Before I begin let me remind you of two things.

First, these blogs are like life’s experiences, to be read backwards, or like memory, to be dipped into as fancy takes you. (Revisit Posts 10 and 23).This is where senior citizens have a big advantage over the rest, but those of you just starting out can enjoy a free ride, or an inexpensive one. You can buy “Death of a Nightingale” – the royalties go to my charitable fund – or you can make a donation from this website. Either way you will have the satisfaction of helping children with special needs take a holiday in London they would not otherwise be able to afford .

Secondly, these Posts are not just one long moan. As I say in the Prologue, “All is not bad. There are opportunities as never before for those who can seize them. And pleasures abound for those who can afford them, or have been shown where to look for them.” Hence my charitable fund to help facilitate that for children with special needs and their families.

Revisit Post 17 “The World’s Greatest Musical Prodigies”, and you will see where my hopes lie.

But let me get back to the nitty gritty, to the essence of it all. In this Post I am going to write about money and power. People get upset about the “money” side of capitalism, especially clerics. They should be more concerned about the abuse of power, the power that money brings; it is also the power that communism, socialism, yes even our democracy brings. And when I talk about the abuse of power, I am talking about power over people, religious as well as secular, commercial as well as political.

Power does not exist in a vacuum. And all too often today it is an “iron fist disguised in velvet glove”

First revisit a couple more Posts.

Go back to Post 19 “Are you a lion or a gazelle?” and two quotations

Act One Scene 3

Margaret Williamson, the head teacher, Emma Kirk, the music teacher, Joan Errington the English teacher, and Wendy Robinson, a non-teaching care assistant, talk in the staff room about staff training. They somehow find the time.

EMMA KIRK I know another part of the trouble. It’s them folk that prattle on about the evils of capitalism and competition. Oh yes it is. That’s why we don’t win things. Why we have so few sporting heroes of our own. If we want to enjoy them, we have to import them. Then call the football team Chelsea. Them folk, the poor little lambs that have lost their way, baa baa baa. They don’t like competition. Poor little things. Tell that to the Chinese. Today their students are keeping our universities going. Why? To compete. Competition’s a part of life. Wanting to be somebody is part of real living. Earning and spending our dosh makes the world go round, now don’t it? Sure these things are not the be all and the end all, but those folk who moan on about these things are just running scared of life They expect the State to tie their bootlaces for them. That’s no good way to be. Now is it?

And later on in the same Scene

EMMA KIRK The Bible got there long before that. The Tenth Commandment. Thou shalt not covet. No sin in owning Just sin in coveting.

MARGARET WILLIAMSON No sin in owning? How do you get your camel through the eye of a needle, Emma?

EMMA KIRK Those gates of Heaven are still a titchy bit open for those rolling in it. It’s not owning riches that’s the problem. It’s what you do with them. Money makes the world go round. I’ll tell you something. I know the Bible says you can’t serve God and Mammon. It doesn’t say it’s a sin to go shopping with it. Anyway, that’s not the point I’m making. You’ve got to admire what folk make of their lives when they make a success of it.

JOAN ERRINGTON Well our kids go along with that. It’s so much healthier to rejoice in someone else’s achievement than to envy it. And they do, they really do. And we have to encourage it all the time.

And let’s go back to my last Post

Act Two Scene 8

Eileen Winterton, the chair of Governors, sums it all up with Margaret Williamson

MARGARET WILLIAMSON Sacrificial pawns, Judith. And for everyone else it’s “Snakes and Ladders“, with more snakes than ladders.

EILEEN WINTERTON In Enron there was another name for it. They called it “rank or yank“. You were “ranked” if you played ball with them, “yanked“, sacked, if you didn’t. Well, no-one blew the whistle, and people lost billions of dollars and their jobs.

Again revisit Post 24 “The Worm at the Core of the Apple”.

These paragraphs, which I repeat here, get to the nub of it.

The Prologue

The recent Power Report pointed to “the weakening of effective dialogue between governed and governors” and “the rise of quiet authoritarianism within government.”

