SOME THOUGHTS ON POLITICS TODAY

OR WHERE THE HELL ARE WE ALL GOING?

Preamble.

When I was a small boy and knee-high to the renowned old grasshopper I was asked to make a decision, one that would leave an indelible impression on the rest of my life.

I was recovering from a nasty bout of flu (the doctor had been called by my widowed and poverty-stricken mother and it was probably a good thing the NHS had been hatched because she was constantly short of pennies since my father died in the mid 1940s), and when he left I was asked what would make me feel better.

Now let’s get some things put into perspective. The second world war might have been almost a decade in history by then and small boys weren’t allowed too many sweets because they came out of the sugar ration, so they were a treat. Yes, things were still being rationed in the early 1950s! As I lay on the settee near a hot coke fire my mind must have been swamped by conflicting desires. Did I want some sweets or did I want something to play with, like a balsa wood glider?

I chose sweets and to her credit my mum took notice of that choice and brought me a roll of refreshers, a fizzy confection in half a dozen similar flavours, and cheap at twice the price.

The die was cast I had made my choice. And as I write this almost seventy years later I have at my elbow a roll of refreshers. I would never have kept my interest up if the choice had been a balsa wood glider (most likely smashed on its first flight from settee to armchair), and the greatest possible sadness lies in the truth that nothing lasts for ever and my refreshers (bought in a multipack a few years back) are past their best by date and I can’t find any more in the shops. I am eking what I have left out.

Having made my choice, was it a good choice? I had been quite poorly (flu is nasty), had my temperature taken by a doctor who smelled of something I didn’t like sniffing (whisky, I think), and my second most abiding memory after the Refreshers is shivering and snuggling into a pile of blankets on the settee by the fire, over-heating and rolling onto the linoleumed floor and pressing my sweating cheeks against it to cool down. It was horrible, and the Refreshers were an improvement.

I recovered and attributed my resurgence to full health to the Refreshers. The thing is, would I have been so willing to thank a cheap sixpenny glider for my recovery? When I chose the sweets I obviously made the correct decision, and even though the choice was made by a fevered child who had suffered the torments of influenza, it had been the right choice.

Preamble over.

On our last holiday to France a woman threatened that she would shoot me on the streets if she had a gun. And she was serious. She was one of a veritable army of ordinary, decent and hygienic citizens who know one thing about themselves that they don’t want anyone else to know. (I might be wrong about the decent bit, but she didn’t smell unpleasant)

She knew that she had been told the most outrageous lies by people she trusted, and she had whole-heartedly believed those lies, and when she discovered the truth and that her trusted advisers were liars she had chosen the glider rather than the sweets, and the only thing she could do in order to live with herself and hold her head up high was continue to try and make the sodding thing fly. Which is a foolishly inappropriate way of saying she just had to continue to believe those lies even though her balsa wood toy constantly wrecked itself, and, she knew, always would.

This is, of course, all to do with the huge life-and-death matter on everyone’s breath in the UK, the Brexit thing. There are two conflicting stories.

One is that the European Union is neither use nor ornament and it robs us of sovereignty, money and the right to self-determination in an unforgivable way. It sends hoards of foreign nationals to take our jobs and abuse our health service. It is no good at all.

The other story is that a famous Brit (Winston Churchill, Prime Minister during the dreadful second world war and thoughtful cove when that war was over) could see that the devastation of war in Europe could never do a blind bit of good and that the only possible way to prevent its recurrence was a united Europe in which such self-destructive philosophies as nationalism would eventually sink without a trace. Now, I’ve no great fondness for everything that Churchill said and did, but really do believe that in this instance he had hit the nail on the head. Close relationships and mutually advantageous trade might well kick a disastrous and destructive world war three into touch before it fired its opening salvo.

So, in my mind, if international politics is to have any flavour it’s just got to be that of my roll of Refreshers. Long lasting and hopefully never off the shelf.

But Nationalism is rearing its ugly head everywhere and my countrymen were given a flawed choice: advise the government to leave the EU, or remain in it. The choice was flawed because an element under the guidance of a very wealthy man (Dominic Cummings by name) was prepared to pander to the hopefully dormant forces in all of us, racial contempt for anyone with a slightly different set of chromosomes to our own random collection, and xenophobic hatred for those whose birthright denied them the chance to have English as their first language. With he aid of the popular press (most of which is owned by non-domiciled billionaires who hate the idea of a future EU law about hiding their money) he has spread the message that the European Union is bad for us. He has let it be known that the laws passed in the European Parliament are voted for by non-elected civil servants (which is very far from being true), and got his mouthpiece Boris Johnson to report that bananas that weren’t straight were to be banned - also a billion miles from being true.

Anyway, the choice was offered and votes were cast: a roll of sweets of a balsa wood glider?

Why, I ask myself, do these wealthy man want us to leave the safe haven of a united Europe? Why have they prepared for this hour over years of drip-feeding a busy usually hard-working public with falsehoods so that they, in numbers, have turned against what is possibly the best idea that Boris Johnson’s hero (Churchill) ever had?

Let me offer you a few suggestions.

For a start there’s money to be made (cause the UK economy to crash and bet on how much, and make millions when you win).

Or wars. There’s a great deal of money to be made from wars and another European war in which we would be bound to win would nett them more than millions. It would be billions. They’ve got two things wrong there: their own beloved grand-kids might get slaughtered in the chaos of battle, and what’s that about bound to win?

And more than money there’s power. Oh, and don’t forget the Empire. Tell the proles we want our Empire back and they’ll be sure to back the money men to the end of time, even though its the money men who are making their pounds worth less and less all the time. But what does that matter? We’ll have an empire again. You know, the countries our forefathers raped and robbed way back in the history books.

And the others, those that persist in giving us nil points in the European Song Contest because there’s something about us they don’t exactly like, they’ll always be okay because, well, we’ll always be on the edge of things because the Little Englanders and their bullying flags and drunken savagery built of an incongruously noisy self-belief will make sure of that.

Postscript.

Why isn’t the word postamble in the dictionary? If there’s a preamble why can’t there be a postamble? I want it to be there! But postscript it’ll have to be.

When I was knee-high to that very same grasshopper, the one mentioned at the start of this piece, I learned a very valuable lesson to do with swimming.

Don’t do it if you don’t want to get wet. And even if balsa wood gliders do float, you might not.

So I didn’t do it and I didn’t get wet. Or sink. Or drown.

Which may or may not be applicable to the gist of this assortment of words, whether you like them or not.

© Peter Rogerson 28.09.19