(This is the last post for the summer)
When I was about 8, an older boy my brother knew punched me so hard and so unexpectedly that my face was badly bust and I was laid out on the ground bleeding profusely and half unconscious before I knew what was happening. My friend Jane ran screaming for her mother who came and carried me home.
This boy was previously quite encouraged by my mother who liked that he was from a wealthy family and went to a fee-paying school. When asked why he’d punched me he calmly said he’d ‘wanted to practice [his] boxing’.
In the 70s I went to a comprehensive school in Solihull – a place with a disproportionate number of fee-paying schools and I later attended a 6th form where a number of students from those schools ended up. There was a casual racism and snobbery anyway among the cliquey horrors who made up the generally well-healed youth of Solihull but those who’d come in from the fee paying schools had an air of assuredness and entitlement that usually bore no connection to their actual abilities. It was grim. I discovered what it meant to be rejected for reasons I had no control over and regularly went AWOL in the second year.
Later on, studying law at Northumbria uni, a course which attracted a good number of privately educated young people, I was again spending time with some of the entitled, the well-healed with a group-think so obviously borne of entitlement and a sense that The System was there to serve their needs, it was almost tangible.
Disclaimer – I also know a handful of truly decent ex-public schoolboys – who through sheer strength of personality – seem to have avoided being dehumanised by the elite end of the private and especially boarding school sector in Britain.
However, most of the public school brats who’ve run the country since Thatcher administered the first mass punishment beating on the working class, have behaved like that boy, as if the rest of us are peripheral to their wants and needs.
To date they’ve trashed the NHS, completed selling off UK infrastructure to their mates, taken already meagre benefits from the poor, abandoned the vulnerable (poorer old people / children in low income families / the unaccompanied migrants promised help under the Dubs Amendment / even the poor of the world were hit with a cut in UK aid during the pandemic) because throwing their weight around seems to be what they enjoy.
So now, I look around me and everything is broken. It –Britain - like the office of Prime Minister and bits of Downing Street after a Johnson knees up – is trashed. We are collectively lying on the ground, feeling sick and dizzy, looking at the sky wondering why we’re bleeding.
A new Tory leader, even if it’s a half-reasonable one (and I’m not sure there is one of those in the pack), is not going to alter that any time soon. The posh boys have completed the wrecking of our post-war hopes of fairness and decency. Like dutiful peasants we're all sitting back and waiting for the people in the big house to decide who gets to ‘have a go next’.
But it’s not just Brexit. It’s not just Tory austerity. It is not just the global legacy of the illegal invasion of Iraq which altered so very much it’s hard to know where to begin. And – yes – it’s worth mentioning here that those of us who were so utterly against Blair’s ego fest, DID predict the horrors of that vile adventure just as those who wanted to stay in the EU absolutely correctly predicted the mess we now have with Brexit.
But it’s more than all of that.
In history it is often hard to pinpoint the point; spot the time when things pivoted and altered irreparably. However, it’s really not that difficult in this instance. It began with Thatcher convincing working class people that they could / should buy what was already theirs. Britain has never ever recovered from the selling-off of council homes. Our current desperate housing crisis has its roots there. Privatisation in terms of its scale and consequence is the behemoth – it is the catastrophe of a very British fuck-up. It was a grubby trick that makes those defrauding old ladies out of their savings look like monks. It makes the ongoing unfairness of the bastard Council Tax seem trivial. I was a city councillor when that monster was let loose - see blog 420 Political bullying claims bring back painful memories .
Privatisation of everything that was seen as the legacy for all of Britain in the optimistic post-war era has brought us to where we are now. It culminated in the sell-off of Royal Mail – thanks Vince Cable. Major beneficiaries included a Saudi royal prince getting shares at bargain basement prices. The rotten irony is that while the right-wingers bang on about patriotism and used raw xenophobia (and blatant lies) to sell Brexit – they have sold Britain into foreign hands at every single opportunity – from energy companies to the water we drink and that is before you begin on the issue of Russian Oligarchs funding the Tory party. Boris Johnson recently put Evgeny Lebedev in the House of Lords presumably as a sweetener to daddy Lebedev – pall of Johnson’s and ex KGB officer.
