I don’t remember members of parliament in the past, showing so blatantly the wish to be loved, as those we have today. It seems that this wish determines some of the priorities in the order of legislation. Currently Gordon Brown is behaving as if he was permanently on the stump, with photo opportunities in hospitals, schools and pretty well anywhere, instead of at his desk in Westminster. Churchill had it very tough, and while the Royal family were going round bombsites and army headquarters, one rarely saw pictures of Churchill, unless the need was great.
Why is it that a fair proportion of the population, the press, and oddballs like me writing in blogs, have been predicting the sort of problems, like Northern Rock, single-parent families, overcrowding in prisons, and a lot more, and that those who are guiding the country seem to have set these to one side in favour of tinkering with the education system, the health service, not once or twice, but on a regular basis. Is it because they believe that the populous is more concerned with these matters than those I’ve mentioned? All of the above problems have destabilised the country, put up taxes, and made us all politically apathetic. We are subjected to highly expensive judicial enquiries, and indeed the inquest of the unfortunate Princess Diana, all at incredible expense, and trauma to the bereaved, when again the man in the street knew, before they even started, that the outcome would be no better than the original status quo.
I often think that everything that is decided, that is going to cost billions, should be set before an independent panel, selected by the electorate, not the politicians, to oversee what the money is being spent on and how it is being spent. I know all about the committees, but they didn’t stop us going to war, nor the building of the Dome. We on the periphery of the United Kingdom, think in an overall way. For example if I were to choose a place to live in England, it would probably be Cheshire, because that gives easy access to the whole of the UK. I suspect the people in Westminster are blinkered by where they live and can see no further than from the south coast to Luton. This then is why vast sums of money are spent in the southeast on things like the Dome, and the Olympic Games, things we, on the periphery, will never be able to afford to enjoy at all, or if we do, just for one day, but we are being asked to foot our proportion of the bill.
While I’m on the subject, I have always thought that today, with all the modern sciences and equipment, reasonably large sized copies of the national treasures of not only Britain, but the world, should be readily available either on stands carrying 20 or 30, or on screens, in our local museums. The quality of reproduction in the books that one gets in the library, are so poor by comparison to the original, that they almost defeat the object of having printed them. We on the periphery, unlike those in the southeast, haven’t access to many of these treasures, but we need them in some form or other, so why not large visual replicas