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Though it grieves me to say it, we occasionally need a Trump, though they should never get into power. We used to have them, Enoch Powell on the right, Dennis Skinner on the left, elected representatives dragging our opinions to right and left and reminding us of our responsibilities as a society. Without these political ‘extremists’ ever-present we would not have civil partnerships, sex discrimination law, immigration control, care in the community. They weren’t the people that won these debates, they were the constant thorn in the side of their political parties that kept these issues alive. Crucially, they did their work within the structure of their parties. Nowadays politicians are so determined to stay in power and keep their lucrative jobs that their sole aim is to maintain votes and to do that you can’t raise your head above the parapet. The result is every party camped in the quagmire that has become the middle ground. They use the bait of greed and self-interest to catch voters. What is the result? We get what we deserve. So care for the elderly has all but disappeared. We have pot holes in our roads. There is no out-of-school provision for teenagers. The NHS is expected to keep us all alive for longer without the means of doing it. Why? Because there is no money. Why is there no money? Because where we used to pay 30% income tax, the basic rate is now 20%. Great for the voters who can now have lots of holidays, TVs in every room, wardrobes full of clothes and, well you know where I’m coming from. There is no point in moaning that you can’t be helped when you’ve blown your cash on frippery. Reduce your income by a third and see how you get on. Maybe we should have an American health care system where you have to make those decisions. Do I get comprehensive health insurance or buy another television? Do I contribute more to the state so my hard-earned assets can be passed on to my kids or pay my life savings to a private care home that is making a profit for its owners. In 2019 those profits amounted to £1.5bn. That money could have reduced fees or been diverted to other causes. Trump shook up American politics, but did so with all the power that goes with the Presidency. We need Trumps within our party system to help us decide where we want our country to go.  

There is a huge kerfuffle about the latest lockdown. Sir William Bradbury, chairman of the Conservative 1922 committee, is worried that our civil liberties are being denied. There was I thinking that it was the duty of the state to protect and care for me – isn’t that why we pay money for the armed forces, the police, the NHS and every other government service – when it appears that we, the great majority taking Covid seriously, should really be sacrificed for the sake of business and businessmen. Civil liberties are to protect a citizen’s freedom from government abuse. Trying to halt a pandemic is not an abuse. But now the churches are getting involved. It was the monastic orders who first provided care for the sick and the poor, and such benevolence has continued thereafter, well, until 2020 evidently. I can understand a plea for communal services just as I can understand that many people who might attend those services are among the ones at greatest risk and perhaps should not be mixing. What I struggle to understand are the words of John Steven, director or the Fellowship of Independent Evangelical Churches, who said the new restrictions came as a “very significant emotional blow” for couples who had weddings planned this month. Around 70% of couples getting married these days have been cohabiting for years. So where is the emotional impact of a few months delay? If marriage was that important why did they wait? And surely, there is a far greater emotional impact if someone dies. ‘We had a brilliant wedding, everyone had a great time except Aunt Betty who died two weeks later from Covid.’ Fortunately, I have a solution. Give everyone their civil liberties, let them hold big weddings, parties, football matches, but make it a condition that everyone attending puts their hand in a bucket of red dye that will not wash off for six months. Then those that have exercised their civil liberty to protect themselves will know who to avoid and the hospitals will know who to turn away. Basically, if you don’t act responsibly in the best interests of the community you forfeit the right to health care. Why should people who don’t care take treatment away from those who do?  

While our Prime Minister may align himself to Sir Winston Churchill, there is one important area where he fails. Sir Winston helped form and then led a National Coalition Government. And he wasn’t the Prime Minister in power at the time and possibly not the first choice. Neville Chamberlain was the PM and recognised that the only way to win the war was if everyone worked together. He knew the Labour Party wouldn’t accept him and was prepared to step aside. A natural Conservative successor was Lord Halifax but he said he could not perform the role from the House of Lords. Sir Winston got the job. His first war cabinet included Clement Atlee, later to be a Labour prime minister for six years, and Arthur Greenwood, deputy leader of the Labour Party. Initially a group of five, it grew to eight and used members from all the major political parties, including the liberals. Sir Winston presided over a government of national unity and in so doing gave no one (even or especially his own party) the opportunity to bring politics into the war. And Sir Winston didn’t waffle and offer false hope. Bleak as it was he said it straight. He never promised, for example, that within a few months we would have a world beating airforce. In case you need reminding as we approach November 11, in the six years between 1939 and 1945 we lost 382,000 servicemen in World War II and 67,100 civilians died. In the eight months between March and October 2020 there have been almost 59,000 deaths with Covid 19 on the death certificate, according to the government website. Maybe some people should have swallowed their pride and their egos to give a government we could all support and have no excuse for not supporting.

