Reply #5: Despite

[Joe Chi Minh]

what looks like a nightmare scenario, because there are so many wised-up people over there, your political contex always seems ull of hope.

In the UK, on the other hand, I can't even bear to read about our pathetic politics anymore. The fact is that we threw away a welfare state, full employment (on the initial initiative of La Thatcher, there have been countless changes to the way in which the unemployment rate in this country is tallied - well over a score, possibly as many as forty plus by now); remuneration was relatively great, and if you left one job, you could get another one straight away. Most people could afford a car and rented accommodation. Now flats at reasonable rents are, I believe, in short supply. Instead of privatized one-man buses, you had a driver and a conductor, who went around collecting the fares. The railways had not been privatized and functioned relatively brilliantly, and with far fewer major accidents. Needless to say, the media helped spread the notion that British Railways was a joke. Well if it was, you could laugh - which nobody would today in relation either to the transport infrastructure or to the National Health Service. Education, too is a disgrace.

Many, many people's lives have been cruelly curtailed by homelessness, poor health, suicides, overstretched ambulance service, the spread of the MRSA superbug, courtesy of privatised cleaning services. It goes on and on. "Rip-off" Britain is the term generally used, as most prices are exhorbitant compared to mainland European prices. We no longer have any plausible idealists in the body politic.

Since our brightest and best have no copunction about outsourcing our jobs, I would really like to see the Government, itslef, of this country, outsourced to the evidently much more competent and less cynical Scandinavian, German and French politicos. No remuneration would be too high, because we would surely get value, while now, they can't think of enough ways to squirrel away dosh, pay rises well above the rate of inflation, freebies with all the rogues and vagabonds of big business you could imagine; all in exchange for comprehensive misgovernment and maladminstration and various forms of legalised malfeasance. Corporatism is king and Blair, Jumping Jack Flash, the jester.

Also, of course, another reason why we are interested is surely because when America sneezes, the rest of the world catches a cold, so your elections are very important.

In Scotland "wheels within wheels" is endemic, and is part of the reason for the soaring cost of the new Scottish parliamnet. Personally, I would like to remove the politicasn to an old building that used to be a public school, and leave the new parliament open to the public as a folly! I'm sure tourists would come from all over the world to see it, recognising the syndrome behind its problems. A kind of Caledonian Ozymandias, I suppose.