Chickens coming home to roost... (From Bradford Telegraph and Argus)

Chickens coming home to roost...

8:31am Monday 22nd September 2008 in Columnists By Mike Priestley

What a mess it all is! The capitalist world is either about to collapse or it’s going through a massive “adjustment”. Take your pick. Either way, it’s going to be a rough ride for all of us and even if we come out of the end of the tunnel intact, things are never going to be the same again.

Of course, I feel sorry for the people who will lose their jobs as a result of the present huge shake-out. We all do. But I’ll bet the prime concern for each of us is how it’s going to affect us.

Personally, I’m considerably displeased with the overpaid, greedy, incompetent captains of global finance who have led us into this mess and the politicians who have let them. The last things you want after a 47-year working life and on the threshold of a reasonably comfortable (though far from affluent on a local-newspaper pension) retirement is for the financial world to go belly-up.

Savings are no longer secure. Pensions are under threat. Gas, electricity, food and fuel prices are increasing at an alarming rate. Services provided by national and local government are being cut back. Those fixed points in our world which we have always taken for granted have developed crumbling foundations.

If everything goes in cycles, this is the “down” that balances the books for the “up” that those of us who were born during or after the war have enjoyed for most of our lives.

We were the golden generation, growing up in a world in which everything was becoming more plentiful and accessible. Our parents had been through the privations of the 1930s and fought a war. We enjoyed relative peace and previously undreamed-of affluence.

But now the chickens have come home to roost. We’re at war, with enemies overseas and the constant threat of terrorism at home. The global environment is in peril thanks to our excesses. And financially, the situation is worse than it’s been in our entire lifetime (and a couple of earlier generations’ lifetimes as well, if some of the pundits are to be believed).

If this is indeed the start of a period of adjustment rather than the end of the world as we know it, we can expect a more austere carry-on afterwards: lowered lifestyle expectations all round; banks no longer throwing money at borrowers who can’t afford to repay it; more people living within their means; houses more affordable (but available only to those who can raise a big deposit); less choice in the shops….

A world, in fact, rather like the grey one in which the post-war generation grew up before the consumer society was born and the good times rolled.

Justice? What justice?

What on earth goes through the minds of appeal court judges? Two Sheffield yobs, one aged 15 and the other 16, attacked a disabled man waiting at a tram stop, beating and kicking him and stamping on his head. He died and they were arrested and convicted of murder.

An appeal court, though, knew better. It quashed their convictions and they faced a retrial. If they’d again been found guilty of murder, would the appeal court have again overturned that verdict?

We won’t ever know because they pleaded guilty to manslaughter instead and were sentenced to four years in prison. Because of time spent in jail already, they’ll be freed in about seven months.

Small wonder the dead man’s girlfriend described the sentences as “diabolical”. There must be some devilish hand at work behind a legal system which can produce such travesties of justice.

These louts decided to attack a defenceless man, and did it with such violence that they killed him. So they murdered him. No question. You know that and I know that. So why don’t the appeal judges? There can be no other word than murder for it, however cleverly defence lawyers might toy with legal definitions.

Unless or until the courts come into line with ordinary people’s ideas of justice, they are going continue to lose the respect of the public and increase the risk of vigilantes doing their job for them.

Things can get spooky

There might be some people who consider Bradford priest the Rev Chris Howson to be a bit paranoid for claiming that he’s being spied on by “spooks” from the Menwith Hill defence communications base near Harrogate. I’m not one of them.

At the start of the 1970s, as a young writer on this newspaper, I had cause on several occasions to interview people who were on what was then known as the “alternative” scene. Their views were anarchic and anti-Establishment.

There were a lot of people around in those hippy days who held such views. And being young myself at the time and by nature anti-authority, I wrote about them with some sympathy.

That was when strange things began to happen with our home telephone: mainly echoes and clicks, which were disconcerting. They went on for some time.

The nature of my job changed and I no longer interviewed people of the revolutionary tendency. And eventually the echoing and the clicking stopped.

But I was convinced at the time, and remain fairly certain to this day, that my domestic telephone line had been tapped so the “authorities” (whoever they might have been) could keep track of what I was up to for reasons best known to themselves.