I wonder if Miliband’s key problem, in our shameful society, will turn out to be that he is a Jew. One hopes not. The big whisper on Ed so far has been the union link. Anti-Semitism displaces and reforms easily on other targets in our crude journalism and mind-sets. Something is always available to stir the burning torches. I was pleased to see him admitting in public that we should not have gone to Iraq and we seem to have paid-off the financial debt to the US that followed our bankruptcy after imperialist adventures, so perhaps his talk of ‘new alliances’ has some reality.
Ralph Miliband talked quite cogently about socialism not being possible through democratic means. I can’t reconcile socialism as a good end personally, but democracies have a pretty vile history too, imperialist from Athens, through the Dutch, British, French, German and US exemplars. Laughably, nearly all the writing left of the Athenian times is anti-democratic, and I’m aware whatever the faults of western democracies there is some freedom of expression.
I believe there is a wall in front of Ed and all our politicians that prevents anything new. It’s invisible, unlike the monstrous building of the Iron Curtain, and most of the clapped-out Marxism I’ve read, is not “capitalism”. I know of no human systems that were not capitalist, even in Stone Age economics. The wall is madness, perhaps that of the ecocides Jared Diamond has written about. I can only guess at it. It’s whatever drove Easter Islanders to build huge statues, other societies to screw their water supplies and so on. Pakistan, for all the current calamity of flood, is in danger of running out of the stuff. Some parts of Peru are more screwed than they were in ancient times, when one tribe controlled the stuff through ‘gods’.
One can guess that those on the commanding heights of the world economy somehow extrude this wall. Europe and Brazil are on strike today against the wall. I saw some rich clown on the BBC this morning telling us this is all because “we” have spent too much. I tend to see policing as a microcosm of the wall problem. It looks as though we need more and better cops because of crime and antisocial behaviour, but we can’t afford even the ones we have ‘because of the wall’. We have plenty of docile, unemployed and under-employed bodies we could use, but the wall means we can’t afford to use them.
“ConDem” or the “Cuntilition” are about to unleash a very old solution. The real problem is that we are so wasteful and inefficient. We can do more with less. This is a key brick in the wall. “Ed’s Lot”, broadly whatever ZanyPFNulabour becomes are also stuck with this brick, only have to promise they would use a smaller one. Ed can’t promise to tear the wall down as we all know this leads to “Soviet Paradise”, and bad as we are at reading Newspeak and Doublespeak, we all know this really means eating boiled grass and ending up on show trial (we have this shortened for us as as “socialism” in our heavily unbiased media). Though the wall is invisible, Ed the Red knows it will swallow him whole, never to be seen again in public with his pretty wife, should pictures of him holding hands with union bosses, or plans without the IMF seal of approval appear in the press.
Ed has hinted that we were very silly to let the financial sector become such a large part of our economy, though one assumes any kind of Wilsonian selective employment tax to encourage manufacturing employment would now be a kiss of death. That we need manufacturing and building capability is as obvious as the need for effective policing, but the same wall applies. The Germans kept substantial manufacturing, so how did they cheat the wall? They didn’t have a convenient supply of North Sea oil and gas either.
A few moons ago, we were dumb enough to give up virgin daughters on hearing tales of Jabberwocks and other demons. Now the invisible wall will have us lose 40,000 cops (the ones not trained to eat chocolate-dipped strawberries and quaff champagne) and add a couple of million to the unemployed. The wall promises this will be a good thing and that its invisible hand will soon re-employ everyone.
Ed will probably say nothing, though his lips will have to move. He doesn’t have to. Unless the wall favours us, the economy will collapse and ConDem will start looking for a Falklands’ Factor (we may still be able to cope with a Real IRA man on Rockall after the cuts). The jobs lost to Thatcherism (which I attribute to policy since around 1967 and the famous begging bowl visit to the IMF – one not needed except our figures were dud) have never been replaced. Ed is nearly as pretty as his wife, she is preggers, so expect lots on this.
I’m off to teach some foreigners. Unlike some cop handcuffing Mr. Domestic Violence and being stabbed by the ungrateful spouse, I am an export success, not some dire drain on the public purse. I no longer teach our own, we’ve given some childminders PhDs to do that cheaper. We need factories, we need cops, social workers, new industries and ideas in practice. Expect Ed to promise all of this, but remember, the wall says we can’t have them and what the wall says, goes – mostly to wherever is cheapest. Vote Wall. It’s all you can do.
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