Month: October 2020

The Government is pouring money into the economy. The vast majority of it is going to Amazon, Apple, Comcast, Google, Facebook, Etsy and many other American Big Internet companies.

It’s also going to European companies who control most alcohol sales and other US companies who control fast food sales and online payments such as Paypal, Square and Stripe.

There are UK companies capable of benefitting – Deliveroo, for example, and some supermarkets, where taxpayers have long been subsidising zero hours wages. But we have no competitors for the major US monopolies and we are no longer willing to even recognise monopolies, or fatbergs…

The Tory party exists totally within a property development bubble, which pays their way and sustains them both politically and economically. The online world and the high street are, frankly, irrelevant to them. BoJo made his fortune from bribes as MoL from million pound rabbit hutches developed for Russians and Chinese. BoJo would not recognise a British person if they stood in front of his face.

You can tell that he just hates being PM. Being accountable and building a consensus is well beyond his megalomania.

This guys was once one of the most admired men in the world. Now his own daughter thinks he’s a schmuck and he regularly makes an absolute idiot of both himself and the truth.

What does Trump do to make successful, independent men destroy themselves ? Rudy Giuliani will forever be remembered as the guy who defended the indefensible, on the back of his two predecessors ending up in jail. 9/11 is Trumped.

Need I add any more ?

This guy has broken planning laws, COVID laws, tax laws and still, unelected, gets to tell us what to do.

That would be dandy if he was any good, but the U.K. is a shit show thanks to him and his ‘boss’ Boris.

45k dead and counting. No Brexit. An economy in free fall. Massive debts.

There’s little doubt that things would be significantly better if we adopted the Former Belgian model of having no government at all.

And as for all those Brexiteers who voted for Boris, what did they expect apart from bluster and lies and failure?

I spent a lot of my college days protesting apartheid outside the South African embassy in Trafalgar Square, often taken into custody. At the time apartheid seemed the most egregious sin on earth. Having sat in Brixton and Toxteth as they both burned, perhaps I was over-reaching, and I had my own gripes as part of a heavily oppressed minority in the UK (MI5 were actively framing Welsh speakers at the time).

Naturally, I believe that the forgiveness and compassion showed by Nelson Mandela in a world full of Reagans and Thatchers was my moral code.

When I moved to London in the 80s I worked with an African partner to bring music from the continent to the UK and got involved with Amandala, the cultural wing of the ANC. I had never visited the country at this time and would not do so for a long time. Still, I played my part based on morals, not geography.

Madiba has sadly passed and South Africa has now matured and hosted the soccer world cup for the first time on the continent of Africa.

In the meantime, Invictus has matured into a rugby world cup win under Kolisi and a more representative team.

The country is still a long way from where it needs to be and divisions and tensions remain palpable, although perhaps less so than in the US, a country that seems to have reverted badly into dark times.

My ambition now is to take my latest venture, an educational platform, into South Africa and make a real difference, not scoring some political points.

But I still wonder how my life and destiny got sucked into a country so far away, where I have no natural affinity.

We like to believe in democracy, don’t we ? But what does democracy mean ? In its homeland of Great Britain it used to be largely made up of ‘rotten boroughs’, constituencies constructed to favour a few landowners. Even after reformation, emancipation and universal suffrage we still do not get to select the leader of our country. The country votes for a small number of Members of Parliament and they select their leader, who becomes our de facto leader.

In the US, the situation is even more arcane. People vote for a President, but then their votes are abstracted into an ‘electoral college’, of which only half are legally bound to follow the votes of their State or district. The last election saw the President loose the ‘popular vote’ by a massive three million people but still take office.

Of course, this is all laughable to countries like Russia, where the dictator running the country (with a huge amount of popular support, it has to be said) makes up his own election numbers.

And in many places, there are good reasons not to elect a leader by majority vote, countries that have significant minority populations, for example: this has resulted in horrible conflict in countries ranging from Fiji to Rwanda to Sudan.

Polemicism is on the rise – tribalism will always exist. But we live in an information age where the political models of the industrial era need overhauling.