Post democratic times.

 Subject: Post democratic times.

Joe Biden bows out and and the Democrats is left with plenty of egg on its face.

I’m amazed in this brave new but unscrupulous world of ours that a man who it’s admitted is be an irascible liar amongst other despicable things is placed on a higher level than a man who sadly is showing the first signs of dementia. 

Donald Trump whose term in the office of the President of the USA was blighted by sedition and his refusal to accept he had been defeated by the voting public and whose public demeanour is one of a tyrant.

An American public seeped in its Constitution should not behave in this way and yet 70 years as the defender of the free world and high on its own appraisal of itself,  its overt accumulation of power and seeing itself through the almighty dollar is about to vote in a most disagreeable man with narcissistic self opinionated  faults that make Benito Mussolini seem almost angelic.

If this image is how Americans now see themselves we are in for a rocky ride especially If their opinion of us is anti American

The Kings message

 Subject: Fwd: The Kings message

Her majesty’s government will :- (and so begins the transfer of power and commitment to change).

“Maintain the balance between ownership and tenancy, the rights of the citizen and the immigrant”. “The right to continue to have underfunded children against the human right to have as many children as you care to even  if the state has to fund the child through to working age. Even the concept of human rights, especially in reference to people coming into the country, as of their right is still challenged.

There is no right in a totalitarian country only the right of the dictatorship to decide, it certainly makes things simpler if a slide rule or algorithm provides the answers and sidesteps the moral/ethical aspect of the question. Is affordability the bench mark or are there deeper values at play.

From the time of the lumpen clog shod factory worker eking out a pittance in the traditional satanic mill, to the soul draining queue at the dock gate for a days work which incidentally made the mill and shipbuilding profitable, to the empty factories and ship building now undertaken on the European mainland. Was it down to the rights of the welder in the dockyard or the machine minder in manufacturing, perhaps the bloody mindedness of management also played a part as it wholly only saw value in the bottom line or was it because of the distance between the ermine and the cloth cap which made paid employment less attractive than income from dividends.

We are caught between two stools. American mythology profit and  power before all else and the European experiment of a wider set of participative values. The Afrikaner in South Africa had a derogatory word for it,  “soutpiel” when describing the English who couldn’t make up their minds whether to be in philosophically in SA or England. Hardly dry on the manuscript, the Kings speech describing Labours proposal for government was being taken apart by the commentators (the enablers) raising all kinds of negative comment. These highly paid armchair experts who infiltrate our minds and set the political atmosphere in and on the media platforms are paid for being controversial and creating the smoke and the daggers which we mistake for healthy political dialogue. The public are left confused thinking that what they had thought a good idea was rubbish and via versa. Is it an any wonder that the mental health of the country is on a downward trajectory, the stress of having your common-sense assailed is one of the root causes of abuse. We are in for a rough ride as the forces of extremism line up to contest for middle of the road opinion and it’s important not to be drawn by either left or right if their direction of travel excludes the right of reply.

Do we make history or does history make us.

 Subject: Do we make history or does history make us.

Are we, of independent mind, willing to force our way to the front of an issue or are we carried along at the back of the class only able to note events as they happen.

With the cacophony of conflicting views presented on the various media channels by  men and women each prepped with at least one angle on the subject and already tailor-made to suite a perceived predisposition.  Can we see a patten which could be called a popular trend emerging to signify the historical direction along which we travel or has our path been so broken up that we hop from stone to stone in danger of being carried away by the fast flowing stream and the hurdles we encounter on route.  

Of course it's true that leaders make history. From Genghis Khan to Adolf Hitler, from Gandhi to Martin Luther King, each in their different way made history and we the people followed but equally of course it was people who brought those people to prominence and it was with the connivance of the electorate (with the exception of Genghis Khan)that they were given a platform.

Donald Trump in the US continues to divide America into irreconcilable camps, antagonistic and diametrically opposing it’s hard to think their opinions are born to people who were educated in the same educational system. The inward looking mid -westerner (many of them Trump supporters) who's once great cities have become waste land as manufacturing  was given over to the Chinese and their immediate world shrank into one of listless poverty by the demand of market forces (well illustrated in Steinbeck's 'The Grapes of Wrath') and supported by the democrat as well as the Republican. History driven by the Banks and venture capital, is being formed, not by leadership but by the short term gain and the needs of the boardroom to protecting the 'investor class'.

