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The Times!!
Arrgghh!! No way.
But I must admit that talk of insurrection makes me feel all warm and fuzzy at the moment as I sit here uncomfortably with
an 8 week wait to see an NHS dentist!! That’s a lot of paracetamol too..
This country was never meant to be a rentiers paradise and that is what it has become.
Good luck with that
The Tories have abandoned any thought of a social contract, although they may follow a Hobbesian theory of life being miserable, brutal and short (for other people that is). Anyone in the pay of the Murdoch press must be suspect.
@Pilgrim Slight Return
If it’s an abscess I have found Silica, works wonders and is available at Holland & Barrett.
‘The Social Contract’
Allow me if you will a meditation on that.
Thatcher said that there is no such thing as society.
What was it that this ignorant and arrogant fool did not understand?
Having read both Michael Hudson’s ‘And Forgive Them Their Debts’ (2018) (about debt relief in the ancient near East) and Isabella Weber’s ‘How China Escaped Shock Therapy’ (2021) and how the ancient Chinese had as an objective the happiness of its people, I can see that they both share a particular outcome, a ‘social contract’ emerges.
That is that the rulers in both lands realised that they depended on their citizens/subjects to help defend their borders at times of war and other threats. A happy populace is a loyal populace that will serve in such times. Thus was created a reciprocity: the rulers accepted that they relied on their subjects for safety and security; the ruled realised that they depended on their rulers to control debt and market prices. Sounds fair to me?
So what you had was a true sort ‘inter-dependency’ or what you might call ‘a society’. Because that is what a society is.
Contrast that with how we in the West operate now and in the past.
In the West – certainly up to the WW1, even WWII and right now – it was OK to treat your subjects like shit and then expect them to go off to war and sacrifice themselves for a system that treated them badly.
After all, you as a ruler could use nationalism and fascism to get your subjects to hate the other side. Never mind that they were under nourished, in poor health, poorly educated – us in the West – and those elsewhere ruling in the same way as the West in the name of ‘modernisation’ – could use ‘public relations’ to stir up enough vim and vigor to vanquish our foes.
And once it was over, we’d come back and accept our lot – to be exploited and thrown away once again when not needed, ignored.
I think that the British need to be asked some questions (as do the cousins over the pond and some Europeans too). Questions firmly rooted in the past which is meant to be inferior to the present but which I find not to be the case.
Are you prepared/do you think it right that you or your family would be expected to sacrifice their lives for a country that:
1. Makes you wait 12 + hours in an ambulance or hospital corridor (if you are lucky) to receive medical attention and makes you dip into your savings to get private treatment?
2. That makes you wait until the end of the month before you can claim your first benefit payment if you become unemployed?
3. That makes you wait for dental treatment but leaves you with some very expensive private options instead?
4. That has been selling your graft and your talent cheaply on the international scene in the name of ‘competition’ and making your wages fall?
5. That ripped up a perfectly good and beneficial trading agreement with your nearest continent and destroyed the economy by raising prices and disrupting perfectly working supply chains?
6. That can’t even look after the elderly properly even though it has known for years that the elderly would grow in number and can’t even be bothered to pay those who look after them a decent wage?
7. That cannot manage an epidemic outbreak sufficiently well to minimise deaths?
8. That has thrown you to the wolves that are the private sector who charge YOU what the hell they like for energy, water, rail travel , (not to mention road maintenance, education and increasingly the NHS who fleece the Treasury)?
9. Whose executive is able to suspend without question the parliament where the politicians you vote for are prevented from representing your views and holding the executive to account?
10. That cannot look after the young and vulnerable?
11. That turns away desperate people who are fleeing death and destruction?
12. That pretends to rule for all, but all too often listens to and rules for the minority with the power of money?
All I know is that I would not fight for a country that did this to its citizens. No way. And nor will my children. They will not become soldiers, policeman or fire-fighters either until we’ve got better country than this – nothing but a rentiers paradise.
‘No such thing as a society’ sounds increasingly now not as a belief but as a result of too many years of Neo-liberal Thatcherite bullshit. It was actually a prophecy that Thatcher spoke off – and one of her own making, except that she was too stupid and vain to realise it at the time.
As a self-fulfilling prophecy therefore – that is the only way in which Thatcher’s words have stood the test of time.
Thanks