1. The Blurb
One thing about today’s world never fails to amaze me, and that is the sheer terror that any wealthy person has, perhaps buried very deeply but extant nevertheless, that in some way or by some means beyond their control their accumulated personal fortunes could be stripped away from them. There seems to be a very deeply rooted insecurity within these people that causes them to continually need to scrape together more and more material wealth like some over-zealous croupier at a shady casino.
I often wonder what I might do if I had, say, thirty million pounds in an offshore account in a nice, balmy tropical paradise. Would I buy a huge mansion with eighteen bedrooms, set in a sizeable chunk of the English countryside? A penis-extension car which could never be driven at its top speed legally on any British road? Fine Wedgewood bone china to carry my meals to a Chippendale dining suite? Race-horses? Stocks and shares? Bonds?
Nah. For a start there’s only me in my household, which is how I like it because I get to read the news in peace. What the Dickens would I, as a committed singley, want with eighteen bedrooms? And imagine having to mow all that grass! I don’t drive and have never wanted to learn, so the over-priced hunks of metal that overload rich people’s spam filters hold no appeal for me whatsoever. I want dinnerware that I can shove in a dishwasher, not some flimsy, frilly stuff that requires the attendance of fifteen security guards and a land-shark to escort it from sink to drainer, and which would probably dissolve in Hysterical Shopper detergent anyway. My Dad knew everything about race horses, but to me they’re a long, brainless animal with a leg at each corner and, long or short, their heads all look the same size to me. If I had 30 mill, the last thing I’d be doing would be risking it on the performance of industry, and bonds tend to tie the cash up for way too long for my liking.
So why would I want 30 mill? Well… the truth of the matter is that I wouldn’t. I’ve seen what having vast amounts of money that they can never hope to enjoy fully does to people. They become selfish in the extreme, develop delusions that they’re somehow better than everyone else, and seem to feel that if they don’t unfortunately avoid breaking their necks on horseback chasing defenceless animals throughout the countryside then they’ve somehow not proved to everyone that they have any kind of social worth. To my way of thinking, the fact that they actually DO that last one proves beyond a shred of doubt that social worthiness is something that will always elude them anyway.
So much for material wealth then, but would I want to live in poverty? As a disabled person I’m not far short of it anyway, but have so far managed to avoid the predations of the DWP because they know that if they do try and interfere with my income they’ll have a corpse on their hands. I long ago planned and prepared for a nice, quiet, painless way out and I reserve the right to use it should the need arise. They have a letter stating that other people will receive letters detailing my reasons at the time, should that time arrive, for punching my own ticket, and that kind of information is something that the DWP absolutely does NOT want entering the public domain. I figure they’re going to have to answer, if the London Met can overcome its corrupt nature for a few weeks, some seriously sticky questions about Mrs Stephanie Bottrill as it is, in connection with what is known as “procured suicide,” which is a criminal offence under the terms of the 1961 Suicide Act. My testimony, should it ever need to be produced by friends whom I would leave behind, would leave no doubt as to where and upon whom any blame for my self-powered departure from this plane would be placed. I know that very many people become very emotional over the subject of self-termination but I found, when I was fighting my almost two-year battle with the DWP, that eventually the only way to look at one’s situation under those conditions is logically, and logic states quite simply that if life ceases to be worth living, then cessation of the practice of living, at a time and by a method of one’s own choosing, is the only remaining answer.
However, poverty hasn’t touched my household and I remain hopeful that it never will because no matter how much I insult the wilting wallflowers at the Department of Witless Pillocks, I remain convinced that there is still at least one lonely atom of common sense floating around within their domain, urgently seeking an adequately vivified braincell to inhabit. I have enough to get by on and pay the bills with and that, because I paid income tax, NICs, and VAT for 31 years before becoming disabled, is enough for me as long as my right to it, within the social contract that I had no choice but to be a part of, is recognised and left intact. I write books, which I release on Amazon under the name Edward J Bailey, including collections of the letters that I’ve written to the Evil Ones at Wasteminster. I’m actually behind with publishing those last, because putting the books together is a real PITA and it’s always one of those jobs I wish I’d never started by the time I’m halfway through. Last month I earned the princely sum of £4.05 from sales of those books. What the hell… the stories are fun to write even if the letters collections are a pain in the proverbial to compile.
That’s my situation, and I know that I’m a damn sight better off than more than a few people out there these days. Could I use a better income? Of course I could; who couldn’t? But you know what they say about wishes being horses, right?