Trump's leadership has the belligerence of a Khan but it's hidden in the courtroom and behind the law and the lawyers who nit-pick the contractual clauses rather than one which  envisages a destination which encompasses us all. Trump is a mixture of a Barnum and Bailey showman, one minute on the high wire the next a clown pretending to throw water over his audience. As Circus it's ok but it's no way to run the most powerful nation on earth. The paucity of thinking beyond the glib catch phrase seems beyond the nation who's collective mind has been stunted by generational advertising and gimmicks and who's capacity to think for itself is buried in the copywriters slick phraseology and the promise of jam today.

We aren't far behind in the U.K. with a parliament packed with conformist propaganda, the truth buried under a fear of losing voters and upsetting people with the reality.

Only yesterday the government had  announced their latest master stroke, the intention to clamping down on the 'sick note' and withdrawing pay from those unwilling to return to work. With millions of people now refusing to rejoin the commute into work after experiencing the governments 'stay at home' directive to cope with Covid 19 people seem to have broken with the conformity of generations and turned their back on work in exchange for unemployed benefit payments. These benefits are designed to cover illness in all its shape and sizes as well as economic hardship but generally required the acknowledgement that you are suffering in some way. With a plethora of newly discovered ailments, some fundamentally mental, it’s easier for the doctor, not wishing to risk misdiagnosis, he/she has little option but to hand over a sick note.

As we all watched the Post Office Inquiry it was easy to see how easily Post Office Branch investigators were able to scare the pants of the Postmaster/mistress to the extent they handed their own cash over to cover shortages. Subsequently much was found to be due to a malfunctioning Horizon Computer system and a back door into the system where corrections could be made but notwithstanding, the shortages were allowed to stand and people sent to prison for it. The Directors at the Post Office seem to be Teflon coated since, other than reputaional damage no director has been kept at his majesty’s pleasure.

The PO enquiry drags on, as did Hillsboro, the Grenfell Tower, the Blood Contamination scandal and  one suspects that ‘enquiries’ are simply a method of kicking an issue into the long grass and protecting that class of person for whom birth  trumps everything.

Success or failure are two bedfellows

 Subject: Success or failure are two bedfellows

This morning I woke up to the news of the attempt to shoot Donald Trump.

In a land where shooting people is endemic, it’s surprising only 4 presidents have been successfully assassinated given the public exposure they offer a sniper. John F Kennedy is the most famous of course, in broad daylight shot from a distance with a high powered rifle we see the tragic end to a young man in the prime of his presidency with the hope of much of the western word on his shoulders. He wasn’t without blame and his private life was risky to say the least,  in at least this one aspect Donald Trump emulated him in growing up under the tutelage of a rich powerful father.

Trumps natural chutzpah was to raise his fist in defiance, a show of resilience  which his followers will cherish and their harsh assessment of the world outside the USA makes me worry as Trump supporters show no sense of unifying with anyone other than themselves.

The American mindset crafted by Trumps messaging is quite crude in the concept of any future role America should play. There are few diplomatic niceties, little apparent reflection of the power of a coalition which came into being since Russia invaded Ukraine. The Chinese, already a super power tooling itself up as a nuclear state, Russia with a stockpile of warheads which exceeds even Americas, and now the belligerent kid on the block, North Korea who psychology is so extreme, who knows what they may or may not do. Europe is a collection of disparate states each with different philosophies, tied in to their European experience by a troubled historical past. They could easily fragment if their corporate affairs are threatened.

All this within four years when Russia started to turn the screw. Firstly in Syria and their support of Bashar al- Assad, then the invasion of Crimea and Ukraine,  the west (we mean America) started to rationalise its position, to weigh the odds of the cost of war rather than its strategic importance. The odds have swung towards the totalitarian state,  their collective will unfettered by electoral responsibility they determined the cost in terms of power and the future rewards power will bring.

We never believed, after World War Two and the efforts made towards active collective security through the realisation of NATO that financial backsliding amongst member nations with America baring the brunt of the cost that they would eventually balk at continuing. Amongst the individual nations who benefit from NATO, as with any payment, if you fall into arrears it’s almost impossible to catch up and with so many social commitments promised, without defence spending ring fenced and populations within NATO not educated that the world is still fragile place (just as it always was) and that we can’t take our defence for granted.

