Why are young people left-wing?

I am what would be considered a young person and I am a right-wing conservative (not a Tory though). Without getting into a soul searching debate of what actually defines 'wings', lets just say that I am one of the few, if my position in society at large were to be examined. My fellow peers at university are mostly ultra-liberal and even more so left-wing bordering on socialist. Political affiliation is a difficult subject mostly because the people subject to evaluation simply do not know what they are, because few know what they believe in. They have a few hunches as to what an appropriate knee-jerk response would be to some random statement, intended to produce such a reaction but that is about it. When pressed they get annoyed and want to end the discussion. I do not want to end the discussion, I want to know why most people start of their lives as left-wing liberals but later on change to something else and not necessarily conservatism or similar 'isms'.

I have a lot of friends in Sweden, and Sweden is about to have an election. Regular readers will know that I wrote a long prodding essay about Facebook here, sadly Facebook will feature again in this little attempt to come to closure. Facebook is where the action is, so too with politics. I am very saddened to see that so many of my friends, of similar age to myself, are so fantastically left-wing. They post little messages on their personal "comment" about their thoughts on the election and they join various groups who advocate socialism. Much to my dismay for they are comprehensively and collectively, wholly ignorant of the dangers of what they are advocating. I can say this not because I am a righteous plonk who thinks he knows what is best for everyone else, no, because I am a political nerd, and I would like to think that my thoughts and comments are a bit more informed than those of the average Joe.

I have been fortunate enough to have known some of these people since I could barely walk. They are truly wonderful people, but sitting where I am, they are also complete fucking nut-jobs who are indulging in the most disgusting form of cultural relativism. What is more they seem to have no recollection of history, which is made even worse since I know they have had history classes; I took the same classes. When they say socialism, they dream up some eutopia-like scenario and post a nice little red star to accompany their political creed, leaving me dumbstruck again. They know nothing of the gulags, perestroika or glasnost or of serfs and Molotov. What is 1905 and 17 to them more than some random years? Do they know that Soviet socialism (which is nice way of saying 'communism') killed in excess of 20 million people. Who is Solyetzin, what did he do, 'sounds lika soya to me'. Do they know that socialism/communism has failed everywhere it was tried? Sweden was not built upon socialism, but it just so happens to be one of the frontrunners of the modern welfare state. Welfare per se, is not socialism - I think. That might just be my deluded way of putting together a cognitive argument. Put it like this instead: I believe that if you are fortunate enough to have had the possibilities to advance to such a point that you are self-reliant, then a small small percentage of your income should be given to your fellow man so that he too, hopefully, can do the same. Our birth place is, to the best of our knowledge, random and for all I know I could have been sitting in Katmandu right now, mending carpets, not having a thought in the world for the modern welfare state. Based on that alone, it suffices to say that we should all be compassionate but not excessively so [I think]. However...

The dangers of the welfare state are 1) it often is unjust in taking lawful property from individuals through excessive taxation, 2) it substitutes the collective judgment of the government for the freedom and judgment of the individual 3) it discourages initiative and entrepreneurship by individuals, and 4) it leads to excessive government power and hence corruption. The danger of these tendencies of the welfare state were well summarized by Lionel Trilling, a respected man of the contemporary liberal left as quoted by Gertrude Himmelfarb in her book 'Poverty and Compassion' “Some paradox of our natures leads us, when once we have made our fellow men the objects of our enlightened interest, to go on to make them the object of our pity, then of our wisdom, ultimately of our coercion. It is to prevent this corruption, the most ironic and tragic that man knows, that we stand in need of the moral realism which is the product of the moral imagination”. As political economist F. A. Hayek has stated; “The guiding principle that a policy of freedom for the individual is the only truly progressive policy remains as true today as it was in the nineteenth century”.

