More dead cat distraction

robs1

Member
This article in yesterdays The Times sums it up nicely. These Brexit Loons and UKIP are as mad as we thought in 2016.

Nostalgia trips are robbing us of our future​


An unhealthy obsession with looking backwards, led by the prime minister, is diverting us from innovation and change​

Alice Thomson

Tuesday May 31 2022, 9.00pm, The Times
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Nostalgia: a wistful or excessively sentimental yearning for a return to some past period, place or irrecoverable condition. The word originates from two words, nostos meaning home and algos meaning pain.

I love a bit of bunting, sepia photos, sponge cake, Ladybird books, the national anthem and a few egg and spoon races under the shadow of the church tower but we’ve become obsessed by the past and it doesn’t feel healthy. Everything now is compared to another decade.

One day it’s back to the 1950s with a call for the return of rationing and cake competitions. The next it’s the 1970s with flares and tank tops, and wasn’t the three-day week a laugh. The Second World War is a perennial favourite with the plucky Brits. Top Gun has been resurrected from the 1980s. Or are we trying to recreate the 1990s with the return of interest rates and Challenge Anneka?


We are more than two decades into the 21st century and we still can’t let go of the last millennium. Yet 14 million people have been born in the UK since 2000. We spend so much time discussing what did or didn’t happen and who to blame, emulate or glorify that we forget sometimes we need to live in the present while planning ahead. The best books, such as Sathnam Sanghera’s Empireland, throw the debate forward, challenging us to change, but too many see it as an affront to question our history or try to invigorate our future.
Boris Johnson is one of the worst offenders. He loathes innovation. When we used to play tennis together after work at The Daily Telegraph he was aggressively old-fashioned, insisting on using a warped wooden Dunlop Maxply Fort. Graphene was for the weak.

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Now every Downing Street initiative is a throwback. Last year he was ordering a new Royal Yacht Britannia, last month he was calling for the rehash of Margaret Thatcher’s right-to-buy scheme.
Last week it was the return of imperial measures, which the classicist Mary Beard dubbed “nostalgia wars”. This week it’s grammar schools.
It’s partly because the prime minister has no original thoughts or new ideas, but it’s also because he hopes these golden oldies will resonate and reassure the electorate. He’s failed to realise that we can learn from the past without wanting to replicate it. He needs to read Rule, Nostalgia by Hannah Rose Woods, published last week, about the dangers of perpetual national regret for a bygone age.
Jacob Rees-Mogg, the cabinet minister, is even more determined to cling to a mythical squirarchy, leaving crested letters for civil servants who aren’t toiling at their desks, unlike his father, a former editor of The Times who once embraced Mick Jagger and called for the liberalisation of drugs.

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There’s nothing wrong with a little retro music, a vintage dress or a few antiques. We should celebrate classical music and art. There’s a beauty in our layers of architecture. But great cultures thrive on invention as well as revival.
The prime minister’s vision feels more Geriatric Britain than Global Britain. He would hate to be thought of as cautious and pedestrian but he has no inspirational, innovative or radical solutions to this country’s problems. Even the recent windfall tax on oil and gas companies was Labour’s proposition. Age isn’t the issue, it’s a myopic mindset. The astronomer royal Martin Rees, who was at the Hay festival last weekend, is 79 and is currently imagining how human colonisers of Mars may need to become part-robot cyborgs to thrive.
Take education: children are once again expected to rote learn for myriad exams, scribbling away in Victorian conditions they will never replicate as adults. They aren’t being trained to think and challenge and explore for the 21st century.
Universities should be crucibles of change. Instead the prime minister appears to see them as the enemy in his culture wars and is determined to curtail their influence. Meanwhile the NHS needs bold thought and ideas for its modernisation, now, not just money.

