...100 thousand druggies, rapists, murders and the like roaming the countryside on the pretext of pulling weeds?? ...
Well,
another 100,000 to add to the couple of million that are out there already. And not a pretext, really doing something useful. Not necessarily all pulling weeds, obviously, and equally obviously under control.
We have one of the finest armed forces in the world ... why would anyone seek to undermine that?
Heavens, I wasn't proposing to arm them! National Service doesn't necessarily mean running off to war. A friend of mine seems to have spent most of his service time in France unblocking drains.
Your comments on the unemployed are really below the belt. Obviously coming from someone too comfortable in there circumstances and aloof from the real world. I'm pretty sure that most folks who are unemployed would swap places with you in an instant.
You might be right on several counts there. On the other hand I sometimes envy someone who isn't personally responsible for all the debts of his business, someone who doesn't have to make sure that the door is opened every morning for another day's work, someone who doesn't have to give his telephone number to the local council as a contact to be called in the middle of the night if there's a serious incident on the industrial estate, someone who doesn't have to go through the disciplinary procedures with another employee who's been thieving, threatened a co-worker or abused a customer, and someone who at Christmas can go home for a break and not even think about work until January. For me, Christmas Eve is the time when I start checking the 50,000 or so price changes that have to be applied before the first day back, and this year there's the added excitement of making sure that the VAT changes are done right (again). It all seems real enough. I'm not complaining, I hope. On New Year's day this year I was at a farm, fixing their computer, and I know how much more pressing their problems can be than any of mine.
To quote the outgoing Chancellor "there's no money". When I was twenty the government told me I'd get a pension when I was 65 years old as long as I paid enough NI contributions. So I paid, not that they gave me any choice in the matter. Now they tell me that I won't get the pension when I'm 65 after all. There's no point my bleating about it, that's the reality. I don't feel very aloof from it. So I'm looking for untapped resources and trying to avoid waste. It's what they did in the 1940s. In those lean years, you either joined the forces, or you worked where you were told to work, or you went to prison. Miss Bateman never mentioned that in my history classes. If you didn't run your farm sufficiently productively the government would take it away from you and give it to someone else. One guy died trying to keep his farm, the police shot him (in justifiable self defence, the farmer was armed with a shotgun). Miss Bateman didn't mention those things either. It came as a shock to me when I found out, but now I shouldn't be surprised if we find ourselves in that sort of situation again before very long.
To try get back on topic, we have problems with invasive species that won't go away on their own. We haven't the money to pay the bill for the welfare state, so how are we going to deal with a Spanish invasion? Passing more laws is just throwing more money down the drain.
Being in a big mess requires thinking outside the box. We might have to start thinking what for a couple of generations have been unthinkable things. Things like "why are you growing flowers instead of vegetables?"
