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April 02, 2005
Bureaucrats paradise?
A visit to An Englishman's Castle is always worth it. Tim has a wonderfully anarchic view of many things - particularly the lunatics who infest our parliament. One item recently caught my eye, the story of an old pilot, who, at 92, has once again flown a Spitfire he last flew in WWII! It struck me, not for the first time, that this iconic plane is one of those symbols which almost every person recognises instantly, and the men who flew them - and the far more numerous Hurricanes, Typhoons and other fighters - were themselves a remarkable breed. I wonder what they would make of our nation today?
One old gent I had the privilege of knowing briefly (DFC and Bar, Aircrew Europe Star, France, and Germany Star among other decorations) once said candidly that he thought Hitler would have had no difficulty recruiting for the SS and the Gestapo in Britain. Every Town Hall and Whitehall jobsworth would have been queuing to join! Mind you, he had been engaged in a long running bnattle over benefits for his disabled wife (herself a decorated ex-servicewoman!) with the bureaucrats whose "Rules" disqualified her because she was in receipt of a war pension - £5 a week!
Another post on Tim's blog made me ponder briefly on this bureaucratic paradise we now inhabit, with his comment on having to fill in and file forms for three different subsidies! I used to face a similar battle with the bureaucrats every year who insisted that my Mother, then in her 70's might have married, had children, and be in receipt of income she had suddenly acquired without telling them. It was a monstrous form of some 40 pages, the bulk of it completely inapplicable to an old age pensioner - but don't try to tell the Whitehall cretins that - it's supposed to be simple and to stop benefit fraud, they bleat! Well I wonder how many old folk are deprived of their pensions each year because they haven't someone to deal with this idiotic form for them? Probably quite a few.
I think the old boys who flew those Spitfires in defence of this once-fair Realm, some with barely six hours flight experience in this superb machine, might have had some serious second thoughts about it if they could have seen the future their offspring have created! Far from tbeing the "Land of the Free" and a paradise for the brave, it has become a place governed by Thought Police, Bureaucrats looking after their own little empires, so the brave, the bold, and the free are derided, ridiculed or prosecuted if they dare to defend their rights in the face of Blair's favourites: the criminals, the feckless, and the cronies.
Welcome to 21st Century Britain.
Posted by The Gray Monk at April 2, 2005 10:58 AM