Warning!!!

A question which has been bothering me for most of my adult life but has now more than ever been placed in sharp focus. Events in England over the last thirty years have made the answer imperative for our society to answer. 

Is it right that somebody who does nothing but dish the dirt on other people earns hundreds of thousands of pounds a year while a fitter and turner in a factory which creates wealth earns twenty thousand pounds a year. In addition those who earn vast sums live in this clique which looks after their own. They close ranks to exclude outsiders. When one of them is found wanting in moral fibre or truthfulness, the rest deny any knowledge of what was going on. Andy Coulson and his Oxbridge circle is a case in point. You cannot convince the bulk of the hard working population that those in authority did not know about what was going on. Yet after he left the News of the World not only did they employ him on a vast salary but turned a blind eye to his payoff and continued hush money from News International. The very people who say they did not know about this are the same who are running the country. Can there be any doubt why certain parts of our society have no faith in the common aims but think that they have to grab what they can.

There is a history in England stretching back to the middle ages of ordinary people getting so angry at the disparity in wealth between the elite and the rest that they rise up in protest. Though in the main the authorities win, the system usually has to change.

Are we now living through one of those periods? That there is a wide disparity in wealth and responsibility in this country there is no doubt. We have to learn the lessons of our history and somehow curb the worst excesses of those with power and wealth.

Where though is the Labour Party? The ranks of this political movement are now full of those coming from the same Oxbridge background as all the others. They laugh behind their backs at John Prescott but he worked for a living. Alan Johnson is sneered at in the newspapers which are run by members of the same clique. What is the difference in the Oxbridge mafia looking after their own and the gangs in the estates looking after their own. Gangs do not have the levers of power to pull or their weight of public opinion formers to keep their territory to themselves  but they have a strength in violence against other gangs. Is there any difference other than in the methods used?

If we are not careful the ordinary citizen will rise up in revolt against those with the power and the wealth just as over the ages English people have done.

( This theme is explored in my novel A Ceremony of Innocence written under my full name of Edmund J Gubbins. It can be obtained through Amazon both as a paper back or for download to your PC, Kindle, iPad or other readers.)