Friday 22 April 2016

Dear Prime Minister

This is the full panoply of Hart District Council's celebratory efforts for the Queen's 90th Birthday celebrations...

...you may struggle to see them, here let me help you...

...is that better? It's pathetic isn't it? I'm not sure Aldershot bothered at all and I didn't see anything in Farnborough at the weekend.

In the golden, olden days, there would have been bunting strewn across the road like red, white and blue snow, there would have been flags as big as horses from every beribboned lamp post and the - now absent - telegraph poles, shops would have decked themselves out in colour-coordinated decorations and prepared shop window displays that had more to do with royalty, nation and empire than they had to do with the goods the shops actually sold.

It would have been in every town, village and hamlet in the land. We would have had a public holiday, schools would have had a day off, and parishes would have had a day of events with a church service and a hog-roast.

I don't blame the local councils, we all know they've had their budgets cut and cut again by the inadequate cockwombles in Westminster - that's you, as if you didn't know, and under the capitalist system that's been replacing democracy since 1979, they are supposed to expect help from the 'private sector' on these occasions, 'private enterprise' is supposed to step-up to the plate.

The Estate Agents had a go, those are paper discs being shredded in the light-breeze of the last few days, and a couple of reels of transparent plastic mesh (taffeta?), while another shop did have a bucket outside with balloons on sticks to which they had attached a dozen or so cardboard masks of her Majesty and the Duke of Edinburgh! Very fetching.

You see Prime Minister, the private sector is all about the bottom line, and while they might pay for some gardening work in exchange for disfiguring hoardings on roundabouts, they won't shell out for a bunch of decorations with no 'guaranteed return in the investment'.

That's why we used to have a general taxation system in which the rich (who benefit from the efforts of the poor, or the inherited-wealth born of the efforts of slavery, land clearance, enclosures...) paid enough for local authorities to be given enough to do enough in situations like this.

This was at one end of town; it probably represents a week's child-protection budget!
Or a penny on the council-tax?

Compared to the Silver Jubilee celebrations (two years before the rot set-in at Westminster), both the Golden and Diamond jubilee celebrations have been muted, damp squibs.

It is a sign of the end of 'Empire', the end of 'great' Britain; even Margret Thatcher (the architect of all you stand for) started to distance herself from some of her core policies in her final post-retirement speeches. She hated what you were doing with housing.

Yet you keep banging on about privatisation, forcing schools to convert to academies, out-sourcing, making-do and mending with Chinese money and French technical expertise (which half the company's own board thinks they don't have!), breaking-up the Health Service...

...what are you going to do with all the money you're taking out of the economy Prime Minister? Run off to China and build a nice house in the hills a long way from pollution centres and rising oceans? Their leader is becoming more dictatorial every day, kidnapping publishers from Hong Kong, taking overall control of the armed forces...he's not going to tolerate a bunch of Western toffs buying-up land there, he's too busy making sure his mates buy-up London...and Toronto and New York...!

Although, republicans would probably argue that celebrating the birthday of a highly privileged woman who wants for nothing and gets the best of everything is anathema in itself! If she fails to make it to a hundred will the Household Division take the Royal physicians outside and shoot them? But that's another post for another day.

You command a dying world Prime Minister...badly.

2 comments:

  1. "while another shop did have a bucket outside with balloons on sticks to which they had attached a dozen or so cardboard masks of her Majesty and the Duke of Edinburgh! Very fetching"
    Made my day ..:-D

    ReplyDelete
  2. If you can picture a bucket of eye-less grinning loons...that's it!

    H

    ReplyDelete