I am not an angry person, most would call me calm and placid, but I’m angry today. It is generally accepted, I believe, that those suffering the most financial hardship in the current crisis are the lower paid of our society. Those on zero hours contracts and minimum wage doing jobs they probably don’t enjoy but need to because it puts food on the table for their families. We know that, we see it around us. But some MPs seem to think that the parents of poorly fed children are at fault. They are accused of not working hard enough to feed their kids, which is amazing as there are a diminishing number of jobs. To add to that insult, and it is an insult, 322 conservative MPs turned down the opportunity to give free school meals to children during the holidays. If it was a case of not having the money I might understand it, but we do have money to support museums, galleries and theatres, we do have money to spend on ‘consultants’ for the government and MPs, we have the money to increase MP’s salaries. Yes, with thousands of people being put out of work, businesses not having the money to pay their staff let alone give them a raise, our MPs got an extra £2500 a year from April. That puts their basic salary up to £81,932. So if we hadn’t paid the MPs more we would immediately have had £1.6 million to chip in towards school meals. And, as if that wasn’t bad enough, we subsidise the meals of those MPs in the House of Commons. In my journalistic days I got to sample the Commons ‘canteen’ and it was pretty good, far better than I enjoyed in the Post Office when I worked there. But perhaps canteen is a misnomer, the PO canteen, and no other canteen I have ever frequented, served sirloin steak, haddock kedgeree or salmon tagliatelle. And in what other plush surroundings would you get beer battered cod, chips, mushy peas and tartare sauce for £6.41? Someone said that if we paid MPs more money, then we would get better MPs. Wrong, we’d get more people applying for the sinecure that it seems being an MP has become in some quarters. The point of an MP is to serve your constituency. Cut their salaries in half, attract people that believe in the community rather than the career and we immediately save £24 million a year. That will feed a few kids in the holidays.

It goes against my natural instincts to readily agree with any government minister of any political persuasion. I’m always looking for that ulterior motive. Yet on this occasion, I agree with one, though probably for the wrong reason. There was a furore about a government campaign that showed a photograph of a ballet dancer (albeit an American ballet dancer) and advised her to retrain in the cyber industry. Naturally, it was ill-timed and ill-judged. The premise was that as the arts and artists across all media are suffering from Covid restrictions and are unlikely to find work in their chosen field, then they should all re-train as something else. Along with all those hospitality workers, I suspect. It was ill-timed, because when you are already down on the floor, you do not want a clumsy government boot coming along to kick you in the face. And it was ill-judged because, almost certainly, we don’t have the capacity to re-train 137,000 people, let alone find them all jobs. However, behind the bonkers ad is a more substantial thought that this and all governments need to address. As people will have to work until they are 70 years old in the near future, in this rapidly changing world we should expect or anticipate that (a) we will not be able to do the same job when we are 70 as we did when we were 30, (b) that it will still exist as a job. Not that long ago, men would go out to work at 15, do basically the same job or be with the same firm for 50 years and retire at 65. Some professions were able to retire at 60 and the wealthier few at 55. Others never had that opportunity. Take the case of the dancers. How many professional dancers are still performing at the highest level in their 40s. Darcy Bussell quit when she was 38. As the unfit among us will know, your body deteriorates with time, we are not young forever. As Martha Graham said, ‘a dancer dies twice—once when they stop dancing, and this first death is the more painful.’ Dancers aren’t the only ones with curtailed careers. Footballers, gymnasts, rugby players… they all have a premature retirement and must move on to other things. They can’t all become managers, coaches, tv pundits and administrators. They must have a second career. This happens in other areas too. Service personnel can’t be front line fighters forever. Any actor will tell you, there are precious few decent parts for older women. As the retirement age lengthens other occupations become marginal. Would you expect a 70 year old to still be a steel erector, a roofer, a general labourer, even a nurse or doctor. The longer we expect people to work, the more rapidly, the world changes, the more need there will be for re-training. So instead of telling those in the arts to think about new jobs, maybe the government should be saying to everyone, ‘we understand, here is the training, here are the opportunities.’ Maybe I have got a bone to pick with that Minister after all.

First let me make it clear that I am a sceptic and my scepticism ranges across the globe and all political parties. However… We are going to save £18.9bn coming out of Europe. That was the pre-referendum promise. At the Conservative party conference this month the number had been watered down to £1bn a month. Who is going to save it? Well there was the obvious back-tracking. First, years ago Mr Johnson admitted that the referendum promise of £350m a week was a gross figure not the net amount. As it is, we get £4.4bn back in agricultural subsidies and another £5bn in a rebate in place since 1984. The real total is £9.5bn, a healthy sum for the government to spend. The flip side is the one we pay for, the consumers. If there is no deal the British Retail Council says our food bills will increase by 20%, approximately £3.1bn. About 80% of our imported food comes from Europe, we can’t replace that instantly from around the world and we’d still be paying tariffs anyway. Then there is the cost of administering everything that is imported or exported. Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs, no less, say the extra cost will be £15bn a year just to fill in all the extra forms. That is likely to be an underestimate as it doesn’t take into account all the new VAT compliance. As the people importing and exporting this stuff bear the cost of form filling, that £15bn will be passed on to us, the government isn’t picking up the bill, but it will have to pay out a further £470m just to build new border customs and control sites, no estimate yet on the cost of manning them. Basically, the government saves £9.5bn, we pay out £18.1bn. Hmmm. Of course, the numbers or lack of them is not the only hot air to come from the Tory conference. We have been promised a £160m investment in wind energy to create the 40 gigawatts required to power our kettles etc. Sadly, people in the industry think the money required is closer to £48bn. Not a lot of difference there then.

