Ireland

Watching the tiny and rather improbable figure of the Irish President, Michael D Higgins walk along the ranks of the Irish Rugby Team, he reminds me of the mismatch that has troubled this tiny island from its very early days. 


As he stares up at these giant men from a hight of no more than 5', it is a reflection of the implausibility of the people of this Emerald Isle to come together at last to find representation in one team to represent all.
Ireland's past has been a history of conflict or warring families and a refusal to properly unite against the common enemy England.
It's strange to think and indeed a triumph, in the years since the last world war, when the nations of Europe banded together to form what became the European Union, that the countries were often on the boil, set against each other.  Conditions in which the most minor diplomatic blunder could unleash the one against the other in a bloodbath.
These islands were, until recent history much the same. The Irish, the Welsh and the Scots all with a common enemy England, all continually plotting home rule, all seeking independence to fly their own flag.
Ireland though was different. First it was an island in its own right and in some way this made it both geographically and psychologically  separate. Just as the UK sees itself different to the European Project by being separated by a few miles of water so do the Irish resent their being drawn into a union.
Irish history as mentioned has been a troubled one with sections of the island being at loggerheads with other sections, each represented by fierce warrior families who needed no urging to attack each other for the slightest reason. The whole texture of society was loose and irregular without organisation or social cement. History was a set of stories passed down over the generations.
The earliest describe the Formorians and the Firbolgs, dark swarthy people, people of whom the stories become legends and describe their battles with Wizards and the like.
The duel assault, from the Vikings and the more sustained assault from the Church of Rome made the development of society difficult in so far the conflict between Pagan bloodletting and the establishment of a church which demanded the totality of your soul was a rocky road to travel.
From the prince warrior, Brian Boru to St Patrick and St Columba, the folk law and the storytelling, the illusiveness of hard facts, make the picture of Ireland's past like the mist swirling over the Bogs of Donegal or County Mayo, a difficult conjecture.
In these early times no system of representation prevailed, the family was the real root. Every head of family submitted to his chief and blood relationships were the only ties. As in Scotland these blood clans were the binding force and as such very localised. The concept of allegiance was to a centralising body was an anathema, a frame of mind which held Ireland back for centuries and which even today results in a great deal of bloody aggression  between the individual factions that represent power and local justice within the society today.
Are you "with us or against us" is not an academic question. In the answer can depend whether you see the dawn and a new day or struggle to survive the kicking.
Rough justice, a methodology born from the lack of a properly formed, political centrist position where opposition is healthy and the question of "them and us" is more analytical than realpolitik.

The Migrant

Migrant - A person who moves from one place to another in order to find work and better conditions.
Migration has gone on for thousands of years and is the backdrop to all European settlement as the people from the warmer south and from Africa migrated north. The Indian sub-continent was self contained even before this period as were  the Chinese,  a settled community going back into antiquity each having a definite, clearly defined civilised society long before the European. 

In Britain we were dressed in skins when the Romans arrived and the Romans gathered much of their knowledge from the Greeks who proceeded them. Even the area from which most of the migrant body comes from, Syria and the surrounding area, were dabbling in mathematics and astronomy whilst the dominant members  of the EU, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands as well as ourselves, hadn't got much further than learning to till the soil. 

I for one was a migrant. Wandering around looking for work, exploring the opportunities that life in another land offered. Occasionally one found a little resentment in not being of local stock but nothing to worry about.
Of course "I" was one, and "they" are many, but is the mind-set of the present day migrant any different from my own or those of you who chosen to 'up sticks' and set up home in another country. Is our motivation any different from the Syrian family or the Afghan who has been seized with the need to improve his lot.
Apart from the numbers, it is our fear of not being able to assimilate a culture which is under-pinned by a strict religious belief and which has a history of domination. 

People on their own are malleable and assimilate fairly easily but people who have a religious determination are the antithesis of assimilation, to them to assimilate is to lose some of their religious heritage and that is a step to which their whole reason for being, is so entwined it is impossible and only conversion of the "other" is an acceptable outcome.

So it's not the migrant but their 'baggage' which worries us. And we worry about their baggage because it is idolatrous, not in the sense of worshipping idols but in the sense of it being an "uncritical excessive devotion to something" which inevitably leads to the complete opposite of the belief that a society, as multi cultural as ours has become can only exist if we assimilate.

