Ok it was a April fools joke.
i am slightly humgover today after having a few drinks last night, so while i try and remember all the details from last nights fun why dont you write in your best/worst April fools (fuels?) joke you have ever heard.
(Just for the record i am not a member of any politcal party as i dont think any of them have th intrests of the people at heart)
Update : I have found the funniest April fools days joke
Apparently the Government want to read our e-mails
Now thats funny
Perhaps I should ask What are you joining the Lib Dems to?
ReplyDeleteA very heavy weight to be lowered into the sea would be good.
What you said is similar to the American humorist Will Rogers. He said he did not belong to an "organised political party"-- he was a Democrat. Fast-forward about 80 years and 3000 miles, and he could be describing any one of the political parties in the UK, but especially Labour in recent weeks. They are, aside from picking the public's pocket systematically, about as well-organised as the proverbial soup sandwich.
ReplyDeleteLooking at the political scene here and now, we see two large parties and a small one, all with a left-liberal agenda, all obsessed with the illusion of controlling the people, all with weak leaders hated both by their own party activists and by the public, and struggling to maintain what little authority they have. It looks bad.
DeleteBut was it ever much better than now? Do we have an illusion of things having been more stable in the past? The prime ministers I can remember -- Eden, Macmillan, Douglas-Home, Wilson, Heath, Callaghan, Thatcher, Major, Blair, Brown -- were all constantly engulfed in crisis after crisis. Was it any better earlier, with complacent Baldwin, shifty Lloyd George, clever Disraeli, stern Gladstone? It think that if your studied their careers more closely, you would find the same pattern.
Will Rogers was probably right about the Democrats, but I'm sure the Republicans were just as chaotic then (though it would be hard to imagine them being more chaotic than they are now).
There is perhaps one difference between the past and today. Things looked a little more hopeful then: you could believe that there were men rising through the ranks who might make strong, competent leaders. Now we look at the main parties and can't see anyone coming forward who would make a halfway decent prime minister. That's because no intelligent, competent person would want this hellish post: he'd be running a profitable business (probably overseas). The only people who want to grab the leadership are bastards and chancers.
Or is that another sentimental illusion? Has it always been like this?
Difficult last question. We generally get more cynical as we progress through life and our generation managed to throw off the deference that our parents often automatically used to show to authority.
ReplyDeleteI said to my father, who died five years ago, aged 97 (he had retired from the RN after 30 years and who was conservative in every sense of the word) that I would no longer be prepared to die for my country. He surprised me by saying that neither would he any longer. Here was a man who had seen action in all the major sea theatres of the day Norway, North Sea, Dakar, Sicily, Dunkirk etc., at the age of ninety effectively admitting that the situation seemed not worth saving.
It surely must have got worse when seen from ths perspective.
I noticed you missed Winnie from your list.
I missed Winnie on purpose. I was born under Attlee (a sad load), but still too young to be politically aware by the time that Churchill had given way to Eden. And if Churchill was, as has been suggested, verging on gaga during his last term as PM, I am not going to cast nasturtiums on him on the basis or reports by historians, those unreliable people.
DeleteMe too. 29 months of his term of which I remember nothing although I do have other memories from that date. (I am congruent with Brillo in that respect, incidentally.)
DeleteI remember Churchill being talked about but was also unaware of what the post of PM meant. By Eden, I had my earliest political awareness as my father would talk about it when I went to bed. Option one was being read a story. Two was a talk about something. Three was the news. They were in that order of preference as it put off that evil moment longest when I had to go to sleep - a waste of time which I have always resented, perhaps for varying reasons... ;-)
I am sure you will know anyway that Churchill himself said History is going to be kind to me. I am going to write it.
DeleteClassic. I will not listen to the detractors. Like all of us, he will have had his faults. But they were dwarfed by his greatness.