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My son came into the kitchen while I as washing up and complained about me listening to politics again. "It's pointless. The Conservatives are going to win!" and went back to his computer game where winning and losing depends on your skill, not your school.

History is not his favourite subject, he doesn't understand why people do stuff, like vote in Hitler. On the program I was listening to they were wondering if anyone realised Thatcherism was forming in the 70's?

He doesn't understand why people want Brexit. I can't help him because neither do I. To begin with, I did, because I thought we would have control of our fisheries, but that is not the case - we could have had control of them now, only we traded them off to other European countries because they thought our fish were worth more than we did. As will happen again after Brexit.

And there was the stuff about Europe being run by huge corporations so not a democracy. But Europe has banned the pesticides made by powerfrul Bayer that are killing bees. France has unilaterally stood up to America and asked for some of the tax money being syphoned out of their public services by American tech companies. Europe is the only part of the world even close to achieving its Paris Climate pledges.

When people say they want to get back control, what do they mean? Control of what? It sounds like they want us to be head of an empire again, but the empire was about keeping other peoples down so we could steal their resources to make our country rich. It wasn't all cricket.

Just as happened in the Middle Ages after the plague, it was the reduced workforce after the First World War that brought workers rights.  I have heard it argued that was the reason for the NHS and free education.

It is not in the interests of business to pay high wages.  Some business leaders who backed Brexit want Britain to be more like Singapore, where wages and taxes are low, but people have to pay for Health, Education, Pensions etc themselves. There is not the sharing of resources we have grown used to.

I remember a little what it was like before Mrs Thatcher. Like everything was in freefall, some people were out to get all they could from the system and the system was breaking. It feels like that now, but on the other end of the spectrum. There is huge change coming, not just from the weather, but from unemployment caused by computerisation. Not everyone can be a techie, but so many jobs with wages you could live on are going to go. If we paid people for being kind, care work would be a good carreer, but we would rather try to invent robots to look after our parents. After us.

Countries are going to become uninhabitable, billions of people will be refugees, yet Climate Change is not our priority. A hundred years from now historians will not  be wondering what the trends are that shaped the future,  they will be trying to understand why we are choosing to ignore the future. We are lying to ourselves. We are accepting that the Prime Minister lies and laughing. An election is not a show you can switch off when the credits roll, it's  the start of a shift in the balance of power, changing how we live.

We don't have an Empire, we don't even have a Commonwealth, as these countries have grown independent of us now. Britain is not the energetic head of the family but the tottering grandparent happier reminiscing about the good old days. We are a small country and our only value to the rest of the world is as  a market.

Capitalism is all about selling stuff. And the centre of Capitalism is America. And here we are leaving the "control" of European regulations (animal wellfare, workers' rights, pesticides etc) and looking for a friend. America will be our friend if we buy its stuff, stuff made without those European regulations, therefore cheaper than what we can produce. So to compete with cheap American imports our farmers will have to drop animal wellfare and pesticide and gm control. And if we do that, Europe won't buy our stuff. On a recent program the only reason a Conservative candidate could give for Brexit was that we could make our animal wellfare standards higher than in Europe. But the European standards are a minimum, not a maximum we need to be free of Europe to change.

There are other things which have been said by the Conservatives which are not true - Conservatives have not reduced homelessness. A Labour protester outside a hospital did not beat up the Health Secretary's assistant. Fact Check UK was not a Fact Check. I don't understand all the money stuff but as these things are lies I believe Fact Checkers (at least those who are not Conservative Head Office pretending to be impartial by creating a  website called Fact Check Uk  with the purpose of misleading people trying to understand what is going on) when they say  claims about increased spending are also untrue.

Everyone aspires to be the best. But should being the Best Liars be why a party gets elected?

Is it because the Truth is too hard for us to face? Is this like the time before the First World War when so many things reached tipping point? Do we want Boris Johnson sending us over the top?

We do need change, we need to change our children's future and give them hope

Comments

Tory scum are going to win. But someone mentioned John Major was 6/1 to win when he got elected. So I'm hoping for the best of a bad world and SNP/Labour Allaince. Brexit is quite simple to understand. There's only 2 things you need to know. We import more than we export, most of it from the EU. And Britain, as you point out, does not have the economic leverage of the the only trading blocks that matter. America, China and the EU. George Orwell got it pretty much right. Without leverage you don't ask, but are given terms. If you want to know more about Thatcher watch A Very British Revolution on BBC 4. It's all there. Her continuing success can be seen in taking money from the poor and giving it to the rich. A reduced workforce did not bring higher wages but again we're in Orwell territory, building things and blowing things up. The New Deal in America, for example, did little to mitigae widespread poverty. Millions diied of hunger in the Hungry Thirties. Full employement was because capitalist nations were at af full tilt. Coal, Steel, Iron and the heavy industries at full capacity. But in the First World War in particular capitialist feared revolution. Soldiers came back from the front in Germany and Italy in particular with guns. Trade Unions organised the workforce and even here in Britain we had the General Strike 1926. Fascism was a response to the threat of Communism and growing trade union militancy. The Beveridge Report published 1942 was a bestseller and promised all the things we are now seeing dismantled. Homes fit for heroes was a sop for the working man after both wars. Now we're been sold every man for himself and race to the bottom. We know how that ends. 

 

Thanks for your brilliant comment. Had never heard that soldiers brought their weapons home, but even those who did not would have brought back the idea of organised fighting.

I keep hearing that it was protectionism which caused the first war and that is why trade alliances are so important. That Trump considers America above the World Trade Organisation and has brought about its collapse because wants America to decide what is fair, is maybe the biggest threat to peace.

Am surprised you say the New Deal didn't help poor? I have only read that in right wing articles so I will have to look again!

Thankyou again for taking the time to give such an informative comment

 

sorry Di, tend to ramble on. to say there's one cause for the 1st ww is overly simplistic. Protectionism was a key policy in America from the Civil War onwards. Nations like Britain were the worrk shop of the world and could produce most things cheaper. Chna is where America was. The Road Back, the sequel to All Quiet on he Western Front shows how soldiers organised themselves into factions, the German Frei Corps (if I remember rigfhty) to fight against each other. In the industrial north of Italy workers had guns, but factories had soldiers and machine guns. Think of Winston Churchill sending soldiers and tanks to George Square. The fear of Red Clydeside and revolution was real after the Russian revolution. The New Deal did help the poor, but it was a sticking plaster when what was needed was a new bed. The second world war and let's remember a managed economy at full capacity saved Britain. Even with slave labour Britain continued to outproduce Hitler's Germany. It's the economy -stupid, as Cliniton famously said. Every time we give a tax cut to the rich we don't build hospitals, schools or train nurses. Keynsian ecomonics has been replaced with monetarism which only benefits banks and bankers and also penalises the poor. Thatcherism is monetarism on steroids. Only money matters and people like money can be treated as tradeable parts that can be disposed of when they no longer produce value. That's exaclty what the motto work makes you free meant. But we no longer need barbed wire. 

 

You have so much knowledge! Have you written about this in blogs on here?

 

I have little knowledge di hard, blow dried to cover my lack. I write some stuff on here. Usually I just make it up. Amorphous. That's why fiction suits. 

 

well, thankyou for taking the time to give me some suggestions as your little knowledge is more than mine!