So why are young people left-wing? I think (a lot of 'I think' tonight simply because there is very little written on this subject, at least very little that is available to me) a lot of it is derived from some spurious belief that because you are young you want to break from the past, you want the new world, automatically assuming that the old world is a bad world. Since you yourself are 'new' your ideals have not been tainted by reality and pragmatism (you remember, I am sure, all the bollocks you got at school "anyone can do anything" and we all thought 'great, fantastic, I can be a rocket scientist' even though we knew deep down that there was probably only one or two kids in the room who had those kind of brains) and you express yourself in the way of a revolutionary who has the most commendable of values, not to mention altruistic of values, but has little in the way of prospects. Because you are new (simple terminology but lets not get bogged down in semantics) you reject all opposing views as being irrelevant and erroneous, because they are made on the premise of an old society. Yours is the right belief, the righteous belief, yours must be correct because others are wrong, since their ideals and morals have been debased and contaminated by the old world. Hence by proxy, and proxy alone, your altruistic and utopian idea must be morally superior to those of the elders. And since you have the moral imperative only you, and you alone, have the right to change the world.

Socialism is meretricious.

The Virtues of Meritocracy

I do apologise for having been absent for a lot of time, regular readers will know that I am now the proud subscriber to a bar job, and I am thoroughly enjoying it at that. A lot of heavy keg lifting but nothing that I cannot handle, furthermore a sudden realisation that British people are at large very rude in the pub - something which made me rather sad since the Kiwis and the Aussies are perfectly delightful (the majority) yet the indigenous do not seem to be able to quite handle the pressure of being humble when requesting something as simple as a pint. But alas I digress, I believe what is on the agenda today is meritocracy for the reason that it is slowly seeping back into the roots of Britain again.

'Death of the Fox' is a book by George Garrett, an American poet and novelist. He was the poet laureate of Virginia from 2002 to 2006. His novels include 'The Finished Man', 'Double Vision', and the Elizabethan Trilogy, composed of 'Death of the Fox', 'The Succession', and 'Entered from the Sun'. I am currently reading Death of the Fox and rather enjoying it since it revolves around Walter Raleigh but rather annoyingly all the spelling is american so it is just about readable for any English speaking person. I shall leave the content for the reader himself to google but it centres around Raleigh's life and covers the arrival of the Tudors in England in 1485 to the execution of Raleigh in 1618.

There is a passage which I would like to rip right out of the novel for it is very striking and pertinent in these days as well, even though intended to read of the 14th century.

Great men rise above their peers like the tallest trees of the forrest. Proud, but first to catch the eye, and therefore soonest to be cut down. And down they come with a groan and brief thunder. When they are gone there is only rotten stump and empty space of sky to prove they have ever been there.

Now I ask; is this statement true? Is there such a check to limit the reach of the most ambitious of men? I would say this statement has become largely moot in today's society. We live in an age of celebrities, be they politicians who are famous for the broadside of their jaw or celebrities who are famous for being simply famous but that is just about where their personal agility ends. One must for the sake of society argue that if someone who is reasonably ambitious today would stand up and declare his intentions, people would to all intents and purposes follow that man regardless of the nonsensical ideas that are spewed out of his midst. We do not question what should be and we do not replace dangerous paradigms with our own common sense. I argue that this is down to meritocracy. What is more I take the strongest and most fervent of objections to what we have become: nightingales. We close our eyes when we sing and see nothing and hear nobody but ourselves and it is quite frankly killing the whole foundation of man as we know her and turning our brief stay in this place into a perpetual opprobrium which, no matter how you argue, is detrimental to all of us.

This narrator has had the good fortune to have grown up in more than one country - it gives one perspective and perspective is good for it lets us judge things from two sets of books. "Merit" is a bad word in most of the European continent and Britain today, the best and most suited for a position are not necessarily the most likely final occupants of that post as logic would dictate. Instead rather spurious sets of selectors are used such as sex, skin colour, background, religion and many other very strange denominations which, at least in my view, should be nowhere near the academic process that is selection. This is because of biology and more importantly evolution. I subscribe to evolution and not creationism so if you are expecting an essay on that I bid you farewell for you are not about to get one.