Imagination

The sound of cicadas in my head the smell of wood smoke in my nostrils, the lowering sky with the sun settling into the sea this is the setting for my dream as I walk across the burnt plain in that moment when day turns to night in the African bush. The change from day to night is the calling card for the Mosquitoes to arrive and feast on fresh blood, it is the moment when the predator stirs himself to sniff the air and peer into the fast disappearing light. As the light fades the animals tense up and gather closer to the herd, closer not for protection but as a numbers game which signify, why me, why not someone else.
The air is full of new sounds many made by the millions of insects which the hot sun had driven away into the nooks and crannies of the earth, The baleful sound of a a lions roar or the grunt of a wild pig in the undergrowth. The scream of an animal terrified as its attacker succeeds, sinking in its its teeth and dragging the animal down.
Each night has its gory story of life and death, of being part of the food chain, each night is a time to get through, somehow, to await that dawn of a new day, a new 24 hour cycle, where the future is measured in calculation and not a soft pillow in the lodge sleeping quarters.
If I were an ant I would pray to God not to make the ant-eater. Were I a mouse, that the snake hadn't been invented. Each species preying on another, each the others dinner, no end to the strife. A life, of chasing and being chased with retirement not mentioned and only the eventual lonely ousting once past your best.

Living within your means

Have you ever asked yourself why the reporting of costs these days is always in the billions of pounds rather than millions which was common a number of years ago.
Monetary inflation, largely the result of Quantitative Easing, the Central Banks pumping money into the system, effectively devalue currencies and leads to an erosion in value across the board.

Harold Wilson famously described it as "the pound in your pocket" after his devaluation in 1967 by which he meant what you could buy much the same with your pound. Remember, in the 1960s the purchases by the man in the street were relatively simple and largely home produced, and therefore it hadn't devalued across the board and life was relatively unaffected. Of course it was a con since imports went up but for most of us, it didn't matter.
With this phenomenon of QE being practised by most economies across the globe, the trade advantages, of having a cheaper currency to exploit overseas markets is lost or evened out as devaluation is much the same across all sophisticated societies.
Billionaires become more and more common as they exploit the currency fluctuations whilst we at the other end of the economic spectrum  stay, if we are lucky, virtually static.
Coming off the pre war gold standard and falling under the fixed convertibility of $35 to the ounce agreed at Bretten Woods after the war was a currency bench mark but when Nixon stopped the convertibility and allowed the dollar to float, the gloves were off and the speculators were given free reign.
Today's currency hardly relates to anything. The debt mountain is now many multiples of the total assets in the world and so a book of accounts resemble a bankruptcy of unimaginable proportions. It's all silly money played in a casino with no one accountable for the house. 

One day it will come crashing down as it nearly did in 2004. 

The banks on whom we place our trust are in the hands of shareholders who demand growing returns. Short-termism is the only game in town and one wonders, as the banks fail and close their doors,how we the people will survive without our credit. Perhaps Barter will be the currency. Grow your crops and learn to weave as you hunker down and re-learn how to live within your means !!!

Perhaps we will rediscover ourselves, discover our true strength of character working with the little we have and not dreaming what credit can buy. 

We will join the billions of others who have no bank account, no financial gizmo to provide the "codology" which we were fed in the early 60s when the money we earned was not paid directly into our own hands, as it had been at the end of a working week, but had to be deposited into a bank account, a financial deceit if ever there was one. Your money became their money. They used your money to trade and lend on substantial rates of interest, whilst paying you nothing for the privilege. 
They issued you with credit  cards and other incentives to spend and charged you on each purchase or on the use of the card which had been thrust upon you irrespective of your wishes.

They incentivised the banking system by drawing us all into its clutches and you and I have been their fodder ever since.

Making the distiction

Making the distinction.

There is always a distinction to be made. Another view point which has been formulated in a different environment with different touch stones, different values.

We were talking about Uber. The American on line taxi ordering service which is sweeping the world. 

As an idea it's terrific. Since we are all connected through the Internet in one way or another we, the seller or the buyer are constantly  at each other's service. 

Services are generally constrained by regulation designed to protect the buyer from exploration since it is assumed the buyer is the more passive and vulnerable party and probably hasn't considered the full implications of what he is buying.

