Living and Dying

Subject: Living and dying.

What will it be that taps us on the shoulder and gestures us away. What event, a car crash an aeroplane disaster, simply stepping off the road whilst looking the wrong way. Or will it be an unexpected illness, a heart attack perhaps a stroke or a long debilitating illness like MS. Will it be Alzheimer's, that slow disconnect with reality where, in our eyes the person we knew has died whilst the person lives on, unreachable but maybe content in their mental shut down. Then there's Cancer that scourge which is a disease but not a disease, an over replication of cells, which goes on naturally from conception but  suddenly the order is replaced by chaos. There is no shock to the system, like an impact or a cut. No virus or poison just a moment in time when the bodies maintenance system  which has reproduced trillions of cells, just goes haywire for no apparent reason. There's no antidote, no vaccine and no warning. You have cancer.
Perhaps it's this silent nature of the change within your body which is so difficult to accommodate like a thief who steels your precious time and you reflect, why me and why now. 
Coming to terms with our mortality has always been a philosophical question, it was usually about others who had passed away, people you knew, people of your generation, friends and even family but not somehow you. Your own death was never in your thoughts and if it was you rather thrust those thoughts away as being unhelpful. 
But now with the knowledge of your own private cancer a new perspective on life, a new route is being taken, a new regime is put in place to confront this thing you have never taken seriously, your mortality. 
Time lines are drawn, the visualisation of our fragility and the hypocrisy which attends our lives, thinking that our experience will go on and on, as if it were a right. The concept of our 'immortality' is part of the protest we make, of seeing ourselves as special when in fact, all we are is a cell replicating process which at any time can go wrong.
Can we confront our mortality with religious conviction, yes of course we can. Can we pacify our fear by studying a philosophical treatise which applauds death as it gives the believer an opportunity for rebirth and improvement. The assumption being that life is not just for living but a period for study and preparation. 
There are of course many who have no props, no belief in a life beyond death, only nostalgia and a pragmatism which protects us from the truth, that like the wind we come and go. 
Life is a biography, a series of stories and events which for good or bad have been the stepping stones of our varied lives. Looking back if we can envisage that we did no intentional harm, that we engaged where we could with openness, and resolutely refused to hold a grudge. If we sense satisfaction, not of the money we didn't make but of the lasting friendships we did. If we can, in part hold to Kipling's famous poem If, which sets out some of the criteria for having lived a good life, then your purpose in life is fulfilled, be you a Christian, Buddhist or Atheist. 

And Trump flew over the cuckoo's nest

 

Subject: And Trump flew over the cuckoo's nest.

The people in the protest industry and it is an industry, seems oblivious to the context of their actions. Hell bent on picking a fight with Donald Trump they are chaffing at the bit to issue him a bloody nose, never mind the consequences of picking a fight they can't win. No amount of ideological bravado can avoid a bruising contest which we are bound to lose.
Watching the plane land one assumed there's no struggle with the cabin luggage,
no queue to reach the door, and certainly no suggestion that they won't be met when they disembark.  No stressful scanning for his bags on the luggage carousel or missing a red ribbon tied to the handle, no flicker of concern that they didn't  put it on board.
It must be strange, used as we are to our obscurity, our lack of importance, to always be the centre of attention. Always having photo lenses poked at you, your every word taken apart for its meaning ( if it has one). (Trump is excused that).

His helicopter has just flown noisily over our house, not more than a couple of hundred feet above the roof. It doesn't say much for security, flying that low, a bazooka in my garden would easily have scored a hit and brought him down.
His ongoing spat with the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan is unseemly. The days of grown up diplomacy seem long gone, the to-ing and fro-ing of insults via twitter is sadly symptomatic of the mis-use of social media. Is it any wonder that ordinary people are constantly at each other's throats using this disconnected, artificial method of communicating.
London will be full of protesters getting over excited about Trumps visit. Many more will protest than the small number who protested against Xi Jinping, the Chinese President, a man with many more 'human rights' offences against his name. Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe or Turkeys President Erdogan all found a measure of support amongst the protesting public but Donald Trump has armies of haters, not because he was responsible for waging war on his own people, not for his despotism but because he is an unpleasant man. If being unpleasant were the trigger for acute, almost irredeemable hate then we would be at each other's throats most of the time but being unpleasant was never a crime. The dislike for Trump is based on innuendo and new found 'norms of conduct' which have become almost sacrilege within the snowflake community.
Sensitivity is the defining aspect which describes these people who feel Incensed by Trumps attitude to women, his intolerance of unfettered immigration from South America through Mexico, his concern about the strategic imbalance from the Chinese and their  refusal to accept copyright law, the indiscriminate misuse of social media by Russia to skew the presidential election. The list goes on. He is damned for being a nationalist, as if in the 'hippy happy' world of multiculturalism, the nation states he rails against would in any way show any sort of reciprocation. I don't know if it's drugs or their woozy view of the world which induces such an evangelical fervour, "love will heal our disunity", be it religious disunity or plain economic greed. The leaders of Hezbollah and their nation state Iran, are in no frame of mind to sit at any peace talks in any of the conflict zones they currently engage in and when Jeremy Corbyn supports their cause in the Palestinians fight against Israel but won't countenance  sitting down with Trump at dinner tonight, we are in a right old ideological mess.

