… if the question is - How do we prevent political Armageddon
or even just Armageddon?
Yes, something occurred to me as I struggled in the
swamp of near insanity, paddled in the parallel universe of how-did-this-happen
and crawled through the dense dark forest of daily despair that is the current
news cycle. Then the clouds opened, the path sprouted flowers… Ok, that’s enough
of that nonsense.
Sometimes you get hit by that lightning bolt of
inspiration and I did.
Like many, I watch horrified and fascinated while
Trump undoes anything and everything good that Obama achieved – from
environmental policies and healthcare to protecting young migrants (see last
week’s blog) and on and on. Even his own people now seem to see that Trump is mesmerised
with being the anti-Obama president.
Here in the UK, as we flush ourselves down the
toilet of self-focus and global ridicule called BREXIT (see my letter in The National
yesterday http://www.thenational.scot/comment/15540790.Letters_II__Boris_is_trying_to_cover_himself_in_faux_glory
) I wonder what could bring society back to reason, back to caring, back to
functioning.
From the failure in social housing policy, brought
to our full attention with the Grenfell tower horror, (see my most recent
letter in The Guardian - https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/sep/17/local-community-should-set-up-their-own-grenfell-fire-inquiry
) to the crumbling infrastructure evidenced by everything from poor road maintenance
and dysfunctional over-priced railways to school standards, the sense of
wrong-path-taken has never been stronger.
But, like those tangled cables that wind themselves
into an apparently untraceable mess behind your electrical items, it is possible to find where they lead and
where they started. Even the triple mountains of personal debt and even the
increase in the numbers being mauled by vicious dogs point, in my view, to an
identifiable root cause. What is the common denominator here? The answer, I
suggest, is incredibly simple. Margaret Thatcher. Even training our young to
normalise eye-watering debt – which I trace back to the introduction of tuition
fees in 1998 – was a policy of son-of-Thatcher Tony Blair (see my letter in The
Independent last week http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/letters/magic-money-tree-theresa-may-conservatives-brexit-juncker-a7946921.html
).
(Actually The G and The I BOTH published two of my
letters last week. I think everyone else is too depressed to type.)
Both Thatcher and Blair preferred to spend on war
rather than social investment. As the Chinese billionaire Jack Ma states, the
trillions spent on war by affluent Western powers in the good times instead of
inward investment, plays a much more significant part in their current woes
than the ‘globalisation’ so hated by the jingoists.
T’was Thatcher who privatised the railways and
essential national utilities and much of British infrastructure. T’was ‘Thatcher, thatcher, milk snatcher’ who
handed a state-grab to the rich long before that was even a term. It was she
who vilified and maligned the public sector that now struggles with low wages,
under-staffing and poor morale. It was she who sold off social housing and
allowed a life-enhancing resource for the working class, which had been a jewel
in the crown of social policy since the 1950s, to be denigrated and turned into
just another ruse for the sharp elbowed and careless to make a fast buck. Thatcher
deregulated public transport and yes – she even did away with dog licencing.
So – in this instance – why don’t we take a leaf out
of Trump’s book (yes I know he doesn’t read and can barely string a lucid sentence
together, I am still being metaphorical). Yes – let us take that leaf. Let us
introduce a broad, blunt, brutal, over-arching Trump-esque policy which is
simply headed thus
Whatever SHE
did let’s undo it and whatever SHE
would do – let’s not…
*
And if you want a break from the political, slightly
sick-making seesaw of politics, go to my amazon author page and check out the free-kindle-book
grab. This week from 21st – 25th
Sept – all bar one of my books should be free in their e-book versions.
Remember – only where books are concerned is there
no such thing as greedy…