As I wrote that line the image of Lloyd Blankfein came into my mind. His smug, arrogant face as he testified in front of the American Congressional Hearing regarding why the Banks had got themselves into such a financially precarious place in 2004. He was justifying how some of the tools his traders used to make money were not immoral but in his famous analysis " the trade was between two functioning adults and therefore if the one person was selling the other a package of rubbish it was up to the buyer to detect it". This in a sentence summed up the business of modern financial investment. There can be no rules or protection, during the sale, other than the "common sense" of the buyer. 

It turned on its head the age old concept of having to verify what's under the bonnet !

Verifying what's under the bonnet is such a fag. Providing rigorous training or such old fashioned concepts as holiday and sick pay is out of date. Seeking to uphold safety and hygiene are all an unnecessary overhead and distort the bottom line. 

To the person I was speaking to this was all irrelevant since the "opportunity to make money" was the criteria and, to his credit he posted the idea that it did allow ordinary low skilled people the opportunity to work. 

Of course he was right the Internet has allowed us to buy medicines from China, bypassing the doctor or the caution of pharmaceutical registration. It introduces porn into our children's bed-rooms and gambling into the lounge. It is both ugly and beautiful and, as was said this morning, it cuts away the red tape of convention where work skills burnished through experience are cut out of the loop in the never ending desire to reduce things to the bone, where everything is judged on price and not on value.

Pucker accent

I suppose one has to be a political anorak to find interest in watching old re-runs of general elections but then growing up in a northern, socialist household with my dad having experienced the hardships of the 1920s, 1930s, indelibly marking him for life and demanding change in a country defined by class and birth right.
He was one of those people who was ideologically drawn to events in Russia (he went so far as learning Russian) where the proletariat  had overthrown the Establishment for communism and there was a new dawn in civilised relations where people would be equal or at least treated fairly.
Of course it was all high jacked by Stalin but the ideal lived on and the sanitised socialist party in Britain began to make progress.


The program I was watching was the 1966 election. Harold Wilson, my hero had been elected in the 1964 election on a small majority and he had called this election to give himself a more governable majority.
I had left the UK in 1961 and having spent a few months living in Holland and, via South Africa arrived in Australia my vision of life was very different to that of living in a grimy northern city.
Never the less I followed the journey of the Labour Party after the defeat of MacMillan with interest and watching the re-run of the election, the mention of all those household names from all three parties, not to mention the media people who were beginning to ingrain  themselves in our psyche.
The old black and white pictures. The rudimentary charts and graphs to display the voting patterns through the night. We felt that we were part of the event, people were taking the trouble to explain tomorrow's result and bit by bit the political jigsaw was coming together.
There was much more trust in the leadership those days even deference as we naively believed that they had our best interests at heart.
Cliff Michelmore, Robert McKenzie,  all pucker BBC types.  Jacket and tie, posh accents and impeccable manners. No wonder we grew up so well trained !!

Boris Johnson

I don't suppose there are many of you who watched Boris Johnson appear before the Parliamentary Select Committee to argue the case for pulling out of the EU.

Other than those who live in the UK, Boris is the Mayor of London. An old Etonian running, in his second term, a city which is predominantly Labour. 

He is a man who I can not fathom his popularity with the voting public since every time I see and hear him I am left with the impression that he is a clown. His overall demeanour is a joke, with his unkept hair and that imbecilic smirk. His inability to answer a question without turning the question into some sort of comedy script, leaves me wondering and fearing for my own sanity. But for many it's "good old Boris" as the 'leader writers' and the 'political hacks' make him out to be a leader of the country in waiting. 

I suppose the Romans had Nero and we have Boris, the comedy act to finally put us out of our misery when the curtain descends on  the last act in this nations fall from grace.

The appearance before his fellow parliamentarians in the committee was excruciating. 

He bumbled along, playing his normal part of the absent minded joker. He read from a document which purported to have current facts and figures only to have it pointed out by the chairman that the document was dated 2014. He has no views that you can pin down as original, only generalities delivered as if he were addressing an after-dinner gathering of his old school alma mater. Wink wink nudge nudge.

And yet the media continue to carry the message that this man is to be the next Prime Minister.

Where's the catch. How can seasoned hacks be so in thrall with this man. I know we the voting public are susceptible to being softened up by the 4th Estate but this is ridiculous and very scary. 

Even South Africa's President Zuma begins to look ministerial when compared to this blond monkey, this "jackanapes" !!!