Tag: privatisation

Politics In A Mad World

Hamar WilliamsLeave a comment

Let’s be honest I’ve ballsed up again. Fresh from a lovely nap I picked up my phone and discovered the world is falling apart. The Tories have refused to take the NHS off the negotiating table in the trade deal with the US, despite categorically insisting it wasn’t for sale during the election. Current Labour leader Keir Starmer’s party have paid out a load of money to his cronies / whistleblowers who were part of the Panorama documentary that tried to further paint the anti-racist, anti-apartheid, and pro-Palestinian campaigning former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn as a racist anti-semite. Machiavelli would be proud. There are even rumours Starmer is going to withdraw the Labour whip from Corbyn and kick him out of the party. This would be remarkable. It would also be the final nail in the coffin for the Labour party and any pretence of a socially conscious respectability. To think they were once the party of the people. Starmer was supported by the media and put in place with one express purpose, to be nothing like Corbyn and he’s doing a fine job, not just in the ways he thinks or hopes.

The fear is that the world is falling apart. The reality is that I really don’t know whether it has always been this bad and we’re just getting more coverage of things if we take time to read independent media. I’m just bemused at how people don’t recognise how self-serving our politicians are. Or they do but see it as part of the job. Perhaps they think most are but not the few they support. That could describe my support for Corbyn and few else of course but the evidence really does suggest otherwise. I look at Boris and wonder how anyone could think he possibly stands for them but if they stand for leaving the European Union, closer ties to America, privatisation and the eradication of the welfare state then he does stand for them. As my friend, who doesn’t like Corbyn, said at the last election, “If I didn’t give a shit about anyone other than myself and my immediate family I would vote Conservative for the benefits it would bring me economically”. I paraphrase slightly but that was the gist. It is very easy to be self-righteous and left wing but that’s simply because the other side make it so easy and hard not to be. It’s just concerning that so many people seem to follow the King Turkey when Christmas is on the agenda. I’m confused because I don’t see why people think like this, the only thing that makes sense is that people genuinely believe they can rise up a ladder and claim some of these promised benefits for themselves. They just don’t notice the big glass ceiling let alone any of the other glass ceilings in between. At least Boris has left them a big sack of fools gold on the bottom rung for them to squabble and be divided over.

Aeon

Hamar WilliamsLeave a comment

Now feels like a good time to plug a favourite website of mine. Aeon is all about ideas and when you read though the titles of the different articles they publish, the mind illuminates with excitement. They generally publish essays and short videos. The essays are usually three to four thousand words and of a high enough level not to be considered light reading. For this reason I can get a bit lazy as I know it will involve a certain amount of mind effort to read one. It is things like this that allow me to realise that my use of the internet doesn’t go much further than looking at football, politics, buying things and generally killing time and shutting off my brain. The internet is the greatest invention and has the potential to revolutionise society on scale not obvious since the printing press and I use it to kill time and shut my brain off. I know I’m not alone in this. Humans are ridiculous.

Aeon then involves a little effort, if you’re me, but it is well worth it. They used to also publish Ideas that were usually around the one thousand word mark which my short attention span was more suited to but they unfortunately seem to have done away with them recently. They publish essays on philosophy, science, history, psychology, law, nature, education and every sub category within.

For example this is an article on Ashoka Maurya who was an Indian Emperor over two thousand years ago. Seeing first hand the horror of warfare he creating ‘an infrastructure of goodness’ which also included the spread of the teachings of Siddhattha Gotama – the Buddha – and changed the face of the Indian continent in the process.

This is an article on the spread of pathogens throughout history, from The Black Death to polio, and how they’re generally spread silently by the seemingly healthy.

This article discusses free will and determinism, using our understanding of the sometime random actions of molecules to give some answers to this age old argument.

This is an essay on the concept of ‘hysterical women’, how women’s pain is often medically overlooked and undertreated but that ‘believing all women’ is not necessarily the answer and oversimplifies the issue.

This discusses how not only is privatising public services bad economics but also how it undermines our social and political bonds as a community.

And finally this is an article about how fish are nothing at all like us but that they are sentient beings and that they finally deserve a real place in our moral community.

Ultimately these are just a few examples of articles they publish and even then they’re only the ones I’m drawn to. There’s a little of everything for everyone. I mention Aeon because they’re not a massive publishing or news company, they don’t have adverts all over their website and they produce really interesting work. It’s online magazines like this that people need to be made aware of in these times of sensationalism and factual inaccuracy.

Just because I can I’m attaching a video of sea life in the Ningaloo Canyons off Western Australia. The video is on YouTube but is from Aeon, or at least that’s were I found it. There is also a video on the creation of the police force by Robert Peel in 1829 and what that has meant for society up to the present day. Enjoy the fish for now though.

Take Down Thy Fence

Hamar WilliamsLeave a comment

Goodbye my lover…sung an annoying whiny man once. Today marks the end of a relationship nobody knew they cared about until after the Brexit referendum two years ago, or was it three, it might have been three. It all feels like a complete blur politics wise these last few years. Actually as I say that it might have been 2016, which would be four years ago because Trump was 2016 and certainly there were parallels of fear over the two. Social commentators the world over spent hours refusing to admit they had zero understanding of how society thought outside of their own narrow little universes.

We have spent the last three and a half years, let’s settle on that; arguing, hating, blowing up bridges, digging deeper trenches, building barriers and getting nowhere, and we’re in a much worse position than had we just stopped hating each other for five minutes and worked together. Tomorrow our relationship with the EU will be exactly the same as it is today, it’s just we won’t be able to influence decisions. Despite officially leaving it won’t be until the end of the year that we either sign a rushed and half-cooked trade deal or we just crash out with no deal at all. Boris was going to Get Brexit Done but it’s become clearer that nobody except the puppet master Dominic Cummings really has any clue what that actually means.

We leave one trading block to gain the liberty the Americans and Chinese are very quickly going to take away before turning us into the meat within their squabbling sandwich. The only power on the world stage we have is The City of London, the financial centre which will very soon become the epicentre of British efforts at becoming a cold, wet and windy version of the Cayman Islands. There is already talk that the fishing rights to our waters will be sacrificed to allow the financial sector access to European markets. It may have been one of the major issues that was used to sell this power play but it looks delusional in hindsight that unelected bureaucrats like Cummings would stand up for a few fishermen when his mates in the City demanded a return on their investment.

The EU is not perfect and they have feasted on the carcass of countries which were never going to be able to match up to the requirements of membership. It was a great model; get them in and when they can’t keep up, call in the debts and sell them off. The Greeks for example may have brought it upon themselves but they were sold an illusion that would benefit only the minority at the top. Are those in power in the UK taking us out because they want to protect us from that? Or are they in fact the minority at the top who have simply seen an opportunity of even more personal riches in dollars and yuan than the euro can offer?

It doesn’t matter anymore though because tonight at eleven o’clock, or midnight Brussels time ironically, we will be leaving the EU. We have five more years at least of Boris and when the Labour Party lurches back to the centre; an opposition in name only. What comes next is anyone’s guess but before anything happens we all need to accept that the fight to stay is over for now. It is only in this acceptance that people will be able to make any genuine productive moves in the future. We also need to accept that this is not a black and white argument, that there are actual genuine benefits from leaving the EU. There may not be many but until we can see that they do exist we’ll never manage to reconnect with the leave voters. Too many barriers to cooperation have developed over these last few years. You may disagree with your neighbour but while that fence gets bigger the only person to benefit is the one selling you new planks of wood, incidentally he’s also the one leaving you both notes about the indiscretions of the other.