One thing is certain, he is absorbed with his image. That is totally clear every time he opens his mouth on television. One thing I’ve failed to understand, but then I’m stupid, is why he is going to town on the poisoning of a foreign spy, by another spy. There is no shadow of doubt that the act has wider implications from the point of view of the health of some of our citizens, but it doesn’t have to be a hammer one takes to a nut. In my simplicity I believe this is purely an ego trip with tricky side issues.
The Primer Minister’s action uncovers a dichotomy. Currently in jail, or widely being searched, a number of people from the Subcontinent have allegedly, or been proven to have carried out actions of terrorism, in this country, not so much on their own people but on the indigenous population. To someone with an ounce of intelligence it might come as a surprise that the representatives of those countries on the Subcontinent which have been harbouring training establishments for terrorism, have not been sent home. To my simple mind this is more than a parallel case. It would appear tricky if every time a national of another country is assassinated in this country by one of his own nationals, that a number of embassy officials would be given their marching orders. Is this particular case, therefore, selective because it has been so much in the press, because the murdered man gave secret information, and was therefore the responsibility of the government, or is there something, as usual, that they’re not telling us?
Now let us look at something far more important. Housing! I never cease to be amazed at the misinformation provided to our leaders by their advisers. Brown has made great stress on his proposals to build millions of houses at a time when we need housing, but we need updating the infrastructure far more. Houses need surface water drainage and sewerage disposal, mains water and electricity, telephones and waste disposal. As a one-time sewerage engineer, in June this year I posted a Serious Warning concerning Flooding, and in it I gave a rough idea how sewerage systems grow, and explained it was impossible to keep up with progress, For example how difficult it is to take an old system, or even the non existing system, and sewer the sort of areas Brown is talking about. In our district, and we are on the edge of a green area, development has been such that sometimes we are told by BT that their lines will be out of service for a period as they are overloaded. I strongly suspect that applies to a lot of the other services. Recently our government instituted a new landfill site approached through a housing site.. The houses in the vicinity have been inundated with blue bottles to the extent that they are coating the windows; this is the sort of unanticipated problem that will be faced by massive building without massive attention to the infrastructure and design details, cause and effect.. I suspect that this is just another ego trip, and quite like a lot of Labour’s proposals, subject to yet another U-turn, when it dawns on somebody in Whitehall of the monumental problems, disruption and expense this proposal will naturally generate..
‘Givers and takers’. I was talking to a young woman the other day about the behaviour of some people, and she came up with the phrase, ‘givers and takers’, and I started to think about it. She said there are some people who give, all the time, of their time, materially, and mentally These people will not, under any circumstances, allow those they help to repay them in any way. At the other end of the equation are the takers, those who demand, accept as their due, wouldn’t dream of repayment, rather they demand even more. I have come across these people and, this young woman says that, to some extent, I fall into one of the categories. Clearly there are grades from one extreme to the other. I suggested to her that the givers suffer from inferiority complexes and a low opinion of their own value, in spite of the fact that they are truly valuable, and have to keep reinforcing some need for acceptance. From my own experience, I guess that the other extreme, the takers, too have an inferiority complex, though in this case they feel that their value should be recognised, applauded and paid homage to. Consequently they don’t need to recognise a debt for what they consider is their right. Am I barking up the wrong tree, or even barking mad?