The travesty of 14 years of conservative government has meant our armed forces are down 2010 levels and, as with education, health, public infrastructure, social welfare , police, sewerage control etc,etc,etc, the villains in the piece are the Tory party manipulators who stood to gain financially from the marketisation of UK plc. Nowhere, be it the trains, the prisons, the post office, the water companies, the environment agencies and agencies across the board who seemed more in bed with with the business they were supposed to control than the public they were set up to protect.

It’s been a massive failure, this mantra of privatisation but perhaps we as a nation are destined to fail because of the ‘lack of will to succeed’. In some ways mollycoddled by the concept of human rights and the integrity of human action we inflated our worth.

Perhaps we haven’t progressed that far and need to pull our tails in.

Loosing the magic.

 Subject: Loosing the magic.



Over the years of faithfully completing my blog you know I have struggled to describe my ambiguity towards women. It’s not misogyny rather a skepticism  about their aims. There’s no doubt I owe my mom a tremendous thanks for bringing me into this world in what seems such a painful evolutionary process. My mom, bless her, nearly died giving birth to a large 10 pound plus baby, who even at that stage of his life was proving difficult in presenting himself to the outside world as a ‘breach baby’, and this in the slight frame of a tiny 4 foot 11 inch woman.  A miss match if ever there was one and incongruity seems to have been etched upon me ever since as the screams of childbirth lasted into the night and I became the centre of my moms life ambition, (along side my dad of course), who continued his phlegmatic approach to most things, head burrowed in a book or news paper

I watch the safari cam-cord show ‘Wild Earth’ as the distinctively accented South African born guides glide around the hectares of wildlife land in their jeeps spotting the twitching tail of a cheetah behind the long grass or, close to the watering hole we watch the animals parade to drink in a pecking order which helpfully doesn’t mix the predator with the pray. The magnificent maned lion, the laborious elephant, the flighty springbok, all part of an evolutionary fit, eat or be eaten. The fertility circle of the female and the testosterone driven urge to fight and dominate are the constituent values of the wildlife scene, no health and safety malarky, no human rights, just an active pro forma to life and death depending on the species.

Only mankind has threatened this balance of power with the insistence of religious or sectarian  principles governing our actions and what a convoluted ‘mix-up’we have landed ourselves in as we start to veer away from the pronouns which describe our gender.

The lion knows his place, the lioness hers but in the arms wrestle for supremacy men and women have lost sight of this evolutionary purpose. Women force themselves into roles much more fit for a man, witness the role of a female PC as she scrambles around in a melee outside a pub trying to secure fighting men.

There was a time when striking a woman was thought heinous but as women become more assertive in all walks of life that blurring of cultural etiquette starts to fall away and much of the magic is lost between us.

It’s a funny cultural conflation which provided women with the protection of etiquette to instil in the physically more powerful male rules of engagement that were supposed to ensure each know their place and yet, through feminist ideology, much of this protective culture is being destroyed by the insistence of laddish behaviour on the woman’s part and an ongoing defining drama where men are always cast as the villain.

Competition is always a factor in demeaning one thing from the next but if we learn to respect and understand our respective roles then the world would be a happier place.

Beyond the pale

 Who are the civilians in Gaza. As the death toll goes up and up and the Israeli airforce continue to pound the civilian buildings, any sense of “we are civilian they are Hamas” begins to diminish as death becomes the final arbiter for those living, as does any sense of cooperation with ordinary people who might have been nonaligned but who now hate the oppressor on either side.

With a history like this how can a ‘Two State’ solution come into being, (ie the creation of a fully fledged Palestinian State along side that of Isreal’s.) how can normalisation be established for future ties with the depth of outrage swilling around.

Perhaps the only solution is a Korean style separation, such as between North and South Korea with a ‘no go’ area between the two states and economic ties broken as all population movement is stopped. I suppose this is a solution favoured by Isreal’s but not Palestine since they seem totally reliant on Isreal economically.

Perhaps the fault lies in the history of the region and the unreality of any healthy interrelationship. You can’t build a structure when the foundation is weak and the fractured interrelationship between Arab and Jew appears to be a permanent thorn in their side. It wasn’t always so. In biblical times they were Arabs with a tribal difference which defined the social family structure. The house of Abraham descended from Noah split. into Issac and Ishmael. Moses through from Issac went on to found Judaism whilst Ishmael’s  progeny later founded Islam through Mohammed.

