If we vote for clowns get a circus!

The other night Pat and I watched the excellent docudrama “Dirty Business” about the dreadful state of our privatised water system. It was overwhelmingly depressing, chillingly worrying and guaranteed to make anyone critical of those who make decisions on our behalf. The content of the programme I will leave for another time – there’s only so much rage my old heart can stand these days But sufficient to say we, in the UK live in a country where all the public utilities – the essential services upon which the nation depends have been or are being “sold off” to private companies, most of them not based in the UK. These vast financial conglomerates – hedge funds and private equity companies - are buying up our essential public services to make a profit – at the expense of all of us. The result is poorer service, higher prices and, in the case of the water industry, increasing environmental and health issues as the “family silver” – the water industry, the NHS, the railways, vast swathes of our education system and the energy industry is given into the hands of private individuals. I am reminded of the warning of the great economist John Maynard Keynes who famously told us: "Capitalism is the extraordinary belief that the nastiest of men for the nastiest of motives will somehow work together for the benefit of all” – and, as the docudrama showed us, there are some seriously nasty men and women indeed reaping the profits from the millions of us who pay our water bills and I suspect they have a hearty laugh on their way to the bank.

But we are where we are – and as I say, there’s only so much rage my old heart can take these days.

It was Margaret Thatcher over 40 years ago who gave the initial green light to the privatisation of water and some of our other utilities., the idea underpinning the policy was that it would remove the vast costs of running and providing these services from the exchequer and place it in the hands of private companies – the companies would profit and the government would not have to raise tax from the population to pay for the services; it was supposed to be a win win for everybody; the government is released from its obligations and the electorate get tax cuts, which, of course, as Thatcher and other politicians knew is what people will always vote for. As time has shown, however, it has been a disaster – private companies have walked away with vast profits but the nation has suffered poorer quality provision. higher prices, and increasingly been asked to fund huge pay-outs to these companies.

But it would be quite wrong to lay the blame entirely at Thatcher’s door. In the years since every government of whatever persuasion has carried on and expanded the privatisation of our basic services. At the time of Thatcher’s premiership she brought the worst out in me – and sad to say still does today, but, I will say one thing in her favour she was a serious politician – she made no concessions to the baying mob. She did what she believed in, no-one could say they hadn’t been warned. I disliked her and disliked her policies even more but she was, whatever one says, a leader, she had gravitas and hinterland; she was not the shallow husks, the playboys, the wannabes and the populists that fill the parliamentary benches and take up residence in 10 Downing Street today. Thatcher didn’t feel the need to be “liked” because she was convinced of the rightness of her beliefs – whereas today our politicians are made of poorer stuff. The nature of leadership is to make the hard decisions, not pander to the mob. Great leaders – Churchill, Attlee, Macmillan, Wilson in our country or Kennedy, Johnson and Roosevelt in America for example – didn’t feel the need to demean themselves by seeking cheap popularity – they had policies that they believed in and took the necessary tough decisions to ensure that they became a reality - whatever Joe and Jean Public said or thought.

We as a nation are desperately in need of grown up, serious thinkers, people with both intellect and the moral fibre, like those I mentioned above, to do the right thing for the common good. Instead, we have been let down by a series of intellectual midgets, political dwarves and morally bankrupt wannabes as prime Minister: Blair, Cameron, Johnson, Truss, Sunak and Starmer and these have been backed up by hundreds of low quality MPs from all parties, all on the Westminster gravy train. The only PMs we have had since Thatcher who offered something approaching true leadership were John Major, Theresa May and Gordon Brown – and there’s the rub. Each of these three were vilified by many in their own party and by the wider electorate, they didn’t relate to the “common man”, they didn’t always say the right things, they pointed out that hard choices had to be made, they didn’t try to be everyone’s friend; in other words, they were leaders and not just panderers, anxious to curry favour and be popular with Joe and Jean Public. I’m utterly fed of hearing that Keir Starmer is a good guy because he pulls on his fake England footy shirt and plays 5 a-side footy with his mates and that he supports Arsenal. I don't want a man baby who refuses to grow up and be a kid again playing footy with his mates - I want a serious adult who has put childish things away and entered the adult world. I’m not interested in people like Tony Blair who, in his desire to be loved, told us "Call me Tony" and extolled the virtues of various pop groups to impress the mindless mob.

