Stocks & Shares

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Here's a question. Whose country, actually, is this - the UK as a whole I mean, as my country, Cymru, has yet to secede from the Union and rejoin the EU as a small country - I've been apparently been labouring under the misapprehension that we operate a democracy here. Demos: of the people, the populace. Now I'm not going to get into the historical detail of the Ancient Greeks' ideas of what constituted the populace - slave-ownership kind of gets in the way here - but, the people who actually live in a country, or union of countries, generate the wealth and actually are the major economic component of them, really are the true 'owners' of those countries and unions.

Unless you believe in the Divine Right of Kings, the Church and land ownership - which follows from the above - we really should by now have a rather more balanced and equitable vision of where we stand and go as a society. But, none of it, if the Kwarteng-Truss Axis is to be believed. As far as it is concerned, business might as well still be being conducted in Medieval Europe. With Kwarteng's obvious disdain for the true wealth-creators of these islands, their legal right to representation, and an utter contempt for those who won't or can't seek work in the non-existent, so-called high-paying jobs available to anyone not fortunate enough to have benefited from a public-school education or having been born into a trust fund or 30,000 acre country estate and a house in town inheritance, we see more than a glimmer of our noisome past history.

As far as the K-T A is concerned, the Tudor Poor Laws, enacted under Henry VII in 1495, might just fit the bill. I quote: "...vagabonds, idle and suspected persons shall be set in the stocks for three days and three nights and have none other sustenance but bread and water and then shall be put out of Town. Every beggar suitable to work shall resort to the Hundred where he last dwelled, is best known, or was born, and there remain upon the pain aforesaid."

It is this very notion that there are the natural and entitled rulers of countries and the rest - majority - of the population simply there to do their bidding and feed their bank accounts. A notion that I'd naively thought was - slowly - being cast beyond the pale of human thought. But no. Apparently, this institutional delusion is still a force to be reckoned with, on both sides of the economic fence. And delusion it is, as history attests.

This Saturday's Guardian Journal leader points out something I and many others have been banging on about for decades: during the 'glorious' Tory leadership of Margaret Thatcher, GDP [I won't mention the shortcomings of that metric] doubled, which sounds impressive, except when contrasted with the mad, bad 1970s, when GDP quadrupled, and we had near-enough full-employment, decent wages, a functioning NHS and social care system, and railways and utilities that actually bloody worked.

Back To The Future would be a good thing for all - the stupidly-rich excepted - but not the one that the current crop of robber barons would like to see. Rather the 1970s than the 1870s. Next time, can we please just nationalize public services, utilities, and once and for all, land. This particular prole refuses to forget that one of his immediate ancestors died a pauper in a twentieth-century workhouse...

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