Punching above our weight

 

Subject: Punching well above our weight.

I'm subject to binges, not liquor binges, the call to those has long gone.  My binges are books and authors, genres  which ebb and flow depending on what has caught my eye.

Many years ago I bought every spy novel by John le Carre, fascinated by his story telling and intrigued by the murky world of espionage. It was such a pleasure to take up his story line each day,  the intrigue and the cross dealing, never quite knowing who's side who was on.
Books by Philip Roth who novels about America and the American psych are spellbinding, as is the textured travel writing of Jonathan Raban with his insight into the open spaces of the USA and his love of a coastal sea on which he meditates about the country sitting just across the strip of water between him and the shore. The  pathos and hedonism which spoils so much of what goes on on land. Another American author  Richard Ford, is great for his complex gritty plots which have you squirming.
Travel writers though are my favourite. Paul Theroux takes the journey onto a different level, his narrative is full of characters he meets along the way. Their stories are the backdrop of the place he is visiting and bring to life the essence of each country.
At the moment I am captivated by the prose of Colin Thubron an English travel writer in the 1980s, his trips through China and Russia, the steppe, the immensity of space and the effect that space and history has had on the people makes the read fulfilling. But it's more than the story and the detail he describes, it's the way he describes it, his choice of words and his skill of knitting the words into a slow subplot. The story comes alive as each sentence is examined as a work of art. I read him slowly like sucking a boiled sweet the flavours revealing themselves, all in good time.
The ease at which you can go on a trip into the unknown, no jet lag, no queues only a £9 fee paid up front and off you go.
From political intrigue to financial skull

duggery. From the biography of a childhood hero to the historical perspective of wars fought generations ago but which in their time warped the world and may well do so again.
Human beings, in all their stark disingenuousness, perhaps more nature than nurture, more confused by the system we use to evaluate our sense of right and wrong than a desire to do harm.
Books on the quantum and the quark, books on time and it's implications which have  no meaning in our observable universe. Concepts of space and time which sets us not at the centre of anything but an inconsequential blip right at the edge of just a small part of the universe.
Books on theology and religious observance, books on belief and conflict due to that belief. Books on evolution which place the biblical story somewhat adrift in time. Books of philosophy which try to reason our reason for reasoning, and books of human involvement which make one realise that given our inconsequentialness we never the less seem to continue, as a species, to punch well above our weight.

The Nasty Party

 

Subject: The nasty party.

The scandal of under funding in social care for the aged has its roots in the Cameron Osborn era when there was a mechanistic desire to bring financial borrowing down as soon as possible regardless of the social consequences. Osborn as Chancellor cut the budgets of most of the government departments, other than defence and overseas aid. 

It highlighted a division in thinking between the the maintenance of the very structure of our social responsibilities and the need to balance the books. It brought in an era of chucking out support services by cutting back on the money allocated to municipal government who are tasked with the day to day running of the services.
The library's, the youth centres, the community police, old age homes the list goes on. They were ruthless in their pruning but as a gardener will tell you, too much pruning causes the plant to die. We are now at that stage, the health of the nation is dying, people are dying unnecessarily, the youth in our cities are dying of knife wounds, the roads are becoming dangerous through lack of maintenance, the contact points for citizens to go and seek help, the mental institutions, the doctors and the national health service are all under strain, people on disability assistance aren't  receiving their benefit on time and the police force now admit they do not investigate a quarter of the crimes reported because of staffing levels.
Osborn and Cameron ushered in this age of austerity because of an ideological assumption that 'everyone' was on the take and like headmasters in a school they were going to introduce a leaner, more financially efficient structure so that the board of governors in there case parliament would see how clever we have been in balancing the books.
The under laying destruction was for them a price worth paying, both were very wealth people in their own right. They lived in na an land, Westminster where privilege insulated them from what went on outside the walls. Their schools were privately funded (with a little help from being granted charity status) and so the funding cuts to education, just at a time when pupil numbers were increasing due to immigration, have set back pupil to teacher ratios to those prior the 1950s at over 30 pupils per class, virtually impossible for a teacher to give a properly structured lesson because their energy is absorbed keeping the kids in line. Contrast this with classes in the private education sector with class sizes between 12 and 15, no wonder they secure most of the places to Oxbridge.
Food banks and general deprivation. Homelessness coupled with a housing market designed for the middle class. Rental accommodation now released from the constraints of regulation are, in many cases appalling with little protection from the whim of the landlord.
The Tory myth, a party of inclusion. Mrs May had it right, "we are seen as the nasty Party". How right she was.