Natural selection is the process of survival: a process resulting in the evolution of organisms best adapted to the environment. You can extrapolate this to the rather mundane task that is everyday life of the hoi polloi, you and me and everyone else in our curious little 16 hour battle period, 365 days a year which we have come to denote as our 'lives'. Regardless of what you might think of the human species we are rather fine example of what natural selection is capable of; there are certainly a lot of deceases but seen in the light of what our species has accomplished it is nothing in comparison. What is more we are able to heal ourselves out of our own means - a mighty feat which few other species can master. Now we think of this in terms of economics and more importantly the private sector and the operators within; namely the companies. The companies that provide the daily bread for million of people around the globe, if not billions. A lot of these organisations are very powerful and are powerful, wealthy, because they work hard and more relevant to us; they select people based on their ability and not their appearance. A single bank interviews thousands of people for maybe just 10 jobs and by doing this they ensure that they will get most profitable person, the person who is willings to work the hardest to deliver most dividends for himself and the company, the sort of person who constitutes and investment in itself. They select the brilliant from the brightest.

If you invest in people you want to make sure that your investment will not go to waste, that said person will come to work for your organisation for at least a couple of years so that all that training is not lost, it is simple quid pro quo economics and is used by most business outfits to reach their combined goal of making more money for such is the marked based economy that we live in today. But, what if you break the system, what if you have a planned jobs market where not only are your employes selected for you but you are obliged, under law, to accept them no matter what whacky nut jobs you end up with. You will loose money, your profits will shrink and your status in the social hierarchy will stumble and fall. Why? Because we are not all equal, we do not have the same motivation, outlook, dreams, background, parents, environments or any other number of factors. We are different and that is what makes us different from any other species. Look at birds; they are homogenous they move the same, look the same and for all intents and purposes act the same. We are omnivorous entities who succeed because of our difference, because it fosters a sense of competition; and urge to be better after the initial failure, an urge to prove to the world that you can do better that you are not part of the dregs that inhabit the lowest pits of this world. Those who refuse to work even though they are perfectly capable, those who betray, those who let others suffer for personal gain etcetera. That list could be made endless of people who have no business in interacting with decent hard working folk but such is the situation in which we perceive; we are different for good and for bad, and if we break that pattern, if we engage in social engineering we are dabbling with powers well beyond our comprehension and understanding. And it is not a matter if something very horrible is going to happen as a result, it is a matter of when.

Rambling notions of the past [Blur + Blair]

I just watched a documentary about Blur. This in itself is spectacular for two reasons; 1) I have not watched TV since Christmas and 2) it turns out that life in general was a lot more honest back in 1995. I suppose what will not catch your attention is my TV watching habits which are a bit unorthodox - if you find some spare time give me a call.

No, what really struck me after having watched that documentary was how life was so wholesomely different only 15 years ago. We did not have all the fancy gizmos we do now like mobile phones, this computer from whence this little anecdotal essay is being written, nor mocha-chinos in every corner shop. There was not this general zombie-like obsession with possession. You were not socially castigated for not having the latest iPhone or the latest fashion from Paris or New York, it seemed that it was more accepted to just be yourself.

It would appear to my mind at least that one of the potential reasons for the financial crisis we are in right now has been overlooked. Could it just be that the reason the markets are doing so badly is because we do not need anymore pointless shit, we have enough, our houses are filled to the brim with junk, really, that we simply do not have any use for. I had a conversation that with a friend yesterday and he was formally shocked when told him that I only buy things (i.e. not go on random shopping sprees) when I need things. What is the point of having 30 different t-shirts and 10 pair of jeans? This is not an onslaught on capitalism but rather an advocacy for responsible consumerism; what we are doing now is sucking the soul out of people. We pretend that to be something you have to have certain things. Celebrities go to gala parties in £25K dresses and what are you supposed to say to that? A mere mortal as you are? £25K for a fucking dress?

Entschuldigung?

