Well, this 12 year bush tucker trial is beginning to come to a head. I am no celebrity but what with Royal Mail, nurses, ambulance and rail strikes, the cost of food, energy, services (you name it and it is up), the immigration mess, the ineptitude of Brexit implementation, water quality, social care misery… I am minded to get out of here!
We won’t go, though.
We will persist and adapt. We will listen and work with people with shared values to define a much better future.
The thought leadership of the nation does not reside with the Conservative party. Time and again their focus, their whole strategy, is to cling on to the people who voted for them, a minority of the population.
There are two hard years ahead, though. Despite having less than any mandate at all, this government will cling on until the last possible moment. It will continue to use the tactics we have already seen in the autumn statement of postponing the more acute funding pain until after the next election. Remember that note left by Labour in 2010, “There is no money”?
We will continue to see swathes of Tory MPs, including the new crop, declining to fight again. In sum, they know they are losing so they are setting up the next government to fail and meanwhile they are looking after their own. They are frail, fraught and full of fractious factions. Vote them off the show now, I say!
Doughnut economy
So, to the positives: at our Annual General Meeting we were delighted to welcome Sarah Dyke, Somerset Councillor and prospective parliamentary candidate for Somerton and Frome. It was inspiring to hear how our neighbours are bringing new, radical ideas to bear, including, for example, the principles of Doughnut Economics. We are familiar with economic models based on the flow of work and money between employers and employees which results in the supply of – and demand for – goods and services. Simple enough. The problem is that we are trashing our environment as we go and leaving a trail of inequality and want in our wake.
Doughnut economics seeks a fair social foundation for the economy whilst not breaking our planet’s ecological constraints. We need to maximise the re-use of goods and services and properly harness and recognise the value of the unpaid inputs we make as parents, in running our households, in helping others in our communities and at work. This isn’t the wokerati at work. This is the sustainable future of the human race at stake. Without thinking like this, the nationalists, the plutocrats, the factionalists get to win. They do not create, they destroy. Witness poor Ukraine.
Mike Chapman
Liberal Democrats Blackmore Vale
