Talking with the Taxman about Poetry
This isn’t the first time I’ve pinched the title of the first album I ever bought and used it for a blog title, I just can’t shoe horn in the second album I bought which was by Jive Bunny and the Master Mixers. The reason I like the album title, and the reason its pertinent to my thoughts at the moment is that it mixes the emotional with the brute reality. I am emotional about politics and my heart and my head often conflict.
Every sinew of my body is reviled by the idea of a Conservative PM, yet the more I read about this new coalition government the more my rational side tries to temper my desire to scream. Don’t get me wrong privatising schools, and in a recession, already has me preparing to march on Parliament but the fact that the legislation preventing me doing just that looks likely to be repealed excites me. There’s some interesting and positive moves in today’s Queen’s Speech but my optimism is cautious – I have heard rumours that politicians sometimes lie. I’m most emotional though about the cuts to public spending, the public purse is paying for the mistakes of the private sector and yet again our children’s education, the welfare of the most vulnerable members of society and the wages we pay those who do the vital jobs of teaching our kids and nursing our sick look likely to take the brunt for the mistakes of those who got rich quick. This isn’t party political though, had any of the three main parties been in power the temptation of a quick buck and sod the consequences would have had its appeal. That’s the problem with a global societal structure based only on money without any other guiding ethic. Blind adherence to capitalism is what got us in this mess and perhaps it would be better to stand back and watch the system break than bail it out and start the whole cycle off again.
I’ve heard those who defend capitalism do so because they abhor communism, some kind of red mist descends at the mere thought of contemplating an alternative to capitalism. Feudalism though did not end because everyone was convinced capitalism was better, it was not foreseen, one system simply evolved into the next and maybe we need to let evolution take its course and see if capitalism can give way to something better.
