The Judge RANTS!
Date: 14/02/15
More Than A Thousand Words
You know that old saying about what a picture can paint in verbal terms? Cop a load of this (as featured on The Graun's website this morning:
If ever an image summed up a situation, then this qualifies. I mean, look at them (if you can bear to)! Three very wealthy men in early middle-age, well-groomed, well-suited, utterly comfortable (despite their rhetoric) in each other's company, because they are all ultimately part of the same gang. As they always have been. Consider (from left - if only geographically - to right):
- Edward Samuel Milliband. Age 45. A scion of the aristocracy of what the Brits flatter themselves is 'the Left'. Corpus Christi Oxford and the London School of Economics. Special Adviser to the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Parachuted in to Doncaster North (a place with which he had no prior connection) to be 'their' MP from 2005.
- Nicholas William Peter Clegg. Age 48. Son of a banker and a descendent of Russian minor nobility. Educated at 'independent' (i.e. private) schools and Robinson College Cambridge. Former PR man for a company which lobbied on behalf of the Gadaffi régime. Later a lobbyist on behalf of such luminaries of business ethics as British Gas. Parachuted in to Sheffield Hallam (a place with which he had no prior connection) to tbe 'their' MP from 2005.
- David William Donald Cameron. Age 48. Son of a stockbroker and of a daughter of a baronet. Educated at 'independent' (i.e. private) schools and Brasenose College Oxford. Special Adviser to the Chancellor of the Exchequer. PR man for a dodgy media corporation. Parachuted in to Witney (a place with which, etc.) to be 'their' MP from 2001.
All that is missing from the picture is the gurning phizzog of someone who, we are assured, is out to 'break the mould of British politics' (© the SDP (deceased), 1981), namely the leader of our very own Insane Clown Posse himself:
- Nigel Paul Farage. Age 50. Educated at an 'independent' (i.e. private) school. City through and through, having worked for no fewer than four major players in the Square Mile casino. Professional politician ever since, having founded his party in 1993 and having been a member of the Parliament of an organisation he wishes to abolish for the last sixteen years. Parachuted himself into Thanet South (a place with which, dee-dah, dee-dah) with a fervent desire to become 'their' MP from any time now.
And that, my dears, appears to be the sum total of options available to most of the electorate in just under three months from now. To call the prospects 'depressing' would be a misuse of the word not merely from the point of view of it being a terrible cliché, but also because it would cause us to miss a golden opportunity to use the phrase 'absolutely fucking appalling'.
As the more perceptive and forward-looking Americans tend to say when viewing the prospective Presidential candidates on offer (mostly, but by no means exclusively, on the Republican side), out of such a large potential field, "is this really the best we can do?"
Think, if you will, of those of your own acquaintance who get on with their lives every day doing things which actually matter: things like looking after the helpless young or the equally helpless old; like keeping the roads clear so that everyone else can get on with what they need to do (*); or like managing to keep a small- or medium-sized business on track in an environment where those paragons of probity in the banking biz are not willing to lend you anything like the consideration that they are willing to offer the Titanic captains of industry whose casual venality has brought us all so much contentment and success, and where you are likely to be doomed - especially if you are in the retail sector - by cosy little deals stitched up between 'developers' and complaisant and eminently-bribable planning officers and councillors which will enable a 'major player' to dump a supermarket or 'shopping experience' within half a mile of your shop.
All of these people would, you might agree, be eminently more suitable for positions of political responsibility than almost the entirety of those who currently get to do it. And - allowing for the natural weaknesses of people in general - you would almost certainly be right.
But there is no chance that any of them would ever now have the opportunity to do so, at least not without divesting themselves of those very same qualities of probity, imagination or just simple, down-home empathy which would make them suitable for the job.
For not only has social mobility not merely ceased but gone into reverse these past forty years, the possibilities for anyone not already of the 'right' background getting into a position of political influence has diminished to the point where one would need the Hubble Telescope to make it out in the far, far distance. And even then it would be fuzzy. There was a time - well within my own life-span - that former trade union officials or minor academics would find a place at the table of power without too much difficulty (although I admit that - then as now - who you knew mattered greatly as well). It is a mark of how bad things have become that even I find myself looking nostalgically back at the Thatcher administrations (aka, The Normans' Conquest) with a greater degree of regard for those ministers and MPs who had actually done things other than politics before shouldering their way into parliament. True, they tended to be oafish self-made men who seemed unable to comprehend that, just because they had been able to do it, that didn't mean that everyone could if they simply bucked their ideas up a bit; but they had a hinterland which had at least some grounding in the world in which the rest of us had (and have) our being.
It now seems that the Old School Tie of the historical cliché - having been loosened or even cut off altogether - has now returned, tied into a tighter knot still, and which knot is throttling any remote possibility that we poor deluded consumers might some day end up with a government which was at least able to recognise real life as she is lived by the many and make some accommodation with so inconveniently squiggly a concept.
It can therefore be no surprise that we are so heavily sat upon by a beast sporting an arse comprising four cheeks, and one which recognises only what it is told by the vestigial brain complexes in that nether region (or, as they are usually termed, 'the popular press' and 'influential think tanks'). So we can have three-point-five parties who are all in favour of cutting services to those in need in order to pander to the financial sector, or to buy-to-let parasite landlords, or simply to popular prejudice; and where the proudest boast of the self-styled 'People's Party' (sic - very) is that it will be as ruthless and inhumane towards the poor, the unemployed, the chronically physically and psychiatrically ill and those who have been the victims of simple bad luck as such virtuosos of viciousness as Iain Duncan Smith and Esther McVey have been.
It has got to the stage whereby even I - despite what I have said more than once here in the past - am doubting the point of voting in May. Although, living in a colony as I do, I have one more plausible option than they do just a few miles away over the border, I cannot summon up any degree of enthusiasm for what is risibly termed 'democracy' in this land today. If the word 'democracy' is to have any meaning, then it must encompass the notion of having a real and viable choice between the programmes available. What is being proposed to us now consists of nothing more than four channels of property porn and feckless-proles-shock-horror 'exposés', although you might be lucky enough to catch a glimpse of something different if you live in a border area, but even then the picture is so fuzzy and distorted that you don't have much hope of being able to make out what you are being offered.
(This is except, of course, for viewers in Scotland, who have their own programme. And a far more interesting-looking one, too)
I suppose that I will drag myself into the polling station on that Thursday morning, before I - with an equivalent lack of spring in the step - troll on down to the day job. But I cannot guarantee at this stage that I will not deliberately 'spoil' my paper in protest at being held hostage by a system run by and for the benefit of a self-perpetuating, self-regarding, self-obsessed and self-abusing élite whose loyalties are far greater towards one another than they ever now can be to those of us who have to put up with the inevitable results of their dwelling in the Hall Of Mirrors which the Palace of Westminster increasingly resembles.
* And this is as good a place as any to ponder the question of how the snowplough drivers get to work without a snowplough driver clearing the road for them...and how that driver of that snowplough himself gets to work unless he lives, as 'twere, over the shop.
