If only…

The past few years has thrown up some of the worst and most harmful scenarios witnessed in the last 50 years. Climate change has seen millions affected including potentially over 20,000 dead in the recent Libyan floods. The Covid pandemic has killed millions across the world and is still with us (with the UK death rate one of the world’s highest). The perverse scenario of deadly floods and extreme long-term droughts with rising levels of starvation and dramatically increased levels of migration.

Add terrorism, wars and increased level of autocratic, far-right governance and one has to wonder what is happening, and in such close proximity of each other? Add the negative effects of the internet, online fraud and increased violent crime and you have to wonder if there’s a message being sent from above that things have to dramatically change, before it’s too late (if it’s not too late already).

Back in the UK…

I get the feeling that we are losing our individuality. Many moons ago I attended a Labour party meeting here in Chester with Barbara Castle the star speaker. It was the time that Thatcher was at her peak despite what was going on in the country. Castle observed that voters were like sheep caught/transfixed in the headlights unable to see reality. With Brexit and Johnson we believed the hype, we follow slavishly so-called celebrity and are glued to digital screens. We follow what BBC Radio 1 plays and make mediocre artists thrive while great talent remains unseen and struggling. We seem to have lost the power to descriminate between good and bad, truth and lies; we are sleepwalking into oblivion.

I was shocked (but not surprised) to see what extra financial income was being earned by a substantial minority of MPs. It seems that becoming an MP can open the door to wealth for many of them. And this while social inequality and poverty continues to grow. Those fortunate enough to be elevated (mostly for dubious political reasons) can earn £350 a day plus generous expenses for just turning up while a single pensioner is paid £160 a week (one of the lowest rates in Europe). And check out those ex-MPs who landed us in the mess we are in today like George Osborne, a previous chancellor, who now earns hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions performing jobs that poured down like confetti.

Every public institution is on its knees after 13 years of the worst governance I have experienced in my lifetime. We are stuck with a first-past-the-post voting system which favours just 2 political parties and provides a substantial majority to a party with much less than 40% of the votes cast with less than 70% of voters bothering to participate. Is it any wonder why so many fail to vote? But the real problem is that change is unlikely whichever of the two parties wins. Labour sits on the fence and agrees with most of what its opposition says and does, afraid to alienate voters.

A pandemic of pandemics

Look around you and you’ll see that we have not only suffered from a viral pandemic but pandemics of injustice, poverty, homelessness, social inequality, falling living standards, environmental degradation, failing health standards, addiction, obesity, climate change, corruption, violence, far right political autocracy, managerial incompetence, democratic degradation, vanity, narcissism and I could go on. But what’s more frightening is that there doesn’t seem to be a way out of this catastrophe from our leaders.

The only realistic answer is for each and every one of us to start thinking independently for ourselves, vote for what you really believe in, stop listening to the pundits and extremists, study the options, be wary of promises, be creative, ignore the hype, develop real and not imagined personal relationships, give migrants the help and respect they deserve, and give our youth something to hope, live and fight for (because right now their future looks bleak).