No one seems to have told Daniel Hannan that Britain was about to get a new deep coal mine, by unanimous resolution of Labour, the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats on Cumbria County Council. Everyone now accepts that the miners were right. Everyone. Well, everyone apart from Michael Heseltine. Is Hannan pleased to be in that particular company?
Britain did not experience a post-War decline. This country's people were not worse off in the 1970s than they had been in the 1930s. But faced with the idea that anyone might dare to point out that simple fact, a man who knew very little about Britain, but who seemed to have discovered a few writers from the distant past of whom no one else had ever heard and declared them to be the political soul of the place, was practically banging the desk on Newsnight last night.
Hannan's "argument" that foodbanks did not exist 20 years ago, making their growth comparable to that of smartphones, is beneath him. There were things like soup kitchens in the past, until there was no need of them. When the need came back, then so did they. There was nothing remotely comparable to a smartphone between the Wars, or in the 1980s. But there were things very like foodbanks. And now, here we are again.
Hannan grew up between public school and Peru. He was born in 1971, so ask him about the most popular television programmes in Britain in the 1980s. Ask him about the pop music. He couldn't tell you. He thinks that people hate the NHS. At the very least, he wonders why they don't. He knows absolutely nothing about this country.
When it came to economic policy, then a funny little sect of 1970s cranks had thought that everyone else had just given in and conceded that their own weird ideas were the Laws of Physics. But then, for all his many faults, along came Jeremy Corbyn. Something similar is happening among the foreign policy nutters, too.
Only 40 years ago, a single manual wage provided the wage-earner, his wife and their several children with a quality of life unimaginable even on two professional salaries today. This impoverishment has been so rapid and so extreme that most people, including almost all politicians and commentators, simply refuse to acknowledge that it has happened. But it has indeed happened. And it is still going on.
Another hung Parliament is coming, however, and we need our people to hold the balance of power in it. It has become a local commonplace that I am on 30-30-30 with Labour and the Conservatives here at North West Durham, so that any one of us could be the First Past the Post. I will stand for this seat, if I can raise the £10,000 necessary to mount a serious campaign. Please email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com. Very many thanks.
Hannan's "argument" that foodbanks did not exist 20 years ago, making their growth comparable to that of smartphones, is beneath him. There were things like soup kitchens in the past, until there was no need of them. When the need came back, then so did they. There was nothing remotely comparable to a smartphone between the Wars, or in the 1980s. But there were things very like foodbanks. And now, here we are again.
Hannan grew up between public school and Peru. He was born in 1971, so ask him about the most popular television programmes in Britain in the 1980s. Ask him about the pop music. He couldn't tell you. He thinks that people hate the NHS. At the very least, he wonders why they don't. He knows absolutely nothing about this country.
When it came to economic policy, then a funny little sect of 1970s cranks had thought that everyone else had just given in and conceded that their own weird ideas were the Laws of Physics. But then, for all his many faults, along came Jeremy Corbyn. Something similar is happening among the foreign policy nutters, too.
Only 40 years ago, a single manual wage provided the wage-earner, his wife and their several children with a quality of life unimaginable even on two professional salaries today. This impoverishment has been so rapid and so extreme that most people, including almost all politicians and commentators, simply refuse to acknowledge that it has happened. But it has indeed happened. And it is still going on.
Another hung Parliament is coming, however, and we need our people to hold the balance of power in it. It has become a local commonplace that I am on 30-30-30 with Labour and the Conservatives here at North West Durham, so that any one of us could be the First Past the Post. I will stand for this seat, if I can raise the £10,000 necessary to mount a serious campaign. Please email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com. Very many thanks.
«Only 40 years ago, a single manual wage provided the wage-earner, his wife and their several children with a quality of life unimaginable even on two professional salaries today.»
ReplyDeleteBut that does not apply to everybody, else the Conservative Party would not be getting 42% of the votes.
Indeed in the tory golden areas of the south, several millions of average tory property owners receive £20,000 to £40,000 a year in property profits, entirely redistributed from poorer people, from poorer parts of the country, and their quality of life has boomed since 1980.
Since many Conservative Party MPs have themselves large portfolios of properties in those tory golden areas, they have had every reason to concentrate public spending to attract businesses, jobs, and this renters and buyers, into those golden areas, and to make conditions as difficult as possible elsewhere to give a big incentive to the people of the north to migrate south to find jobs.
The penny is dropping, even there. Most people in those areas are not in that position.
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