Tintin
19th June 2018, 09:09
"It is as though there has been a deliberate rolling back not just of human progress, but of human sensibility."
Few regular commentators are able to articulate frustration and display perspicacity, and humanity, quite as well as Craig does, and, he makes some very insightful comments here that capture all too well what it feels like to live, and is often experienced by its citizens, in the 21st century United Kingdom. [Or, I would posit, the Disunited Kingdom - The DU(c)K - possibly a dead one or at least one that is sleep-waddling its way into a lake of orange sauce.]
Certainly, for me, this is a clarion call not to take a side in political parlour games necessarily, but a reminder, in its own subtle and not so at times way, that we all as individual republics of us have a positive part to play in contributing to a future that we would want for ourselves and others during what is a trans-formational time in the landscape of UK politics.
Whether that is a DU(c)K I see on the horizon or a flock of condor flying oh so high into a brighter future remains to be seen.
But, we can shape this through our own self awareness, and by being very well informed along the way.
Enjoy the article: I know I did [Tintin Q]
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A Longer View (https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2018/06/37667/)
18 Jun, 2018 in Uncategorized by craig
A few weeks’ break gives you a perspective on British politics aside from the day to day excitements, and the long view is just horrible. An astonishingly inept and irrelevant government maintains itself by a series of straight lies to both Tory Remainers and Tory Brexiteers about its intentions.
Both these groups know they are being lied to, but the show stutters on because all in the Tory Party are clinging on, with a death grip, to office if not to power. They are in turn sustained by a Northern Irish party of antediluvian beliefs that appears to have time travelled from the less enlightened parts of the seventeenth century, and whose leader’s idea of politics is to march at the head of a group of ill-educated bigots, who will muster far too few teeth in relation to number of feet, proceeding with drunken braggadocio along the streets of Cowdenbeath.
Meantime society is well on its way through an extremely painful process of transformation. Well-paid, long term jobs offering job satisfaction and career progression are almost as improbable a dream for people under 30 as appearing in the World Cup final or owning their own home.
Employee protection, whether through organised labour with clout or a legislative framework to prevent employers from abusing their power, has dwindled in practice and is a concept well outside the Overton window (http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?103183-Article-Craig-Murray-A-Longer-View&p=1230751&viewfull=1#post1230751). Our younger generation grasp for the prospect of a few months’ unprotected employment at low wages, as desperately as did their ancestors in the 1830’s.
It is as though there has been a deliberate rolling back not just of human progress, but of human sensibility.
Meantime the rich get richer at an unprecedented rate. The concentration of wealth is mirrored by a concentration of the ownership of housing. Media ownership concentration into an ever-tightening circle continues to exert social control, while the gatekeeper role of the big new media corporations of twitter, facebook, google and wikipedia is now being very openly abused to maintain the Establishment narrative. [My emphasis - Tintin]
Any political party with the slightest prospect of power, will always be influenced and infiltrated by those with a strong stake in the economic status quo wishing to defend it, while advancing their personal interest.
That is an eternal truth and afflicts both the Labour Party and the SNP. But while the programme of neither the Labour Party nor the SNP is as radical as is needed, both do reflect a genuine discontent with the status quo and with an economic philosophy which emphasises above all the freedoms of the very wealthy. There is more genuine choice on offer to the electorate than has been the case in the UK as a whole for many decades, which explains the crescendo of reaction from the media and the de facto casting off of the practice of political neutrality of the BBC, which was prepared to be reasonably fair in treatment of political parties only when they were all neo-conservative.
Whether in the next decade the Labour Party is now sufficiently radical to contain the tensions racking the UK’s political economy, within a broadly constant political system, remains to be seen. It continues to be my view that the first great crack will open with Scottish Independence, and more radical societal change throughout the rest of the UK will swiftly follow that catalytic event.
Few regular commentators are able to articulate frustration and display perspicacity, and humanity, quite as well as Craig does, and, he makes some very insightful comments here that capture all too well what it feels like to live, and is often experienced by its citizens, in the 21st century United Kingdom. [Or, I would posit, the Disunited Kingdom - The DU(c)K - possibly a dead one or at least one that is sleep-waddling its way into a lake of orange sauce.]
Certainly, for me, this is a clarion call not to take a side in political parlour games necessarily, but a reminder, in its own subtle and not so at times way, that we all as individual republics of us have a positive part to play in contributing to a future that we would want for ourselves and others during what is a trans-formational time in the landscape of UK politics.
Whether that is a DU(c)K I see on the horizon or a flock of condor flying oh so high into a brighter future remains to be seen.
But, we can shape this through our own self awareness, and by being very well informed along the way.
Enjoy the article: I know I did [Tintin Q]
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
A Longer View (https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2018/06/37667/)
18 Jun, 2018 in Uncategorized by craig
A few weeks’ break gives you a perspective on British politics aside from the day to day excitements, and the long view is just horrible. An astonishingly inept and irrelevant government maintains itself by a series of straight lies to both Tory Remainers and Tory Brexiteers about its intentions.
Both these groups know they are being lied to, but the show stutters on because all in the Tory Party are clinging on, with a death grip, to office if not to power. They are in turn sustained by a Northern Irish party of antediluvian beliefs that appears to have time travelled from the less enlightened parts of the seventeenth century, and whose leader’s idea of politics is to march at the head of a group of ill-educated bigots, who will muster far too few teeth in relation to number of feet, proceeding with drunken braggadocio along the streets of Cowdenbeath.
Meantime society is well on its way through an extremely painful process of transformation. Well-paid, long term jobs offering job satisfaction and career progression are almost as improbable a dream for people under 30 as appearing in the World Cup final or owning their own home.
Employee protection, whether through organised labour with clout or a legislative framework to prevent employers from abusing their power, has dwindled in practice and is a concept well outside the Overton window (http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?103183-Article-Craig-Murray-A-Longer-View&p=1230751&viewfull=1#post1230751). Our younger generation grasp for the prospect of a few months’ unprotected employment at low wages, as desperately as did their ancestors in the 1830’s.
It is as though there has been a deliberate rolling back not just of human progress, but of human sensibility.
Meantime the rich get richer at an unprecedented rate. The concentration of wealth is mirrored by a concentration of the ownership of housing. Media ownership concentration into an ever-tightening circle continues to exert social control, while the gatekeeper role of the big new media corporations of twitter, facebook, google and wikipedia is now being very openly abused to maintain the Establishment narrative. [My emphasis - Tintin]
Any political party with the slightest prospect of power, will always be influenced and infiltrated by those with a strong stake in the economic status quo wishing to defend it, while advancing their personal interest.
That is an eternal truth and afflicts both the Labour Party and the SNP. But while the programme of neither the Labour Party nor the SNP is as radical as is needed, both do reflect a genuine discontent with the status quo and with an economic philosophy which emphasises above all the freedoms of the very wealthy. There is more genuine choice on offer to the electorate than has been the case in the UK as a whole for many decades, which explains the crescendo of reaction from the media and the de facto casting off of the practice of political neutrality of the BBC, which was prepared to be reasonably fair in treatment of political parties only when they were all neo-conservative.
Whether in the next decade the Labour Party is now sufficiently radical to contain the tensions racking the UK’s political economy, within a broadly constant political system, remains to be seen. It continues to be my view that the first great crack will open with Scottish Independence, and more radical societal change throughout the rest of the UK will swiftly follow that catalytic event.