In 1997 on the night Blair won his landslide majority I sat up to watch the results come in – I went to bed at just after 2 am depressed and horrified as I watched Blair and his fan club singing a cheap and tuneless pop song “Things can only get better” on the steps of Downing Street. I was delighted at a Labour victory but it all reminded me of football terraces, of drunken louts in a city centre and it seemed to me then and does even more so today to be a metaphor for the death of serious politics and serious politicians in this country.

And I wept for Neil Kinnock, a serious politician, who had been Labour leader before Blair; who had made the necessary and difficult changes to make Labour electable again and brought a hinterland, a dignity and a pride to the Labour Party after a difficult interlude. Kinnock’s background music to his political meetings and conferences was not a cheap drunken pop song as favoured by Blair but the uplifting and powerful 3rd movement of Brahms’ 1st Symphony. But 21st century Joe and Jean Public don’t want “uplifting”, they don’t want dignity, they don’t want hinterland, they don’t want leadership, they want happy clappy, dumbed down, easy politicians with cheap and mindless sound bites, they want razzamatazz, they want everyman – not boring fuddy-duddies who can actually do the job and make the hard but right decisions. In our flashy media driven celebrity world appearance is everything and staid middle aged thoughtful people like Gordon Brown or Theresa May just don’t cut it when good old Boris with his gags and his daft haircut are around or Peter Mandelson is schmoozing and whispering sweet nothings in Joe Public’s ear – and look where that got us! If we choose inconsequential and trivial people to represent us then we must suffer the consequences.

So I don’t blame Margaret Thatcher entirely for what has happened or is happening to our country. True, she started many of these balls rolling but we have had plenty of time to reverse the direction of travel and we have failed. As an electorate we have increasingly, through our voting in of poor quality “leaders” and representatives of all parties, taken the easy way out. We have, through our votes, and just like Esau in the Bible, sold our birth right, our family silver, for a mess of pottage – for tax cuts, for cheap food, for the massive cuts in the “red tape” and the bureaucracy which protect us and makes life more sustainable, pleasanter, fairer, more decent; we have traded these aspects of the common good in favour of the low cost government promised by the snake oil salesmen of all parties. So, when you next complain about the potholes in your street, the waiting time to see your GP, the time your Granny spent lying on a trolley in a hospital corridor, the dreadful water supply, the cost of train travel or its inefficiency, the cuts to provision being made in your child’s school, the lack of job opportunities for our young people, the morally bankrupt policy of student loans, the poor response of your depleted and underfunded police force, and all the other ills that our society faces ask yourself how it has come to this. Don't blame the Labour Party or the Conservatives - it's not the party; political parties are made up of people and it’s the poor quality of the people we have voted for who are to blame; we preferred representatives and thus leaders who drunkenly sang and told us “Things can only get better” (they lied!) or that we should give approval to a middle aged man who might be a decent well intentioned guy but is too anxious for us to see him running around a 5 a-side pitch in his wannabe England footy shirt rather than be intent on his job as a leader, taking the hard decisions needed in the national interest and for the common good.

Today, the Green Party won a by-election and rightly celebrated. The newly elected MP, Hannah Spencer, is an ex-plumber who celebrated by eating fish and chips outside the local chippie and was photographed taking a selfie beside her cheering supporters. I'm sure that Ms Spencer is a splendid lady with many virtues and the best of intentions but I'm not convinced she has the gravitas, intellect or the hinterland to be an effective leader charged with making the right choices on our behalf. 

In the end she was and is like so many of our political class concerned with image (her own) rather than substance, hence her desire to portray herself eating chips and taking a selfie - it's what impresses Joe and Jean Public in 2026 Britain. The moral in this sorry tale for today is that in the end we get the leaders, and by extension the country, that we vote for; in short, if we vote for clowns we don't get serious grown up government and leadership, we get a circus. And that in turn allows the sort of criminal activities depicted in the docudrama "Dirty Business" to flourish.