Brothers, cousins, uncles who are now at each others throat were once part of the same stock, but as in any family feud the schism runs deeper than normal because of the assumption of ties which when destroyed are inimical even malevolent to rational persuasion.

Humans with their prejudice are unstable bed fellows owing to assumptions of fealty to tribe and kith-ship, and illustrates how bound to support from those around us we are. Swimming against the stream, holding controversial opinions, rank you a trouble maker to be shunned. And yet it’s from the ranks of controversy a way is defined to move forward.

Churchill was a belligerent whist around him the appeasers held sway and we may be at the cross roads as decisions to arm Ukraine with better defensive/offensive weapons might just be that moment. Of course Churchill was not making decisions in a nuclear world were retaliation brings with it such a price but the lesson of the cold war was that at the brink rational voices held sway.

Joe Biden’s dismal public performance contrasted with his coherent strategy as President generally far offsets his early onset of dementia, forgetting names has been with me for 50 years but it quite rightly sends out warning signals. A greater warning signal is Donald Trumps almost flippant attitude to leadership with no sign of cognitive joined up thinking, simplistic popularist rhetoric replaces the balance required in diplomacy

History and the tales it tells.

 Subject: History and the tales it tells.



Reading of the 1930s imposed famine in the Ukraine one sees the historical tension between Russian an Ukraine played out by a monstrous body count. 6 million largely Ukrainian  peasants died of starvation in the Soviets realignment of productive capacity from farming to industrial pig iron. In a day of media attention the sight of ten million staving agricultural worked dying on their feet from hunger should have stifled all political acceptance of communism as a stable alternative to capitalism in the 1930 but the malign aspect of Bolshevik ideology, where people were expendable to the  national ideological plan dreamt up by Marxist/ Leninist thinkers who, when led  by Joseph Stalin was ultimately responsible for up to over 10 million deaths of his own people. These dark age statistics have never been understood in this country as it struggles to come to terms with its period of Empire and Colonialism. The Jallianwala massacre in the Indian town of Amritsar where 379 Indian people were shot by the British Army is a black mark on our history and taught in our schools as such but the Maoist extermination of millions of their own people in the cause of mind cleansing, ranks with Stalin and Hitlers monstrous purge of 6 million Jews in Germany.

The point of history and historians is to set the record straight and by doing so warn the present of the depths mankind can sink when ideologically unhinged. We are different but similar to wild animals and whilst, through the black art of propaganda and untrammelled communication we can be worked up to accept the killing at least the animal does it for food and self preservation.

Language and communication therefore sets us apart from the rest of the animal kingdom and in the case above it was ideology which allowed the blood letting, ‘ideology’ a phrase easily used but little understood, a set of ideas or beliefs, often political which characterise a particular culture. There has to me to be a certain acceptance of a totalitarian mindset for ideology to take over as the dissenter is pushed aside (and often murdered) to collectivise a national viewpoint and its a danger when through media platforms the ‘common man’ is exposed to propaganda. Truth and rational debate give way to scurrilous rhetoric, rabble rousing anger is easily bent to some sinister purpose and the population becomes complicit to what is going on around them. The Weston Capitalist have their own sinister agenda I believe globalisation is one. It desensitises people to the real cost of their consumerism and the hardship it causes in distant communities. It was only through the real time exploitation of the World Wide Web that the fragmentation of the industrial process allowed the poorest to be engaged in production and whilst this brought some relief to the poor in western countries it also took away their ability to compete for work

The politician here and seems obsessed by winning votes rather than being effective in which ever ministry he or she is given. The sense of ‘conviction’ politics seems dead but without conviction the political dynamic is worthless. The merry go round of a prime ministerial reshuffle, moving the dummies in the shop window serves little purpose unless it’s to remove a non performer. The ministerial brief of a department is pretty unique to the type of department they control. Learning that brief and then a year later move the person on to new responsibilities seems totally counter productive.

Rory Stewart’s book “Politics on the Edge” was an incisive expose of the turbulence of ministerial office when plotting and almost internecine warfare between smart boys of Eton prevented him from doing his job when birth has given you privilege, the job you do is almost incidental and the out come almost irrelevant.

We will see I hope a change in emphasis with this new government but never underestimate the power of the civil service and its phalanx of Etonians ready and willing to impede its change.