My natural inclination is to be shy, some might say withdrawn. Shyness puts you on the edge, the periphery, and you rely on others to draw you in, to a certain extent. It also makes you aware of your own abilities because shy people cannot bluff successfully. We tend to know our limitations and are unwilling to dupe people into thinking otherwise. The reason we know our limitations is because we recognise and admit to our failings and failures. This general lack of arrogance and excessive pride is called humility. Our peripheral position has two outcomes. The first is that we will be welcomed into a group because of the contribution we can make to it. We never seem to be part of it, or integral. We will soon be forgotten when the need for us diminishes. It is a state we are accustomed to. The second outcome is our potential to observe from afar. From the edge you can see all that is going on. You are not required to be in every conversation, so your silence allows you to scrutinise those that are ‘in’ or striving to be so. What is striking, as a spectator, is that those closest to the centre of the group, those that tend to lead or want to be leaders, they seem to lack genuine compassion or sympathy. They will say whatever is necessary to maintain their position. Whether they admit it or not, whether it is financial, physical, famous or fiscal, their superior position is important to them, otherwise why would they put themselves there. There are people who have had ‘greatness thrust upon them’ as Shakespeare says. They are few and far between. Their compassion and kindness is called humanity. A failing that the shy seem to share is a sense of fashion. We may seem dowdy and plain. Maybe that contributes to our peripheral camouflage. Maybe we don’t need to dress to draw attention to ourselves. Maybe we don’t need to behave and act in a way that keeps us as the focal point. Maybe we don’t feel obliged to say the first thing that comes into our head because it appears smart and will keep people on our side. As observers of others and the image they create, the shy are in the best position to assess our self-image and decide where we wish to place ourselves in the human spectrum. We probably don’t require a bizarre hair-style or odd way of talking. We certainly don’t need to be told when we’ve messed something up. While we don’t have an overbearing pride that verges on arrogance, we certainly have enough pride to admit our faults. One strives to imagine the size of someone’s ego that contributes to their impregnable self-image. One has to ask, do they genuinely believe all that they say or are they scared of losing face? Is self-image so addictive that ‘we deceive ourselves and there is no truth in us’ as Faustus says quoting the bible, Sadly humanity and humility are not rewarded in our society because those that recognise them don’t have the unshakeable self-image or ego to promote them. They are handy when you need to maintain your powerful position but after… what the heck.   “Be not afraid of greatness. Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and others have greatness thrust upon them.” William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night “If we say that we have no sin, We deceive ourselves, and there’s no truth in us. Why then belike we must sin, And so consequently die. Ay, we must die an everlasting death.” Christopher Marlowe, Dr. Faustus “If we say that we have no sin, we are deceiving ourselves and the truth is not in us.” John 1.8  

First the serious bit. I have no objection to the PM having someone to take over the daily briefings to the public. For the time being they appear to have a purpose. However, this new role he has created is a political appointment and the person in the job can counter any arguments put forward… well, by anyone of any party, group, country. She is not the impartial voice of the government, our representative acting in our best interest, she is a Conservative appointment. This effectively gives the Conservatives, for the moment, a free, prime time, party political broadcast every day. At election time all parties get their tv slots allocated on some reasonably fair representative system. So why should this fairness be thrown out of the window now? This is not, on this occasion, bias against the current government, I have so little faith in the English political parties that I despair of anyone giving us any genuine leadership that is not based on self-interest. But one way or another I always thought of our British system being fair. Now for the rant. Where do these appointments stop? Three senior press people for the PM plus the one for the Chancellor, how many more are there lurking and how much does it cost us? Just the those I know about are probably costing over £500,000 a year – that’s a lot of money. We are even building a special studio for the broadcasts in 9 Downing Street. We could have three nurses for one PR person or support ten low-paid workers for a year. This is a national crisis and yet we keep employing consultants, ‘advisers’ and other political appointees when we allegedly have no money. What’s the point of bringing out all the Churchillian references when there is nothing Churchill-like in what you are doing? That is the point – Churchill did things and made things happen. He always seemed to have a purpose, something important and relevant to say, he looked to the future but acted in the present. I have never got the impression he stumbled from one self-imposed disaster to the next. And why are we following the US? This is their model, the President surrounds himself with ‘advisors’ or lackeys. Our democratic system has been replaced by presidential edict. And when they started publishing the photographs of Trump’s inner circle who had tested positive for Covid I noticed that all the women looked like models. If you are a woman is it a prerequisite for a Trump job that you look pretty? All the effort and sacrifices that women have made for some sort of equality and still an international leader appears to appoint women on the basis of sexual attraction. Rant over, sorry.