https://youtu.be/NvwOKo21w3g
The song reminds me of Thatcher's Carnage, her Hiroshima. The laying waste to a country, her destruction of the region known as Scotland. If anything re-energised the SNP, the desire the independence, it was quite simply the casual economic experiment she performed in her testing ground. The alluring agricultural allotment as she would have thought after her bad Balmoral experience.
At the end of the eighties myself and my five siblings were all working outside Scotland two through choice and three because their company had relocated, only to return home, after helping with the transition, to a dole queue that had exponentially increased in the 10 years of the 80's.
It's a popular misconception that it was the old industries that were closed down. It's true that steel and coal were flattened like the ship yards but also the new industries like Silicon Glen where many companies also folded, or closed satellite plants and moving their people, back home. Shops that served communities, the cafes and bars, the post office, newsagents, grocers, florists, butchers, bakers, and off licences! Those same shops callously destroyed then are now the beating heart of the economy, the train commuter belt in London as we are reminded today, that served their bespoke passenger communities. No, this is not new. The venues that miner's went to for a wedding, the local dress fitter, all these industries then, as now, that are the barnacles on our rotting boat. Yes, despair is not new.
A popular Economic misconception is that full employment is good and high unemployment bad. High unemployment is good if you are trying to pay less for your employees. Full employment is good if you're an employee as it means you can easily move job if you find yourself in a badly run one. We're heading for the former and the Government 's backers will be quite happy to see it that way.
The penny drops as the mushroom rises boomed out of the speakers in this house as Thatcher was sacked by her own party, as the digital decade clock ticked over, it was a fitting end to the '80s. She introduced the poll tax in Scotland, was rescued in 83 by an Argentinian Junta, nearly lost the 87 election to the rockstar King Kinnock, and then as we moved into the 90's, BOOM, the mushroom cloud could be seen over Downing street.
She was all alone, oh yes, all alone. "Her plane's away now, miles out of sight...", yes sounds like her ship had sailed and sunk like the Belgrano!
The song, written with deep roots in CND marketing, has also adjusted well to being a love song in my life.
Teenagers, like me, really had little emotional intelligence. We latched on to things but had no idea.
Frequently you found out the consequence of your actions and couldn't do a U-turn or felt boxed into the corner, paralysed by who you might offend, so just offend yourself. Freezing in the headlights or stubbornly sticking to your path, who knows, but admitting being wrong certainly wasn't high on the agenda. Going back cap in hand and apologising for being right was never a wise strategy, but cutting your nose off to spite your face was. Then there was no going back. Just ask Vincent Van Gogh which hand he answers the phone with. His penny dropped the day Alexander Bell walked through the door.
This could be splitting up with someone or even going out with someone. It could be jumping on a bus to go to a gig in London and realising that you had no money and not getting off in Edinburgh or Newcastle but carrying on in the hope that Merlin the magician might appear, or a genie and grant you 3 wishes. Clutching at straws you walked around London then got the overnight bus back, aye them were the days. Teenagers committing suicide had a hand in the song too.
It was quite simply, BOOM. A big crash wake up call.
With suicide you usually only get one bite of the cherry. You might not ever get to love someone again but at least you get to love somebody else, when you split up. You may go out or even marry someone but at least you can still divorce. At least you'll have a dull day to remember the first trip to London when you never cut your losses and got off at the first stop. I can still hear the voices in my head saying I'd paid for a return to London so I'd get value from the experience, perhaps I did. Perhaps I learned to cut my losses.
There's some green shoots but there's none with suicide. I was lucky.
The song's subtext for me explored that against the background of needle exchanges across the table in a Pilton flat, it was a horrible song in it's despair. If you're the last one alive as the rest of the corpses start to rot, it's a bit of a BOOM moment. When Trainspotting came out it was a flashback another BOOM!
https://youtu.be/NvwOKo21w3g
With every verse and chorus you feel there's a chance for redemption and the yet it never happens. Its relentless because it was, like lockdown.
"We are all doomed Captain Mainwaring"
It's what the 80's were about for many.
Hiroshima & Nagasaki were destroyed and 'lest we forget' the bomb could have been dropped 20 miles outside and the destructive power been there for all to see, but it wasn't. It was dropped to create maximum civilian death, commonly known as a war crime but rarely discussed that way.
I think the western teaching is that we did the Japanese a favour by finally winning the war and initiating regime change. We kick started their economy as they started from such a low base they employed new technologies, not the quill and ink pot for them. Pump action parker pens please! A philosophy that Empress Thatcher employed in the UK, well the destruction anyway, she just presumed that capitalism would create new industries. She had a few blind spots, and I do laugh wondering what her response would be to someone in cabinet proposing "Furlough".
The penny drops as the mushroom rises is a magicians cape trick.....or when you open the box after sawing your friend in half, you look again.....it's not the same!
There's been a few economics collapses since and the boom bust nature of our economy demonstrates its structural sensitivity. The blatant bias of by those purporting to set the test reminds me of a famous magicians trick where you end up telling them the answer but you still feel they worked it out all on their own through magic.
