FraserWords

What a crappy week that was. As if we can afford to lose decent people who believe that if we can afford to send soldiers to foreign lands with expensive weapons, we can afford to feed our hungry children. And I had a water leak to fix. And I had to phone the council.

As you know, workmen arrived to resurface the ruined road outside Fraser Towers at 1pm last Monday. I wanted to find out why nobody had bothered to let me know I would be trapped by roadworks, and for how long this would last.

Using the council’s useless automated phone system and call centre – council tax nearly £1,800 a year – I finally got an answer at 3.30-ish the following day. Sorry they hadn’t let me know, and the road would be closed until tomorrow lunchtime. So for two-and-a-half days the lane had ‘road closed’ signs at either end. And the police had not even been notified. What if somebody in the village had had a heart attack, gods forbid, or a house had caught fire? How were the emergency services to know they would have to use the long way round to get to the village?

Another shambolic demonstration of the world in which we live, in which consumers and service users, who are made to pay out massive sums of money, are treated like dogs.

We do need to be manning the barricades demanding to be treated better, but now, when we do, we shall be missing two fighters for decency in our world gone mad.

I loved Bob Crow. He behaved with the aggression, the ferocious determination, with which the right behaves if anybody threatens their privilege or money. He had the same combative attitude the right-wing media displays when acting to protect the status quo. But Bob used his skill to stand for the have-nots.

When he was criticised because train drivers earned good salaries for being entrusted with our lives, he could not have been clearer: negotiating good wages for working men and women was something to be praised, not vilified. When the outraged Daily Mail stole pictures of Bob sunbathing on a holiday beach, he could not have been clearer: why shouldn’t working people have a holiday too?

He’s a loss because he was one of those people who showed how the left could work: working people could get decent pay and conditions, and if given such would deliver a quality service.

Tony Benn was in a different league, a man of lifelong principle who had no equal at pointing out the essential simplicity of the socialist viewpoint: behaving with fairness and sharing wealth and opportunity create a better world in which more people have an involvement and a stake and therefore responsibility. Using wealth and privilege to exclude people creates a world in which a class shut out from opportunity and comfort have no reason to have a stake or any responsibility. A world which can afford billions on weapons that slaughter people is a world in which there is enough money to care for the sick and feed the hungry. People employed in industries that kill people have skills that can be used in industries which use the same state funding to help people. There is nothing complicated about any of that, and Tony Benn stuck to that mantra.

I listened to the news of his death, of course, and it did strike me that there ought to be a law against allowing pygmies like Cameron to comment on giants like Tony Benn. David Cameron is not fit to lick the boots of a principled man like Tony Benn, and has no right to make any comment about him. Listening to the BBC endlessly re-run the crass ‘loony left’ insults of Joe Haines, Harold Wilson’s former press secretary, was also very sad.

I’d love to be around in 100 years’ time to compare the way history views Tony Benn compared to that hate-filled greed-monger Margaret Thatcher. Because history will show Benn’s positions were the positions with legs, the positions which stood the test of time. Even now we can see a growing consensus of agreement with his principle that state ownership of essential services for the greater good is the right way to go. Even now we can see massive support for his pacifism.

I compare them because much of Tony Benn’s obituary coverage dealt with the way he divided the Labour Party in the early 1980s. Yes, he did. But the coverage forgot to mention two crucial points: the policies the Labour Party espoused in the ‘longest suicide note in history’ had, and still have, massive support – nuclear disarmament, state ownership, decent conditions for working people, even exiting the European Union. They weren’t adopted because they were vote-winners, they were adopted because conviction politicians thought they were right. The policies never got the chance to be put to the electorate because the Falklands War brought Thatcher a jingoistic landslide. Instead of standing and fighting, a terrified left was broken for a generation.

Tony Benn outlasted all the hate, and will be remembered with affection and respect because he was on the side of right: the side that said equality of opportunity, a sharing of our strengths, a belief in social justice for everybody, were the aspirations any decent body of people would have.

Water, water

So instead of poking about in old documents at the record office, I spent the morning up to my soggy fetlocks in a burst water pipe at the bottom of the garden. Ever since, the water pipes have been clanking in the most sinister way. I am expecting a significant and expensive explosion any moment.

Vinegar, vinegar

I have permitted various Brothers and Sisters to taste my fine vintage Chateau Linkinhorne 2013 cider. Our Chief Scout said “I’ve had worse”, which I fear is true; Brother Yardie claimed he had swallowed his teeth with it; and Sister Chef wondered if it had a future being marketed as cider vinegar. They can all sod off. Hic.

SuperSister

Many of you will know that this place now has its first SuperSister, formerly known as Mrs Who Must Not Be Named. She has done a Very Brave Thing to help a friend because she is a Good Woman, and we will all send her our best wishes for a prompt recovery spared from too many of the grumpings of the Brother Who Must Not Be Named.