Forgive me, Blogger, for I have sinned. It is five days
since my last blogfession. I don’t even offer any excuse, although plenty spring
to mind. In fact, excuses seem to be very much the thing right now. Excuses for
inaction, excuses for past actions, excuses for possible future actions; the
hardest bit of politics seems to me to be getting your excuses in early, ideally
before any blame has been apportioned. Meanwhile the show must go on. The show
today being, of course, the subdued state opening of Parliament.
It’s like the worst kind of scripted reality show; mindless fodder for
the lumpen masses, where wooden characters act out pre-ordained plots as onlookers
agitate from the side-lines. Did I say agitate? Of course I meant – John McDonnell
meant – peacefully demonstrate their kinder, gentler opposition; not in any way
engage in a Day of Rage to bring down the government; oh no, that would be inflammatory,
nobody meant that, did they, John? Hedging his bets McDonnell first called for
insurrection then yesterday pretended he really meant ‘a bit of a march’ with a
few mild placards.
And over on the other channel everybody is watching the
Grenfell Game, wondering who is going to scoop the big prize. The various
cheerleaders are whipping up the audience into a frenzy in an effort to ensure that
as many as possible leave the game with more than they owned when they arrived.
Compensation has gone from being the provision of relief from loss to a system
of reward for giving the best depiction of entitlement. Playing the helpless victim
of greater powers has become a new career for some and facilitating that victimhood
is a full-time occupation for others.
To assist in upping the entertainment value, a bevy of
modern-age virtues are brought to the front line: selective outrage, moral
equivalence, the race card, the muslim card... along with a whole entourage of faux
facts, from mangled statistics to downright lies. He said, she said, they did,
we didn’t; the war of words is rapidly becoming a well-rehearsed soap opera in
which everybody knows the format. Shit happens, everybody mucks in, politicians
on all sides try to spin it as a triumph for themselves and a ‘sad indictment’
of the supposed motives of all the other competing sides. We’re all sinners
now; casting the first stone is nothing to do with conscience, it’s merely a
matter of timing.
Meanwhile, the world still turns. Those who pay for
everything will still pay for everything. Those who have only ever taken will continue
to take. And the poor sods in the middle scrabble for the safety and promise of
salvation of the few scraps of flotsam from the wreckage. The ideologues’ multicultural,
rainbow-nation dream has been a disaster and the disparate forces of
malcontent, jostling to put their special interest centre stage at the expense
of others threatens to tear it still further asunder. In pursuit of a world in
which everybody wins, against nature itself, we are instead in a place where,
with few exceptions, everybody loses.
Ask not what your country can do for you...
Whatever happens today, peaceful or otherwise, it has to
be hoped that common sense and common decency prevail and the process of
governing the country is allowed to begin again. Instead of demanding from society
yet another slice of a finite pie of money, police, emergency services, ‘justice’
and so on, look to the other side of the Grenfell disaster. Follow the example of
those who freely gave of their time and resources to help each other out. Margaret
Thatcher said there was no such thing as society – and she was right. People conveniently forget that she went on to say: “There
are individual men and women and there are families. And no government can do
anything except through people, and people must look after themselves first. It
is our duty to look after ourselves and then, also, to look after our
neighbours." Why, she was practically Jeremy Corbyn!
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