SHARES FOR SALE

Seeing that I’ve got myself into a mood for putting bad things right, let’s take a squint at the dominant force that drives just about everything in our lives these days.

It’s money. We are told that it makes the world go round and, not being any sort of astrophysicist I’m in not position to disprove that hypothesis. But look at what we do with it.

We encourage inventor and the creative types in our populations to come up with ideas and then proceed to manufacture stuff if those ideas are about new products. It’s called a free market economy and it works. It’s good for the thinkers and its good for the consumers who get what they might otherwise never dream of having, and I can’t argue with it. And if the creator needs a bit of financial assistance then there’s absolutely nothing wrong, as I see it, for a few mates to risk their own cash and invest with him. It makes sense. He probably can’t afford it on his own, and those mates stand to make a killing or a loss depending on how things go.

But greed has to start stepping into the system. Now personally I would place the blame firmly on the shoulders of the late Mrs Thatcher when she was the prime minister. She got the idea that those who enjoy gambling (and that’s what it can be) on the stock exchange might like to gamble on a certainty, and that, of course, is no gamble at all, not if the returns are guaranteed profits.

So utilities, owned by the people and not her, don’t forget, were put up for sale and some were bought by ordinary Joes like thee and me (if you are an ordinary Joe, that is) and others were bought by confirmed gambling addicts like City men both here and overseas. We all knew what happens when ordinary Joes see a sudden profit … they sell up and take the cash, and that happened because the shares were undervalued in the first place. And those with already too many shares buy some more. So in the end there’s a gravitational drift of money to the few as small profits are taken by Joe this and Annie that. It turns out that the utilities that serve us, via the gift of stock market gambling, are owned in part by foreign investors who rather like the situation.

So the newly privatised utilities are no longer run by the inventor who had a personal interest in seeing his bright idea succeeding but by managers who are on an albeit decent wage, but who are just managing for somebody else. And in order to seem successful they have to make sure the profits keep rolling in, and don’t forget the profits are not just the cost of the end product but a slice, a percentage, for the investor. The dividends. It probably brightens many a dull morning when they clink into bank accounts the world over.

The managers, being generally bright boys or girls, have to make changes to the original product or service in order to enhance profits and keep their jobs, so cuts are made. These cuts are originally meant to pass unnoticed by the rest of us, but things like that can pile up over time. Amnd it was those cuts that meant that my lovely wife’s sister’s birthday cards didn’t arrive on time for her 88^th. Not one of them. And most people are only 88 once.

Money has become the servant of both the king and the swine that creates misery on birthdays. But less of that.

The nett result of the above happening in public service after public service is that for everything we ordinary Joes or Annies pay for, a slice of what we pay is whittled off to enhance the piles of dividends paid to anyone who had the foresight, the wherewithal and the moral compass to buy a slice of what they knew shouldn’t really be up for sale in the first place. But it was because a politician said it’s all right that it was.

Talking of politicians, have you ever given any though as to what qualifications most of them have? It’s worth pondering the issue. Because many of them (and note, I’m not saying all) are merely immoral seekers after personal glory and wealth. Does anyone come to mind? A bloke who’ll lie through his teeth and pretend that he isn’t? You know, the PM who caught Covid way back during the early stages of the outbreak of the damned virus and somehow both survived and managed to recover in record time by playing sudoku? Not that I’m suggesting that anything was devious or suspicious about it. I wouldn’t dare. The man’s clearly as honest as the day is long…

I bet he’s got shares in everything going.

© Peter Rogerson 20.03.22

POLITICS OR A PRIMEVAL SLUDGE

I should imagine there’s one thing we all notice as we pass through our lives and that is there is a tiny minority of our fellow beings who thinks they’re several steps above the rest of us when it comes to the evolutionary line without actually noticing that in reality they’re several steps behind.

Although I suppose it means what we mean by the evolutionary ladder. I have my own way of looking at it, a logical one which defines the evolutionary ladder as being a stepped incline starting way down low and ending up in some mysterious ethereal clouds which can’t exist but which are useful as a kind of analogy.

