By that I mean of course, 2013.
It has been customary for me for many years (with one recent outstanding exception) to say something along the lines of "thank God that's over and let's hope for better things in the year to come."
No more. The hell with 2013 and the hell with 2014 and so on.
Here then are my end-of-year thoughts.
With the passing of time and
inevitably aware of the aging process, I find myself becoming increasingly
misanthropic and with regard to the current “Age of the Common Man,”
increasingly disgusted.
I have recently been reading
about the state of politics and governance in England in the latter part of the
18th century. This was a time of quite extraordinary corruption by
any standards, some of it motivated by the late King George III, a somewhat
misguided monarch who imagined that he could rule in the manner of his
predecessors two centuries before his time.
To this end he declared himself opposed to political parties; of course
it must be remembered that the convention of having a parliament composed of
two parties (well let us say two and a half to be generous) became the norm
(again) later in the king’s reign. Large sinecures were provided to
co-operative persons; some of these it must be said carried – at least in their
titles - a degree of period charm. “The
Early Life of Charles James Fox” written by the Rt Hon. Sir George Otto
Trevelyan Bt, includes the following splendid example:
“George Selwyn, who returned two members, and had something to say in
the election of a third, was at one and the same time Surveyor-General of Crown
Lands which he never surveyed; Registrar in Chancery at Barbados, which he
never visited; and Surveyor of the Meltings and Clerk of the Irons at the Mint
where he showed himself once a week in order to eat a dinner which he ordered but
for which the nation paid.”
There are references to others
who were receiving sums of the order of £8000 p.a. (at 1770 values remember!)
for doing nothing except perhaps taking the King’s side on parliamentary votes.
All "right-minded" modern democrats
– at least those who are perhaps less well informed than they should be – will
be quick to express horror at such abuses.
These people would do well to read Private
Eye, where each issue invariably contains appalling tales of government
waste on a staggering scale, with billions poured down the drain on useless IT
schemes (one thinks e.g. of the NHS) and even larger sums wasted in "educating" hordes of chavs, communists and religious fundamentalists; golden handshakes to BBC officials, parliamentary
expenses, corrupt local officials, legions of so-called management consultants etc. In sum, the incompetence is breath-taking and modern people can only show great naïveté criticising the leaders in the 18th century, who at least
presided over Britain’s progress and advance in the world.
Charles James Fox, a brilliant
man, a hopeless gambler and it is said a debaucher too, was one of the few who did
their best to stand up to the corruption (William Pitt, Earl of Chatham was
another). But there were others: one
Murray was offered a pension of £6000 if he would remain in the House of
Commons, where he already received £7000 as Attorney-General, with a Tellership
(worth the same) for his nephew. He
responded: “Good God! What merit have I
that you should load this country, for which so little is done with spirit,
with a fresh burden of six thousand a year?” And then there were the extraordinary John
Wilkes and the outstanding Edmund Burke.
Given the individuals to whom I
seem to have chosen to give mysupport, a casual reader might feel obliged to conclude
that I am a Whig. If one accepts that the Whigs
claimed to be the champions of individual liberty (to a lesser or greater
extent it must be said) that casual reader would be quite correct, though I am
only a Whig up to a point – say 1867!
Unfortunately I am entirely unable to offer my devotion to a single
point of policy of the Whigs’ alleged successors, the Liberal Party. The current incarnation styled “The Liberal
Democrats” to be more interested in ordering us about rather as the post-war
Labour party of Attlee did, or in fact as does any modern party to be found
anywhere in western Europe. I will state
however that the theocracies (e.g. Iran, Saudi-Arabia) are of course infinitely
worse, as are the dictatorships – Russia, China, North Korea and so on.
In modern so-called democratic
times it is standard practice to condemn the oligarchy (mostly the aristocracy)
that ran the country in the 18th century. Fie I say!
Successive interfering reformers
have destroyed the aristocracy with their shameful death duties – an outrage in
my view (tax income by all means but taxing capital is the road to perdition)
and replaced it with what? The likes of
Fred Goodwin, Len McCluskey, Lord Mandleson, Tony Blair, Goldman Sachs, Lloyd’s
Bank, Arthur Scargill, George Galloway, Alistair Campbell, the useless Lord
Pearson who destroyed Marconi, dubious hedge funds and their managers, and
innumerable other freeloaders and hangers-on.
At least the aristocracy (most of
them anyway) had style and class.
Blair these days appears to be
almost universally loathed by left and right alike. I loathe him for his outrageous dishonesty,
his ghastly creepy oleaginous personality and for the fact that it was under
his appalling leadership that the following occurred:
- Destruction of the House of Lords
- Banning of fox-hunting (described as “Hunting
with dogs” by his plebeian party supporters)
- The smoking ban – fascism in action, which has
destroyed many livelihoods
- The appalling fraud and lies given out in order
to prosecute the Iraq war
There was of course much more;
and unlike the others I have listed, he was prime minister – for ten years at
that… Democracy? Wonderful stuff.
These days I feel that I should
like to restore matters to the time just following the second reform act of
1867.
And yes I love being out of
fashion and out of my time. The hell
with them all: long live the aristocratic principle and to hell with 2014.
Until the next time
:
