Well, according to the Daily Mail
and other right wing mouthpieces of the good ol' Establishment, we, and most especially
Jeremy Corbyn, are living in the past.
Apparently he and we want to see a return to
a long gone age. To step back in time to an era lost to a modern world in a
global economy where the promises of riches for all will come tomorrow (always tomorrow
I notice) and via the tried and trusted mechanism known 'trickle down
economics'. We at the bottom currently feed from the crumbs and scraps that
fall off the masters table and that's just simply the way of the 'modern world'
and it cannot; nay - should not, be challenged
or changed. It is the 'modern' way. There is no alternative and to hark back to
the terrible and destructive past is to become a Dinosaur.
Ok – where do I begin? Ah! The
source. The Daily Mail. A newspaper (if it can be fairly described as such) owned
by a tax dodging £Billionaire who sits in the House of Lords as The 4th
Viscount Rothmere. His given name is Jonathan Harmsworth. He has non-domicile
tax status and owns his media businesses through a complex structure of
offshore holdings and trusts. He pays zero tax and at the same time makes
£Millions off his media empire based here in the UK. But for all that his paper
preaches to us that we lot at the bottom need to understand that he and his ilk
at the top know what’s best for us and that it ain’t no good going back to the
past. We are Dinosaurs one and all.
Now I lived a lot of my life “in
the past” and I can remember at least some of it although some seems, most strangely,
to be lost to me. Let’s deal with the ‘lost’ bits first eh?
For instance, as a kid in the
1950’s and 60’s I can never remember seeing anyone sleeping in a doorway of a
shop because they were homeless or spikes being placed where they sleep to make
it impossible for them to settle. Or homeless people being arrested, brought
before the Magistrates and fined. Fines they can’t possibly pay and all for the
terrible offence of being destitute and, well, for being homeless because of
that destitution.
I can also never remember people
having to sell The Big Issue on street corners in order to try to pull
themselves out of poverty or people who have been forced into beggary and
indigence asking for the change in my pocket so that they can eat that day.
And on that I can also never
remember a situation where food banks became a facility available to people
deliberately impoverished by the system, (and a facility by the way that were once
called ‘Soup Kitchens’ which again appeared during another era where the rich
ruled the day and where there was “no alternative”), food banks that are the only place where parents
could go to feed their kids for the next three days at a time.
I can also never remember old age
pensioners having to choose between heating their home or having something hot
to eat that day or indeed being advised on the TV and Radio how to “eat for
less”. Or those same older people being told how they should dress in layers to
sit in front of a one bar electric fire on only for 2 of the coldest hours a
day so as they don’t perish and die during the freeze that every winter brings
them. My memory seems to be pretty poor actually because I can’t remember any
of the above at all.
Really - all this “I can’t
remember” stuff! It’s very frustrating you know. Anyway, perhaps it’s me but
there are a few things I can remember so I’d best write them down
before I forget them too.
Right here we go. These things I
can recall.
I can remember poverty being
alleviated via full employment and a welfare state that wanted to take care of everyone. I can remember houses being
built that were either affordable for the working classes or council houses
going up where genuinely poor people could escape living 5 or 6 to a single
room and sleeping on old mattresses on the floor covered by coats and not
expensive blankets to keep them warm at night. I seem to remember too that most
were damp and parasite infested rooms in housing actually reserved for the
lower classes and owned by rich Landlords. They were called ‘slums’ were they
not? Yeah – I remember now. Breeding places for TB, Scabies, Rickets, Measles,
Chicken Pox, Mumps, and all the other good old conditions and diseases now
returning to haunt the poor and vulnerable.
I remember prospects for young
people leaving school where there were properly structured paid apprenticeships
and even for some the promise of a University education without having drill
themselves in to enormous debt that will chase some of them to even their
graves. They had, oh what were they called now? Got it - Education Grants to
live on and they even had their Tuition Fees paid! My god! It’s all coming back
now.
In fact I remember when libraries
were opening rather than closing. When local authorities could afford to fill
holes in the road and where, if you bought an old dilapidated house you could
apply for a Council Grant to make it a fit place to live.
And most of all I remember a
National Health Service where lack of money wasn’t the prime and destructive motivation behind the withdrawal
of health services leading to an increase in disease and deaths and where services were
actually increasing in quantity and quality for everyone free at the
point of delivery. Where people’s health was seen as an investment and not an
expense. And where privateers and profiteers like Virgin Care with their grubby,
money driven involvement with the growing cancer of NHS privatisation didn’t
even exist.
Now reading this back maybe the past had lessons for us and the more I think about it the more I really
wish I had a time machine. Because if the things embedded in my memory are anywhere
near true then I for one desperately want to take that trip backwards and subsequently Mr. Jonathan Harold Esmond Vere Harmsworth, 4th Viscount Rothermere (and the rest of you lot in the 1% at the top), I’ll
support any political leader or party that would be my transporter and companion.
So, Jeremy Corbyn and his
supporters are Dinosaurs are they? Well it seems to me that the real Dinosaurs
are the members of the Establishment who get away with murder and play hide and
seek behind what Galbraith called “The Conventional Wisdom”. A ‘Convention
Wisdom’ that has, for decades stolen from our pockets to fill theirs. Any
wonder they want to perpetuate the system ‘as is’? Unfortunately for them their
robbery game is now being exposed daily. The empty ‘no alternative’ argument
holds no credibility any more.
It is actually they that continue to play the role of
the Dinosaur in a fast changing world. A Dinosaur that, as they play their continuous
game of hiding their greed behind ever thinning veils of a false economic respectability
they invented I think could fairly be a Dinosaur called ‘Youthinktheysaurus’?
Well the answer is increasingly “Yes”.
Roll on to the past JC. I’m on
board the same train.
Graeme.
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