Do We Get the Politicians We Deserve?

Today we got our very own Prime Minister Trump! Brothers by other mothers. Both confirmed liars and sociopaths (that's a psychopath without the axe), they yomp through life believing that everything is there for the taking. And they take it.

And we let them.

Serving the public and being a public servant couldn't be further from their minds. It is all about THEM, not what is best for their country.

But wait. Are we complicit in ending up with them?

Are we so negative and critical and cynical of all politics and politicians that no sane person in their nice mind would now consider putting themselves forward for a lifetime of public scrutiny, criticism, abuse and blame for everything down to the weather?

Has it become a chicken and egg conundrum? What came first the self-serving politician or the cynical voter?

While this particular battle was an internal one inside the Tory party. abstaining from voting seems to be the alarming means of general protest for a growing number of British subjects. But the irony is abstaining is NEVER seen as a protest against whatever array of undazzling potential leaders happen to be on offer. Abstaining from voting is seen as a BIG FAT assumption that you do not care who rules you. Silence should never be mistaken for agreement, but of course it invariably is. And 'don't care got nowhere' as our grandmothers were so fond of telling us.

If we can be exulted to be 'passionate' about a brand of ice cream or a variety of coffee, why so luke warm about the things which should matter most and have the potential to have the biggest effect on our lives? Like our leaders?

Bad things happen when good people do nothing. Whinging about who rules us or Brexit does not count as doing something.

Meanwhile we have open access to all the drugs, booze, porn, gambling, food and online addiction, ie bread and circuses, we could wish for to ensure we remain in our own little bubbles anaesthetised to reality and unlikely to rise up in any meaningful way.

The French Government live in fear of their electorate. We need to follow suit and aim for a bloodless coup or two. When we've all decided what we actually want, that is.

Meanwhile Trump couldn't be happier to have his Little Brit bro' ruling Britain.

The Body in the Library? The Body IS the Library!

In no sense does the council tax payer get the impression that 20 out of 43 Libraries are to be axed by cash-strapped Oxfordshire County Council as a LAST resort, rather than a first resort. Where is that schedule of less drastic options they have considered/rejected and why isn't it on transparent public display? Does it bear any relation to the 100 suggestions to cut council spending without cutting services in this article of two years ago, at least half of which seem eminently sensible? Nor do we see any leading councillors offering to take a pay cut, even as a public gesture to show they care/we really are 'all in this together', if times are so genuinely tough.

And more than one commentator in the local press has pointed out that these cuts will actually save very little money in real terms as our Libraries are pretty economical to run in the first place with many smaller branches already open for reduced hours. In addition they apparently cost less than 0.5% of the council's revenue budget!

How too does a 4.4% cut in funding from central government equate to an almost 50% cut in libraries and other council services? Now my maths may not be my strongest suit, but even I smell a rat here, even larger than a County Council passing heftier cuts onto their customers to make a political point/cream off some profit and blame the government.

A colleague with a longer memory than my own reminded me this week that if you think about it, we've seen nearly 30 years of public assets being stripped or sold off by councils to be privatised, so that nearly every utility, building and even road bridge is now owned by someone else, not unusually an offshore or foreign concern. This selling off of Britain has left many councils with very little left to sell off when they want to raise a bit of short-term cash. They have now centralised their own services to a large degree, flogging off any buildings/brownfield sites created, disposed of most of their council housing stock, so what do they have left?

Why those useless libraries, day centres and youth clubs cluttering up the county obviously. And you don't want too many of them in a property hotspot like Oxfordshire. Ok, so it might bring you below the legal minimum service standard you are obliged to provide in return for people's council tax, but maybe that's a risk worth taking. How many people have the resources the commitment and the time to sue after all? Especially when hit with so many outrages to protest against all at once. Most people will just mouth off for a while and then eventually accept the new status quo. Until it's time to break the news to them of the next cuts planned...

Crime & Corporate Punishment

Behold - my first Poet Laura-eate podcast (with a bit of movie-software cheating thrown in!) Every embeddable MP3 player seemed to come with its own multi-media content pre-installed. By someone else. Or didn't allow an image, or turned its nose up at Blogger. Amazing how much of your life you can waste trying to get to grips with these things and finding yourself up one dead-end alley after another. To think I had delusional visions of setting up my own blog radio station with broadcasts each week to try out short stories, interviews and comedy etc. However that might have to wait for reincarnation...well certainly until I find a new job anyway (the other saga that is taking up most of my headspace).



When not trying to learn podcasting/applying for jobs, I've been indulging in a documentary-watching phase, notably 'Enron - The Smartest Guys in The Room', 'Wal-Mart' The High Cost of Low Price and my favourite 'The Corporation' - the extraordinary story of the birth and rise of the Corporation, an entity which shares the same rights in law as a human being, but apparently the same psychological profile as a psychopath! Here is a promo clip. The film itself is nearly 3 hours long but is one of those films you come away evangelising that everyone and their dog should watch.



In the Wal-Mart DVD there is a chilling scene where a former regional manager in charge of expansion relates how he used to drive through small towns betting to himself 'six months', 'four months', 'a year at the outside' as he drove past the often family-run for decades high street retailers, psyching out the town in readiness for the next grand Wal-Mart opening. So obvious really, yet it seems to me we Brits have been remarkably slow to catch on to the fact that the more we shop at the large out-of-town hypermarkets the more our towns and cities will implode, and even that there might be a deliberate corporate plan to destroy our towns and cities, eventually making us wholly reliant on the likes of Wal-Mart and internet shopping (something I personally only resort to if I cannot buy what I seek locally). In Oxford this week I treated myself to a discounted bracelet at one of our few remaining independent boutiques, only to have him confide in me that he might be closing down after 25 years. How did we let things come to this? At the end of the Enron film, a scandal I never quite understood at the time; but can scarcely believe the scale of after watching the film; this Tom Waits track played out to the closing credits. Ten years old now, yet a song not only for our times but strangely apt for the crash of 1929 too.