Monday 8 August 2011

That feeling again

‘After David Cameron spoke to Theresa May, the home secretary, and Tim Godwin, acting commissioner of the Metropolitan police, about the riot from his holiday villa in Italy, Downing Street issued a statement saying: “There is no justification for the aggression the police and the public faced, or for the damage to property.” May echoed the words from No 10, saying: “Such disregard for public safety and property will not be tolerated.”’
The above from one of the continuous Guardian reports yesterday on the riots in London.

Nor, of course, is there any justification for the spit-in-your-face contempt for the public good shown by the bankers and the politicians who colluded with them, and the damage to the economy they caused. Nor should disregard for the humdrum daily hardship of most people in this country be tolerated.

Despite the UK being one of the top ten richest countries in the world (from Wiki, whichever list you choose), there is more debt than there is money, anywhere, to repay that debt; the money to repay has to come from ‘growth’, because that's the system we’ve subscribed to, and which has worked, on and off, for a few decades; but the current level of debt, even if there is the necessary ‘growth’ – which there won’t be, because no one is putting in any money to create it – will not be paid off either in my lifetime or in my children’s lifetime.

A few decades ago, during one of those periods when the US and Russia were ramping up the rhetoric, I remember walking down the street and looking at the normality of daily life and thinking this is all an illusion, the only reality is the Bomb. Not, really, ‘thinking’ that, but feeling it, a horrible kind of numbness. These days I’m having a similar feeling.

1 comment:

Tony Lurcock said...

This, and the Guardian discussion, took me to G M Hopkins's letter to Bridges (Aug. 2, 1871).'...it is a dreadful thing for the greatest and most necessary part of a very rich nation to live a hard life without dignity, knowledge, comforts, delight,or hopes in the midst of plenty ....they profess that they do not care what they wreck and burn, the old civilisation must be destroyed. This is dreadful look out but what has the old civilisation done for them? (Penguin Poets p171.)

Tony Lurcock