Make do and mend

I was reminded yesterday of the mission statement, whereby virtue-signalling, fad-following company evangelists dream up ludicrously trite expressions which reveal the vast and echoing hollow emptiness of their souls. For every corporate vision you can be sure that a team of gutless, witless HR/PR/VCR types will have been paid good money; money that could otherwise have gone to maintaining or improving the core business.

But surely, they will protest, we do improve the core business... by focusing on the synergies which generate diverse new solutions, incentivising innovation and pro-active intervention in ongoing processes... going forward. Yes, of course you need to have an aim but honestly aren’t you fed up to the back teeth with all this ‘passion’ that companies are selling these days? Passionate about this, passionate about that. Yeah, yeah, we get it... but why not just be honest that all you are really passionate about is profit?

Admittedly, it must be nice to be engaged in an industry where profit is merely a happy outcome of doing something you really enjoy. But don’t rub our noses in it, for goodness’ sake; many people work at jobs which slowly grind them down over many years and these sorts of jobs are not improved – in fact, often the reverse – by the heavy-handed interventions of sociologists fiddling about at the extremities. Few companies were improved by the advent of the HR department and since when did HR become more important than the engineers and producers and front-line salespeople who do the hard miles?

The same is true in politics and thus we get vacuous bigots like David Lammy; greasy pole climbers with barely a brain cell not fully employed in dreaming up offence on behalf of anybody they have decreed must be offended. Politicians were once of the people – one of Labour's great achievements - and had grounding in real, local issues. Sure, there have always been idealists and there will always be those with a greater mission than sorting out the pothole problem, but when it comes down to it, the unglamorous potholes still need sorting out.

But so many MPs now come through the Oxford PPE, Spad, special interest routes that the impression among the wider electorate is that their concerns are as nothing against the great crusades of leftist thought. No cause, it seems, is too insignificant to get angry about and no imaginary slight too small to protest. For those caught up in the maelstrom of self-righteous outrage it all seems real enough, but from the outside you just look like a bunch of children stamping your tiny feet. If you ain’t gonna fix them potholes, we’ll have to do it ourselves.

In times of plenty nobody much cares about what our idiot political class is getting up to; there is enough to go around. But in times of stress – and by all accounts (if you believe such accounts) every budget is being stretched to breaking point and there is nothing in the pot for petty point-scoring. In the war, they were told to make do and mend; this is what is happening in politics now. Our MPs are no longer representing the core business of government; instead they have become the HR arm, forever fiddling with the inconsequential.

Our politics is broken... time to start over

When you can’t rely on elected officials to do their job you have to just ignore them and do it yourself. Cut through the waffle, crack on with the job and challenge every bit of pointless rhetoric posing as noble endeavour. And when after all your efforts to fix your member have proved insufficient you have to go out and make a new one. If you want a government that does what you want it to do, you can no longer rely on the existing political class. It’s time to make a new one from scratch.