Your country? Your interest?
Does Paul Hogan, the Australian comedian, have more in common with his fellow countryman Rupert Murdoch than with Billy Connolly or Lenny Henry? Does an English electrician. doctor or fireman have more in common with the Duke of Buccleuch and his 268,000 acres or the Duke of Westminster and his land value of over two billion pounds than with a Spanish. Russian or Mexican electrician, doctor or fireman? One glance into your back garden or at your alarm clock will help you to answer these questions.
According to government figures, the richest 3.2 per cent of people in Britain today own 84 per cent of listed shares. 91 per cent of private companies and 88 per cent of land. This is what a "property owning democracy" means — a democracy where three-quarters of the daily newspapers are owned by just three millionaire companies, where non-elective judges, generals and civil servants wield tremendous power. None of the lords, dukes and baronesses are elected, nor are any of the multinational companies who also have a marked effect on workers' lives. Wealth is owned and controlled by a small section of the population — the capitalist class. They are a parasitic, redundant class who are dependent on the vast majority of the world's population, the working class. The workers run the present system from top to bottom, they produce everything in it and own nothing except their ability to work, which they sell at a price called a wage in order to live. If you feel your wages are not high enough, that your rent or mortgage payments are getting you down, that you can never seem to save any money and that you are always dominated by money-related worries, then that doesn't make you typically British but a typical member of the working class. The only difference between workers from different geographical regions is sometimes the extent to which they are exploited.
What workers need to do is to question, not only their loyalty to "their" country, but of what benefit, and to whom is this loyalty of any significance? They need to question a system which is based on rivalry; which sees only a minority of the world's population living in luxury at the expense of the vast majority; where tens of millions die of starvation every year although scientists estimate that the present world population could be fed seven times over. It is a system based on profits rather than the satisfaction of human needs that needs to be questioned.
Edwina on health
Commonsense would be enough to tell most people that poverty is a major cause of ill-health. Nevertheless it is always useful to have intuition backed up by hard facts such as those contained in a report from Bristol University which shows that poverty in the North East of England is a cause of premature death, chronic ill-health and low birth weight.
But commonsense and statistical evidence are not enough to convince Edwina Currie, the newly appointed Health Minister, who suggested in a talk to an audience in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, one of the cities covered by the health survey, that ill-health had more to do with ignorance about good eating habits than with poverty or unemployment. She advised people to eat more vegetables and natural fibre and drink more milk. This advice is about as useful as telling starving refugees in the Sudan that they wouldn't suffer from malnutrition if only they would eat more sensibly.
Duke’s hazards
Independent is not an adjective usually associated with the BBC. No doubt as part of the Thatcher administration's campaign against alleged "anti-government bias", a new chair of the BBC Board of Governors has been appointed to replace Stuart Young, who died recently. The only qualifications that the new chair. Marmaduke, "Duke" Hussey, would seem to have that equip him for the job are his connections with certain aristocratic elements within the ruling class. He is married to Lady Susan Hussey, lady-in-waiting to the Queen, daughter of the 12th Earl Waldegrave and big sister to William Waldegrave. Tory MP and Minister for the Environment.
His connections with the media are somewhat less impressive. He was a chief executive and managing director of Times newspapers in the 1970s and was responsible for the confrontation with the print unions over manning levels and wage structures which took The Times and the Sunday Times off the streets. More recently he was brought in as a chair of the ILR station Radio West, when it was experiencing economic difficulties.
His new job as Chair of the BBC governors is just one of the many appointments that are in the gift of the Prime Minister. Rumoured to be even closer to the Tories than his predecessor he is likely to ensure that the diet of television offered to us by the BBC gets even more bland.
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