28th September 2011

I have just spent two weeks in Scotland.

It felt like the twilight zone.

Driving around trying to find a 3G signal in order to check emails and post blogs and download The Guardian now that I have cancelled the Times as a one man protest at phone hacking.

The valley is steep sided, surrounded by high wooded hills.

A river runs through it.

As I was fishing a couple of jet planes swooped over, low across the Loch below the height of the hills on either side.

During the holiday we saw any number of missions as the pilots practised their bombing runs for action in either Afghanistan or Libya.

But not just jet fighters.

Helicopters flew over practising their manoeuvres, so low I could clearly see and wave at the pilot, who waved back.

And magnificently, if you like that sort of thing, a huge transport plane, a Hercules I imagine, so low that I almost thought that if I cast too high I might catch him.

There was so much evidence of a nation at war, or preparing for war, or just rattling its sabres?

And the cost is hard to imagine.

Each exercise, each manoeuvre, each sortie costs the tax payer at a time when the defence budget has been dramatically cut back.

This Government is unashamed.

Not content with creating inflation, throwing people out of work and creating the conditions for a depression, its leadership has the temerity to lecture other world leaders on how to deal with their economic problems.

Hidden in the news this week was an interesting clue as to the style and strategy being employed.

The Libyan Campaign to remove Gaddafi we were told would cost roughly a quarter of a million pounds.

To date it has cost £1.7 Billion.

No explanation, no apology, maybe it was all the fault of the outgoing Labour Party?

Or maybe the low flying exercises hidden away in the far north of the country in the twilight zone will be funded from some sum of money that has been hidden away in a secret election fund?

Then there are free schools.

Free for whom.

The pupils who qualify for free school meals? If indeed there are any.

Free for the parents and others who have established them.

And how is the loss of tax income and the increase in welfare payments being paid for?

Mr Clegg attempted to convince his Liberal Party that things would be worse, that they were they insisting on Liberal Policies at the heart of the Government.

But they are not the opposition they are collaborators.

So why is the Labour Party not opposing the policies that are harming our society, creating division and causing real harm for families and communities, the elder and the disabled?

It is clear that so many of the advances made by Labour, new or not, are now being dismantled and cut back.

Years ago as a sixteen year old working in the MPNI I was opening the post and one letter contained a sixpence.

The pensioner explained in his letter that he was so disgusted by the insulting increase in his pension award that he was returning it, perhaps it will help the Government he stated, it certainly doesn’t help me.

It’s a view with which I have some sympathy.

But what do you send back that will in any way assist this Millionaire Coalition Government?