In the last twenty years we have seen the full death of integrity in the UK. Integrity at work is frowned upon, and in some cases is a sacking offence. Integrity of belief in politics is to be sneered at unless you are a Conservative. Integrity in product development is often dubious. The integrity of the BBC has been severely compromised. Only this evening I commented that Tony Parsons and Julie Birchhill hadn’t been on for a while, and then I realised that this was because Labour is not in power, and they are probably quite lazy now anyway.
The media is pumped into our homes by an inflated and lower quality supplier, in my case free of charge, although I could just plug in the box my broadband supplier sends me and get a lot of extra useless channels if I really wanted it. Freeview is more than enough, I do not need anything extra, and to be honest I could live without that too. All too often, we see the same faces presented to us year after year, sometimes being paid millions of pounds to appear, and the people concerned are neither talented nor interesting.
We have lowered the denomination of information to the point where it is largely useless, education is of considerably lower quality to improve the statistics and innovation is apparently to be discouraged unless it relates to mass market products. From ‘the bland leading the bland’ days of Tony Blair, British culture has been in a downward spiral until we now apparently have a population so stupid that they respond to our unelected PM repeating the words strong and stable over and over again in place of anything approaching attractive policy.
What became of the questioners, the innovators, the creative thinkers, the academics straying into other walks of life and seeing a new angle, or even discussing it? What became of the BBC I used to be so proud of? What became of honesty, hard work and the individual? In their place we seem to now see subdued lackeys lazily carrying out the mugwump instructions of people with too much money and no imagination, who in turn are carrying out instructions from people with even more money and less imagination.
I have written many previous posts on the danger of corporatisation. It endangers education, creativity, healthcare, public service provision, politics and the nature of your daily life. Nobody listens, because life is more convenient if you do not have to think. Perhaps if I appeared on Sky or Dave making jokes about it people would take it more seriously.
True freedom takes work and confrontation. It involves actual debate, and an actual exchange of real ideas. It does not need to be repressed by strong and stable leadership, and there is no passing the buck. Sometimes freedom costs, and sometimes you really should start paying, in the form of putting some actual work in and saying NO to things that you know perfectly well just won’t work.
If the UK is to stop the American rot of complacency, lazy thinking and blaming others for their problems instead of actually helping them solve these problems, now would be a good time to do it. No thanks, we do not wish to bomb Syria. No thanks, we do not wish to sell the NHS. No thanks, we do not wish to be sucked into more American economic mistakes in the form of the ‘consumption-led economy.’
I have never heard such rubbish as I heard on the news today on this very subject. It is lazy, stupid thinking to make consumers with ever-shrinking disposable income the focus of economic policy. It is a cop-out which leads to disaster, and if that disaster fails to affect you, it will certainly be visited upon your children.
Boris may well have had a Brexit accident, but it was a good accident. A weak pound encourages the export trade, which is the only way of having a genuinely strong economy. Small businesses are proportionately far better for the economy, in much the same way as feeding the poor makes more sense than tax breaks for the rich, who merely squirrel their extra money away instead of spending it. Small businesses employ more people, innovate, answer problems far more effectively, just as the poor spend and stimulate their local area instead of sending their cash to the nearest tax haven.
If I can see this, and our government cannot, who do I vote for? Sort yourselves out.