On behalf of the rest of us...
It may seem a strange reaction to last week’s local election results but if the best that disaffected voters can do is vote for that a-hole Farage then the following proposal is simply bursting with merit just like processed health foods / chemical hair products with fruity names are always ‘bursting with natural goodness’.
Under better circumstances the argument might lack punch, appear bland, cowardly, dead, uninspired – all of the above. However, by default it may have become ground-breaking. Never has the hard baked ground of conformity and entrenched privilege needed breaking more than it does right now.
Yes, this is about a Scottish break-away.
And if you think this approach lacks positivity, maybe you are right but boy are we ripe for active negativity right now. Why? Because everything that happens, everything promoted as a development or policy or new idea or step forward winds up with you and me, ordinary people being nailed to the floor with one more spike. We’re not just being bled dry we are being flayed, gutted, dismembered and scalped and what is more we are supposed to agree that it’s doing us good.
I’ll go through a basic list just because from time to time it helps to join up the dots – like those pictures in cheap colouring books your mum used to buy for holidays or long journeys. Usually you could work out the image without joining up the dots sometimes you could not but joining them up certainly gave a much clearer image of the puppy / bucket & spade / flower. So;
As a gobsmacking example of sheer brass neck, the topic of unpunished bankers remains live. Until such time as anything actually happens that should happen in terms of knuckle rapping for criminal behaviour the subject is open as far as I am concerned. As an illustration of a whole sector that screwed us royally and globally and then got rewarded and protected by the government bailing them out with public money, there has never been a better example. So we’ll have that dot.
The police and journalists in the same cess pool is one huge can of worms that is too gruesome to visualise but yes the keepers of the peace and the self-appointed keepers of the public conscience have been in nasty bestial unholy alliance.The resulting Leveson enquiry is circus of self aggrandisement, self focus and an excuse to ignore real issues such as the world has possibly never seen before. Anyone who thinks it’s anything to do with ordinary people just because the celebrities or the press or the police or the people running the enquiry occasionally remember to mention a non-celebrity caught up in the moral road crash is being naive to a point beyond redemption. There are several dots here.
Institutions we might have expected more from have shown themselves, over recent years, worse than those we might naturally have been suspicious of for example;
The BBC – more in thrall to celebrity than characters in even the silliest sitcom but still paying themselves plenty at the top and pulling in a licence fee as if they are providing the public service of post war years.
The Anglican Church - more misogynistic than Henry VIII (oh yes there is a connection there!) but still the state church in all ways.
The Catholic Church – more of a danger to children than Herod but still handled with kid gloves with just a few who have the energy to pursue individuals through the courts for a very very long time.
Privatised ‘public’ transport - screwing us over madly year after year, in the name of the free market with train companies attracting more subsidy than they did when they were nationalised. Somehow the free market (thanks Maggie) means that our money goes into shareholder’s pockets rather than into the service.
Privatised energy companies - (thanks Maggie) screwing us over legally. The latest introduction of standing charges simply means that those who use the lowest amount of energy either because they have a small income or are ideologically opposed to knackering the planet (me on both counts) get exploited disproportionately.
And I could go on but I think that’s possibly enough dots. Basically, however much you can see that things are just wrong and bad people in positions of power and/or influence are doing horrible stuff - somehow it just carries on. Those-that-have receive more and those-that-have-not and did not create the mess, are getting hammered in to the ground.
So how does this relate to Scotland?
Well – just maybe, just this once – the good folk north of the border should not worry too much about the logic of the situation or worry about the imponderables such as the economy, whether they would be better off without playing host to Trident or being ruled from Eton (sorry Westminster – see April 23rd’s blog). Maybe they should just use the referendum to show that ordinary people CAN actually change things. Ordinary people can make things happen that the establishment don’t want.
And maybe – just maybe this once in history THAT is as powerful as the argument gets.
Whilst I can’t forgive Mel Gibson his anti-Semitism this really is about FREEDOM. Not freedom from English oppression but freedom from the corrosive effects of political inertia.
So go on Scotland
JUST DO IT