It’s been a while since I had a good old rant here. It’s not because I haven’t had anything to rant about, it’s had more to do with having the time to actually write this stuff down. Now that I have got a couple of minutes it’s difficult to know where to begin.
I want to start with what’s in the news today. The first item on my radar is that the postal unions have voted to strike. I see this as just the fist straw in a wind which heralds the onset of a coming hurricane, or in this case I fear the onset of an Arctic winter of discontent.
Those of us old enough to remember, or even those of us with enough education to read our history books, will be able to understand that our wonderful Supreme Soviet of a government is performing like any sad old centralist, ‘control-freak’ regime at the fag-end of its inevitably bloated parasitic life. The result of its “Tax and Spend” lifestyle means that the years it has spent artificially inflating the public service and stuffing the commissariat bureaucracy with inspectors, checkers, snoops and busybodies, to whom it pays artificially high salaries and generous pensions, means that the country is broke and the government’s coffers are empty.
All of these civil service employees are beginning to realize that the good times are over and their friends and mentors in Downing Street will inevitably have to shortly start a whole round of axe wielding. The Civil Service, Teaching, Health Care Workers, and Local Government unions are beginning to realize that the diabolical contract they entered into with Tony Blair and New Labour to get them into and maintain them in power is about to be spectacularly broken.
I am sure that each of these sectors wants their particular enclave to be ‘ring-fenced’ and protected from any cuts as a ‘front line’ service. When they find that this just cannot happen then the sort of action taken by the postal workers, strikes, go-slows, work to rule’s etc. will obviously follow. Welcome to another “Winter of Discontent”!
Comrade Brown and brothers Mandelson and Darling would have us believe that all of this fiscal embarrassment is entirely due to the banking crisis and the global recession. The question I ask however is “where has all the money from the good times gone”?
When a business is profitable you would expect it to take some of that profit and invest it back into the business. I suggest that you wouldn’t expect said business to hire a whole load of extra staff to sit around playing solitaire on the PC and raid the stationery cupboard while other staff are employed to spy on them. When the average person has a windfall, or is in a good well paying job, if they are sensible, they put money aside “for a rainy day”. Well here in the UK the rainy day has arrived but suddenly we don’t have any money to afford to buy an umbrella.
I don’t think that the Socialist wonders currently wielding power can lay any of this at the door of the opposition parties. Tovarich Blair and Brown inherited one of the healthiest and most robust economies in the world and were so convinced of the Conservative way they undertook to maintain the previous government’s fiscal plans for the first four years of their time in power. If you are looking for blame for the banking crisis look no further than the Iron Chancellor who set up a system of banking checks which let a group of irresponsible greedy Chavs pay themselves obscene amounts of other people’s money for gambling (and often losing) yours and my hard earned funds. All this after he had raped and pillaged our pension funds and burdened us with more taxes (stealth and overt) than any government in the whole history in the world.
So, back to those of us who are old enough to remember, or can read the history books. I fear that the cold chill specter of the ghost of Christmas Past this year may well be the haunting phantom of Jim Callaghan, back from the grave of the Winter of Discontent whispering loudly into Gordon Brown’s ear “Crisis – What crisis?”