But what more struck me about '95 was that people seemed to be wearing basically only what made them happy. There was no uniform dress code which you would adopt in order to fit in. Now I cannot with hand-on-heart say that I think people should dress differently, women of my age are doing a formidable job in drawing attention to themselves and for that I salute them. However, what I do wonder is this; do they really want to wear all that or are they doing it just to please everyone else. Lets not pretend that males have anywhere near the same social pressure to dress appropriately, so if you are from the Equality Commission you can piss off. Rather, would it not be better if there was not this social stigmata against independence of thought? Why are people more brainwashed by the media today than they were 15 years ago? Surely the internet cannot have had that big an impact and with the dawn of the celebrity culture... Why do people want to be like them? They have nothing to their name but scandal and contort, no desirable virtues and only the worst of vices. They drive everything from government policy to Olympic planning. This used to be a country or art, culture and above all good taste but now it is one of celebrities; those that are famous for being famous.

But really going back to the documentary could it just be that back in the day we were just a bit more upfront about our intentions? We said what we liked and if someone disagreed then so be it. We wore what we did and if someone disagreed then tough luck, same thing with food and entertainment.

But now...

I cannot smoke where I want because it is not allowed anymore

I cannot wear what I want because if I do I will be labelled anti-social and provided with an ASBO

I cannot say what I want for in this culture of hypersensitivity I am sure to insult someone

I cannot write what I want for if I do I will be sued for libel

I cannot question what I want for if I do I will not "conform" and ensuing character-assasination is as sure as Saddam's beard.

I cannot drink what I want for if I do I will labelled a drunk and the prices raised to prevent me from drinking anything but lemonade

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I think life was more honest because the word 'progressive' had not yet entered into mainstream parlance. And the group of progressive had hitherto been hiding in the shadows waiting for the opportune moment to seize the day and the people. When someone declares themselves a progressive, my hackles rise. What they mean in reality is that everyone else must be forced to bend to their vision of society, to conform to the socialist utopia they espouse, to be a good little prole. Progressives have no place for independently minded individuals. Progressives are the enemy of individualism, and are, therefore, the very essence of misanthropy. They choose to forget that society is composed of individuals. Progressives are to be despised utterly and completely. Perhaps, most of all is their mangling of the language. Progressives do not want progress, but regression to the dark days of the cold war eastern bloc style of living – the tractor stats will always be going up, despite the enslavement of the population and the collapse of the economy. There is nothing progressive about a progressive, just as there is nothing liberal about a liberal.

Perhaps the best way to finish this little tour-de-force is with a comment on the 'rant'. What used to be perfectly legitimate and sensible commentary on issues which certainly were important to the great majority of people have now become 'rants' and the diminished status which accompanies this particular form of essay. What today for the most part, to me at least, passes for informed and serious debate is cast aside by the media and a lot of bloggers as 'rants' purely because they refuse to listen to what is being said. Where does the imaginary line go between a 'rant' and a 'informed comment' why has the former completely engulfed the territory once housed by the comment? If you complain about something today it is automatically labelled a rant. All papers do it, most bloggs partake in this form of self-censorship and the readers, as a result, do not take the content seriously and merely go on to the next point on their reading list without actually taking onboard the gist of what was read. Like the Tories' favourite phrase "don't bang on about Europe" this is what results from labelling everything a 'rant'; people get pissed off by not being taken seriously. We will bang on about fucking Europe and the EU because it is fucking important, it might not fit your little shitty political agenda but that's life - deal with it. Just because you do not take an active interest in them does not mean they wont take an interest in you and more importantly us, those of us who have to live with the legacy of your incompetent helmsmanship of the country.

Blur might not have been the most suave of bands and they certainly indulged in a lot of profanities at the best of times. But at least they were real, and so were their fans. Could the same thing be said of Lady Gaga?

Degeneration

This is not an accident; this is not a combination of a few pieces of bad luck or misfortune in the national life. Westminster awash with rumours about Brown, rumours about the General, rumours about the Chancellor and rumours ostensibly about Britain. Politicians used to put the higher vested interests in the nation above their own petty party politics. It is not an accident that our government now looks more like a Britney Spears album; a work of pure fiction, produced only to make money and not even the slightest trace of any heart or soul.