So where’s the bottom? In which primeval sludge does the ladder rest its feet? Well, that’s simple, isn’t it? I read somewhere, and I believe it because it was probably written by a scientist of huge renown, that life on Earth only had one mysterious start. And if you look at it logically that beginning wasn’t as complex as a mouse or a raccoon. Not even a fly or a wasp. That beginning was with a close relative of the amoeba, a single celled organism that could barely do more than exist. And that’s where my evolutionary ladder rests its feet.

At the other end, at the top, the ladder rests on a cloudy ridge of perfection and we might call it the end of time. Maybe it’s surrounded by a cloud of glittering something or other but more likely a nation or internation of superbly bright beings who don’t squabble or fight or have wars because such behaviour is beneath them. Instead, they exist on a high plane where thought and sex are important, and very little else is. And they’re surrounded by glittering stuff so they don’t even have to switch the light on..

Now, most of us are plodding up that ladder and, being sensible and wonderful people, we’re on our way from the bottom, which is already far behind us, towards the top, and on our way we’ve picked up a few invaluable hints. Like we don’t have the answer to everything. Like we’re one of a myriad of living beings (and cats, dogs, the aforementioned raccoons and amoeba) and all of us, even them, have a right to our place on the planet. We might not be equal in girth or even intellectual ability, but we are equal in existence, occupying a space in a particular time and dependent on the past whilst protecting the future.

Yes, protecting the future … but what from? Well, that one’s easy. If tomorrow is going to exist at all it’s going to have to be protected. There are quite a lot of bright young people about who can give you a few hints as to what from when it comes to the air we breathe and the land we walk on. We call it the environment, which is a very boring word when what we really mean is home. And it can easily be eroded by carelessness. By greed (did you know there are some greedy people around who would easily pile shit into their home, and live in it, if the alternative is doing a bit of cleaning up?) and by wilful selfishness.

Those people are way down on my ladder. But there are others behind them and those are the one I started nattering about when I began this piece. I mentally class them as a group and call it a spectre of dictators. They are men (usually, though women are not exempt from belonging to this group) who believe their own opinions are so much more important than anyone else’s that they try to dominate those around them. Remember Hitler? Say no more. But this spectre of dictators, if they are stupid enough, manage to gather an increasing amount of isolation from the rest of humanity that they actually get to thinking that they’re above everyone else without actually noticing that their feet are slowly descending towards the primeval sludge and its nation of amoebas who really don’t want to know them.

We are all aware of some of them who, through great personal misfortune, don’t quite make it to power and influence, which is a good thing. But they’re around us, all right. Billy No-It-All, that sort, Annie I’m-Always-Right. Give them the isolation of the powerful and they’ll start a war.

Because wars are what they’re good at. Wars are where you brainwash others with your own ideas and mistaken ideals when they’re too young to see how wrong you are and then submit them to a whole range of mutilations and death on the battle field while you hide somewhere nice and safe, probably with champagne and delicious Cornish pasties at your elbow, and certainly no chance of meeting a premature ending yourself. And then you can give medals and ribbons to the brave youngsters who have lost bits of themselves painfully, like legs and arms and maybe even testicles, as they fight a silly old war based on nothing but your ego and a few dreams of fame and fortune, which history teaches us you’ll never actually get. We never met Julius Caesar on the ides of March, did we? That was a day he didn’t want to see. Or Hitler in his bunker at the end? Or the confusing demise of Mussolini in Italy? Or any of the other slugs lower down on the evolutionary ladder than we are as they fall off.

The main problem with them, though, is the way they cause pain, misery and death to those of us who know a darned site better than them that we are closer to the shiny conclusion of evolution and the joys that a radiant future holds for our species when we reach it. I’d have them put down at birth, but if that were to happen I’d be just as bad as them. Instead, I’d invent a cunning plan that would painlessly and almost lovingly neutralise them so that they can’t do much harm to anyone. Maybe give them a dustpan and brush and tell them there’s a place in their heads that needs sorting out.

And by the way, and I hope this doesn’t upset him, but in my opinion our current prime minister is one of them. But he might need a whole bloody vacuum cleaner!

