I am very lucky and privileged to be in touch with a lot of the great 6th formers I taught for 30+ years in the UK (started late, went to Uni when youngest started school) ... and this is what Angela wrote to me yesterday- and I found it really moving (sharing with her permission):
Always strikes me how many people don’t see that being in the EU/SM has struck us the right balance between capitalism and socialism in many ways. Providing us with the markets and prosperity to create jobs, but at the same time creating a club where those markets can be tempered by employment rights, consumer rights and ethics.
Because ethics and protections cost money. In the world of the hard Brexiters we are heading to, they are an irrelevant nuisance to be removed as soon as possible because they eat into profits and remove some of the absolute power of the markets. Pure globalist capitalism - and disaster capitalism too- where people are an expendable commodity.
In Corbyn’s ultra socialist world, people do matter, collectively rather than individually, but can be sacrificed for the greater good of ideological aims, just the same. And ethics and rights still cost money, and still need the commitment to upholding them from everyone who’s in the trading game. Whatever Corbyn thinks he wants, we just won’t have the money and we won’t have any say in the rules, on our own against countries like the US (particularly Trump’s US), who do not share those commitments.
This is what Brexit means.
about the Banana Republic reference, remembering Australia's series of Prime Ministerial losses (not meaning Harold Holt of course) - and they grow bananas there too.
