Circling the Plughole...

Is what I feel Britain is doing at the moment.

The election of Jeremy Corbyn to Labour leader casts me back to the time when Labour were idealistic but had policies as mad as a box of frogs.

My real concern is that after decades of plastic politicians, people may actually vote Labour into power.

Ideologues are the very worst of people. Margaret Thatcher was one, so was Tony Blair. They were so fanatic in their self-belief  that no-one could convince them their path was wrong. They would quite happily ruin a whole country, make millions unemployed or got to war and kill hundreds of thousands of people just to prove an ideological point.

They are very dangerous.

Not matter how chummy, or down to earth they appear, they are dangerous. They have no consideration for the results of their actions, the path, the idea, the dogma is all and MUST be followed. Slavishly. There is no compromise.

The same goes now for Jeremy Corbyn. He has lead a life without compromise, on the back benches he has been able to get away with extremist and dangerous views and connections without scrutiny. I just wonder whether now he's on the top table will he be be a politician and ditch his dodgy historical connections, or will he be the true ideologue and hang onto them regardless.

My money is on him sticking with it and the Labour PR team labeling his fanaticism as principles.

The thing is, there isn't much to look forward to. Our economy is flatlining as North Sea Oil reserves start to decline, we have no industry to grow us out of the slump, and the financial sector still has more than a decade left of toxicity in any debts it holds on to.

After decades squandering the booty from the North Sea, using it to prop up a crippled economy and paying unsustainable amounts of people unaffordable sums to not work, making new entrants to the job market and new migrants to stay and work on minimum wages that don't raise enough tax revenue to cover the cost of increased demands on infrastructure.

We will head back to the Seventies, when we couldn't afford to keep the lights on, we were crippled by Socialist dogma and no-one had a viable plan.

The ideas were bankrupt back then and they are just as bankrupt today. The chancellors of the early Seventies spent most of their time printing more money than the country could back up just to keep things going.

These days quantative easing has pumped the same pressure into the economic system, inflating the value of everything but most substantially house prices. With the debt time-bombs of equity-only mortgages about to
go off over the next 5 or so years, I see no end to the misery.

In dire times like we'll have over the next decade, voters do strange things. Dangerous things.