Home Rule for the island of Ireland a necessity. The Irish with characteristic fervour had pursued their cause and many an Irish landowner, part of the Irish aristocracy, spent their days haranguing the delicate susceptibilities  of a Liberal conscience. The Tories were no less enrages at the thought of their land owning cousins in Ulster being thrust under Papal dominance.
The outcome we know and since events were overtaken by the Great War the ire and dislike which arose in Parliament over this matter was one of the reasons the Liberals were greatly diminished and slowly cast out from being a political force in British Politics.
Fascinating as this period is, even more fascinating is the eloquent yet waspish tongue of Mr Dangerfield. Written from a position of hindsight, his book was applauded and highly rated by historians and the academic fraternity  and whilst I find it immensely entertaining, illustrative of the period and the political actors of that period,  I find myself worrying about the power of the written word to obfuscate and  obscure the true picture.
There is a turn of phrase and a sense of pomposity which the English are famous.
Mr Dangerfield, like Loyd George,  Bernard Shaw and most famously, Mr Churchill, used the English language to weave a picture which had the mist of folk law entwined in the  fabric of truth. The ability, through oratory to raise people to emotional incontinence is a dangerous gift, with little thought to the tensions raised within local communities  where the players are deeply entwined with day to day prejudice.
Never the less, a great read and a fascinating insight into a period which saw the gradual demise of British hegemony.

At what cost to the individual.

 

 

All nations are like a tarnished mirror, they reflect the image of the people who look into them. If the source has afflictions and affectation then these will be reflected as the common denominator which describes the nation, warts and all. This reflection is taken as a national characteristic and builds around itself the cultural and religious variances which help develop a nation. A nation therefore is built not on a prescription of things you would desire but on the rough hewn susceptibility of chance and history. The identity of a people and their back story is what makes them so different even from people who live not many miles distant but have grown up isolated from each other by geography and a limited means of travel.

This myriad complex world of substance and difference, a world which has slowly matured over centuries has been the scene of an experiment the like of which has never been seen. For reasons of economics and profit and brought about by the marvel of  inter-connective communication via the internet, the hatching of a plan to divide the world into consumers and producers, not as in the old days of placing the production close to the consumer but by sourcing the production in the poorest parts of the world where people are expected to work a whole day for pennies and transporting the goods across the world to the wealthy, allowing  the privileged wealthy to be even more advantaged by buying goods, even more cheaply.    It's perverse in the extreme. 

In our defence of Globalisation and the need to transfer people from all corners of the globe to make the ease of the 'developed wealthy' a little more easy and a little more wealthy, we have encouraged the intermixing of ethnicity and culture and allowed the spin doctors to projected it as a positive. From a better cuisine to better the understanding of the different people and their priorities, priorities which different people bring when they settle in a new country and all is part of a learning curve we must undertake to understand not only the other person but ourselves.

The shrill condemnation of the voices who would question the scale of such social engineering is wholly based on the suggestion that if you question the process you are prejudiced, nay worse, a racist.
The people who are loudest in their condemnation, who fling the epithet that nation states and nationalities are a thing of the past, based on the absurd claim the because there is a genealogy that links us all to Africa, therefore our observance of national norms is tentative, "we all come from somewhere else" is drilled into our conscience making us afraid to question the premise, not for its genetic truth but because the passage of time, geography, climate and so many other factors makes the argument that we are all the same ridiculous, other than as an anatomically collective species.

To assert that the National Health Service couldn't work without the Filipino nurse or the Indian doctor, setting aside the criminal indifference to training the local people to do this work, it never seems to concern the collectivist to address the problems of the brain and skills drain it puts on the countries who lose  these workers to the West. This is skimmed over in the need to homogenise our "think/speak" in order to brainwash the people for the purposes of their containment.

All nations were formed out of practical need. The identity of the British is subject to wild variance between its constituent parts. The Irish, the Scots the Welsh and the English are so different that it is only seen as a composite whole by glossing over the many deep differences and the pragmatic approach to political convenience which political history has connived to make this island race of four nations fairly comfortable living with each other. Imagine the potential turbulence when nations from every calling descend on this tiny patch of ground and claim their inheritance. 

Once again, political convenience will have to be applied but at what cost to, dare I say it, the indigenous individual.

An eight metre sprint

 It was as if time stood still or at least slowed down to a trickle. Waiting in my car I saw the three octogenarians advancing towards me along the pavement. It was like watching the all too regular contest between those huge trucks on the motorway when one driver takes it into his head that he can overtake the truck in front and swings out into the middle lane. A slow gargantuan tussle begins as the overtaking vehicle slowly inches alongside and part of the motorway is blocked whilst this battle for first takes place.

Three old people none of them steady on their pins were advancing slowly, their walking sticks trembling in the sunlight like three Excalibur's waiting the chance to do battle.
Pedestrians coming the other way took one look at these two hombres and an even more determined woman and stepped out of their way. The distanced travelled was not all that great but the determination to be first was unequalled. Slowly the woman drew abreast, a glance to the side and the man in the middle put on a spurt, well he waved his stick in an effort to increase speed since this was becoming the equivalent of Bannister and the 4 minute mile. The two men were grimly intent, the woman grinning all over her face as she tried to accelerate and gage the gap to overtake. In slow motion it all took on an unreal air, the battle of the titans would seem appropriate. There was no reason to the contest, the distance gained was unimportant, like the truck drivers the gain was irrelevant nothing much more than the length of the truck but it was part of human nature to want to be first.
In what seemed like an age the trio drew level with my car and the contest drew to a close as Marie opened the passenger door and got into the car.