Stand for Albion?

I was going to write a post about this country and its structure, or more specifically about the decline and decay of England.

That the nation that was England -- it isn't any more as a walk round many towns will show -- is less than it was can't really be argued about. This is not a mourning of the passing of an empire (they come and go, so ours came and went. So be it) and nor is it quite a foray into the nationalist arena: if Scotland thinks it can survive on its own then that's how it is. Same for Wales and Northern Ireland if they wish to stand alone. I think it a shame if Britain becomes series of smaller entities but you can put it down to the will of the people, though I do have to say if Scotland achieves independence then let us hope they grant the same privilege to any part of that country which wishes to secede. If the Hebrides or the Orkneys say they want to go it alone, I presume the new king of Scotland will agree it's okay.

Anyway, be that as it may. Life goes on, one way or another (I do though find it curious that at time when the likes of the European Union grow then more and more areas want to be 'independent') and my concern is the patch I live on, known as England.

I would imagine that at this point there may be someone reading this who begins to get agitated that I represent that worst of things and thus am a Little Englander. I probably will in association with that be labelled with many tar brushes, to mix my metaphors. I doubt if any of them would be flattering. But while I don't like some things that others adore (or say they adore; the reality is sometimes different between saying and doing) I do care about where I was born.

In the light of this I was thinking about England. It isn't the country my grandparents and my father were willing to die for through two wars, nor the land my father-in-law served to protect when he was an officer in the army in places like Belfast. This is not the land I remember growing up in and while times change, they do not always change for the better or for that matter, for the happiness of the people who live there.

I'd like to say "so it goes" but we have been badly let down by the people who pretended to care and essentially pissed on the nation once voted into power.

Nothing can be done now. We trusted these people to do the best for us and they let us down. Now we have to get on with this even as it falls apart on a tide of mismanagement, dishonesties, fiddling, financial collapse and corruption against background of unfettered immigration. No matter how bad it gets, we can be sure we will be given more of what has gone before but in larger doses.

It made me think that perhaps we should go back to smaller countries for ourselves, because the bigger gets more greedy, more incompetent, and more ineffectual with it. No matter what the theory is, the desire for more gradually asserts itself over the desire for just letting things be.

Perhaps then the way forward is to be smaller. If England stands alone then it stands alone and we have to manage ourselves. With that, we don't have to fund other regimes or support other greedy ambitions or even nurture other cultures. We are what we are and that is how it is.

So, as England is largely lost, how about starting a new entity called Albion? An independent entity which embodies what England and the English are?

Before you get agitated, this is not a rejection of other skin colours. If anyone wants to be a member of Albion, irrespective of skin colour, they can be. All they have to do is not worship another nation, lust for another ideal and most importantly, not drag along a religion that curses people for not being in that religion. You see, it would be about attitude. If the attitude is that Albion is English -- not British, not British-Asian or British-non-liking-the-English or whatever -- you qualify. We would, difficult though it would be initially, stand alone and sort out our own problems. While I'd prefer Albion not to be under the thumb of the EU, I presume the will of the people would determine how much pressure we were willing to take from unelected officials in foreign places.

But here's the biggest problem: where would Albion be? The English cities are now lost, and most of the towns too. The politicians who carved up the nation for the benefit of the non-English, the people who yelled that we were not multi-cultural enough (even when the newcomers were resolutely opposed to anyone else's culture), have enabled the submerging of England into some strange hybrid and essentially unhappy place.

As we can never go back in time, as we can't invite people to leave and as we can't expect them to change their outlook, we have to go. Leave our own land. We who don't want the muli-culti approach would have to surrender the cities and the towns totally, given the numbers of non-English there already. All the landmarks, all the architectural achievements, all the theatres and the libraries and the galleries, all the urban achievements... they would be left behind too. Albion would have to start again on absolutely everything.

It would take time, perhaps too much time. One thing we do not have now is patience; we are reluctant to play the long game. People would be disaffected by having to build a whole new country from scratch, made unhappy by the thought of all they gave up to endure this. Suddenly freedom and with it the prospect of not being overwhelmed by cultures that despise the natives, would seem worthless. It takes time to build all this, and probably we probably wouldn't do it as well as our forebears did.

We would have to redefine our boundaries and guard against the barbarians that would flood the lands we left behind. We would be weary and vulnerable.

