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It’s been another week of having to focus on the practical and the financial, sorting out all sorts of mundane and boring affairs, from tax returns to shopping, and an MoT and repairs on the car. Thank God life’s not always this dull.
Here’s an interesting fact I picked up this week. Following the closure of the swimming pool in Hythe, there is no longer a single solitary public swimming pool anywhere in the vast county of Kent. Kent is also a county that has somehow retained its split system of secondary schools, and still has the 11+, lots of grammar schools and lots of schools where the rejects have to go.
Is it just a coincidence that Kent is one of the lowest achieving counties in terms of academic success overall? According to a friend who lives in Kent, and who should therefore know, Kent is also a complete cultural desert. Though Kent is by no means the only county that has no public swimming pools that poor people and their kids might like to use.
I found myself back on the trains in midweek, on another excursion to the land south of the river, to delightful Greenwich, for a dinner with old friends, in honour of a very dear friend who was celebrating retirement from a long and very successful career in education.
This was my first ever journey on the Docklands Light Railway, and very pleasant it was too. Apart from having to access the platform at Stratford through a solid cordon of railway police, a human barrier that was forcing passengers leaving the trains to show tickets, or Oyster cards, or travel passes, or whatever. Birth certificates and passports too for all I know.
And all I know is that I wasn’t the only one there who had never seen anything like it. Whatever happened to ticket inspectors moving quietly and unobtrusively through trains? Why do we need to mount quasi-military operations these days to deal with ticket dodgers? Feels to me more and more like a police state.
This was the week the government forced through the Commons its bill to allow 42 days detention without having to make charges. The week Magna Carta ceased to have any meaning. The week the government needed the support of the Democratic Unionist Party, the solitary UKIP MP and dear Ann Widdecombe in order to push through its legislation. This is a government without shame.
My friend K had taken ages to drive up from Kent owing to having to queue for ages for petrol, thanks to tanker drivers being on strike. The oil companies are currently making billions (literally) in profits, and do so in part because they keep the wages of their workers pushed as far down as possible. Somehow this doesn’t seem to strike many of us as unacceptable, and all we find generally is bitching about the striking tanker drivers. Though not from K, who is wise and patient and caring and very wonderful.
It doesn’t do now to be poor in this country, which has increased the gap between the wealthy and the poor under New Labour. And no-one seriously imagines this is an issue that will be even considered, let alone acted on, when New Labour, unloved and despised, finally sinks without trace, which is all it deserves.
New Labour virtually promised in its ‘97 manifesto that it intended to do something about the pathetic undemocratic first-past-the-post electoral system. Has it done so? No. Not a thing. So now we’re heading for yet another 10 years or so of right wing economics and faith in the workings of the ‘market’. Market my arse.
I think Blair would have made a half-decent (if that’s the appropriate expression) market barrow boy. But not Gordon. The gift of the gab, and the ability to actually sell old rubbish, is not something he has. Nobody’s even buying the old line about “No more boom and bust”. We’re back to bust.
This was the week of the ‘climax’ to this year’s hit TV series, The Apprentice, the British rip-off of Donald Trump’s glorious ‘entertainment’, starring ‘Sir’ Alan Sugar and his hard-faced despotism. How wonderfully popular these programmes have been, with their desperate wannabe young capitalists all eager to join Sugar’s honeypot organization and get their grubby little salesperson’s hands on some of that lovely moola. There’s no humiliation they’re unwilling to risk or endure in the pursuit of that holy grail.
10 years we’ve had of New Labour doing nothing about the disgusting racket that’s the housing market. 10 more years of building nothing like the amount of social housing (or other housing) that we actually need. 10 more years of converting what used to be council-owned housing into assets for private landlords and property developers/speculators. How many flats did the Blairs end up buying?
10 years of letting the banking and financial lords of the universe do whatever they fucking well liked, making billions out of conning the suckers that we all are into buying overpriced financial ‘products’.
The driverless DLR from Stratford wends its way at high levels through the towers of Canary Wharf, and offers superb views of these incredible glass and steel symbols of corporate and financial power. Here we have the bastards who miss-sell mortgages, charge high interest rates on loans and offer pitiful interest rates on savings, and who come and go in their limousines and taxis.
