Greener Grass or Astroturf?

It has been said that all politics is local. So while the writer of this blog is concentrating so hard on the scene here at home, it’s easy to ignore that there’s a big world out there with their own priorities. I asked an old friend of mine who lives in England to commit some of his thoughts to the blog and here they are unedited by me as to content but with a couple of tweaks to spelling and grammar in order to bring it into line for American eyes. Also note that the current exchange rate is about $1.59 to 1 British Pound.

“Everywhere you go in Britain the public are fed up to the back teeth with dishonest politicians. And this is why!

About two years ago I was asked by the local Liberal Democratic Party if I would be willing to assist them in some way with their campaign for the Derbyshire County Council elections. My written reply was as follows – ‘The U.K. currently has the most inept, dishonest and corrupt government in its modern history. Both at national and local level. The opposition parties are doing very little to challenge this. Why then should I offer my support to any party?’ Needless to say I did not receive a reply. Little did I know how right I was but even I did not realize just how bad things were.

Where does one start?

The blatant lying began in the early years of Blair's disastrous premiership. The truth was a complete stranger to Blair and his crew. Rhetoric and spin was the answer to all. If Blair knew that he was going to lose a motion in the house then the answer was quite simple. Don't have a debate and consequently no vote and then slip it through when the headlines were focused on other events

Agree with what happened in Iraq or not. This country was led by Blair and his spin doctors into an illegal war on falsified reports and a tissue of lies. If Blair did not like the truth he changed it. One man, Dr. Kelly, lost his life in very “dodgy” circumstances because he was about to blow Blair's case out of the water. And so it went on. The majority of people in the U.K. did not support this war although they do support our troops. Blair has a lot of blood on his hands.

On the home front, Chancellor Gordon Brown was busy boasting about how good and prudent was his handling of our economic affairs while blithely ignoring the fact that he was presiding over an unprecedented credit-led boom. Financial constraints were abandoned and it was 'hey ho, fill your boots time'. Credit card borrowing went through the roof and some people had over £1000,000 of credit card debt knowing they had no way to pay it back. The banks were falling over themselves to lend money to borrowers knowing well that there was little hope that the debt would ever be repaid. It did not take a genius to work out where it was all going to end. Two years before the American Sub-Prime market crash, I predicted to my golfing friends, over a pint in the club house, that the British economy was about to implode. Boy did it.

Since then we have had one exposure of corruption after another. Most of it against Socialist M.P's. but not all. Hundreds of thousands of pounds in expense scams have been claimed by M.P's. The Speaker of the House, one Michael Martin, a Labour M.P.from Glasgow, who is supposed to control the House of Commons, has become the first Speaker in 300 years to be thrown out of office for dishonesty and incompetence. Many more disturbing events have taken place which would take too long to go into now.

We have more public servants now than at any other time in our history. Many doing non-jobs, on high salaries and gold plated pensions which the private sector has to pay for. Except it is probably not going to be there to do so. The national debt currently stands at over £1.3 TRILLION.

Our education system has been so dumbed down that everyone passes the exams but kids are coming out of education at 17 unable to read, write or do simple maths. What chance do they have of finding meaningful employment? Stay on and go to university our government tell them. What they really mean is, "get into huge debt to pay your tuition fees. Never mind the fact that when you have finished and can't find a job you will be unable to repay it." This is assuming that you can get a place at university. This year there were 30,000 more applicants than places available. The government was so busy watching its back that they forgot to provided the extra places.

Our National Health Service is a public scandal. It would be funny if it were not so tragic. Need an appointment to see your doctor? Two weeks time do? Need an urgent operation, how about this time next year? Public money is being poured into the system but only to provide more management and administration. Not to provide more doctors, nurses and equipment.

I could talk about crime, social services and so on and on, but I won't.

What does the public think of all this?

There is a total loss of faith in the current House of Commons. The general consensus everywhere you go is that it is a pig sty with every member's snout in the trough. This is unfortunate for the many honest members. Never in our history has Parliament been held in such low esteem. M.P's. are being forced to resign daily, including cabinet ministers. Our very system of democratic government is under threat. The only solution is to dissolve parliament and call a general election with new candidates replacing those found to be on the fiddle. Brown will not do this because he knows that the Labour Party will be wiped out. The latest opinion polls put Labour at its lowest ever share of the vote.

After all the lies and deceit the old adage springs to mind ‘You can fool some of the people some of the time but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time’.

COME THE REVOLUTION
(and it might)

P.S. One lesson to be learned from all this is that the one thing a country does not want is a government with a large majority. They say power Corrupts.”

There are some lessons here for us in the US too but I’ll comment on those in a separate post.