I have been vacillating for some considerable time about whether to name and shame Electricity North West for the appalling way they treated me, aided and abetted by the courts, the police, the planning dept. and others. On the one hand I don’t see why they should get away with it, on the other I am very apprehensive about taking them on again; last time the stress killed my wife and soulmate and gave me diabetes. However, after languishing for quite a while I am now coming out of it, see title.
See also my recent post Mr Bates versus the Post Office. The resounding victory of the postmasters and mistresses has inspired me to expose ENW, which was also flagged up when they recently left the substation gates wide open, again, see picture. Hopefully, this will be my last word on the subject, other than to let you know the outcome. I was going to do it this week, but I have been collating all the evidence, very depressing. I am out for lunch tomorrow, so it will probably be early next week.
I may well give up trying to save the world and fighting “The Man”, we’re all doomed anyway but hopefully not in my lifetime. I have a new love in my life and we both have a yen to find a renovation project in a sunny place, Portugal, Greece, Cyprus? with the sea /ocean in front and the mountains behind.
Possibly, in future this blog will be about our new adventures; with a bit of propaganda thrown in; the leopard doesn’t change its spots.
“One Johnny Marra, there’s only one Johnny Marra”, so sang my shipmates whenever I said anything controversial or profound which was quite often, or even a “big word.” They would conspire to provoke me into it, I could always see it coming but it was done in good humour, and I like to think that we all benefited from it. That was back in the late 1970’s when I worked two summer seasons as crew on the Windermere steamers after I came up to live in the Lakes from London. I got the job because I used to drink in the pub with one of the captains. I was the “middle-class fucker” and although I got on well with nearly all of them, it was obvious that I was different, but then I am also different from most other middle-class fuckers. Just thought I would explain where the name came from. (“JOHNNY MARRA. JUST SAYING”, is to be the title of my next book but initially I will be sharing it on this blog, so you can read it for free.)
More than four decades on there is so much more wrong with our society now that it depresses me just thinking about it. If you set out to deliberately do everything wrong, it would be the same as we have now. Who is to blame? All of us, of course, but in the last few years most of it is down to the corruption and incompetence of the Tories. God knows why we keep electing them, not me I hasten to add. I have heard them described as the cream of this country, ‘thick, rich and full of clots.’ Quite frankly the other mainstream parties are not much better so I’m starting my own. But unless I can get others on board more dynamic, it will not come to anything, I don’t want to run it. I’m an ideas person not an action person and getting on a bit to boot. I’m not even convinced that most of the Great British public are worthy of my attention. But I would like to help those who are unable to help themselves and provide a focus for those who WOULD like to do something. If we can start by getting this country on the right course, it will help the rest of the world. But I am not going to waste a lot of whatever time I have left on building it up. At least I have tried and cannot be held responsible for the problems caused by the others or be accused of apathy. One of the main things we need to change is our first past the post electoral system. Proportional representation would make politicians represent the wishes of all the electorate far better, attract into politics more people with right attitude and would help to prevent hi-jacking by vested interests, lobbyists.
I am pessimistic about the future of our world. Those more learned than I tell me that the planet will continue to orbit the sun for another several billion years until the sun runs out of fuel and becomes a red giant, it is extremely unlikely that we will still be on it. Will we even be around in another thousand years or even a hundred years? we just don’t know. Will life be worth living when we have destroyed most of the environment? Our world causes nearly all the environmental problems but for the moment it is the undeveloped world that suffers most from them. That is changing quite fast, and our actions are now coming back to bite us on the arse. Now it’s starting to affect us, most of us can SEE that we need to do something, that’s a start.
However, I am not going to start quoting a load of figures, they don’t matter they just document what is happening and has happened, not what needs to happen. There are far too many talking shops, “experts” and excuses when what we need is radical action. What matters is how things affect us, other humans, animals and the wider environment. Statistics and figures are bandied about by all sides, but nobody with the power to do something about it does anything, or not enough. Obviously, the brave activists of Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil are doing something but is anybody thanking them for it? They just get arrested and given punitive prison sentences. They are not fucking criminals for God’s sake, and now the government is trying to remove our rights to even protest. Money doesn’t just talk it swears. Activists are castigated for causing disruption when the true criminals, those who are destroying the environment for gain are just given profits, even bigger bonuses and honours. We have been in denial for a long time, but it is rapidly becoming obvious to nearly everyone that the time has come to act fast for the sake of our very survival, unfortunately, the vast majority are apathetic. “Well, it’s not happening to me,” increasingly it is happening and will happen to you, as it has been in other parts of the world for some time.
Of course, this is all leading up to a plug for the Alternative Party, where there will be no sleaze, no corruption or representing the interests of big companies. Everything we do will be open, transparent and in the interests of the majority and we will try to repair all the damage that has been done to the environment, our society and infrastructure.
