Month: September 2022

There are great dangers in trying to even out history, or just re-imagining history to suit audiences or mores.

My two most hated TV shows of all times are the risible Bridgerton and the even more risible Tudors.

Let me explain.

Bridgerton re-imagines Austen’s England as a world where people of all colours wafted around in a way that they wouldn’t even do in the 21st century. It is highly patronising in so many respects. Historically, morally and culturally. Kids watching this will presume that black people had equivalence in that era. How about telling it as it was ? Whitewashing at its worst.

The Tudors took the fat old king and made him a handsome young man forever. Henry VIII was one of the most risible people who ever strode the earth and to lionise him with lies is just pathetic.

So, can we please return to the Game of Thrones and fiction that is actually closer to reality than the pathetic histograms patronising TV execs and fawning critics want to foist upon us.

Or can we have a series with white slaves taken from Europe to Africa (that, at least, is historically accurate) ? Indeed, there have been so few programme about the slave trade (Roots perhaps being the only antiquated exception) that you wonder why redoing Austen is more important than showing the horrors of the slave trade ? Oh, yes, it’s more palatable.

Wishing a narrative to correct historical wrongs is just morally and intellectually incorrect. Righting moral wrongs today is what we need to do.

Not weaving fantasies.

So, because Thatcher and her bonkers economic advisor, Alan Walters, decided that inflation was a bad thing, UK economic policy ever since has been based on this thesis.

Ask a Japanese and they will tell you that some inflation is a good thing. It’s a sign of a growing and expanding economy.

It’s not inflation that Tories object. It’s wage inflation. Yes, all you Tory voters, they don’t want you to have a wag raise.

And that’s what’s come to pass. Hardly any worker in the UK has received a significant wage rise in thirty years.

The vast resource of EU workers helped with this, of course.

Let’s segue into another economic driver. The pound has collapsed, so exports are cheap (and imports are expensive). This should help British business if they are net exporters. So they can afford to pass on savings and increased margins to their workers.

But the reality is that the economic models of the past are just broken or lies. Monetarism was a mad economic theory that devalued public utility and values individual capitalism and rapaciousness.

Thatcher sold off all the assets – the oil, the gas and the nationalised industries and left us without energy security, whilst perusing a war in the South Atlantic.

Now we have a mini me Thatcher taking over from a wannabe failed Churchillian. What did we do to deserve this ?