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Government provides us with a bad example to follow
• ALTHOUGH I look forward to picking up my New Journal, each edition brings more dismaying news.
Protests, campaigns, gruesome murders and assaults, they are all there. I am glad they are reported by you, of course, but I am moved to ask what is happening to our capital, indeed to the country at large, that you have all this bad news to report. I can’t any longer pick out one thing to write to you about, or debate with other Letters correspondents, as there are so many issues that get me steamed up each and every week.
Protests are ignored, even if there are a few “names” lending their weight. Councillors (paid though they now are) seem powerless in the face of the onslaught by developers. The government is selling us short on every count; their anti-social behaviour goes unpunished and unchecked. We now have a dictatorship calling itself by another name, making out that whatever changes there are “good for us”.
By the time the so-called democratic vote comes round it will be too late to stop the latest sales of what’s left of the family silver. Post offices, police stations, unfettered development, sales of public property – where does a government stop?
We, who pay for all the trappings of office for governments local and national, are continually and purposefully ridden over. The higher echelons of this government side with private equity finance, non-doms and assorted billionaire developers who are after the quick buck, “slimming down” of workforces to maximise profit.
I have for many years campaigned on behalf of farm animals but have come to realise that we are nothing but farm animals ourselves in the eyes of those in power: “Not breeding fast enough – get new stock in; not working hard enough for small wages – get some in who will accept the low pay and bad conditions; airport expansion – let foreign owners get on with it, people will only later find out how noisy it will be; a section of the citizenry out of control on drink and drugs – let’s talk a lot but do little and it will go away in a generation.”
The latest New Journal highlighs such a crop of things I want to write in about that I am sending this general letter of concern.
Our society is broken all right. The weekly reporting of horrendous crimes in your pages speak more clearly about the current state of affairs than any amount of police and government statistics. Cues are taken from people at the top in any society – and what examples of bullying, greed, jostling at the trough, cheating, land-grabs, lack of respect, and incompetence we do have before us.
The government must keep the money rolling in to pay for their high-living and obscenely generous expenses and pensions. It is heartening to see the citizens putting up a fight. They haven’t gagged us all yet.
June Gibson
Chandos Way, NW11
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