I recently attended the funeral of one of my old office colleagues who, like me, worked for over forty years in the same organisation. At the wake I reminisced with other long term colleagues about our early days in the workplace, in the 1960s, and 1970s, comparing them with what we came to know towards the ends of our careers, and with what young friends now tell us about their experiences.
At one time health and safety rules and regulations, although obviously necessary in industrial environments, was confined in offices to exercising what was basically common-sense, while we had a personnel department, which dealt with matters of recruitment, and staff welfare. As in any social environment we naturally had our ups and downs with others, although, not being complete sissies, we could argue quite aggressively without it becoming anything requiring interference from anyone in authority, while many of us, myself included, met and married girls from within the office.
What a contrast we see today. Health and Safety has expanded to a ridiculous extent, far more than is justified by the reality, while that accursed non profession HR has spread like the plague throughout organisations, producing absurd policy documents, which only hamper effective working, and which most people ignore whenever they can. HR is responsible for making mountains out of mole hills when it comes to inter personnel relations, setting up inquiries to examine what we would once have regarded as trivial disputes. Far from being a department like Personnel, which tried to help staff, HR is an arm of management, allowing senior officers to keep their distance when implementing policies which treat staff unfairly. As far as romance in the office is concerned it would be a bold young man to make advances to a girl he found attractive, as the sexual Thought Police would be on him like a ton of bricks.
This increasing crushing of normal life is of course now everywhere, as the right of people to exercise free speech is more and more constrained by the metropolitan elite, aided and abetted by the morons of social media, with ‘twitter storms’, and cancel culture treated as valid by a weak, incompetent media, and enforced by politicians frightened to stand up for the values which this country has always represented. The Free Speech Union must now be at risk of overwhelmed by the number of people seeking help in opposing these fascists of the Left. We must not allow the latter to say “you can’t say that” without saying “Oh, yes I can”, and cease to listen to the whining from vanishingly small sexual minorities.
When we dare to oppose the rewriting of history by know nothing activists, or resent attacks on our heroes such as Winston Churchill and Douglas Bader, by those who would be living in a Nazi nightmare but for them, we are accused of being at best reactionary, or even of being Nazis. We now see what have been described as ‘blobs’ undermining our nation, via the education system, the health service and the civil service.
When I think of the brave men and women of previous generations who rallied to the colours, or stoically endured massive privations to save us from foreign tyrannies I have only absolute contempt for the pathetic wimps who now infest our universities, with their demands to ‘feel safe’, as they are too feeble to tolerate the idea that their opinions might not be shared by everyone. Clearly there are limitations on what the government can do to deal with these inadequates, particularly as they are often supported by the useless university authorities but, if I were PM, I would be seeking to cut off all funding to any educational establishment which yielded to their demands, while introducing policies aimed at ridding the country of the hundreds of Mickey Mouse degrees on offer, and forcing jumped up polytechnics to cease to be described as universities. Boris is not alone in the political class in avoiding this subject, but it is a matter which a truly determined Conservative politician should be addressing.
The bureaucrats in the NHS go their merry way, wasting vast sums on administration, while resisting any attempts to reform, while the upper echelons of the civil service continue their campaign to undermine Brexit.
The latest spat between a Left liberal Mayor of London and a ‘right on’ Metropolitan Police Commissioner would be funny, were things not so serious. Cressida Dick should never have been appointed head of the Metropolitan Police after the operation she directed as leader of Gold Command led to the death of the innocent Brazilian Jean Charles da Silva e de Menezes, an appointment condemned by his family. Nevertheless the desire of our political class to display their politically correct credentials ensured that they preferred to select the first female head, regardless of other issues.
Now that she is retiring there is an opportunity to make fundamental changes to the Met, returning it to its proper function of fighting genuine crime, but the continued dominance of the so called progressives makes such action unlikely. Unfortunately TV’s DCI Hunt is a fictional character, but it is his model of policing which would restore common-sense to the force, although whether any such as he could exist under the modern leadership is doubtful. An end should be put to the growing power of what is an embryonic Thought Police, spending time pursuing innocent citizens for using their right of free speech to oppose the nostrums of the politically correct, while the use of trained constables for monitoring computer crime should be stopped, a separate expert agency, on the lines of GCHQ, being created for such matters, who, once having established the details, could pass the evidence to the police for final action. The public wants the police to be visible on the streets, dealing with both petty and major crime, not sitting in offices looking at computers, or attempting to intimidate law abiding citizens by ‘checking their thinking’, as has happened on more than one occasion. However I do not think anything will change until we have a government that is not in thrall to the vociferous activists of the Left. Whether that will ever be the case is, at best, doubtful.
The government has signed up to the ludicrous Green agenda, which is set fair to totally undermine our economy, forcing people to abandon their cars, and to pay through the nose for energy, all to follow a theory based on the false premise that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere drives climate change, when an impartial examination of the scientific evidence, and the historical record, reveals that this is totally false.
When I was young we had serious politicians like Attlee and Churchill dealing with matters of true importance. Now we have a bunch of lightweights obsessing over rubbish such as ‘cakegate’. If this country is to survive in any recognisable form the ordinary, decent, normal people must fight back against those destroying it, whether they be the liberal left, or the lunatics who subscribe to the so called ‘woke’ agenda. I am sure that I am not alone in being sick of the nagging busybodies who seem to think that they have the right to order decent people about.
We will receive no help from the biased belly speakers of the BBC, or from politicians who know little, and care even less, of what the electorate really wants. We need leadership, not appeasement of the lowest common denominator with the biggest mouths!