Except for the decent Gordon Brown, the greyness and hope of a meritocracy which came to nothing for John Major and the dull ridiculous interlude that was Theresa May, the rest have all been public school brats and Thatcher’s bastard spawn. Even Cameron’s lap dog Nick ‘Cojones’ Clegg (Lib) who – having screwed over the youth of Britain on tuition fees to get short-lived second-hand power and who went on to continue that work at facebook, was one of them. Party doesn’t matter. Never forget – as well as being a war criminal – something the media seem to have collective amnesia over – Labour’s Tony Blair introduced the private sector into schools and hospitals and is responsible for the introduction of Tuition Fees suffocating the futures of thousands of young people who just wanted to better themselves with a university education.
The greed and self-serving, faux nationalism and Dickensian attitude to the poor, unleashed by Thatcher, has never gone away. I’d argue – it’s why we ended up with a chancellor under Boris Johnson who could shield his own huge family wealth from the UK tax system – while simultaneously spending the taxes of everyone else and see no contradiction. It’s why we had a Prime Minister who had to be shamed by a footballer into feeding poor children during the pandemic but felt entitled to free gold wallpaper.
And now we have a system where the trains don’t work – despite sucking up gargantuan amounts of public funding over decades – much of which ends up in shareholder’s pockets. We recently found out that for years raw sewage was being illegally pumped into our waterways by privatised water companies. The roads are broken. Councils can’t deal with mess (rubbish – dog shit) or repair schools or libraries. HMRC cannot deal with the backlog of folk needing answers to their tax queries or refunds. The benefits application system – deliberately cruel, obscure and hard to access since the introduction of the hated Universal Credit – was broken for weeks while people struggled.
Like the term ‘food bank’, we’ve got used to the expression ‘cost of living crisis’. There is a growing homeless population. Drug deaths are up as services are cut but as often happens at these times of fiscal fragility, the numbers living in extreme poverty shame us more because there are so many with extreme, eye-watering wealth.
The Times Rich List 2022 tells us that the UK now boasts 177 billionaires. So – as I’ve often stated on this blog – the issue is not resources – as always it’s that a few have far too much – and like the Sunaks – spend time and effort making sure it doesn’t find its way into the tax system to pay for stuff all of society needs. But this government and its cronies will happily tell anyone who will listen that the real problem is that there are too many folk on benefits as did dimwit and Johnson toady Suella Braverman during her recent failed leadership bid.
True, there are far too many people having a free ride – it’s just that – thanks to privatisation and decades of the country being run by those from exceptionally privileged backgrounds – those getting the freest of all rides are the already well-healed.
Everything is broken.
Those born to privilege, like Boris Johnson and his ilk are the wreckers. Johnson was simply the Nero of this Julio-Claudian dynasty. But time and again, somehow, the UK public have been persuaded to vote for those who harm them, and those whose lives bear no resemblance to theirs.
Plus, the calibre of the folk taking Britain for a ride has sunk so low that morons like Grant Shapps, a ponzi schemer with a track record of bullying, actually felt able to put themselves forward as potential PM. The smell from a blocked drain would do a better job.
The people paying the price are the rest of us. Moreover, as we sink deeper into the mire created by those with connections, wealth and privilege, as the tide of shit rises exponentially, those able to keep their heads above the stinking waters will be a fewer and fewer.
I had absolutely no idea that boy was going to punch me in the face. If I had, I’d like to think I’d have taken some sort of evasive action. But the ordinary folk of Britain have been punched repeatedly, kicked and hammered; they’ve had their birth-right stolen by those who already have more than their fair share. I do not understand why they bend over so readily for another kicking.
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Other related posts – 187 - British boarding schools breed posh sociopaths
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Contact - I can be contacted at edinburghfft@gmail.com
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I’ll be back at the end of the summer. Thank you for reading.