A New Year's Devolution

I read an article in today's Independent about the tactics that the British Government wish to employ to make us do what is right and proper. No, there won't be a deluge of the newly initiated police-people. No, there won't be a confusion of Czars - there is a special tool for people like us:

Emotional Exploitation The Nudge.

If you read this article, you will learn that the Coalition had set a seven-person working party to the task of determining what makes us tick so that they can use those emotional discoveries as tools with which to govern us. The idea of massaging 'egotism' and the fostering of 'social norms' is central to this, and is hoped, among other things, to increase giving, organ donation, the sale of condoms, and (I can only assume) making the correct decisions at successive elections - I guess that, in short, they want to make us feel bad enough to want to do the right thing. These plays to our subconscious, referred to tellingly as "Nudges" will form a part of government policy, now that its ministers have all been required to sit and read Thaler's book, "Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth and Happiness" (I am assuming that I, with you if you are British, have paid for these books for them).

This is the tool to repair Broken Britain, revamp a morally bankrupt society, stop us being fatties, cause us to do for free what people used to paid for before they lost their jobs, pay for things that were once Government funded with money from our ever constricted sources of income - and in the end to be jolly nice proper people like wot we ain't at the moment, innit.

I once saw a film called 'Demolition Man' where a police-person was cryogenically preserved and defrosted sometime in the distant future. He found himself in a world of Nice, where there was never a transgression of any sort, and were one to occur, a benevolent voice would emerge from a hidden computer speaker to offer gentle chastisement. A Utopia or a Nice Hell - the film caused one to make that choice!

Anyway - I am left asking what the moral bedrock to all of this is? Where is it rooted. I see no facet of any faith in any of this, let alone Christianity. Its morality seems to be the one determined by a government based on the given needs of the given generation. In an age where that government thinks us fat and lazy, it will become immoral to be such - and we will made to feel that way. There is nothing of the 'Other' in what [little, I grant you] I have read - just a need for us all to conform to models not of our making. 

Like the world of 'Demolition Man', first instincts are that it is a wonderful wheeze. However, am I alone in thinking that it could very well be the most extraordinarily fearful development? 

At What Price a Point?

During the course of the day, the Coalition have been voting on a measure to amend the capping on tuition fees. I have my views on this.

During the course of the day, violence levels have increased on the streets of London - at the hands of 'students' who have taken their protest to the capital. I have my views on peaceful protests.

During the course of this evening, the heir to the throne was terrorised in his car by violent individuals who, knowing who was in the car, continued to assault the vehicle and its passengers. I have my views on this too.

Today has seen a change in the political landscape of our country. Children (yes, there were minors among the protesters) have discovered pack violence. The Prime Minister's apparent contribution to the day's events was a hearty pack on the back for the man who delivered a salvo of measures that, in his heart, go against what he stood for only months ago. One party appeared to be silent while the compromised smaller brother squirmed under a need to assent against its instincts. I wonder if the Liberal Democrats can, or will ever recover from this. The Royal Family are now legitimate targets to those whose point is now made in the smashing of property, people and principals. Those whose intentions were utterly peaceful, of which I am sure the great majority of protesters number, were defiled by those who saw an opportunity to override peace with violence.

I am not sure that the measure to amend the capping levels on tuition fees is the great tragedy of this day. It should have been, in my own opinion, but it wasn't. The face of my future King, the blooded officers of a constabulary whose work is to protect and serve, the defiled monument to those who died to preserve our freedom, youngsters who would do violence with faces covered, 'kettled' youngsters whose heart was to be peaceful - they are the tragedies of today. They are what we will now remember about Decmeber 9th 2010.

Time to go to our newsdesk ....

Curate's Desk Roundup

1. Sarah Ferguson: why why why why why why why why why, why oh why? Jeremy Vine is on the Radio at the moment and has posed the question about whether we should feel sorry for the Duchess of York?

Should we feel sorry for a woman who sold her family for a hand-full of shekels? Should we feel sorry for a woman who wasn't savvy enough to know that this was probably too good to be true?

No mate - she has acted like a Right Royal Pillock and the got caught. Sympathy to her beautiful daughters and sympathy to her ex-husband who in the spotlight under which he exists may well have thought that the mother of his children might not have been the place of his vulnerability!

2. Spending Cuts: So, we have our coalition. (By the way, didn't the LibDem negotiators do well in the Cabinet?!)  The LibDems have gone back on their election promise not to make cuts this year. Gideon Osborne has cut Child Trust Funds, so I think we have a flavour of how life will be. When all those whose jobs have been costed into obvlion this morning stop spending cash in the shops, how will our economy take to that? Yes, cut waste, but jobs will have been lost this day. Finance bods and Unionists are this day worried about it all.

3. Nose Despite Face? The good folks of British Airways are striking because of pay and conditions, perks and the like. They strike, BA loses hundreds of millions of pounds. I have discovered that one of the perks at the heart of this is an up-to-90% discount on the face value of tickets - but the greater issue is this:

...BA haemmorrhages millions of quid while the folks strike. Perhaps BA collapses, and all the folks are made redundant - and then they all have to pay full price for flights with the pennies that they have left after becoming jobless. Yes, fairness in the workplace - and honest day's pay for an honest day's work - but let us not forget that BA staff are paid appreciably more than any other in the industry, apparently. 

So, Farv, why bother with all this when you could be sat outside with a Pimms? 

It feels that the world is going bonkers at the moment. Maybe it's me, and maybe it is sun spots, but there seems to be an evapourating of sense. I can't shake the feeling either that the news is filled with ways that the Gospel imperatives are being fractured. I get days when I get world-weary, and today is one such day!

....though the bigots who ring in to comment on Radio 2 are a source of some rather macabre entertainment