Across the pond

It’s been raining in Lyme Bay and and now it’s dark, although only 6 PM. As the day progressed I sank deeper and deeper into depression. By the afternoon I could not even write a sentance in my head which I wanted to publish. I was drowning. No point in waving.  No signal I could give would make the slightest difference. Why should anyone anywhere bother to read what I say?

Because, I know, I am an incompetant. Why should anyone take notice of anything I have so say about politics, journalism or education? There are many others who know much more about what is happening in these areas.

But what I DO know more about than the leaders in politics, journalism and education is computers, the digital worrld aed the internet.

But I loused up. I messed up the visit of my grandchildren last week, by relying on my mobile phone. Which told me at the critical moment, ‘ Emergency Calls only. So, I, and they, spent the whole day, not making contact.

What was wrong, as I subsequently discovered from the helpline, was that there was a speck of dust on my SYM card. It had happened to me before, and I cursed myself because I had forgotten.

Me and millions of others. As we all try to grapple with the digital age.

So tonight I don’t feel suicidal. How could I. Since as my picture shows, I had every reason to feel good on the day I messed up. The sun was shining over Lyme Bay, and the Golden Cap was really golden.

But what has been depressing me over the last week or two is the state of British politics, 2009.

Very, very, depressing. Our leaders are floundering as hopelessly as me in this new global age. Capitalism as we know it has collapsed. And Britain’s New Labour has found itself owning major banks. Not because they want  to nationalise them, but because they could see no alternative.

They don’t know what to do. Our leaders, Gordon Brown and his team. Gordon is soldiering on and will fight the election next year. But he does not have any idea about what he will do, if, contrary to all the polls, he wins the election. Neither do Labour’s leaders in waiting. David Milibrand is not prepared to pitch to be the new Europe’s first Foreign Secretary. A new role, and one which offers much influence but little power.

Alan Johnson, the minister who is best placed to get traditional Labour voters to the polls, since  he is actually is white working class, has messed up even more spectacularly.

He has fired his leading scientific adviser on drugs, for telling him, what has been crystal clear for years now – Alcohol, which is legal and taken daily in large doses by Labour voters, Conservative voters and even the Lib Dems, who do not spend all their time drinking green tea, damages far more lives than canabis. Not only from those who drink, but because the drinkers beat up their wives. And because the number of teenagers who are sent psychotic by pot is tiny, comapred with the number of teenagers, who get pissed on booze and charge around the streets late at night.

Johnson could have shown himself a leader. By speaking out to the white working class.

Instead, he pandered to their prejudices.

Get tough with sciance professors. Pander to the public fear, whipped up by sections of the media, about illegal drugs and the remote danger of being mugged by pot smokers.

With not much challenge for the opposition. Because David Cameron is far too pre-occupied with getting himself out of the hole he has dug for himself over another referendum on Europe.

But that should be the subject of another blog.