If I can remove the wrapping paper, it is saying that our democracy is often just a sham, and that the problem is not so much spin as twist. It is a serious criticism of those who wield power – the subtle and not so subtle pressures they exercise – the patronage they use to get their way. It should be no surprise that lawyers, accountants, academics and others, from time to time compromise strict standards of professional behaviour and play word games instead. I have seen it happen.

If the System does look itself in the mirror, it needs to recognise that the mirror itself is a distorting one. Will it do even that? Sad to say, the report has already been allowed to gather dust.

I want to draw all these threads together here; but first one other little lesson from life. I have long believed that life is “interesting on the margins.” It can be a terrible bore otherwise. Consistently with that I was curious to know where my heading “Iron fist in a velvet glove” came from, and with the aid of Google I found this:

http://web.mit.edu/gtmarx/www/iron.htmlThe Iron Fist and the Velvet Glove: Totalitarian Potentials Within Democratic Structures.

This is how it ends:

Should totalitarianism ever come to the United States it is likely to occur by accretion rather than by cataclysmic event. As Sinclair Lewis argued (It Can’t Happen Here), it would come in traditional American guise, with the gradual erosion of liberties.

Voluntary participation, beneficent rationales, and changes in cultural definition and language hide the onerous aspects of the new surveillance.

As Justice Brandeis has warned:

Experience should teach us to be most on our guard when the government’s purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning, but without understanding [Olmstead, 1927].

The first task of a society that would have liberty and privacy is to guard against the misuse of physical coercion on the part of the state and private parties. The second task is to guard against the softer forms of secret and manipulative control. Because they are subtle, indirect, invisible, diffuse, deceptive, and shrouded in benign justifications, this is clearly the more difficult task.

The point to this particular “needle”, the essence of this Post, is to understand not just how power is used or misused, but our increasing vulnerability to it.

Many are directly employed by the State and will retain or enhance that employment by being subservient to it. Many are not employed by the State but owe their livelihood to it. Lawyers get briefs. They aspire to become QCs or Judges – State appointments. Leading firms of accountants and Academia get millions of pounds worth of consultation work from Departments of State. None of them will want to be too argumentative or too “independent.” All have families to feed, and a comfortable retirement to look forward to.

Beyond that, the State controls where children are educated as well as the medicines that we are entitled to. It now has a stake in our banks and building societies that control our money supply. If you really want to worry, look up what happened in Malta when Dom Mintoff took over the banks in the ’70s.

The dependency culture goes well beyond the Welfare State.

This is how I sum it up:

Act One Scene 5

Margaret Williamson is made to feel like “a little lump of plasticine” in the hands of David Harding, Wexborough’s Director of Education.

MARGARET WILLIAMSON Tell me, am I a mouse in a trap or a rat leaving a sinking ship?

DAVID HARDING Neither, you’re just doing the job you’re paid to do, like everyone else. When you are employed by the State you’re not paid to ask questions. In particular, you’re not paid to ask yourself any questions. That’s not part of your job description, and it’s incompatible with Health and Safety Regulations.

MARGARET WILLIAMSON When you’re employed by the State, you don’t have to be brain dead but it helps. Of course this is how the Germans and the Russians learnt how to survive their little dictatorships.

Remember that with every Stalin or Hitler, there are lots of little Stalins and little Hitlers.

I do not need to be original here. Just visit http://freedomkeys.com/vigil.htm

This is one of my favourite quotations: “The attempt to make heaven on earth invariably produces hell.” — Karl Popper

Revisit Post 23 “Another Bite into a Wormy Apple”

“I give you the first and, so far as I am concerned, the last law of good civil administration: Those who serve the public should be fully accountable to the public.”

This won’t happen of its own accord.

Realistically there will always be an iron fist in a velvet glove. What this means is that the individual needs to be provided withsome body armour.

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This entry was posted on Monday, May 25th, 2009 at 12:58 pm and is filed under Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.