Our Lady of the Bright Economic Vision!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The daily temperature graph fluctuates, but its general direction is down.  Windows and doors are still open, but the cloud cover emphasises the cooler temperatures.  At least it is not raining, and I can keep congratulating myself that I am not in the UK.

     Our Prime Minister Without a Popular Mandate has, at last, come out of hiding and given a few interviews to the local media, she doesn’t seem ready to take on the nationals with the threat of the Today Programme on BBC4 a big no, no.

     The key element in what Truss said was that, in spite of virtually all reasonable economic punditry condemning her reckless gamble on the British Economy, she had to do “what I believe is right”!  So, if I understand her correctly, she didn’t need a budgetary forecast about what she was proposing because that would have been based on informed projections and facts by proven experts, whereas what she and her wrecking chancellor were about was more to do with self-justified "belief".

     So, the lying Northern girl who has misrepresented her early life of “grinding middle class poverty” and spread her lies about a “failing school” that somehow managed to get her into Oxford University, has now reinvented herself as some sort of mystic: Our Lady of the Bright Economic Vision. 

     I imagine her as a grotesque reworking of Bernini’s sculpture of The Agony of Saint Teresa, lying back clothed in her carefully selected High Street brands (to demonstrate her un-Rish¡ down-to-earthiness) framed by strips of the golden wallpaper of her disgraced predecessor torn from the wall, calculating eyes half-open (to note and take advantage of the main photographic chance as it presents itself) and waiting for the gilt arrow of the Angel of the 1% to pierce the space where her heart should be so that she can unleash foison on those that already have.

     We really shouldn’t be surprised, as it is the same “belief” that drove forward the absurdity of Brexit and that continues to power its demented defenders in the face of demonstrable disaster. Brexiteers actively and robustly excluded so-called experts (Britain, declared Goblin Gove, has “had enough of experts”) from any consideration of the merits in the discussion for deciding the most momentous question of the new millennium.  It wasn’t facts, demonstrable facts, that drove the argument, it was “belief” – and we have seen just how efficacious that has been in boosting the wealth and reputation of the nation!

    Of course, the most obvious problem with dealing with someone whose ideas are based on “belief” is that there is no argument that can win.  The ‘facts’ may line up against the point of view, but all the holder of it has to say is, “But, I believe differently” and what is there to say to that?

     Belief and prejudice are nearly related, and while I believe that facts may strengthen “belief” and give it a foundation in fact so that it is no longer a belief but something approaching a scientific fact amenable to the ‘scientific method’, I also believe that facts must eventually defeat prejudice – you will have noted that I have used the dreaded word “believe” myself!

     I suppose when you come down to it, the way that you think is governed by what you think society is, and what your response to humanity is. 

     If there is one thing that I believe in, it’s people, working and thinking together.  It is the community, whether it be of science, or economic, or the arts, or nations, or whatever grouping you like to use to define the mass, that determine what is true and what is right.  I pop my daily pills, not in the mere belief that they will do me good, but because the scientific community and the medical establishment have produced, checked, and authorized their use.

     Cult leaders can fleece their flocks by wielding ‘belief’ as an effective tool to part ‘believers’ from their wealth, but I expect more from my political leaders.

     And that last thought might well be a naïf belief.  But it is one I cling to.