“Run a country? they couldn’t even run a bath.”
This from Cecil as the election becomes the hot topic in our various refreshment venues. We crumblies have a sense of disconnect and it is not just because politicians, like policemen, are becoming younger. Westminster has become a breeding ground for inept and gaffe-prone robots.
“What I can’t stand is the bad manners, it’s so personal, so undignified.”
Joyce is right. Perhaps it is, again, an age thing. We’ve fought our battles and finally achieved a mellowness which is at odds with a culture which remains perversely gladiatorial, and it is clear already that this style is going to dominate the next weeks, egged on by the Paxmen of the commentariat.
“And they’re still up to their old tricks, expenses, jobs on the side.”
Was it always so corrupt, so dishonest? Possibly. When I was a kid, I was cajoled into clearing my plate of food on behalf of the starving millions. I didn’t know who they were, except that they were “abroad”. Now we have comprehensive statistics of the world’s deprived. Maybe it’s the same with the great and the good; their excesses were no less than today’s, it was just that we were not informed.
“And all this paedophile stuff, I mean, Enoch Powell, of all people.”
Elizabeth is truly shocked. Sex has changed. Time was when the odd extramarital romp was looked on indulgently. They were all at it, from prime ministers down. Now it’s a wholly different matter as it emerges that such adultery was not confined to consensual adults.
“It’s a club; OK, they are playing for different tribes but in the end, they’re all part of the same establishment.”
Now I am musing way above my pay grade and outside any accredited prior learning my long years have given me, but I sensed a linkage between Cecil’s opening salvo and this reference from Nicole to the gilded uberclass. It provides a controversial explanation for the cognitive limitations of the political class.
From its known beginnings, society has been based on kinship. Genesis or evolution, the human story started incestuously. And has remained so; familial and tribal association has been the benchmark for dating options. And nowhere more emphatically than among the alpha class. As the patriarchal paradigm evolved, the male establishment has been foremost in practising inbreeding and the available stock was sufficiently limited that bloodlines would have become chronically contaminated.
So the problem is not corruption, dishonesty, sex, inexperience. Such flaws serve as a smokescreen to prevent public scrutiny of the real issue – incompetence. And that’s one attribute to which we crumblies can relate, because incompetence is our daily experience.
Their inbreeding has rendered the establishment unfit for purpose; over the generations its practice has diluted the cognitive competencies of its members. No amount of image management can conceal it. When a prime minister padlocks his bike to a bollard, you know the country is in trouble, that its story is one of misplaced cock-up, rather than conspiracy, corruption or connivance.
Politics has been described as “the roughest of games”, betraying a recreational and essentially masculine mindset. It attracts social illiterates with an appetite for conflict from self-regenerating dynasties contaminated by centuries of gene pool limitation. We need a system which, as Cecil implied, attracts men and particularly women, who have actually done things at the sharp end, run things, households, shops, businesses in the real world. People who have handled the raw materials of life and know that the rock face is not a place to play games.
