Like Dr Alf I worry about the direction of the Conservative Party and at the failure of May to deliver some home truths to an electorate that seems to have had what passes for a brain removed.
It ought to be quite obvious that our public sector is bloated, inefficient and unaffordable and that the worst examples are the civil service, local authorities, the NHS, police and fire services.
Tinkering at the edges does not solve these problems.
The U turns on executive pay represented an own goal showing May to be weak and vacillating and unwilling to confront gross inequality.
I have been reading the Daily Telegraph since the age of 11 and have been Conservative all my life but a 450 to 1 gap between top pay including emoluments and bonuses and average pay is not only unseemly but dangerously destabilising.
There are no exports worth mentioning, no Messianic drive to get the country “match fit ” to perform, no talk of House of Lords Reform, nothing about productivity, nothing about obesity, nothing about foreign aid.
It is as if Mrs May expects the country to go on existing by levitating on a sea of money from Arab potentates, Chinese billionaires seeking a safe haven, Eastern European oligarchs, drug barons, arms dealers and criminals.
Certainly by my rudimentary arithmetic if we go on spending £1.5 trillion more than is coming in each year we will implode financially at some point but the official red book totals which must cause Dr Alf as a Chartered Accountant sleepless nights bear a sense of unreality.
There is what he may remember old fashioned Captain Mainwaring style bank managers describing to their SME clients as “floorboard money”(One of my friends who owns 2 private nursing homes remembers that this was communicated by these bank managers as them getting out of their chairs, holding an imaginary crowbar and using it in a downward motion to lift up the floorboards to reveal monies hidden away from prying eyes and the tax inspector that could then be used to help justify the loan application).
Those days are gone but from Mrs May who talks in code we here about “difficult choices” a phrase which frightens people into voting for Jeremy Corbyn who talks as if there is an endless supply of money and that with higher corporation taxes, business rates, local authorities unchained to do their worst and taxes on the rich everyone else will have a free ride.
Mayism is a short lived experiment because the Brexit negotiations are already doomed as most of our negotiating hand has been frittered away by the three stooges, Fox, Davis and the head “Mugwump”, Boris Johnson.
There is little point in voting for Corbyn because he would bring bankruptcy and the IMF which Margaret Thatcher saved us by interceding personally with the Sultan of Brunei who bailed the country out. Lady Thatcher said at the time “We owe you a debt of gratitude for life” but in this country memories are short and gratitude in very short supply as people seem to follow the Arthur Daily shoddy car dealer mentality of “Let’s be having it now”.
Tim Farron is an unlikely leader or Coalition partner and Corbyn,Abbott and McDonnell seem to inhabit a world where money is manufactured to order.
It is probably a case of vote for May who wins with a modest majority then fire up the Tory grandees in the 1922 Committee who deliver the “walk the plank”message and the knife between the shoulder blades.
Like Dr Alf I have a difficult choice to make but perversely this one seems right to me because George Osborne and the vehicle he has chosen to further his Prime Ministerial ambitions wants to head a new political party and to do that he wants Corbyn to govern by Coalition and make an unholy mess of everything.
I liked this too. I get it: For a true-blue Conservative like our friend John Gelmini here, it must be tough to watch May bringing down the show. But the problem here goes well beyond May. It has to do with Brexit which is and remains a deeply polarizing issue. And nothing is more detrimental for the smooth functioning of a democracy than deeply polarizing issues: They throw governments in one direction when the “majority minus one” wants to go in the other direction!
I agree the difference between the top and average earners far exceeds what is acceptable. Especially since there are not that many outstanding CEOs. I do however, disagree that Jeremy Corbin is not the person to bring the country to a considerably better state than it is currently in. Let the people who can afford to pay a little more, do so.
I am sick and tired of the Tory press giving him such a hard time.
Reblogged this on LibDem Fischer.
Thanks for the reblog 🙂