This is the result of the very careful grooming of the UK and also the other West European states, that was given direction when the USSR and its fellow-traveller leftist sister parties throughout Europe formed a plan in the mid 1980s. Remember that is was Gorbachev who likened the EU to the USSR. This may all be superficial stuff, for in truth we do not really know what goes on behind the curtains, be quite sure though that it is not for our benefit.

The plan was a reaction against the free markets and philosophy of personal choice of Thatcherism, with the intention of undermining the national identity, moral certainties, will and confidence of nations. One conspiracy theory goes that Thatcher was told by the Bilderberg group to disestablish Britain's sovereignty but she supposedly refused. A conspiracy theory as said but seems that Major and Blair carried on where she left of.

The purpose is to get the nations of Europe, including and particularly the UK, to accept an un-democratic super state with institutions modeled closely on those of the USSR. Blair inadvertently gave it away when, in commenting on the 'peace process' in Northern Ireland, he said to his colleagues who did not entirely see the subtlety "its the process, stupid". 'Project' or 'Process' it is a horrendously strong force which can topple governments. Look at Cowen's government in Ireland - it has the lowest approval ratings in Irish history, well since 1915. Look at Brown's government same story there. Both are kaput, both will be raped by the electorate come the election but that is the fine detail of the scheme; once the election is held in the respective country they wont need to bother for they "democratically" signed the constitution and that is the final piece of engrenage - the gears will kick into over drive once that is signed.

In other words, keep pushing a degenerative agenda. Because as a matter of fact, that is the whole point.

The more ridiculous and untenable positions you force on the populace in every sphere - in wars abroad - in multiculturalism - in economic madness where debit is wealth?! - in hospitals where patients are killed - in local government where people are spied on and children of decent families are abducted by the state - in policing where you can be arrested for your opinions and killed during a demonstration - then the more you tie people up in chasing their tails, in trying to reconcile impossible inconsistencies and in trying to make sense of a society that seems to have gone mad and dysfunctional. This interestingly enough fits well into the list of aims of the Frankfurt school of Marxism:

1. The creation of racism offences.
2. Continual change to create confusion
3. The teaching of sex and homosexuality to children
4. The undermining of schools and teachers authority
5. Huge immigration to destroy identity
6. The promotion of excessive drinking
7. Emptying of churches
8. An unreliable legal system with bias against victims of crime
9. Dependency on the state or state benefits
10. Control and dumbing down of media
11. Encouraging the breakdown of the family

Throw in bread and circuses -that is, bribe the people with their own wealth and the mortgaged futures of their children and 'deliver' (a rotten New Labour use of the word) the Olympics or whatever -and we the people are sleep-walking like shell-shocked zombies into the grim, "post-democratic" nightmare in which the Westminster parliament will be irrelevant, British institutions of worth will be reduced to pastiche, trashed and we will no longer be a free people.

As for civil society, there will not be one, not in their gulags. The most brilliant part in the scheme is that all of this, all that you have just read, will be derided as common conspiracy nuttery and will be treated as such with due respect. It really is a brilliant move. It would be interesting to see how many ministers and MPs know they are being pulled by the leg, who know that they are the "useful idiots" as Khrushchev said.

Its all deliberate. This kind of reduction of a nation does not happen by accident. If it had happened "back in the day" people would have done something about it. One rather famous adage about the British people is that 'we do not do revolutions' it is not our thing. It is not our thing because on the whole, over the past 300 years, we have been comparatively happy with our existence as a prosperous Island nation. We even managed to stick an Empire in there. Somewhere along the line it all went terribly wrong, somewhere someone got the idea that it would be better if us little islanders were bereft of our standing in the world, which by comparison, was huge. Somewhere, someone for some reason - it is all very ambiguous for it completely nonsensical for a Briton to commit such a huge act of treason. Well, today it is not of course, today a politician would sell whatever part of Britain was desired by a foreign state, for a loaf of bread. But before all of this began such behaviour was unheard of.

