October 2013

You must know that for those destined to dominate others the ordinary rules of life are turned upside down and duty acquires an entirely new meaning. Good and evil are carried off to a higher, different plane.

Pope Alexander VI to Lucrezia Borgia

I will be brief!

Chancellor Osbourne’s speech to the Tory party conference in the UK last week included one announcement that had not – contrary to what has somewhat sadly become widely accepted practice – been trailed to the media in advance. The gist of this statement was that – should the Tories be allowed another term in office – once the recovery had stabilised and the structural deficit been reduced the Tories would then focus on running a surplus on the nation’s budget.

This would appear at first glance to be a good thing. One should live within one’s means and it is – of course – good practice to put something aside during the ‘fat’ years to see us through the ‘lean’. What went unsaid was that this would of necessity be achieved by extending – apparently indefinitely – the current policy of austerity, with all that that implies as a brake on growth leading to the further erosion of living standards.

This bitter medicine – though difficult to swallow – might just be accepted as an essential part of the cure for our ills were it not for one glaring omission – one extremely large and utterly disregarded (by the Tories!) elephant in the room. This perpetual belt-tightening will clearly not apply to the Tories’ favoured sons – the one percent!

The bankers – the speculators – the masters of the universe… will all be free to carry on awarding themselves inflationary pay rises, exorbitant bonuses (apparently regardless of performance) and eye-watering severance packages. The stateless corporates will continue to play off nation against nation for their favours, effectively deciding for themselves what – if any – tax they will pay and to whom. Whilst the ‘ordinary’ man (and woman) must take in another notch in their belts and watch as their standard of living slowly dissolves – castles of sand washed away by the incoming tide – the rich aboard their hyper-yachts will simply sail off into the sunset, the income gap between us and them growing ever wider and wider as it has been doing since the 1970s.

I have never understood why it is that – whilst at one end of the spectrum workers are expected to ‘price’ themselves into a job – at the opposite extreme these ‘supermen’ – these Übermensch – are apparently incapable of carrying out the jobs (of which they have had their pick!) for which they are already extremely well paid unless they are further bribed so to do – for what are bonus and incentive schemes but bribery – plain and simple. I have nothing at all against those who enrich themselves through their honest toil and creativity – those who build something which is ultimately of the benefit to all. For far too many of the one percent – however – this is simply not the case.

These men must be truly exceptional to be rewarded as they are. They must indeed be exceptional to be feted so by those who represent us. They are also apparently exceptions to the rule by which the rest of us must live. I feel sure – however – that they will not give a fig that we take exception to them!

Which we do!

Flame off…

The modern conservative is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.

John Kenneth Galbraith

Many of us in the UK breath a hearty sigh of relief at this point of the year – for the party conference season has finally shuddered to a close. Those of like vintage can probably just about recall when party conferences actually meant something – when policies were proposed, debated and then voted upon according to whichever greater or lesser degree of democratic process the party in question espoused. It wasn’t perfect. It was very rarely pretty – but at least there was a feeling that the entire farrago had some sort of purpose.

Nowadays these annual gatherings in corners of the kingdom seldom otherwise visited by many of those in or on the fringes of power, are merely tightly choreographed PR exercises, the prime function of which is to garner headlines in the media and to ‘get the message across’. It is a particular bugbear of mine (one of many, you may have noticed!) that ‘getting the message across’ is now considered to be of such import that it is apparently perfectly acceptable to patronise horribly those of us who make up the great unwashed – presumably on the basis that we possess between us no intelligence whatsoever!

We are unfortunate in the UK currently to suffer what is fundamentally a Tory administration. From the Kickass Canada Girl’s pithy epithets on perusing the news from home I deduce that Canada finds itself in a similar position. Now – for the Tories the ‘message’ that must be ‘got across’ is that the entire global financial meltdown – as well as the subsequent and ongoing international credit crisis – was caused solely by the profligacy of the last Labour administration. (Strangely the inverse now applies – any current woes being the fault of those beyond these shores).

Whereas I can just about understand the Tories holding this view – and indeed trying to make political capital therefrom – it is abundantly clear that every single member of the administration that has been given permission to communicate through the media has been briefed to ram this point home at every conceivable opportunity. As a result there is no question to which the answer is free from this mantra – the recitation of the same hackneyed dogma – an endless repetition of the same trite phrases, presumably in the belief that if a thing is said frequently and loudly enough the rest of us will eventually accept it as the truth.

COME ON!! – for pity’s sake… This is the way that a child ‘communicates’ when it wants something that it can’t have. Show us at least some respect!

Lest anyone – at this point – accuse me of getting ‘party political’ I should make it clear that I consider all parties and pretty well all politicians to be equally guilty in this regard. It comes as little surprise to me that the electorate is increasingly and justifiably disenchanted with those who purport to represent us. The Tories – being currently in power – must inevitably, however, be the prime recipients of our disapprobation.

Oh dear! What was intended to be a brief but pithy commentary on the Chancellor – George Osbourne’s – conference speech, has morphed instead into two less than temperate virtual diatribes. I really shouldn’t let these things get to me, but I do find these preening popinjays so very irritating…