Another phobia perspective

 

Subject: Another phobia perspective

My last blog  concerned itself with my own concern of the power of a specific minority groups to effect discussion and modify free speech within society as a whole.
After having written my blog I tuned into a parliamentary committee meeting discussing not only anti- semitism but islamophobia.
Not being Jewish and not being Muslim excludes me from fully understanding the effect of belonging to a religious minority each with its strict rules of behaviour and dress, each with a strict code which identify them from me. And it's here that I draw most of my criticism. It's my sense of being excluded and patronised in my own country, excluded, not so much from the ceremony in the mosque and the Synagogue but excluded from having an opinion on each group, particularly their exclusivity, not only in the respective places of worship but in their homes and their social construct. I remember calling on a Muslim chaps house to collect a test meter. It had been arranged but his wife, fully veiled would only talk to me through the window, she called on her young daughter to meet me at the door and hand over the meter. This was in the UK in 2012 not Mogadishu and a custom which I contend is alien to our country is part of the social fabric of people living next door.
The committee focused almost wholly on the difficulties that these minority groups experienced at the hands of the majority. Each representative who appeared before the committee  to answer questions, the police, the racial equalities board, MPs who had written reports about the issues Muslims and Jews experience but not one representative or mention of the troubles the white working class experience in the very same town dotted across the country. Towns who's whole ethos has been turned inside out by the influence of the swelling Muslim population. Their evidence was a blank slate  in a sea of heart searching from the white parliamentarians who seemed heartened in their support for minorities but seemingly oblivious of the issues brought on people who only 50 years ago had never seen a Muslim but who now are accused of resentment to a phenomena which has changed their lives.
The 'inclusion' (of minorities) and the 'exclusion' (by minorities) runs at the root of this thorny social conundrum. Exclusion from anything is bound to cause some sort of resentment , be it the club because your not wearing a tie, to any gathering which tells you you are not welcome. This is particularly true if the demographics have changed beyond recognition in your life time. Told to accept it as the new paradigm the people who regard themselves as part of the old fabric are exhorted to mix and merge, to form new identities, to accept the new multicultural nature of their previously, all white, C of E environment, for a polyglot to which they feel they don't belong.

Wes Streeting the MP, who has an almost religious fervour  to educate us on all matters deemed racist, a staunch defender of LGBT rights, clarified the matter by virtually demanding that other views, other than his own are wrong.
It's the black and white aspect (no pun intended) which makes this matter so difficult to resolve. People are becoming anxious about the pressure the establishment is putting on them by propagating a stream of definitions of what you can do and say, and free speech inevitably comes under pressure. Of course it's not only free speech but it's the implication of prejudice both in the work place and other spheres of social interaction. Prejudice has always been part of social discourse.  

You only have to listen to a conversation between  supporters of Arsenal and Tottenham to hear bias and prejudice but we accept this as normal.
We are in an increasingly difficult era where the minorities are well represented by people who speak up for the minority cause. Sadly there seems no complimentary concern about the discrimination against millions of white working class people who are lampooned every day on reality TV as being not fit for purpose.  These are the very people who are now asked to accept the change to that fundamentally precious essence of local and national identity.

The power that brooks no descent

Subject: The power that brooks no descent.

The power of the Jewish diaspora and its claim of anti Semitic views held by people in the Labour movement is once again given full media coverage. People are invited onto programs to denounce Labour and particularly Jeremy Corbyn, questioning the weight of of his approval or disapproval of the Jewish sector within society.

