Max Stafford's Kennel

Today,  I read a truly wonderful piece of straight-from-the-heart prose, penned by a Social Media friend, Bruce Biddulph.

In this piece, Bruce managed to articulate every bit of thought, feeling and gut instinct that has reverberated in my heart and head through most of my adult life.

As a survivor of the Thatcher Years, the betrayal of Blairism and the storm of awakening that preceded and followed Scotland’s Independence Referendum, the barely describable insanity of Brexit and the Maelstrom of trigger happy “Free Market” Fascism that ravages our world today, these words chime powerfully with me as a statement of intent and a rallying call.

Please read Bruce’s words and ponder the sentiments therein.

In my opinion, these words would be worthy  of the great John MacLean.

I’ll allow Bruce’s words to speak for themselves now for although my perspective is Scottish, they transcend borders, just as that great man’s did.

“…Let me tell you where I come from. My interest in heritage and history has deep roots in my political and social standpoint. I watched as our centuries of work, the work of hands and great minds, were destroyed by the hands and minds of people who never broke sweat in their lives. They are my enemy.

I watched as a society of engineers and do-ers were cast onto a sacrificial fire that was no sacrifice at all to the financiers and the admin crews of pen-pushers. I watched as once cohesive communities and long-term bonds of social and democratic balances were ruthlessly torn to shreds and people with true grit and integrity hit the bottle, threw the towel in, emigrated or plain died of broken hearts.

I watched as our towns were torn up, our way of life made a mockery of in television shows designed by utter freakshow people who rose to the ascendant and corrupted life to the max. I watched a sure and promised land became a wilderness overnight.

That process was not done by the men and women I knew, it was done by men and women I never met. Yet the men and women I knew, went to their graves sadly, as surely as the sad remains of their centuries of work and learning were to be and still are, reposed in the graves they welcomed.

Today I dont see junkies, alkies, wasted youth, detritus, I see humans devoid of opportunity to use their hands and minds in full productive and pride-inducing activities. I see people told they are lost, they are nothings, they are nobodies and its all their fault.

They are told that riches alone define your worth, and those riches must be a number of zeros, that how you get those zeros matters nothing so long as you attain them. That is the lesson they are taught and that if they cannot obtain or have obtained them, then they are nothing but animals requiring penning into slave labour or as useful idiots, if they can perform neither task to the satisfaction of the zero-makers then they may as well go the way of the real makers of the past and be done with it.

The zero makers, I despise with every fibre of my being. They alone are responsible for all the fashions of our times, the shuffling of labour pools, the very pollution and cheapening of life values to the point they would watch even the ground they hope all non-zero people would fall into, burn.

They are my enemy, and their footsoldiers my weary adversaries. I will always be a friend to the dispossessed, the disinherited, the real people who you can look in the eye and tell would take a welcome break from hopelessness and would rebuild even though they are nothing and with barely a hope left and who everyone else turns from in their safe disgust. The real people, who if you were in a forest all alone, and without bread, would rush over the hill to seek sustenance if you were too weak to move.

The zeros people would have you perish.

That’s where my moral line is drawn from. And my philosophies, hopes and fears, my dreams, my obsessions, my spraying of alternatives, flows from.

And yes, I cant survive this world of zeros. But to no grave will I go without a fight against the world financier and corruption of life… “

And now you know where Bruce stands, you also know where I stand.