Letters / No more crackpot nonsense
Well, another day, another response from (I imagine) a disappointed Yes voter who didn’t quite manage to help Salmond to crash this country in the recent independence referendum (What’s he on about?; SN 25/9/14).
I note that she doesn’t actually seem to have bothered to read my latest letter – or maybe her comprehension skills are extremely poor, but seems instead to have deliberately misquoted from it and mocked it.
If this is the quality of political debate and criticism we can expect from suspected adherents of the Yes point of view, then I think we can all count ourselves lucky to have survived a very close encounter with absolute economic and political disaster last Friday.
I think we can also rest assured that, given such a childish manner of response to my letter (and not for the first time), the rest of the SN-reading world might by now have made up its mind about this particular would-be critic.
I will try to answer one point she raised, though, concerning whether or not I understand how the political world works. The big problem there is that I do, having watched the actions of successive governments hobble and weaken this country over a span of more than fifty years of personal observation.
I would say that British seesaw politics, coupled with the blatantly traitorous actions of certain left-wing organisations, has put every single person in this country in the position of having to survive subsistence-style IN SPITE OF the stupid things inflicted on them by Westminster.
Making our elected leaders accountable in law, if actions arising from their greed or stupidity were to inflict damage on this country and its people, is an idea whose time I personally think is about to come.
In fact, I think it HAS to come, in order to make Parliament and its actions properly accountable to the very people who pay its way, and who elected its members in the first place.
I suppose that what I’m really trying to say is that politicians should all be made to face exactly the same penalties that apply to the self-employed and self-funded business-people and entrepreneurs who work in the UK’s private sector, which is that one seriously bad decision can and very often does produce immediate bankruptcy.
As the Americans might say: ‘They are only one bad deal away from delivering pizza for a living’.
As I DO say: ‘The political people need to be put in fear of failure, right where they live, so that we don’t see any more crackpot nonsense being inflicted on a deeply-indebted UK: a UK that’s still only barely recovered from the last shower in power who sought to destroy us all’.
I have an idea. Let’s wait for a few months and see whether any of what I’ve written lately (in my various submissions to the SN and elsewhere) is adopted by any political party as part of their strategy – a strategy that would be designed to root out the stupid and dishonest would-be leaders before they have chance to do any serious damage to our country (that would be ‘our UNITED country’, of course).
Let’s also wait and see who acts like a genuine statesman, rather than a dilettante or political chiseller, in the handling of the current problems in the Middle East, before jumping to conclusions about who’s fit to be the British PM.
Personally, and from an apolitical point of view, I don’t see anyone at this time who could possibly be better-equipped – or supported – than David Cameron for that job; but I do see that any of the rest of our politicians who handle things in a less than adult manner – or blatantly for their own gain – will probably not be taking part in the general election next year, by virtue of having been identified as duds and deselected.
Philip Andrews
Unst
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