Friday, July 16, 2010

Making life decisions and switching cash from bureaucracy into frontline services in the land of the free

The morning read was a skimming and scanning of "Costa Coffee's' free copies of the 'Daily Mail' and 'Daily Express'; hardly a variation of the theme those two, not even a complementing one another here, and much of a muchness drivel of the lowest order. We used to call it the "gutter press" and has that term too become obsolete in the "new English" of "New Britain"?

It is getting even "newer", however, and the gobbledegook newspeak holds court as Andrew Lansey, the Health Minister, announces that it is "vital to switch cash from bureaucracy into frontline services." Well, expect more bureaucracy and a privatising of Britain's pride and joy as public cash flows to private coffers. Still, they are very good at selling castles in the air these merchants of spin, aren't they? Easy-peasy in dead metaphor 'Blighty' and there was me coming out of 'Costa Coffee' and walking past one of the Social Tutors giving a little lecture to some of the international students under his care and telling them all how he changed his "life decision". Well, that is what they do these days in orwellian Britain; they make "life decisions", whereas in the good old days you used to change or mind or, indeed, just never made it up. We knew we were dreamers but our heads were our own. However, now, courtesy of "castles in the air", gobbledegook and newspeak, there they are living their dream with the thought police convincing them that they will soon have an even better health service, that 'Blighty' is the country everyone wants to come to - not a bad place if you have just arrived from Mogadishu or Mesopotamia - and that all those proceedures, cameras, checks and control are necessary and it is off to "Costa's" for the morning coffee and visions of Winston in the Chesnut Tree Cafe.

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