The economy that the present politicians seem to live in is the one of the City of London. It’s an economy of hedge funds, off shore tax havens, money laundering, investment brokers, big deals, billionaire investors, ponzi schemes and a whole slew of ten percenters brokering deals designed to give them ten percent just for taking a massive gamble with other people’s money. The City does it better than anywhere else and if you mess with them, they can tank the pound. Talk about a hostage situation!
 
Damn I’m beginning to sound like Liz Truss! And she’s C R A Z Y! She is definitely neuro something or other. I have no idea what a night out on the piss with her would be like, other than I am sure kicking a homeless guy hunkered down in a Tesco’s doorway would be involved. That would be after we met up with Suella who’d no doubt would have spiked our drinks.

 
Of course, that’s not the economy the rest of us live in. We live in the one where: the health service is crumbling; the trains are expensive and badly run; the roads are falling apart; the water companies pay themselves dividends from money saved by dumping raw sewage into the rivers; where the power companies’ smart meters always seem to record more than one expected and make one think FUJITSU! FUJITSU! We all fall down!
 
It is an economy where off shore funds illegally acquire freeholds, rack up the ground rent, make the leaseholds worthless and then gather in the default properties to offer up for a sweet deal with the government for housing illegal immigrants while some private company process them for first class tickets to Rwanda. It is an economy short of funding because billions of public money were handed to the government’s cronies for services they were ill fit for providing and proved to be so by not providing anything that worked. And did I mention FUJITSU and the Post Office?

Which reminds me how if one wishes to reach for legal redress for things like the fraudulent racking up of “Service Charges” for apartments, a solicitor’s letter can cost a thousand quid and any subsequent court case regardless of the result, if one is ever reached, will burden you with the fraudsters legal costs as well…. Excuse me while I wipe the froth off my mouth.
 
Our economy has nothing to do with The City, it is the one of charity shops, food banks, non-existent policing, indifferent schooling, bleak town centres, obesity inducing food stuffs, and “excess deaths” as the NHS calls that boost to cardiovascular issues that accompany the Covid booster programmes, which I’m sure is an excellent way to reduce the cost of geriatric care and pensions.
 

Where’s Clement Attlee when we need him? He was a man with negative charisma but without him, I would not have had much of an education at all. My redbrick excursion was a bewildering affair, full of misplaced expectations I’ll grant you that, but the magic it worked was that it opened my eyes to possibilities and brought me head first into the class walls that the privately educated established. I found something they could use me for and eventually went the old colonial route for the disgruntled on the make. There wasn’t much of an Empire left, and even less now, but Hong Kong lowered my blood pressure considerably.
 

If I was on the make in Hong Kong now, I’d have to be useful to a whole other cabal of vested interests. I’d be muttering about the Western Narrative’s war mongering racist anti-Chinese agenda or something. I’d try make it funny, but I would be made aware of where the money came from and what it needed of me. I’d still make Kung Fu Rwanda about a hapless Chinese journalist from The Wuhan Weekly sent to Brighton to investigate the origins of the mysterious Woke Virus that was introducing pronouns into the Chinese language which had been gloriously unisex for a millennium. Pitching that at the Hong Kong Film Finance Forum would no doubt win me another award. But now I live in England and there is no escape.
 

So I wonder what happened to Clement Attlee’s grand Welfare State? A National Health Service! A National Rail Network! A National Power Service! National this and that … well it all went private or thereabouts and became less interested in serving public interest and more in serving private wealth. And the wealthier that private wealth, the wealthier it gets.
 
But, being a nice sort of chap, even if it was my private wealth, I am sure I would look out of the darkened windows of my Rolls Royce as it bumped over the odd street sleeper and think it is all a bit of an eyesore really, surely the odd billion here and there could tidy things up a tad. Then I would fly to my mountain top lair and make a few phone calls yelling at my club members that the place was looking like something out of Dickens, marauding knife wielding juvenile pick pocketers included. And they would say, “Old boy, just remember that Victorian  Britain was a truly great world power! Everything will be just fine once we’ve conscripted them all into the army and sent them to fight the Russkies and the Fuzzy Wuzzies!” We’d have a good laugh at that and I’d book my flight on Elon’s one way ticket to Mars.
 

What did Jiang Zemin, ex-president of China, once call a bunch of Hong Kong Journalists? “Too Simple, Too Naïve!” The bunch questioning him about democracy at the time were twenty somethings barely out of college so it was probably true but I cannot help feeling that our British rulers think much the same of us. And it has to be said that, on the evidence of a recent trip through darkest China, at least the Chinese government seems to be running things better there. For that matter, the Japanese government is running things better as well. And so is the Singapore government. And have you seen Malaysia lately? None of them have as many billionaires per capita as we do. Surely there’s no connection? And I’m sure I could find things to bitch about their governments as well, but I would definitely get better dental treatment there.
 
I blame the Normans.

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