The other day I came across something I had written on Tuesday the 19th December 2006, entitled Crazy Mathematics, under Serious Stuff, with a forecast of the problems that would lead up to the credit crunch. I’m not stupid enough to think I’m original in my ideas and thoughts, even less do I think what I write in my blog is going to have any effect on those whom I am criticising. I believe that if I think it, thousands of other thoughtful people will be thinking of it too, but the problem really is that we have not got a concerted voice, and we don’t cross communicate enough. All some of us do, is what I do, I bleat repeatedly on deaf ears, instead of having the charisma to be able to say what I want to say on television, and so reach not only a vast proportion of the electorate, but the very people I am criticising. I have discovered that if people in authority don’t like the letters of complaint many think nothing of not acknowledging them, even if they are sent by recorded delivery.
There are so many things that we all know that are wrong, today. For example why are, what I assume to be foreign nationals, standing or sitting on our streets begging? In another blog I wrote of a husband-and-wife team of English beggars, in the 30s, in Balham, who actually owned a terrace of houses, in a lower middle-class district of London. Why are there foreigners at traffic lights on the outer city roads trying to sell us local newspapers, and at times interfering with the flow of traffic?
One example of a problem which I consider needs urgent reassessment, is the government housing programme. The surfaces of brown field sites will generally be hardened and in consequence the run-off at times of heavy rain will be considerable. This should be remedied or utilised. Today a high proportion of people are too busy to garden, they pave over their front gardens, to create parking space for the two or three cars, while at the same time saving work, and what their back gardens are like is anybody’s guess. Just because the design of the large blocks of flats in the 50s and 60s were a disaster, causing us to overstate the anti-social and deleterious environmental aspects, doesn’t mean that in this day and age, there are not a lot of people who would benefit from being able to purchase or better still rent a flat, rather than have the responsibility of a house with all that entails. Why, is the government proposing to build on green-field sites when there are still acres of paved areas unused? My reasoning is that it is considerably cheaper to plough up a green-field site, rather than have all the problems of dealing with the sewage and surface water drainage, hard surfaces and cables of a brown site, and government quietly forgets the long-term effects and costs of the loss in fields, trees and hedgerows that are so necessary to the maintenance of our environment. I would just draw your attention to one particular, there was panic recently when it was discovered that there were viruses and insects which were seriously affecting honey bee culture in England, and the worry was more to do with the failure of the fertilisation of commercial growing products, as it was the bees. Honey bees need flowering natural plants to survive, not those brought on in plastic tunnels. I believe green-field sites should be almost sacrosanct.
I could go on listing my personal worries and objections, but until it becomes the voice of the people, where we have a central, neutral agency that would receive and can correlate, analyse, and broadcast the worries of those of us who are right to be concerned, and then pass on the more serious, more general deficiencies to Parliament, or some other representative organisation that has teeth, we will get other disasters like the credit crunch, and the imminent disaster of ID cards. Writing to the newspapers and even in blogs is to some extent a pointless occupation unless one has a name which is recognized.