That little talk reminded me of several things.
I read somewhere a book by somebody, forget where, when, who, who spoke in detail about changing people's opinions. He finished up with the statement that just by listening to him our brains had been rewired and would never be the same again. Or something like that.
Anyway I have a proposal that could make us both happy if I understood anything. You send me that money and we'll both be happy. I do like spreading a little happiness.
It also reminded me of a time I was in my usual drinking hole in Dundee many years ago. A lad came in and bought a drink. He saw one of his mates and gave him a fiver he owed him. That particular person passed it over to somebody else and said 'here's that fiver I owe you'. This went on for some time until the first bloke was tapped on the shoulder and somebody gave him the fiver back while uttering the now familiar phrase.
And then there is the Ragged Trousered Philanthropists written by Robert Tressell about a group of building workers and decorators doing up a small mansion for somebody who obviously deserves such a place. One of the characters who is forever arguing to his bored colleagues about justice and injustice decides to give them a practical lesson in wealth creation.
He takes everybody's box of sandwiches to illustrate. He tells them that he is a capitalist and he will employ them all. He hands them all a knife and a sandwich and tells them to cut their sandwiches up. That is the job he is employing them to do. When they've done this he takes the sandwiches back and thanks them for their labour. He then rewards them for working for him by paying them their wages. He gives them half the sandwiches and keeps the rest for himself as dividends and working capital.
They know that something has happened but can't quite work out what. He was so reasonable in his explanations and they did agree with everything he told him.
When the rich man gives money to the plebs we forget one side of the transaction. The plebs have to do something for him before he opens his wallet. So, pleb gets a bit of training at his own expense, he then pays to get to the place of employment where the employer has his factory or whatever, paid for by bank loan or even government grant or something else.
He then gives the employer at least forty hours of his life less meal breaks and travelling time of course. He doesn't get paid for eating at his employer's expense. He spends his time producing something the employer will convert into pieces of paper, some of which he will give to him at the end of the week, or month or whenever.
The employer reminds him constantly that its a hard world and a competitive market and he must work harder and harder and may even have to take a pay cut as there are hordes of hungry hungarians or something knocking on the door for work and they are very hard workers as we all know.
And that is what we are told by our politicians. Instead of Little Red Riding Hood telling her dear grandmama that she has beautiful big eyes and teeth, we have poor Sir Percival who has always done his best and who now finds he has been supporting greedy slavering wolves who would gobble him up no matter how kind he was to them.
Funny how all them Oligarchs got rich all of a sudden. I thought the Russians shared everything out and worshipped the proletariat?
Anyway somebody by the name of Stu Dent has set up a petition for those of like mind calling for the north of England to join in with an independent Scotland. Apparently many Scots are signing the petition as well. It could be interesting to see how many people sign up. The government will ignore it of course because the north is a long way away so doesn't really matter. But what they won't realise is that once people start thinking about something, their brain cells get re-programmed and they might find it hard to go back to their previous way of thinking.
In the sixties and seventies the SNP were known in Scotland as the Tartan Tories and people sniggered at them. They're not sniggering now, as they say.
The petition for the embarkment of the north of England now stands at 40,943. Not much, but last week it was about 17,000.
https://www.change.org/p/the-uk-governm ... n-scotlandIf it succeeds I might even get my fiver back.