The three main parties have stated their common position - one of treason against the native peoples of these islands - by refusing a referendum on the European super state.

However this is the basic law of nature; every action has an equal and opposite reaction. They would do well in remembering that.

The Problem with the future of Britain

This entry will explain why Britain will have an extremely hard future. I truly hope someone will disagree because the picture about to be painted is not one of wonderful grace, but rather a dismal leviathan of horrendous proportions.

The main problem with the UK currently is not that we have ceased to exist as a nation culturally. We have ceased to exist as an independent nation as the EU now controls the island and the people on it, needless to say without their consent. We have the unfortunate situation of having our lebensraum (sorry for paraphrasing Hitler) culturally controlled by ourselves but socially , and more importantly judicially, controlled by someone else. This is rather annoying as I am sure you must have found from time to time.

But when it comes down to it we are living of glories long lost and long past, derived mostly from the British Empire and the people who served it through out its very long history. It did some awful things, certainly, but I am of the opinion that it achieved more virtues than vices and voes. But here we are today and all the great inventions, policies, institutions, histories, landmarks etcetera, they were for the greater part not devised or derived from any of the governments for the last 30 years or - maybe even further back. But rather, as we shall see, they (the previous governments) have done possibly everything in their power to destroy Britain as an industrial nation.

Where did it all go wrong then? Well James Dyson in his Telegraph column tell us that

Where did it go wrong? Consolidation, nationalisation and union unrest suppressed our automotive industry. Soaring interest rates and increasingly complicated employment law stifled small engineering firms. The inventiveness demonstrated in the Second World War was not used to build an industrial future: Vickers, a pioneering and successful exporter (when foreign currency was desperately needed), had a request for £5 million in development funding rejected. Advanced plans for aircraft were scrapped, and instead hundreds of millions were spent on buying inferior American hardware.

I think he is partially wrong and partially right but mostly wrong.

What politicians in general just do not seem to comprehend is the issue of pride. You are proud if you are a civil servant, well at least you used to be before it became politicised, and you wear your "HM ad-hoc industry" -badge with great honour for being able to provide a service to the nation at large. Certainly the girls and boys at Oxbridge used to have their hopes set for a job within the civil service or the legal system. Now only the latter aspiration remains, thanks to amongst other things the Human Rights Act introduced under New Labour. Which has created a judicial conundrum, highly favourable to young budding lawyers wishing to make a quick buck (and lots of them) - not so for the tax payer.

One of the largest societies in Oxford is now the Oxford Entrepreneurs and the trend is the same for Cambridge and Imperial College. This is of course not a bad thing at all, society needs more creative clever people, for they are most definately not in Parliament. But while these young bright people are heading for the industry in their little start-up firms, not so many have their sights set upon the civil service maybe because there is not much left there that honest young people would like to occupy themselves with certainly scientifically inclined people. Consider the industries and government departments that have been privatized over the years (beware this is a long list):

• National Grid UK
• British Airways
• British Coal
• Central Electricity Generating Board
• British Railways
• National Freight Corporation
• British Gas
• British Steel
• National Bus Company
• Rolls-Royce
• British Telecommunications
  
• British Petroleum
• National Enterprise Board
• British Leyland
• British Aerospace
• British Telecom
• Johnson Matthey
• Royal Ordnance Factories
• British Airport Authority
• British Electricity Authority
• British European Airways
• British Overseas Airways Corporation
• British Shipbuilders
• British South American Airways
• British Transport Commission
• British Transport Docks Board
• Central Electricity Authority
• Consett Iron Company
• East Midlands Electricity
• East Yorkshire Motor Services
• Eastern Counties Omnibus Company
• Eastern Electricity Board
• Electricity Council
• Merseyside And North Wales Electricity Board
• Thames Water Authority
• Midland Red
• Midlands Electricity
• North West Electricity Board
• National Bus Company
• National Coal Board
• National Express Coaches
• National Grid
• National Power
• North West Water
• North of Scotland Hydro-Electric Board
• Northern Electric
• Northumbrian Water Group
• Oxford Bus Company
• Pickfords
• Public Electricity Suppliers
• Red Star Parcels
• South Eastern Electricity Board
• Scottish Bus Group
• Scottish Nuclear
• Scottish Power
• Scottish Bus Group
• Severn Trent
• South Wales Electricity
• South West Water
• South Western Electricity Board
• South of Scotland Electricity Board
• Southern Electric
• Southern Water
• State Management Scheme
• Transport Holding Company
• Ulster Transport Authority
• Victoria Coach Station
• Welsh Water
• Wessex Water
• Yorkshire Electricity
• Yorkshire Traction
• Yorkshire Water
  

