Tuesdays are our traditional Waitrose gathering days and today was no exception. I was particularly pleased to welcome back our inveterate fell walker who had been confined to her own house after a fall had rather incapacitated her shoulder. On the other hand, one of our other regulars did not make it into our company today and this is always a source of concern less she has a bout of illness. After our elevenses and the purchase of some excellent low alcohol lager which is stocked in the store, we made our way home getting ourselves for our ‘sit’ visit which is, in theory, is devoted to my Pilates session. In practice, I tend to go out and do some crucial non-food shopping in the High Street. I had a particular mission today which was two fold. First I needed to go to the Post Office to return a watch I had purchased back to Amazon as when it arrived, the hands were almost unreadable across the face of the watch and distinctively different to the illustration on the web. Amazon now has a system where one takes the item to be returned back to the Post Office where, facilitated by the QR code on one’s iPhone, it gets returned directly to Amazon and a refund is offered immediately. Then I needed to go onto the High Street to buy myself a new watch as my previous one seems to have given up the ghost after about seven or eight years of daily use. There is a stall on the High Street that sells cheap watches and I needed to make an instant decision between a dark face with silver hands and a white face with black hands. On the spur of the moment, I chose the latter so I now have a watch which looks exceptionally plain but is absolutely functional and has a warranty both on the watch and also on the battery. I was also pleased to be able to purchase a watch with a leather (rather than a metallic) strap already attached and so I dashed back home again. Then it was time for a quick burst of watching the diving on the Olympics before I prepared our conventional lunch for a Tuesday of fishcakes accompanied by microwaved vegetables. The afternoon turned out to be very fine so immediately lunch was over, I seized the opportunity to take Meg into the back garden and to get the back lawn cut. This we managed to do before the care workers were due to arrive to organise Meg’s afternoon comfort call after which Meg and I resumed our viewing of ‘Pride and Prejudice’ on the BBC iPlayer, the first part of which we so enjoyed yesterday.
I have been reflecting upon the wave of riots sweeping the country in which the Far Right have taken the opportunity to capitalise upon the discontents in the country as a whole. To my mind, there seems to be quite an association between the towns and cities experiencing the riots and the Brexit ‘Leave’ voting areas – Hampshire and Surrey are hardly going up in flames. The common factor is evidently those communities that have felt left behind and the last government’s rhetoric of ‘levelling up’ never seriously addressed these inequalities. The most that levelling up seemed to achieve was to invite one deprived community to vie with another for some limited funds to improve town centres which hardly started to address the scale of the problem. Like many others, I am appalled at a personal level at the levels and scales of violence we have seen displayed nightly on our TV screens and I also am in favour of the policies that the present government is adopting of having enhanced role for the courts in quickly arresting, charging and convicting those guilty of the rioting. However, it must be said that these policies are treating the symptoms rather than the causes of the present discontent. The question has to be asked whether once the rioters have been dealt with appropriately and expeditiously by the courts, what is being done to remedy the more fundamental causes. I am reminded of a remark associated with an early 20th century reformer that his aim was ‘to drain the swamp, not pull people out of it’ and of course what is implied here is a massive shift in the economic and social fabric of the country which I do not think is part of the agenda of the modern Labour party even with its huge majority. I have always found it interesting that when asylum seekers were dispersed to various hotels in towns and cities across the country, those communities were chosen in which not only were costs kept down but also the communities so chosen had the least amount of political power to resist. For example, Stoke on Trent and the Potteries have experienced a fairly massive decline over the past few decades and it is perhaps no accident that areas such as these often housed both asylum seekers on the one hand and were the highest voting Brexit areas on the other. So the affluent middle classes may feel quite justified in throwing up their hands in horror at the rioting that has been experienced but their communities have not been asked to accept asylum seekers in their midst. There are many communities in which asylum seekers are accepted by the local community and the indigenous population has made the greatest of efforts to make asylum seekers welcome but it is equally the case that this is not universal.
Kamala Harris has now chosen her Running mate for VP, a relative unknown called Tim Waltz. But he has already made considerable waves by attaching the appellation of ‘weird’ to Donald Trump and his coterie and this notion of ‘weirdness’ is certainly gaining a lot of traction. At the same time, doubts are being cast upon Trump’s mental facility not to mention his emotional outbursts and there even some hitherto loyal Republicans who had hitched their wagons to the Trump star who are now seriously thinking of ‘unhitching’ them. Whereas a month ago the Republicans looked strong and united and the Democrats in complete disarray, the positions seem to have completely reversed and the Trump camp is showing some indications of starting to panic. The view that Trump is himself too old and his mental health as problematic is gaining quite a lot of ground. Of course, there are three months to go before the election in November and much can happen between now and then. But it has to be said that the Harris campaign seems to be slowly gaining ground whilst the Trump campaign is slowly losing support.
© Mike Hart [2024]