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    Re: Austin Mitchell: "Boris is FUN!" Austin Mitchell trivialises everything he should standing for Archived Message

    Posted by John Monro on December 14, 2019, 9:09 pm, in reply to "Austin Mitchell: "Boris is FUN!""

    Austin Mitchell, that name's a blast from the past. He's a well educated man and has a PhD in politics. He lectured at Otago University and whilst in NZ wrote a book about NZ "The Half Gallon Quarter Acre Paradise" Only old folk like me would remember this. Indeed only older folk like me would remember the NZ he was describing, his book turned out to be an epitaph for a way of life in this country that was shortly to radically change - mostly for the worse. NZ gave up innocence and easy comfort and an egalitarian society for all the modern ills- determined to join and enjoy all the rest of the world's troubles. The NZ economy appears fairly robust, but this is a bit of an illusion, stimulated by unsustainable levels of immigration, horrendous private indebtedness for housing and farms could bring the economic house down. Back to Austin, he then returned to the UK to become Labour MP for Grimsby for a number of years. He's now 85 apparently, I hadn't heard of him for a long time, I didn't know if he was still alive. .

    I think we have to accept those old times are gone for ever, perhaps including what we used to think of as the Labour Party. I am just an old man yearning for the apparent certainties of yore, forgetting the uncertainties and fractiousness of human existence throughout its history and during my own time we had our existential crises with Cuban Missile Crisis, and of course this particular existential threat is greater now than it's been for some time. Perhaps the post war period for us, as wealthy Westerners, was nothing but a very temporary benign phase of human history for a privileged tribe of the human species - we do seem to be seriously reverting to something rather more unsettling and dangerous. And ultimately is there anything a single human being can do about it? Are we not all as impotent in the face of time as pebbles on the shore?

    Clap your hands, slap your thigh.... on the sands of time you are merely a pebble; remember, trouble must be treated just like a rebel....send him to the devil. (George and Ira Gershwin)

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