As a world issue the most immediate problem is overpopulation, there are just too many of us. The world population has doubled since I was a young guy and I thought there were far too many then. It is increasing by about 200,000 EVERY DAY. Google the world population graph, after a gradual slope over the millennia it is now vertical. There isn’t a single problem that wouldn’t be much easier solve if there were far fewer of us. But what to do about it? It has gone too far now for an acceptable solution, fiddling around the edges won’t work, we need the population to be rapidly reduced from its present 8 billion to a sustainable 1 billion. That would require genocide on an industrial scale that even the Nazis couldn’t have imagined. My answer is to do nothing and abdicate the responsibility to nature. Let it run, people will fry, drown, starve and die of disease, it will be unimaginably horrendous, but our hands will be clean. Those of us with insight can see it happening but what can we do when most people are in denial that there is even a problem. Eating less meat and driving an electric car will not cut it.
Climate refugees will try to come to the liveable parts of the world in a flood that will make the present migrant crisis seem like a trickle. Eventually, Royal Navy destroyers will be blowing boats full of illegal migrants out of the water, and we will have a sort of “dads army” guarding the coastline. As history has shown, it is good to be an island, the rest of Europe will not be so lucky. It will be your children and grandchildren that are most affected and obviously it will be much worse in the developing world. It’s a depressing thought, but there is nothing we can do about it, not even The Alternative Party. Surely it would be better to have 1 billion people living sustainably, in harmony with the environment and preferably each other than to continue breeding ourselves into extinction. Do you really want to see us all living in megacities shoulder to shoulder living on factory farmed food and warring over territory? As with. most things it’s always somebody else’s fault, I as on a date with a woman and she said yes there is a problem, she had six kids.
As far as the UK is concerned, we need to urgently reduce or even better remove the influence of big companies, especially those that are running our privatised infrastructure and essential services. Privatisation was the biggest mistake and the biggest con of all time. The Thatcher government persuaded us that these organisations would be better and more efficiently run by private companies. Surely if they weren’t being run properly, we only needed to change/retrain the management not the whole structure. Another excuse was that it gave the public a chance to own shares in these organisations, excuse me Mrs Thatcher but didn’t we already own them collectively? Of course, that was not what happened; instead of individual members of the public owning shares in the infrastructure and services of their country they rapidly became owned by big companies even foreign countries. They are not run any more efficiently in many cases they had the same management and staff that they had when they were in public ownership. The only difference is that the senior managers are paid more and the workers less than before. The privatised companies exist only to be milked for obscene salaries and bonuses for senior management and dividends to the owners. German state railways make so much profit for their investment in our railways that they have been able to reduce rail fares in Germany. That is the operative word STATE railways, any profit our railways make goes in dividends to the shareholders and bonuses to senior management, they must laugh at us all the way to the bank. It means that everything in this country costs a lot more than it should and all profits go in salaries, bonuses and dividends rather than improving the network or service, big companies are allowed, even encouraged to pollute and destroy the environment in the pursuit of profits, which is the first commandment of Tory philosophy.
The next big con in Tory policy was the “right to buy” aka selling off council houses dirt cheap to create more Tory voters. That has been a major factor in the cost of owning or renting a house escalating out of all proportion. Ordinary houses rapidly became investments rather than a place to live, nice houses in nice areas always been both. Nothing wrong with that but everyone should be able to buy a house or rent a decent property i.e. a council house. Most of the cheaply bought council houses ended up being passed on to property companies or private landlords. So, the ideal of a property and share owning public bit the dust, it was always obvious that it would. The governments of both persuasions were either spectacularly incompetent, or they cynically planned the whole thing.
Some of the other things that need to addressed urgently: overuse of antibiotics, bee killing pesticides, genetic engineering, artificial intelligence, fossil fuel use, NHS, social care. All the answers to our problems and what we need to do are obvious, we just need to get more people on board and overcome their complacency, I will be dealing with all that in due course.
My intention for the Alternative Party is to make everyone better informed, more engaged, ethical and insightful, I am probably in cloud cuckoo land there, but any political system can only be as good as those it represents. People just can’t see that they are paying much more tax than they need to, and everything is much more expensive that it needs to be. All to further enrich a small minority of already wealthy or incredibly wealthy people. It’s a sort of reverse Robin Hood, robbing the poor to pay the rich.
Just one more thing before I go, it has recently come to my attention that China intends to introduce a gold backed currency and has been busy buying gold by the ton. They obviously think that there would be a demand for such a currency. As J P Morgan stated before the US Congress in 1912, “gold is money everything else is credit”, I am no economist, but it makes sense to me. The US came off the gold standard in the 1970’s and the UK under Tony Blair in the 1990’s Gordon Brown subsequently sold off all our gold when the gold price was low. The price of gold relative to dollars and the pound has subsequently risen considerably. If a currency is backed by gold, it has a value and governments, central banks etc. can’t just print money above the value of the gold. China’s intention is for this currency to replace the dollar for world trading and if successful it would devastate the US economy and as we are so tied up with the US probably our economy also.
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