Under New Labour:

• Royal Mail
• British Energy
• London Underground

Government Departments:

• Defence Evaluation Research Agency
• Atomic Energy Research Establishment
• National Engineering Laboratory
• Laboratory of the Government Chemist
• Building Research Establishment
• Transport Research Establishment
• Property Services Agency

There are many many more. These are the ones I could, through some dashing Google work, quickly find now. As to the financial aspects of nationalisation vs. privitisation I shall not comment upon, but possibly lament - for neither is doing a very good job at present at keeping the UK a float.

To put one of the above privitisations further under the microscope consider the DERA, which employed over 9,000 people mainly scientists, engineers and technicians. This agency consisted of the amalgamated (in 1995):

1. Royal Aircraft Establishment
2. Admirality Research Establishment
3. Royal Armament Research and Development Establishment
4. Royal Signals and Radar Establishment
5. Defence and Test Evaluation Organisation
6. Chemical and Biological Defence Establishment
7. Centre for Defence Analysis

What the government did with it in 2001... they privatised it. Much malice can be placed at the feet of Mr. Blair but in my humble opinion this must be one of his gravest and dumbest decisions ever. Even Thatcher had the foresight to not touch these divisions of the government. Yet Blair, being the world renowned defence analyst that he is, decided that the sale of the nations defence research arm, for a profit, was a good idea. Mr. Obama wrote "Audacity of Hope" well Mr. Blair ought to write "Audacity of a dimwit" he would without a doubt be acknowledged with a Nobel price for his efforts.

Going back to the future of the UK. With the above in mind we clearly see what kind of vision the government has in future for the British drones: No honour in thy work but solely make a profit. This is the kind of thinking that permeates every single notion of the British governance today "how can we make a profit even though we are the School Board?" they care not for the furtherance of the people and the nation as a whole but how they can make more money for themselves. Management in Britain is notoriously bad but possibly this is why, they can only see so far as their profits go, not the impact of their innovation or how they could build upon it.

But herein lies the main problem where are our innovations going to come from if all the scientific divisions of the government have been privatised. Even the phoenix which was reborn out of the privitaisation of DERA, the dstl (defence science and technology laboratories) are boasting on their website how much cash they have managed to make out of their clever innovations. This is all well and good, but they only employ 1,000 of the initial 9,000 that was under DERA flag which means that all those other great gadgets are going into company pockets, safely locked away with no prospect for furtherance of public good only lining the pockets of the fat cats even more.

Britain has lost faith in governments which insist on selling everything which belongs to Britain and not the government, Britain and government are not synonyms for the same words which the latter would do well in reminding itself of once in a while. But also, one must concur that some nationalisations were not particularly thought out either, see British Leyland for example. Regardless, some fine institutions have been lost to the greedy hands of corporations and along with it the crucial know-how, built up during centuries, and the people behind the organisations who lost their civil service badge which they prided themselves with.

What will come of this? Apparently we are now a service based economy and all those evil manufacturing companies remaining in these forsaken lands are slowly being weeded out by the government as they are under intense pressure to stay alive. We know have to import most of the know-how, Britain the country that gave the world the steam engine amongst other great things, because otherwise the country would go out. Apparently there is no one in the 70 million+ strong population who can figure out how the hell a nuclear plant works. That is amazing.

Unless this is all turned around Britain does not have a future.