No, as much as I like the idea of Albion, I can see it won't work. Not unless we the English decamped en-masse to some Scottish islands who had gleefully declared independence from the new Scotland...

Hmmm. Well, you never know...

The only game in town

You would wonder why we play politics.

Here's a game with ill-defined (and often undefined) rules where people who are all striving for the same thing end up with temporarily different views of slight variations of the same thing. Similarities that allow them to posture, scream at each other and offer the occasional witty barb in defence of their position. People who manufacture 'sound bites' to attract applause of their own kind, a section of the population who would probably applaud just as enthusiastically at a flushing toilet.*

Thus we have, say, two or even three political parties (three if you count a bunch of former members of one party who had a split over some faint brand of their ideology from their mates, or couldn't get the power they wanted. You choose which issue forced the split that shattered British politics, etc) who are arguing about the same thing. Arguing about shades of the same thing.

Not one of them, for example, would say that we don't need schools or the NHS or any army. Unthinkable! They argue about how much schooling, the amount of medical care or the degree of defence we need. No question to be asked on the subjects themselves. It's not big differences they have either on their agreed platforms; the gaps are minute in global terms. Ten billion or ten billion one hundred thousand? The differences are marginal but the rhetoric inspires the fans of these strange groups of people to get agitated and blubber that their person has it right.

More? Well, how about our involvement with Europe? Do you want more Europe or a lot more Europe in your life?

No, that's silly. You are never asked if you want any Europe in your life. It is there and we are subservient to it that's all there is to that subject. You are told it's good for you and the discussion -- grown people acting like kids and making gestures at each other across a polished table in a long room not big enough to seat everyone who wants to be there -- is just then about how much Europe is good for you.

You see, the battle lines have already been drawn up, the site of the battleground fixed, the 'forces' of each side using the same words and ideas and the terms of our surrender worked out. It's just how much surrender can we manage.

The end result is the same in all these politics. The mindless slaughter of a few thousand words with people retiring into dark corners of a subsidised bar or restaurant to lick their wounds over coffee or wine. Reserve forces, aka the media, are wheeled in to report the conflict as unfairly as possible but the battle is over. Oh well, after a good night's sleep and the due claiming of expenses, its back to the fray for how much of this or how much of that.

Perhaps one day there will be a party who says that, actually, we don't need any of this or that. I wouldn't however count on it; all of them are capable of 'crossing the floor' to join the other side, or sides, without any loss of rank of privilege.

But worse of all, these people want this 'battle of wills' to be exactly as it is. They want power and all the trimmings of glory and elevated position -- with attendant wages and expenses -- to be in this strange game. How strange? If you play chess with someone else you try to win, not reach compromise. You play with pieces of quite different colours, clearly identified with clear rules. Yet politics is not like that. The rules are vague and can be bent, the pieces have no real clear function and better still they are all on the same side of the board and might only be distinguished by a subtle shading that requires you to hold each piece up in the brightest of lights to check which 'team' it belongs to.

Best of all, the chess pieces in politics are changeable. They are not fixed forms. They are changed sometimes by circumstances and whispers beyond your understanding but mostly altered by whim and whimsy as the need arises. Or they are changed by those people -- often not even elected by you and yours but secure in foreign climes and tyrannies -- who can offer something tasty for a change to be made. Further, what one piece says can say something quite different a while later. What one piece will attack will vary depending on the direction of a political wind that you don't generate or even have felt.

There is however a declared 'need to do things' given credibility by statement and bluster and yet it wasn't you who stated it. You might go along with it, if so instructed or guided or misled, but frequently the issues are all the same on both sides of the board. Sorry, I meant the one side of the board; I was forgetting there is only one side in this.

In which case, it suddenly dawns on you that there are actually two sides to this game but it is you on the other side of the board. And the politics side has all the power and all the self-serving interests to put them out of your reach. They may be misshapen and unidentifiable pieces but they gave themselves all the power and money.

So why do we play this when it works against us, the people? Simply because it is the only game in town. All you can do is stop playing because, frankly, it is the only move you have left.

Happily nothing will alter and the discussion of degree can carry on among the similar but shapeless pieces arrayed on the far side of the board, well out of your reach.

*I regret the reference to flushing toilets and any slight on them my blog may have made. Flushing toilets are, in fact, the opposite of party politics. The mechanism that causes a mini tidal wave to get rid of what you don't want is far more useful, and more clever, than all the overpaid, preening, posturing self-servers in public life.