Every Day is on Shifting Sands

Just read the local rag. The headline: an ex serviceman commits suicide. He couldn't cope.

Who can live like that?

There is no security in this society. One day you can be financially secure, the next you are dependent on the generosity of aggrieved millionaires who, for long ages in this country, have cornered the seat of power. They control the education establishments that are little more than breeding pits for government. They learn the special handshakes that move them, like fat chess pieces, across the board that is our society. Guess who the pawns are.

Who can live like that?

If you are out of work every day is on shifting sands. You are running just to stand still, just to stay in place. Yours is the lot of people who would otherwise be peers and comrades were it not for artifical barriers that separate us. These are the administrators of a system they do not control that keeps them frightened. To process that they must persecute us. They must make us jump through the most trivial of hoops.

Ours is a system that deliberately seeks to undermine the lot of those it was deisnged to help, and those it was designed to help have no opportunity to steer the policies that govern it. Again those policies are in the hands of the most powerful. People that will never need social security or welfare, but who are the most aggrieved about its existence. People who already benefit from the public purse in considerable ways: tax avoidance, tax reductions, subsidies, corporate benefits, expenses, and so on. But those are acceptable perks when it comes to the working rich. Or even, in the case of those who earn so much they can work but hours per year, the not-so-working rich.

Who can live like that?

Sooner or later this system will have to give way. It cannot hold. I do not believe humans can exist in this way. Perhaps Labour's seemingly inevitable demise will spur on some form of change, but change there must be.

Are we to become a sad little island, anchored off the coast of former allies now adrift in a sea of bitter division and sanitised past glory? Who can really say we were glorious when our empire was built on blood and bigotry. Perhaps this is our just deserts. We are to become the sick old man off the coast of western Europe, a bedlam ruled by impotent monarchs and political chancers who parade business credentials like beguiling toys, waved in front of those they deem inferior in order to secure power. The cult of John Galt bred to power in the stockbroker belt and the shires of a country that was once proud to care about its weakest constituents.

Now we live in fear that our independence will be taken and sold to the American private health insurance market in the name of support, while our children can look forward to Christmas meals provided by foodbanks, attending failings schools as starved as they are. Parents forced into zero hours contracts to bolster the profit margins of fat tyrants just so they can have the money to travel to the south of France and brag about how their squalid gulags sell the best sweatshop-sewn products in the developed world.

Pull up the drawbridge they say, so we can lock out the world outside. Full of people who want a piece of our glory. If only they knew.