Every wealthy tax-avoider should be forced to have a
large picture of a homeless person or an over-flowing hospital outpatient
department or a starving child or the suffocating interior of a sweatshop, on the
walls in their place(s) of residence. This way they could be reminded who really
pays for their opulent lifestyles.
I’m just throwing around some ideas for Mothering
Sunday, this coming Sunday 26th March.
I distantly remember that, as a child, you’d make a
sticky card for your mum at school using the strange collection of odds and
ends from the ‘craft’ cupboard. Often, bits dropped off on the way home. On the
day, you would attempt to make breakfast for her. This usually involved tepid
tea and soggy or burnt toast which she received with a surprised smile as if
she had no idea what was coming. Dad would try to be useful and somewhere along the
way flowers and chocolates might be involved.
Now, as a mother and grandmother, I am slightly repelled
by the shelves of saccharine-pink cards, bouquets of desperate flowers, teddies
with bows and schmaltzy messages hung round their necks, plus truckloads of
celebrity-endorsed perfumes overflowing the supermarket aisles. The
headache-inducing advertisements scream at people to buy buy buy something special for their special mother on this special
day.
So, Ok – enough of the grumps. What would I really
like for Mother’s Day?
Evidence is daily with us of just how grim it is for
women trying to be mothers as they flee war. The current famine crises emerging
in African countries, bring up the images we’d hoped to consign to
history, of desperate women rocking starving hollow-eyed infants as the ravages
of war and climate change go unchecked. Even in the UK we must ask, how is it
possible to provide that essential motherly
safety and nurturing while more families live in insecure accommodation or struggle
with family debt. How powerless does a mother feel watching a child become ill
with respiratory problems caused by increasingly bad air quality. So, I came up
with a rough Mother’s Day Manifesto –
Let this government finally understand that the
children and mothers languishing in refugee camps must be given a chance to
make a decent life. The even more vulnerable lone child migrants must be given
immediate help. The UK must reinstate the previously agreed commitment to
accept vulnerable refugee children after Theresa May’s government shamefully
overturned The Dubs Amendment.
Because this and previous administrations don’t seem
to understand basic human decency – there should be – let’s say – a statutory £2million
fine for every pregnant woman or mother
and child group being held in immigration detention centres. Centres such as
the infamous Yarl’s Wood are no better than prisons even though the people held
there are not criminals but unfortunates who are in the limbo land of the current
messy system.
More generally, there must be a coherent strategy to revolutionise
the UK system where, if you are born rich, you rise regardless of how useless
you are and you struggle if you are born poor regardless of how talented. Start
by removing the charity status from private schools and increasing the per
capita budgets for pupils at state schools. As I’ve said many times on this
blog – the current system damages society on a fundamental level. Not just
because the bright but socially unconnected youngsters don’t get on but, more
to the point, dim but very well connected offspring get to be in charge. Then we
all suffer.
As an adjunct to the previous point. Many private
schools are set in extensive and beautiful grounds while very many state
schools are situated on busy main roads or junctions where the worst traffic
pollution occurs. These latter sites must be tested and if the air quality is
consistently poor, the roads must be re-routed.
The government must finally ban the sale of weapons by
UK arms manufacturers to corrupt regimes and those practising human rights abuses. This is an ongoing and identifiable problem. Somehow it keeps being
side-lined. Many UK aid workers find themselves assisting refugees fleeing
conflicts fuelled by armaments made in Britain.
This government must force the wealthy to pay their
taxes. No more threatening a smack on the wrist. No more cup-of-tea
‘negotiating’ with HMRC when tax-avoiders are found out. New powerful sanctions
must be imposed for those who asset-strip companies for personal gain (see blog
185 Does Sir Philip Green kick disabled
orphan kittens in his spare time). Put genuine effort into retrieving the
£millions / £billions owed and currently AWOL in the fiscal system. Then we can
start to tackle the abomination of increasing numbers of homeless families in
one of the richest countries in the world along with many other things on our
social wish list.
Double the tax on private cars. Make buses free for
children and the elderly.
Re-nationalise
railways and halve rail fayres – so we can begin to improve the quality of the
air our children breathe and reduce traffic accident mortalities.
Let the media, employers and governments stop
dictating to women what they can / cannot wear.
Finally – make it compulsory for good-quality dark
chocolate to be free on Mother’s Day 😊
That would mark a really good 2017 Mothering Sunday.