Yet there is a simple solution to poverty, one which doesn’t have to strip the rich of their fortunes. I discovered it in a couple of very old novels that were written back in the last days of the 19thcentury by a chap called Edward Bellamy. It’s sad to realise, as you read them, that so little has changed in over 100 years when it comes to the way we deal with poverty. Or, rather, the way in which we don’t. The books are available free of charge in a number of e-reader formats as well as PDF from www.gutenberg.net and are called, in the order that they need to be read: “Looking Backward, 2000 to 1887” and “Equality.” The latter is the one that details the how of the economic system that forms the “scenery” of the novels, but it will make little sense in places unless the former is read first, as was intended. If you can deal with slightly archaic language, they’re well worth reading.
Using the ideas contained in these books I started a group on Facebook, which for the moment is called P.L.E.B. (https://www.facebook.com/groups/414895271976252/) Quite to my surprise, it is attracting a number of people who are very willing to accord the various topics that I’ve extracted from the books serious consideration and discussion. At the moment, the members are largely from the “have-not” side of the social fence and I would really, really, like to see some of the better-off citizens of the United Kingdom come along and have their say as well. Political persuasion is not important in P.L.E.B. What is important is that we find a way to generate a fairer society in which everyone is protected from the rigours of poverty or other diminution of their personal circumstances. I’d really like to see an electrical engineer or seven in there as well, because I have an idea that they might like to kick around and release as a freebie to whoever was capable of building the device (if it would work.) I doubt that it would be patentable, but it might break our dependence on oil, gas, coal and even nuclear, as well as cut down on the number of wind turbines that no-one wants in their back yard.
You see, no matter what flavour of government we have at any given time in this country, there are always going to be those who will not be content with the policies, or who will be treated worse than they consider proper. At the moment it’s us have-nots who are being made to pay for what I’ll politely call “mistakes” by those in the upper tiers of society. Next time around it might be a government that penalises those wealth controllers via increased taxation. It’s been a never-ending see-saw since the early 1900s and, over a century later, it is still profiting no-one.
My view is that private capitalism is dying a slow and strangulating death because no matter how many people are replaced by automation and computers, the cost of production keeps rising. This is simply because the cost of raw materials, including those used to generate energy, which are becoming more and more scarce, keeps going up. It’s the law of supply and demand that capitalism enshrines within itself as its own particular cancer and, because the private capitalists who want to produce goods here are reliant on supply by other private capitalists elsewhere, who have the ownership of the mines that the raw materials come from, it’s a disease for which its adherents are never going to find a cure. The only logical ending for the capitalist system, therefore, is that it will price itself out of its own markets. Just as with the dinosaurs following the meteor strike of 65 million years ago, first the plants will die off (that’s the mass of consumers in this analogy), leading to the deaths of the herbivores (our goods manufacturers), and once they’ve gone the carnosaurs (raw material suppliers) will have no source of their specialist food – money – left to nourish them. The dinosaurs provide, if only the private capitalists would see it, a banshee warning from the past that specialisation is the road to doom, and the specialisation of the capitalist system is that it consumes only one limited type of food: Money. Those who are squirrelling this “food” away in offshore accounts are only serving to hasten the inevitable end that I’ve described.
The path down which we will have to tread while this goes along is likely to be bloody. Capitalism’s traditional answer to the shortage threat to its existence has been to engage in wars of conquest for the sole purpose of material acquisition. However, the way the world is divided up into alliances these days, such ventures are seriously risky affairs because, unlike the 1800’s where Britain controlled most of the weaponry on the planet and built a world-wide Empire using it, now EVERYONE has similar weapons technology. The chance of Britain remaining above the waves, never mind ruling them (because very many of our former colonies really don’t like us) if we tried it now would lie somewhere between zero and fat. A few empty styrofoam cups might fly into the air as the waters of the North and Irish Seas collided, but that would be about it. Aren’t you glad now that the jingoists who wanted to go and bloody Syria’s nose didn’t get their way? I am.
If you’ve read this far you’ll have some idea of why I’ve written what you’ve read, which reason is that we need a better system before there’s a social disaster the likes of which this country has never had to try and deal with. In Chapter Two I’ll lay out the basic premise that underpins Bellamy’s two novels, which I really do recommend to anyone who has even a passing interest in social engineering. That basic idea is the insulation of the private individual from the tantrums of the commodities and money markets. I hope you will be able to join me again then but, in the meantime, if you can’t wait that long, please do come over and have a look at P.L.E.B. And stick your own two penn’orth in if you feel inspired to do so. The rule there is that one person’s viewpoint is as valid as anyone else’s. The only people we won’t let in are known racists and foul-mouthed tub-thumpers, and any that do happen to slip in will be booted out in pretty short order. All posts require admin approval, which means that it’s not going to be permitted to degenerate into a dump for all kinds of images either. P.L.E.B. Is a place for sensible and sensitive discussion between people who want to bring about change, but who may have differing views on how it should be achieved. From those discussions we hope to eventually draw votes on compromises that could be used as political party policy. We’re enacting something that the leaders of our country seem to have forgotten about. It’s called democracy.
Continued tomorrow…
Darren Lynch
