Thursday, September 16, 2004
I can’t go home
I sometimes think that I got out of the UK just in time. The Labour government was elected in 1997, and we left about a year later. At one point, my father had sworn he’d emigrate if Labour got in, but by ’97 he, and most of the rest of us, had got so fed up with the Tories that Tony Blair looked like a good idea. The Conservatives had by that stage been in power since I was 9 years old, so I had never really known anything else. I was a child of Thatcher. That’s not a nice image.
Blair did some good things to start with, and carried the energy of the new start through his first few years. Then the wheels began to fall off. The loonier tendencies, or perhaps megalomania, started to show through, compounded by some really crap decisions: foot & mouth, smacking kids, Iraq, and now the hunting ban. I don’t know if it’s the bitter & twisted labour die-hards getting revenge for what Thatcher did to the unions, or a continuation of the class war, or just bad government, but they have really screwed some things up. The life of effective government seems to be about 5 years before the rot sets in.
Then, to cap it all, I see this news. Three quid a pint!! Bloody hell, I can never go back.
Blair did some good things to start with, and carried the energy of the new start through his first few years. Then the wheels began to fall off. The loonier tendencies, or perhaps megalomania, started to show through, compounded by some really crap decisions: foot & mouth, smacking kids, Iraq, and now the hunting ban. I don’t know if it’s the bitter & twisted labour die-hards getting revenge for what Thatcher did to the unions, or a continuation of the class war, or just bad government, but they have really screwed some things up. The life of effective government seems to be about 5 years before the rot sets in.
Then, to cap it all, I see this news. Three quid a pint!! Bloody hell, I can never go back.
