I'm not saying anything about the situation, but I heard a great allegory for the "Taking Back Control" situation yesterday which I have adapted because it was made by someone far more intelligent and eloquent that I (or should it be me).
The Taking Back Control bit of Brexit and be analogised thus:
You can't drive so you take the taxi.
But you think how much this is costing you and your not happy.
Some unelected body (the taxi driver) is taking you home (because you gave him a mandate to by getting in his taxi) and you are getting madder and madder
You have no idea what you are going to do, no ability to actually drive, but the voices in your head tell you this is YOUR opportunity to take back control
So you shove him out the way , grab the wheel and you, the driver and the taxi veer off the road into the river.
Then you blame the driver and the people laughing on the river bank.
Over the last couple of weeks I've felt slightly ripped off , well I was definitely ripped off in one instance. For a change I thought I'd pay by cash for a Metro ticket. The Metro is an excellent service but I put a coin in the slot and it didn't drop, so I thought I'll be a bit more forceful with the second. It just jammed, but there was £3 jammed in that machine. While I was trying to sort my ticket I missed the trait , next one in 15 minutes, so I'd lost 15 minutes of my time already. I paid with a card and caught the next train, but no one answered the Help Intercom and there was no answer on the phone line. It was 9 O Clock at night but help and inspectors were absent, but you can bet if I hadn't bought a ticket there would have been someone to catch me.
Now it's OK for me , £3 is nothing , but imagine that was my last £3 and was somewhere like Brockley Whins, I would have been very stuck with no way home but a very long walk. The thing is the time it takes to get sorted to deal with these things far outweigh what the thing is worth. I reckon it would take a couple of hours of my time plus the Metro people's times, and this is a major problem for the poor in this country. In order to get things that may be rightfully theirs they have to spend a lot of time waiting. A couple of hours of my time is worth a lot more than three ponds to me.
Next I bought a few things from Tesco. I thought it was a bit more expensive than I expected and checked my receipt and noticed a single item that I thought was a pound came out at £1.58 . 58p really isn't worth any of my time , but to someone counting the pennies that could be a lot of money. The thing is if companies like Tesco do this a lot there will be a lot of people with less money in their pockets than they should.
My politics are Socialist / Left Wing though I was brought up to vote Tory but if the right wing were led by people like Nick Hanauer and PJ O'Rourke then the world would be a better place. Nick Hanauer is sensible and caring and a capitalist. PJ O'Rourke is also a capitalist but well aware of the idiocies of excess. I am currently reading "Don't Vote, It Only Encourages The Bastards" and he manages to argue that socialism is unworkable using the analogy of an extended family and within his analogy he is right, but the reality is that his analogy to too small to reflect the real situation, however wherever you are on the political spectrum he is worth reading and he has Donald Trump nailed,
Anyway that's some gripes out of my system, enjoy the sense spoken by Nick Hanauer and the wit of PJ O'Rourke , and have a great weekend.
