I’m a belt and braces man, where it comes to serious matters. I don’t fly by the seat of my pants, so when I read that Gordon Brown has sold off our gold reserves for a pittance, alarm bells ring. My problem is that I do not understand high finance. I was brought up in an era where we earned our money by trade, and down at the docks you could actually see what we were exporting and what we were importing. Today it seems we are dealing in money, and intellectual properties all by electronic communication. However down at the docks there are still ship loads of containers coming in from abroad bringing in commodities at prices that no one would ever have imagined, they are so low; and it’s not as if the quality suffered .as a result. In consequence, it is unsurprising that people are running into debt, they can’t resist a bargain, and when they see things priced as cheaply as they are they feel that they are only spending a small amount of money – until the card account comes in.
The real wealth is held in just a few hands, while the government is creating new taxes at an unprecedented rate, the latest being the revival of that old chestnut, paying for refuse collection. I am assuming that a large portion of our income as a nation comes from trading on the stock exchange. One only has to look at the rise and fall of other markets, such as the Japanese, to realise that there is a level of instability built in to these dealings. If we no longer have a gold reserve then it would seem that we are open to being plundered.
The loss of our impregnable borders, and the rush across Europe by immigrants to come here, to work for pay, in order to send money home to their families in distant countries, must inevitably make a drain on our internal finances, which should be based on the natural circulation of money. On top of this we are paying £450 a week to maintain migrant youngsters in accommodation, and in excess of £1000 a week to maintain the miscreant migrants in jail. To me, with my simple attitude to finance, this doesn’t add up, and can’t be justified. The cry is that we need these migrants to fill jobs, and yet we are appalled that our own youngsters are staying away from school and have the literacy and numerousy of seven-year-olds. These youngsters are clearly not being taught properly, their interest is not being aroused, and their parents are negligent. Would it not be better that these youngsters were taught to fill the posts that the migrant workers are filling? There is no shadow of doubt that they would expect to be paid a lot better once they are qualified, but even then taken overall, surely this is a more secure approach than having itinerants here for a short spell, and leaving when they have earned enough. This is not building skills for the future, it is denigrating our stock of skilled workers yet again.
With the increasing national internal debt, comes a side effect. I believe we have replaced simple pleasures, such as walking in the country, simple hobbies and sports, with acquisition, shopping, and servicing the need for the capital to pay for it. This in turn means working longer hours as a family, having less time with the children, even taking on extra work. I am convinced that people are not as happy overall, as their parents and grandparents were, there is too much pressure, too much worry, and far too much hurry. When I was at school I learned the poem which started off with ‘What is this life, if full of care, we have no time to stand and stare, no time to see when woods we pass, where squirrels hide their nuts in grass.’ In school today, instead of appreciating the sentiment, the children will probably be tittering at the word ‘nuts’, our language has been so degraded – it is almost impossible to construct a flowery sentiment without it having another connotation..