A Large-Print Autobiography of Basil Brush

I had to venture out of the city this weekend and it was beautiful - sunny and spring-like with the world looking just like the pictures in the books up there. Of course none of these books were ever close to reality for most people. The heyday of Ladybird books with pictures like this was the sixties and early seventies and can you reconcile those decades with the dreamlike paradise that they show? This is the country that the users of the phrase "Broken Britain" want brought back. Do they really believe it existed? For me it is a construction built of the few times that life slightly resembled these idealistic scenes - just like remembering that it was always sunny and no one ever locked their doors. The truth is that over the years things have got better for everyone in this country.

This is the triumph of liberalism - the meek have indeed inherited the Earth. There has been a consequent shift in attitudes where the extremism of today was the acceptable behaviour of half a century ago. Take the dismissal of proportional representation by the two "old" main parties. They decry the possibility of a hung parliament because it leads to coalition which in turn supposedly leads to weak and stagnant Government (like the weak and stagnant Government in Germany I suppose) and worry the Office Boys with the talk of there never being a Tory/Labour majority again should PR come into force. That basically says that they don't care for the wishes of a large proportion of the population and wish to rule based on what can only be called a democratic dictatorship. No division of ideas into three or four basic ideologies can produce satisfying legislation which is approved by everyone. In our voting system it produces laws that can at best make two-thirds of the population uncomfortable and at worst be morally repugnant to a similar number.

The complication is that the sheep in the financial markets will have an automatic knee-jerk reaction to any instability without thinking about it long-term. Maybe this is why China has such a stable and growing economy - because the power and governance behind it is static and unaffected by inconveniences as elections. They just get in the way of the process of making money don't they?

PR is not flawless - it has problems with local representation I suppose but I did think that we might create something tied to a local area. We might call it something like ... Local Government ... if only we could get the slackers out to vote. Maybe we should have to quote our voting reference to be able to write to the local papers.