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    The thoughts of an old man, me, please read and comment if you can Archived Message

    Posted by John Monro on July 18, 2023, 12:16 am, in reply to ""Putin Finished" yet again."

    .... I haven't looked at the Telegraph's web pages for months and of course they're behind a paywall. I used to read the Telegraph. I used to do its crossword. I found it a reasonably reliable reporter of important information. I do confess however in my youth being a member then of an extreme right wing party.....

    ....the Young Conservatives.

    But you know, the Tories were different than. Harold McMillan, Anthony Eden, Churchill, Douglas Hume, perhaps even Thatcher and Major for that matter, though this could be a bit of a stretch, were people whose brains did seem to be founded in reality and were intelligent, functioning people whose party members in Parliament for the most part were similarly endowed,, Many ministers were competent and admirable people. Indeed, when I was a Young Conservative, the PM just then replaced was Harold McMillan, and Alec Douglas Hume arrived for a short while. Ted Heath later on - there was a singular experience they all shared, the Second World War, for a few years the country only survived when everyone tried to look after everyone else, when officers and leaders had to share the same tables and hardships as those on the factory floor. OK< perhaps a lot of the concern was patrician and "noblesse oblige" but it was there and it was genuine, it was a hope for a truly better nation. When McMillan boasted that his Tory government had built 300,000 council houses , much more than the Labour administration, and sang a little song at the Tory conference in the 50s, he didn't just make this a political point but he was obviously really proud of this achievement. Top rate of income tax was about 90%, inheritance tax was crippling to many rich etc. The Tories truly supported the NHS. New universities popped up all around the realm, hospitals were rebuilt, slum dwellings were demolished and people rehoused in new towns out of the London mire, motorways were built, the railways modernised, the British Empire was dismantled. etc. We should remember some of Macmillan's cabinet for instance, Rab Butler, Ernest Marples, Hailsham, Ian Mcleod, Alex Douglas Hume, Reginald Maudling etc. Maybe it's wishful thinking and you'll all shoot me down in flames, but wasn't there something just a bit better about these people than what we suffer now? And Harold Wilson, a wily politician if ever there was one, Kept us out of Vietnam, (whereas Blair and Starmer are full on warmongers), open university, homosexual reform, capital gains tax, etc

    These truly were different times and for this older man they were genuinely times of progress, economically, socially, educationally. I am aware there were realities in the UK, declining industrial productivity, union intransigence, some serious economic crises, so I don't want to over sugar those times. But at least they seemed "real" in some way, we might have had political and moral disagreements, but we didn't retreat to delusional thinking to defend them.

    But the whole world has so changed. I could have the same politics as I had as Young Tory then and now be considered quite a Socialist - certainly much more so than Starmer and his so-called Labour team.

    Is this purely American influence? I don't know, I do blame America a lot, though, a very distorted society that has become terrifyingly so now. . As a true partner to the US in the war, we're now the poodle to the master, the prostitute to her pimp, the hoodlum to the Godfather.

    What's this alll got to do with this Telegraph article? Well, I think of it as a metaphor, a microcosm or an allegory of what is now happening in the world - it does a very good job. The sheer delusional nature of this thinking is astounding. The news today is of a world literally on fire, yet the parallel rank delusions in the media, in the leadership, and I have to say in far too many of the population, is leading humanity to total disaster. So is Daniel Hannan, his paper and the thinking that produces it. What once would have had the men in white coats coming to ring your doorbell are now the trumpeted glories of a society no longer fit for purpose, and tragically deserving of a mighty fall, and many of us are going to get seriously hurt. Ultimately, someone like Gibbon will write his masterpiece "The History of the Decline and Fall of the Western Empire" but there'll probably only be a few remaining humans with the time and a literacy skills to be able to read it.

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