Here they all are - the brilliant boys and girls with their fat profits-related bonuses, who are now laughing at having to be baled out of their busted and bankrupt practices by the rest of us, we who can only look on in bewilderment as the government promises never ever to let them suffer the actual consequences of their dealing and gambling - because a general collapse of the house of cards that is the private banking sector is just too horrible and too serious to contemplate. I bet they hate the tanker drivers for making them queue up to fill their Porsches, Ferraris and Bentleys.
These people are fucking criminals and scumbags in my opinion. Irresponsible bastards of the first order who were allowed to rampage unchecked all over the land, conning and betting and mis-selling total fraudulent rubbish. Persuading clueless innocent schmucks who were desperate to get on the housing ‘ladder’ that the good times were here to stay and that they could afford a massive 100% loan on some crap piece of real estate.
Thank you Wall Street. Thank you City of London, thank you Free Market, thank you Canary Wharf, thank you Gordon Brown. Thank you, and goodnight.
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This week I’ve forced myself to catch up with reading the newspapers, and have been spending time, therefore, on taking in other people’s thoughts to a large degree, leaving too little time to consider my own, let alone having time to blog them.
The one original thought I’ve had this week concerns setting out a series of demands which must be met in return for continuing to support the Labour Party. So here they are, and I hope I’ll think of some more in due course.
1. Sack Hazel Blears immediately and apologise for ever considering her for government. Admit that she’s a poisonous dwarf and a disgrace to the Labour movement.
2. Gordon Brown to admit that he’s a rubbish party leader, but agree that he’s prepared to finally embrace progressive politics and causes, and start to tackle inequality, poverty and the negative aspects of the free market.
3. Legislate immediately for the single transferable vote, and promise proper proportional voting asap.
4. Implement a proper system of progressive taxation, with severe penalties for rich bastards who try to avoid paying a proper and fair share towards ridding our society of public squalor alongside private affluence.
5. Apologise for supporting the invasions of various countries under the banner of War on Terror, and wasting billions of pounds and hundreds of lives, instead of supporting the United Nations in united international action to pursue and bring to justice criminals who use violence and terror to achieve political, ideological and religious ends.
6. Put up posters in every town centre declaring in large print that Hazel Blears is a nasty little piece of self-satisfied rubbish; posters to be paid for from Gordon’s own pocket.
7. Make education non party-political. Replace Ed Balls immediately with a committee of professional elders, chaired by Robin Alexander in the first instance, but with responsibility for ensuring that from now on only people with actual experience of managing tough schools and demonstrable understanding of child development and child-centred educational practice will be considered as committee members.
8. Scrap any intention to replace or renew nuclear weapons. Pledge the Labour Party to lead a worldwide campaign to scrap all nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction.
9. Immediate imposition of a windfall tax on oil companies.
10. Immediate programme of new housing, to be controlled and allocated by local councils.
11. Apologise for rebranding the Labour Party, for hijacking the party for neo-conservatism, for supporting Bush, and for appeasing Murdoch and his ilk in the press.
12. Take back into public ownership and control, and without compensation, everything that’s been privatized since 1997. Shares can go down as well as up.
13. Take immediate steps to legislate for a democratically approved constitution with an elected second chamber.
14. Reinstate student grants that are fairly and adequately means tested, allowing people who want to further their academic careers to do so. Send any people who fiddle the books to get a full grant, with the trusted accountant, to prison for the duration of the time their child would have spent at University.
15. Invest a similar amount of money in a national apprentice scheme that provides key skills for the aforementioned house building to be fully state run – no need for big conglomerates.
16. Place Hazel Blears in the Big Brother house long after the duration of the current series, when the other weirdos have left the premises.
17. Means test child benefit. It is criminal in its existing form.
18. Immediate abolition of all SATs testing.
19. Immediate 10% rise in minimum wage, with promise of another 10% next year.
20. Immediate 10% rise in state pensions, with promise of another 10% next year.
These demands must be met in full in order to secure our full and unstinting support. Otherwise - bye bye Brown, and goodnight New Labour.
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