Yesterday I was in the company of two, very bright women in their late 80s, who in all the 60 odd years that I have known them have only talked babies, weddings, gardening and suchlike, and yet yesterday they lambasted the politicians, saying that they believed nothing they were told any more. They thought the government couldn’t govern, they abhorred the deceit, the financial mismanagement, personal and national, the money grabbing, and above all they were worried for the struggling majority with unmanageable personal finances and the paucity of enjoyable life for the children. We have heard it all many times, but that is the problem, we all seem to know what is wrong but can’t correct it.

Let us assume the main problems are, lack of experienced politicians, the desire to stay in office in spite of extreme duplicity and mismanagement, the refusal to accept blame, and finally an election system which permits the ruling party to have an unassailable majority, which doesn’t allow for reasonable restraint in the face of the need for rethinking and caution. The desire to be loved at all costs is an added deterrent. Theoretically, in a democracy everyone should have equal opportunity and equal say in the way their life is run. In reality after they have voted they no longer have a say, nor seem to want one. Occasionally there are minor representations, but the basic structure remains unaltered unless there is a strong force at the top, with a strong backing, coupled with an intelligent opposition, offering aid and criticism as warranted, rather than the steady rants to bolster its chances at the next election. .No one seems accountable today like they were years ago. Do you know what your MP looks like? Have you ever seen him (her), written to him for help, and if you did was there a satisfactory outcome? If the answers to most of these questions is no, are we getting value for money, because it is costing a hell of a lot to keep the government bandwagon on the road when you take account of the expenses, the support staff and the upkeep of all the departments and buildings?

I have often said working in a city council environment was less frustrating, more productive and easier than as a civil servant doing the same job in roughly the same area. Big business, and the armed services, handling large sums of money, and in some cases, life and death, operate on a pyramidal system. I wonder do we need the 600 plus members of Parliament. We are told that they are required to act on committees. In my experience three or four intelligent people will arrive at a sensible solution in a 10th of the time that a committee of 20 would take, when in the end the committee’s resolution is often the opinion of one man. There has to be input, and output, and this is the function of those at the bottom of the pyramid. Our system was duplicated to some extent, before most of the vital operations were centralised, and the teeth of the councils were drawn..

I know it will never happen, even though it may seem logical to me, that we would incorporate the functions of the councils and parliament in a single system, with the major decisions taken at the top, while the majority of the employees would be at local level, where they will be approachable to the public, and closer to the work in hand, as the councils were,. There will still have to be some separate departments such as the foreign office, and the War office. Tax collection, including council tax could be made much simpler and consequently cheaper to run. I believe that a system of this type would be considerably more wieldy than the current one, where our voices are so far from the executive, they’re never heard.

Since we do not want the sort of debacle the poll tax produced, it would be wise to fund, say, three universities in different geographical and social areas, to undertake to research the problems and devise a model or models, from which the new system might emerge and can be evaluated. I believe the current system has been shown to be past its sell by date, if for no other reason than there seems to be no restraint, no deep thought, and too much razzmatazz.

I still have to be careful not to strain my eyes and over the last few days I have written a piece about government for today, but events have overtaken me and so I write this virtually in shorthand. Please forgive me.

A number of incidents concerning the national accounting are perturbing me. It started some months ago when my dentist said he was going private because  he spent too much time sending financial statements requested either by the NHS or the Inland revenue, that he had already furnished, but recovering them again took time as they were small items. He is honest, hard working and reliable – I trust him. He said it was a ploy, by the Government to make the dental faction of the NHS go private, so that the allocation of money for dentistry could be reallocated to balance the NHS books. I wrote on the 18th January about another piece of sleight of hand. Then there was the row about police pay, lately the problems with differential pay in Birmingham, the lack of funding for the armed forces and NOW, there is a proposal which will, if put through, make GPs also go private. If this happens, the whole structure of the health service will collapse as the dental service is collapsing, and the disadvantaged will suffer yet again.

The funding of Rock will have had an effect, but there are other matters I don’t understand. Who is footing the bill for our contribution in Iraq and Afghanistan? I can’t find out if the UN is in part, or if it is just us? I don’t understand why some countries are contributing troops to Iraq that are not allowed to be at the front, while our boys are being slaughtered day on day. When Haines was Minister for Northern Ireland he used some very questionable tactics to try to blackmail and bully us to toe some very unreasonable lines, and he was not alone in this. Labour wants to appear to be successful in government, but I believe Brown as Chancellor and now PM has joined Blair in making some glaring mistakes and intends more for that very reason. Our infrastructure is miles below what it was in the 70s, our health service, road networks, and transport services are all below par, and fares are excessive, Our educational system is in total chaos through constant tweaking, term on term, not even year on year. Our taxation is more hidden than open and there is confusion what is included in Council taxes.

You know I could double the list, but I would be preaching to the converted.

Old Light through New Windows. On Thursday last, I had one of those days when things can still surprise you. I saw an incredibly interesting and well put together programme on BBC 4 which confirmed things I had been told as a boy about Islam. It was the first part of a triptych entitled ‘The Art Of Spain’, by Andrew Graham-Dixon. The second thing was my daughter, a very bright lady, who will be queuing for her bus pass in a few years and is an inveterate surfer of the Net, introduced me to the BBC IPlayer, and my advice, for what it’s worth, is, if you haven’t tried it don’t delay. So often I have missed TV items which I would have liked to see. Now we have the opportunity to see them later, for 7 days, or 30 if you down load them, – hence the ’5 days left’ quote above, applies to the Graham-Dixon programme.

I merely wish to cherry pick a few aspects of the programme which gave me food for horizontal thinking, and I don’t mean dreaming, but some of the art would make you wish it was still being produced today. The Moors, consisting of Egyptians, Syrians, and tribes from North Africa, invaded and colonised the southern part of Spain, I knew that, but what I didn’t know was that they introduced the way we eat and what we eat today. They brought the tradition of cooking with imported spices and herbs, and eating a meal in courses. Their art which was on show, consisted of their unique architecture, its beautiful, sculptural decoration of the most intricate designs and forms, and the colourful and equally complicated mosaics, on walls and floors. There is a contemplative atmosphere, fostered by the aesthetic of the architectural design, unsurprising as most of the buildings displayed were mosques or have mosques attached, but none the less beautiful and of the style still to be seen in the Middle East and on the Indian Continent.

At one point in my teenage years I wandered through a number of forms of Christianity and at some point I was instructed that the Koran preached the moral virtues of the New Testament, especially ‘love thy neighbour’. I was led to believe that Islam was tolerant of other beliefs. For some time I have considered my memory to be at fault, until I saw, on the programme, a room in a mosque which had been constructed specifically for the benefit of Jews and Christians and was decorated in Yiddish in stone relief. The presenter remarked that about 75% of the non Islamic people converted. A cynic might suggest it was a simple ploy to aid conversion. At least it was better than the stake.

The presenter referred to the ‘Orange Tree Theory’ which in essence is that empires grow wealthy, decadent, and tend to relax and plant oranges, with the result they are overtaken by others wishing to expand and ultimately, they all cease to exist consecutively. It doesn’t take a historian to see the validity of this proposition. In recent times we have had countries trying to expand their influence at great expense in every form. With the world wide turbulence we now have, it seems the theory has broken down, extreme affluence, greed, extreme poverty, and high speed communication, all seems to be heralding and generating chaos in an unprecedented and unassailable size and form. I hope I’m wrong, I hope common sense ultimately prevails.