Go East my son nnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn

 

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Teachers are under the strain of years of under investment, government departments which were designed to regulate have been replaced by unelected quangos and what should be straight forward investment in for instance sewerage control is avoided by the people we pay to do that job (often by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 ramification regarding its launch and flight over.

What is bulling

 

 

Subject: What is bullying

 

What is a bully and how do we define what bulling is. If as a boss I speak harshly towards a work colleague because they have failed to carry out what they had been asked to do, is that bullying. And the word harshly, what does that mean. If I swear at the person that is out of order in the white collar world but on a building site or in a factory, fruity language is much more in use to express frustration.
In days gone by, horror of horror men would take their disagreement outside and settle it with a punch or two and interestingly the outcome was often more amicable than the slow burn of resentment which characterises today's touchy feely method of dealing with conflict
Of course if a person sets out to use their power or physical presence, to threaten or impose fear over an individual then that is bullying which must be opposed but an argument, resulting in a shouting match is not bullying but rather simply an expression of frustration which we all experience from time to time. There are people who do not pull their weight and some who even go out of their way to oppose what a boss needs doing and in such a situation the boss has to win otherwise you have ineffectual responsibility, or worse, outright anarchy.
It was interesting listening to Dominic Raab the Secretary of State for Justice relate how he felt he hadn’t received justice in the complaints made against him by Senior Civil Servants in their dealings with him. Language is a balm or can be a weapon and in his resignation interview given to GBNEWS his calm reasoning I’m sure won many viewers over. “Butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth” best sums it up and one is thrown back on one’s instincts towards any confrontation these days, that the ‘Woke’ community have won, hands down with a swing towards a more feminist agenda in virtually all aspects of communication. The air-waves are awash with claims of male bulling and in the worst cases of assault and even rape. The use of the phrase ‘institutional misogyny’ has cloaked the police in an image which will affect, not only the way they do their job but in the way they recruit. Interview after interview seems to reveal women in fear of their lives as they walk on the street, young girls ignored by the authorities when they complain of harassment or worse, insufficient support in all matter of activities, a veritable floodgate of discontent burbles out revealing just how crass men are towards the female gender. It’s a wave of discontent which ignores the fact that there are often two sides to a story.
Dominic Raab in his story line seems so plausible that it’s only when the other side of the story is told and one is left having to make up one’s mind in who to believe, so it is in the gender war which is destroying our sense of balance between the sexes.
90% of men and 90% of women find sensible  ways of negotiating a way through what is a difficult route of often conflicting priorities. Men these days are quite rightly made to understand their wider role in the running of the house or their role in caring for the kids. In the past men after work congregated with their mates in the pub swopping banter, which incidentally is what the girls do until they have a child.  
The media from which many of our opinions are formed has itself undergone a sea change under the weight of seeking equality and the female is in the ascendency in most areas of public discourse. This can be a good thing but it disguises the fundamental difference between the way the genders think and behave. Women are still far more child orientated. Women to this end of capturing a mate still decorate their image with deep routed sexual displays of attraction for the males benefit. From high heeled shoes to short revealing skirts and an excessive showing of once private areas of their body is now a days almost de rigueur whilst for the most part, men haven’t changed other than discarding the tie. This in itself is an example of the almost fraudulent claim that we are the same and cut from the same cloth. There is something in the mental approach which determines our fundamental difference.
Viva la difference was the old cry but today as yesterday, wanting to display brings with it the disadvantage that having attracted the male spider what do you do (the spider simply eats him) since putting the situation back in the proverbial box is easier said than done, irrespective of what cold jurisprudence dictates.

Easter Sunday

 

Subject: Easter Sunday.


Today we are celebrating an event the resurrection of a man who had died but through the miraculous intervention of god had been brought alive again as part of his passage into heaven. All religions offer a similar theme, an option to the dreadful finality of death with a concept of passing into a sort of spiritual home for the enlightened.
Religiosity is mankind’s bolster against the unfathomable awkwardness of living a life without  the sense of meaning and reward for the good things we do unto others.
Of course doing good should not presuppose a reward, the reward is in the act itself and millions of people each day feel that sense of being rewarded by simply sensing the appreciation of others for something you have done for them when in fact you have done it for yourself in recognising their need.
This act of knocking on the door of an old person living on their own and who are perhaps sick and frail, the stint in the charity shop or the food bank, the offer of a lift into town or rescued someone when their car has broken down, all these are humanitarian acts which don’t need a religious holiday to signify the part we play in the humanity of which we are a part. This is so important in acting as a counter weight to the dreadful bickering which goes on in the media each day as factional interests take over our individual ones. The factions, political, religious, sectarian are a blight on a common sense instinct to do good and what’s right towards neighbour, friend and even foe. The savour rattling and the use of force to make a point which is in the mindset of a few and infects the many through an unrelenting campaign of insidious propaganda.

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 protege sensing his weakness he drives him on with cliches 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,  breeding and cross breading, the 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 Regan's 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 !!