I've written before about 2006-2008 and how borrowing stats stopped getting reported in 2007 as they ceased to be relevant by those making the most out of concealing them. Its like businesses talking up turnover as if they were money launderers. Who cares how much cash you've turned over, if you dont have a profit at the end then you're either lying, stealing or really shit at making money so hopefully you're in a charitable business like writing a fanzine. I had a joke about God's banker but making a profit is key to distributing the word, so I'll leave it for now The great thing about writing is that your audience gets to write their own punchlines. Economics can be about markets reaching perfect balance, but never getting there, writing is such a democratic genre, every reader chooses their own ending. A bit like Presidents at election time. So many illegal ballots but do you only count some illegal ballots, and how costly do you make elections. I used my brother's card when I was 17 as he was out of his tree somewhere and there was an hour to go. Yes it was illegal, but who cares, Ancram lost and 1979 seemed brighter, the tories were booted out of Scotland, "oh no they weren't!" said the pantomime villain as she developed her testing ground.
I'll digress a bit about Deadbeat and why, during the inflationary times of the 80's, we never doubled or tripled in price from 10p. I just realised, I wrote earlier about getting on a bus to London, and my emotional intelligence. Deadbeat moved from being a hobby, to a potential career, to a hobby, a charitable thing and then we ran out of time and money!
In the current covid situation I see a lot of the Mushroom Rising but rarely does the Penny Drop. Its quite alarming that we'd all diagnosed it from our living rooms back in April and yet still the mushroom clouds keep rising. Popular Party Politics is about presentation of the facts and the truth is a mind numbing distraction from the message. In the 20th century we developed a blame game, Thatcher saying Labour isn't working is a popluar slogan of the 1979 election when 1m people were unemployed. By 1983 with the number over 3m, the unemployment issue was no longer deemed relevant. Voters don't understand the stats they're producing and so they've always got a new set they prefer to get their message across. Latterly its about counting jobs created, regardless of whether its 1 hour a week on minimum wage or not. It's like watching Economics being destroyed again by rhetoric. The 21st century isn't about the blame game, its about the message. Just talk about your successes whether they're true or not. If you say it often enough some people will believe you and the rest you can disregard as conspiracy theorists, hmm, sounds familiar.
In April we knew that we'd not closed our airports early enough or done the simple thing of resurrecting a plan we binned in 2011. While pubs, shops, hairdressers and physios to name but a few would take your temperature as you entered their space, little did we know we'd still not done anything at airports. For a party built around Brexit and controlling borders it seems astonishing that countries in central Europe closed their airports and yet we freely encouraged passengers from around the world to pretend we were open for business to the world. Too many drugs in Parliament or in the cabinet office? I couldn't possibly comment but I would like to see the police stop and search more ministerial cars. They find more than 10% for sure.
We know that tracking and tracing was inadequately resourced and our health service had a shortfall of resources. It had neither the equipment, drugs, testing or staff to fight it.
So which do you guess is more lucrative?
Sourcing more staff to handle the increased volume at the hospitals and overspill bed? Dont be silly there's no money in HR.
PPE - face masks, gloves, random specifications and emergency pricing? Now we're talking.
We can thank all the volunteers doing facemasks for free while trousering £millions.
The financial mushroom just rises and rises and rises!
https://youtu.be/soh7i7QrOhA
Dont worry about the track and trace we can talk about developing a new app. Use technology buzzwords, GPS location etc. Pokemon covid.
So in April we obviously had teams working on our 2 year road map, on our 1 month plan and our daily emergency situation.
Oh, you mean the short medium and long term plan?
No I mean the long term plan, the really long term plan and the absurdly unpredictable 1000 years war plan.
Lifting their noses out of the trough, I faintly heard some mangled snort about PPE's very profitable.
I've asked that the governments across the world take a weekend off to recharge their batteries. Some are in the eye of the storm and dont realise as calm as they feel it is, its not calm. Others are in a completely different place with fingers in the dyke or with the pied piper elsewhere and its mayhem.
All the while, the public are fed a diet of facts that produce a fiction as democratic as any good writer could achieve. Yes, one piece of information can now be interpreted by as many people as read it. This then leads to breaking or adhering to principles as your circumstances allow or dictate. My favourite is using percentages to say how much something has jumped by when the underlying numbers are rising from 3 to 6. Yes 100% increase! When it falls from 6 to 3 its only a 50% decrease so the message moves accordingly.
In my case I have different bubbles of people I'll see, much as I always did, except I used to call them pals but now they are bubbles with venues getting evaluated on the basis of how many of the regulars I know.
My sport is now restricted to digging at the allotment, walking and golfing. I gob too much when I run so jogging is banned. I've got a few pals I go walking with and we do the jakey thing of finding a decent spot to open a few tins and chunter away. Lots of great places I've seen recently, although the Tiger Bar is still my favourite. Jarv and I meet there, its in the woods above the Hermitage of Braid. I'm not giving you the map reference or you might join us and burst our bubble! Ha Ha I knew I'd get that one in.
I like a pub crawl, I've been on one for 40 odd years, so nowadays its in Midlothian or on the John Muir way. You have to carry your own beer, CYOB, but you can bring olives and sandwiches which aren't allowed if you were just going to the pub. Everywhere's a beer garden, I announced as we sat on a log in the woods outside Dalhousie. We looked like builders on the girders, in the famous rockerfeller centre picture.