© Peter Rogerson. 19.03.22

I TOLD YOU SO

I It is, of course, much too late to start saying I told you so when the subject of Brexit crops up even though I did tell you so. Even back at the time of the referendum it was obvious that the threads flitting through social media were often speaking with forked tongues, even when they were backed up by politicians who should really know a thing or two. And billionaires like the owners of the nastier tabloid newspapers revelled in telling us lie after lie disguised as truth after truth.

I wonder how many wondered where some of the anti-EU memes originated when they nodded their heads and muttered about agreeing with the messages in them?

But the Referendum happened and that’s just got to be that. Whether the Russians really influenced the vote is something I’m not qualified to know, but what I do know is that it helped the Putin course when the UK left the EU because it weakened the entire structure of any future opposition they might want to point their mighty weaponry at. And it does seem pretty clear that very rich troglodytes with too much Russian cash were courted by selfish, greedy, unthinking politicians in our own country. Did I say troglodytes? Sorry: I meant oligarchs.

And this was doubtless an influence. I mean, you don’t pay a fat wobbly politician thousands of pounds to play tennis with the wife of one of your society of friends if you’re not going to get something in return, do you? Unless, of course, you’ve got a fetish for fat that wobbles, but Russians aren’t famous for that. My mental image of Russians is based on a recollection of beautiful women who play tennis or dance on Strictly and who you can tell at a glance are unlikely to ever be fat and wobbly. There are men too, but they don’t draw too much attention to their fleshy parts, but I bet they’re not excessively plumptious in the tummy region.

I should imagine that the reward for the tennis game was influence. And, to give him some credit, our prime Minister does seem to have enjoyed the company of affluent latter day romanovs on holiday in lovely places. And they wouldn’t, surely, allow his tummy muscles to spoil the fine Italian views he was being treated to unless they had something to gain. I mean, doesn’t he ever look in a mirror and wonder why they find him so beautiful? And he left his security bods behind, probably just in case they felt like interfering. Well, I suppose even they had seen enough of him in the office back home.

But all of this is one way of looking at why we were encouraged to vote to leave the EU. I remember semi-discussing the issue to locals where I lived at the time (we’ve relocated ourselves since then) and those locals, one arrogant individual in particular, parroted Farageisms as if he was quoting the Bible, and I recall that Farage was only too happy to lie through his teeth in exactly the same way as Adolf Hitler did when he was confusing his own people with racist lies. So the vote went all wrong, and our happy little nation left the EU.

Promises had been made, of course, that we would benefit from cheaper everything. Food would be abundant and almost free, energy would revert to costing Victorian pennies for a supergigawatt and a bloom of green beauty would wipe the smudges from the environment as nasty European winds blew elsewhere. Well, maybe I made that last one up, but it did seem at the time that politicians on the right or blue side of politics were trying to sell their souls and their country for a bite of independence.

And now we can see it was to their financial advantage. When prices go up the share of those prices that is paid to investors goes up proportionally (15% of £10 is less attractive than 15% of £100, always was and always will be). And, of course, prices went up. A lot of prices. Even taxes, and government ministers had the beautiful laxative of coronavirus to blame when the going got tough. It sent them skedaddling to parliamentary toilets making noises like Macbeth’s witches as they pulled their intellectual pants down. Did I say intellectual? I meant selfish, thick-arsed-mentality pants down.

The solution, of course, was to increase taxation to pay for all the excess that had been creamed off the public purse. And the joy of it is if you charge an OAP like me a tenner extra it hurts because it represents the nutrient part of my diet and I might die all the sooner for lack of that nutrient, but the multi-billionaire doesn’t actually notice that tenner being snatched from his greasy fingers. And he can eat his caviare until the cows come home, washing it down with something vile at a £100 a bottle and risk dying of alcoholic poisoning.

And that last bit makes me remember a point I wasn’t going to include here, but will because it tells a truth bigger than itself. Mr Greasy rich man will delight in the beauty of his expensive wine, slurping it down glass after glass at £100 a glass until his nose glows, and its very high cost will make it taste better to him whereas humble little me finds greater excellence in cheap plonk because of its very cheapness. To me a bargain is a bargain and always tastes better!

Right, back to my main point then.

Brexit? I told you so.

© Peter Rogerson