Gunboat Diplomacy & Universal Entitlement

Cameroon is hailing his China trade trip as a resounding success. I would suggest he focuses on selling Afghan opium to the Chinese in return for tea and if the Chinese don’t like it, send an aircraft carrier up the Yangtze or threaten to increase the university fees of Chinese students on courses in the UK.

I was watching a local news item about some hatchet-faced harridan who is fighting to get her grandmother into a private nursing home for which the fees are slightly above the level the social services have set as the maximum they will pay. She rounded off her tirade by saying it was a matter of giving her choice, as if her choice was a fundamental human right enshrined in some United Nations convention.

No it’s not – it’s a matter of the ability to pay! If you can afford to pay the extra, you get additional choices; if you can’t pay, you make do with what’s on offer as a minimum backstop or do the job yourself. The choice she has is whether she is prepared to pay for the upkeep of her familial elders or not. I fear many want the rest of us tax payers to foot the bill for their parents and grandparents. If your parents had the misfortune to look after you for 16 years plus, the least you can do is to look after them when they have the need.

The UK is, sadly, becoming a place where a sense of duty is fast being replaced by a rather nasty and self-serving sense of universal entitlement. How many times have you heard the shrill mantra: “I know my rights,” when it’s manifestly obvious that the person doing the shouting doesn’t have the faintest inkling of his or her rights (from a legal perspective) and is totally consumed by self-righteous indignation aided by an overdeveloped sense of their own importance in the grand scale of the universe?

I was listening to a debate on the wearing of fur by women. One wag suggested that fur is merely leather (which virtually everyone wears in some shape or form) with the fluffy bits left on. You can’t fault the logic, providing you don’t stray into Ethics – which is just north of Kent.