Letters / No inequality there
Well – another day, another fascinating post: Inequality; SN, 01/04/14.
It was hard to know where to begin; so I used Tim Berners-Lee’s little invention to find out more about Bob Holman and his views. Less than 15 minutes later, lo and behold, he’s not an American poet after all: he’s an intellectual Glasgow leftie, who doesn’t seem (or maybe want) to understand (among other things) the reason why Westminster is now full of “former public schoolboys”.
This outcome occurred because, important though that election was, barely two-thirds of those eligible to vote bothered to turn out to do so. This led to a hung parliament, the deadlock eventually being broken by the LibDems’ disinclination to form a coalition with New Labour.
So – we, the voters, were to blame for what eventually got elected, and not the ‘posh rich boys’, who just by chance had happened to put in the money and hard work required to offer themselves as candidates.
And – that was as open a system of voting as can be found in any free democratic society – because anyone who’d been deemed fit to be elected for his or her political stance alone would have had a decent shot at becoming an MP. No “inequality” there, I don’t think.
As a final thought on the “posh boys” – my feeling is that what they’ve managed to finick in the way of financial recovery without rocking the boat too hard has to be admired – whatever we might think of them as people.
The alternative situation might well have been the UK now in its fourth year of starvation, so close to complete was its bankrupted state after Brown had finished with it.
Of course, we could always try to blame our education system for not having informed us adequately in the matter of deciding who to vote for – but I’d have to say that taking a thoroughly slanted snapshot of a totally stupid war (“mechanised murder for profit” would be a better description of WWI, I feel) would not be my first choice of ways to do it.
We can whine all we like along the lines of “well, we weren’t taught THAT at school”; to which the correct response would be “if you can read, write, know how to use a library, and can also use the internet for more than shopping, facebooking and tweeting, it won’t matter how bad your teachers or the national curriculum were. You’re now in a very strong position to educate yourselves more or less free of charge in any direction you care to choose: so just get on with it”.
Admittedly, it’d be a bit of a tall order to cover Europe’s entire social, financial, engineering and military history, starting in 1750 or so (when the cancer of unlimited credit first began to gain a foothold) and continuing to the present day, and including as well the biographies of all of the major figures of that sweep of 264 years; but that’s what’s required, if a person is to make head or tail of why we’re in the situation we’re in today: and, given the right incentive, it wouldn’t be too burdensome a task.
Philip Andrews
Unst
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