With what little wisdom.........

" Do you not know, my son, with what little wisdom  the world is governed"  So said Oxenstierna, the great Swedish minister of the 17th century, of whom Cardinal Mazarin ( no mean statesman himself) said, that if the statesmen of Europe were in a ship together, they would not hesitate to hand the helm to Oxenstierna.

 So many of the confusions in modern life follow from the inability of  almost everyone to look at the roots of the problems They discuss the events as appear before their eyes,  and do not ask why the  events are as they have become., And this is true of  many intelligent people in the media.





Bloody Sunday

The administrative and moral fault of the British army and the British government was small  - and such fault as there was should have been addressed. The significant fault was rather with the IRA which,  by trying to establish no-go areas which the British were bound to resist, caused a confrontation at which some soldiers lost their nerve. This was just what the British wished to avoid and which the IRA was trying to engineer. Who went to bed that night full of happy satisfaction? And yet for years it is the British who have the blame.

MPs expenses

This "scandal" was the result of the views of the electorate over the years that MPs salaries should not be put up -  best  not at all, or anyway by very little. So over decades MPs were told to use their expense accounts  in a flexible way.  And when they did and it came out the media ( although they briefly mentioned that point) moved in with serious criticisms and everyone understood that the MPs were fiddling their expenses. There were a few claims based on falsehoods, but most followed the flexible approach and duck houses should have been perfectly acceptable. This fault lay with the population generally for taking the constraining view to start with,  and with the media for reporting the matter in a corrupt way

Coal and steel industries vanishing

During the UK/EU campaign it was reported, as an example of those areas of the country that  had lost out in economical development in recent years, that 50 or 60 years ago there was a vibrant social  and economic life in South Wales, with an integrated working class community and culture. And now it has collapsed, much of it  has disappeared,  with sad consequences.  But one has to ask why this social and economic community was there 50 or 60 years ago. The basis was the coal and steel industries which should have declined years before. These were industries nationalised by the Attlee government ( to the considerable benefit of the coal owners etc). They should have declined over time, which would have been far less destructive, far more likely to enable a transfer of employment to more modern industries, and far less of a drag on Britain as a whole. But  they were kept alive by the idea that they were good in themselves, and  that they should  be subsidised to keep them alive, Also in these old industries the trade unions resisted change - as exemplified in extreme form by Arthur Scargill and the miners strike which aimed to keep open pits however unprofitable and used violence to support their view.. If Mrs Thatcher had met a Labour Party and a trade union movement looking to work with government in winding down these out of date structures things would have been less traumatic and maybe rather positive,  even with the wrong starting point. But the post war consensus which was bankrupting the country was too strong for a mild approach

Remain/Leave

There were more voters committed to Remain  than there were voters committed to Leave. The Leave vote was pushed to a majority by the protest vote of those who had not benefited from the economic developments of recent years, and felt it and resented it. So they voted against the elite, who supported Remain, and we got a foolish and dangerous result to the referendum. This revolt against the elite is world wide - anyway in the Western world  ( look at Mr Trump)  -  but it is exacerbated in this country by the constant attacks by the media on anyone in the so called Establishment, and especially MPs. The Today programme commented some time ago, in the person of Mr Humphrys, that his job was to get politicians to say things that they did not mean to say. This was to assume as a given that MPs are corrupt, whereas it is the position of the questioners that is corrupt, even though they no doubt think that they are doing a good job  -   as this is  also no doubt true of those that write for Private Eye, which takes a violently negative view of anyone they comment on.  Thus it is not only the Leave press that caused the Leave vote to rise - it was also the fault of the Remain press ( and other parties) which by their constant nagging and unblalanced commentaries  reinforced the anti-elite view