People have become scared of sticking their head above the parapet in a way that reminds me of McCarthyism in the US in the 1950s when liberals were terrified to speak out for communism. The very debate is frozen by a witch hunt that uses the power of the media to bully and ruin lives.
Jewish people are a very talented race of people who have spread throughout the world whilst maintaining their exclusivity by effecting tight control over who was able to enter their faith and be accepted by their community. From biblical times their interest in the financial control of business and their preponderance in senior positions in the banking industry and boardrooms around the world has led to them being seen as the archetypal money man, a person who succeeds even when the times are hard for everyone  else. This ability to look after money and the wealth it afforded them was one the reasons they were villainised by the Nazi Party who saw the Jews profiting during the harsh Financial Reparation period in Germany after the First World War.
Ken Livingston's crime for instance was to express his opinion about a historical event in the 1930s where for a short period of time the Jewish Guild in Palestine (this was before the state of Israel had come into being in 1947) had started negotiations with the Nazis to assist in transporting Jews back from Germany to Palestine. I myself have read of these negotiations and Livingston repeated that they had taken place. For this he was assailed by the power of the Jewish lobby and forced out of the Labour Party.
In essence this lobby seem to have everyone by the proverbial. Their reach into our society, like their reach into the American society runs deep and perhaps if for no other reason we should be wary of this power and influence. It has no democratic rules of engagement, is proponents are shadowy figures who are well versed in using the media to create a witch hunt, this time against Labour and in particularly Jeremy Corbyn.
Communism and Finance are difficult bedfellows. The Marxist dogma of workers selling their labour to the capitalist and the unequal return labour received from the process was critical in the relationship of communism to capital. In some eyes the Jews in Russia represented the power of capital to distort what was truly the worth of the workers.
People these days avow communism linking it to the failed state of the USSR, without properly understanding that as a political philosophy it was an antidote to unfettered capitalism, where only a few succeed and the majority are left as second class citizens.
People like Corbyn have had a lifetime of arguing the fate of communism and the rampant unfairness of capitalism. The Jews who rank high in the capitalistic hierarchy were always a part of the political dialog he had had and his position on anti semitism is one of distrust as the levers of power now define what you can and can't say about the power of the Jewish influence in this country.
They have become the sacred cow, above debate and criticism, their grip has tightened as yet not on what we think, (that would be Orwellian) but on the commentary. I can think of no other discussion hedged around as much as the the question of Jewish hegemony. It's a mine field in which commentary has been effectively closed down, other than what the Jewish community wish us to think and say.
No wonder Jeremy Corbyn has tussled with his consent to the IHRA (the International Holocaust Remembrance Association) definition of anti - semitism, as a prejudice or discrimination against Jews. Any other society on earth can attract prejudice and discrimination, but not the Jews.
The reason given is their mass extermination in the death camps by the Nazis, a heinous crime but no similar injunction is made when questioning the gypsies who were also singled out for execution or the  millions of Russian Slavs were executed as vermin by the Nazis, no memorial is made for them.
As always, it's a question of where the power lays, and as Jeremy Corbyn has found out to his dismay, this power brooks no dissent from anyone.

Designed delay

 

 

Subject: Designed delay.

We instinctively have faith in the medical profession, to lesser extent the legal profession  and quite a few notches below that, our politicians.

The haemophilia scandal, which we have only recently become aware of, has been simmering for 40 years since contaminated blood was given to patents in the NHS.
The deliberate obfuscation by the authorities is a repeated feature in this country where the guilty parties seem to be able to get away with it time and time again.
The trick, as we have seen in so many contentious moments when the authorities have been embroiled in dubious decisions kicking the enquiry down the road as far as you can, is to call for a Commission of Enquiry and place at its head a retired judge to while away his time producing a report. Governments are able to establish delaying tactics by appointing senior judges who are above reproach but who work with their own sense of urgency. A year, two years, three years for time to take statements and analyse the responses seems, to the layman far too long leaving the aggrieved feeling left out of the loop whilst officials take their time.
The Grenfell Tower inquiry has been spinning its time out,(two years and counting) to the anger of the people who survived the fire but lost so much in the blaze. The scandal of who shall pay for the replacement of the type of cladding used, not only on Grefell but in the tarting up of so many municipal blocks, seems to be shifting from the builder to the residents with residents now facing huge bills to cover the cost.
The Bloody Sunday report which has drawn attention to a number of British solders, now either dead or in their retirement that they should be brought to court to answer charges for actions taken under fire in a hostile environment. The amnesty which applied to the IRA solders and was part of the Peace Treaty signed by Tony Blair seems to have been based on the fact they the IRA were classed as individuals and not part of the security force who's official capacity demands a different level of responsibility.
The dreadful loss of life in 1989 at the Hillsborough Stadium in Sheffield was a case where the police were  found culpable of many errors but were able, through the system to delay the investigation for many years.
In the case of asbestos and coal dust damage to the lungs, the amount of delay in coming to conclusions meant that many people died before their cases could be brought to court and therefore their relatives missed any compensation which might be due,
One wonders if this in fact is the main reason behind the delay. Often the public purse is at risk and the longer the wait, the fewer the claims.