Our entertainers give us facts while our politicians have nothing to say

Mike here discusses the way it is increasingly left to entertainers – actors, comedians and pop-stars- to speak the truth about politics, while politicians make only the most bland comments while presiding over the gradual privatisation of state institutions like the NHS and education. This is essentially because all the parties have adopted the post-Thatcherite consensus that private industry is always good, and will always be better, whatever the facts says to the contrary, than state interference. Worse, the parties and individual politicians are a part of the problem. They have been absorbed into the same military industrial complex they pretend to regulate. Major corporations sponsor political meetings, lobby MPs, and then provide lucrative positions in their boardrooms for MPs and senior civil servants. This needs to end now. Under French law, no civil servant can take a job with a company until two years after they have left the civil service. This is to prevent companies headhunting senior civil servants for their contacts in the rest of industry and the administration, and help close the swing doors between the civil service and the industries they regulate and invite for government contracts. Anything similar over here is roundly denounced as either unworkable or else specious claims are put forward claiming that it is already outlawed under present legislation. See Mike’s comments on the government’s response to his e-petition against ministers voting over subjects in which they have a vested interest. Furthermore, many politicians actually don’t come from the working or lower middle classes, and so are isolated from the hardships the Neo-Liberal agenda has created. This is shown by the comments of a Tory councillor, repeated in Private Eye, who said there needs to be houses built for people on modest incomes, such as £50-80,000 a year. If only that was the minimum salary! The Conservatives have been using the privileged background of many Labour and Socialist MPs and activists against them, particularly on the subject of immigration. The claim is that these MPs are insulated from the harm their policies do to the working class, because they themselves hypocritically belong to and enjoy all the benefits of the middle and upper classes. This argument was first advanced about forty years ago in which a book which argued that as the middle class membership of the Labour party had increased to the point where they were now the majority, the party had lost touch with its working class roots, and was dominated by people who despised them. There is much to this, though the policies that are damaging the working class, formulated and implemented by MPs and officials from the middle classes, are those of post-Thatcherite Conservatism, not Socialism.

Mike Sivier's blog

This could have been designed to follow my rant about politics being about perception: In response to a news report that NHS doctors’ surgeries have been found to be filthy, radio listeners were treated to a lengthy monologue on why the media are running down the health service to make it easier for the government to sell it out from under us.

This lesson was delivered, not by an eminent politician, but by the comedian Rufus Hound. He was speaking on Radio 4’s The News Quiz.

And he said: “Does this not scare anyone, though?

“There are a lot of stories coming out at the moment about all the ways that the NHS is failing. At the same time there is privatisation by stealth. Now, if you’re a conspiracy theorist, maybe those two things just resolve themselves. If you’re a normal person, you’ve got to become a conspiracy theorist…

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