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The pandemic should have been a moment to pause and redefine our ambitions as a country. Covid showed it was possible for governments, scientists, tech companies, organisations and individuals to pivot and come to terms with a new reality very quickly. Yet we appear to have learnt little from two years of jarring pain and jigsaw puzzles, convinced that going backwards is the answer. It’s the opposite of Johnson’s Build Back Better promise.
There is clearly a conviction in government that few, except the young, want to embrace change. But when I went on the Elizabeth Line the day it opened it was packed with curious travellers from babies to pensioners. People feel energised by the new. Humans thrive on a sense of progress.
The beginning of the Queen’s reign was marked by a feeling of potential and possibility with Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay climbing Mt Everest. The playwright Tom Stoppard recently said he worried there was a lack of optimism in this jubilee year. But it’s not the Queen who is obsessively looking backwards. Her contribution to the platinum anniversary is encouraging the planting of millions of trees for her Green Canopy project, an investment for the next generation.
In Top Gun: Maverick, Tom Cruise is told: “The future is coming and you’re not in it.” But Cruise’s character knew how to adapt to survive. Britain needs to do the same. As Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa writes in The Leopard, “Everything must change, so that everything can stay the same.”



UK politics
Blimey these journalists are unable to write a coherent story.
Does this one not realise that top gun is an American film, how does making a sequel of it reflect on the UK ?
Grammar schools were far better than the system we have now standards of education have slipped since they were scrapped, the results have gone up only because they make the assessments and exams easier, as for universities only a couple of years net work rejected applications from graduates due to their appalling spelling and grammar , of course an university educated hack is going to think uni should be for all, despite the fact most cant manage
" proper" courses and we have desperate shortages of skilled workers to do real jobs and will earn far more than many of those who go to uni and without the debt. As for the nhs yes it needs to change but guess who will be the first to shout "hands off the nhs" yep these very same hacks looking for a story.
Of course we should look back to the past to see the mistakes and successes and then look to implement the best for the future, let's face it its remainers who are after 6 years longing to go back in time and rejoin the EU not forge our own way to success.
Blimey if I had produced such a poorly thought out and self contradicting essay when at my grammar school my english teacher would have dragged me out in front of the class and had a field day
 

czechmate

Member
Mixed Farmer
Blimey these journalists are unable to write a coherent story.
Does this one not realise that top gun is an American film, how does making a sequel of it reflect on the UK ?
Grammar schools were far better than the system we have now standards of education have slipped since they were scrapped, the results have gone up only because they make the assessments and exams easier, as for universities only a couple of years net work rejected applications from graduates due to their appalling spelling and grammar , of course an university educated hack is going to think uni should be for all, despite the fact most cant manage
" proper" courses and we have desperate shortages of skilled workers to do real jobs and will earn far more than many of those who go to uni and without the debt. As for the nhs yes it needs to change but guess who will be the first to shout "hands off the nhs" yep these very same hacks looking for a story.
Of course we should look back to the past to see the mistakes and successes and then look to implement the best for the future, let's face it its remainers who are after 6 years longing to go back in time and rejoin the EU not forge our own way to success.
Blimey if I had produced such a poorly thought out and self contradicting essay when at my grammar school my english teacher would have dragged me out in front of the class and had a field day

i couldn’t understand the reference to the new Top Gun.🤷‍♂️

mind you, nostalgia ain’t what it used to be🤔
😂
 

Muck Spreader

Member
Livestock Farmer
Location
Limousin
Must admit being of a certain age, I love all the retro nostalgia that the UK obsessively loves to bathe in. Where else in the world can you visit so many steam railways, traction engine and tractor rallies, stately homes, industrial archaeology sites, war reenactments, living museums etc. However, looking from the outside in, you do get the feeling that the UK has now reduced itself to a theme park for Chinese and Japanese tourists, which is also rather sad or is it in fact the golden future? :scratchhead:
 

robs1

Member
Must admit being of a certain age, I love all the retro nostalgia that the UK obsessively loves to bathe in. Where else in the world can you visit so many steam railways, traction engine and tractor rallies, stately homes, industrial archaeology sites, war reenactments, living museums etc. However, looking from the outside in, you do get the feeling that the UK has now reduced itself to a theme park for Chinese and Japanese tourists, which is also rather sad or is it in fact the golden future? :scratchhead:
When you have a rich history why not preserve it, we can learn a lit from it, France hosted the EU summit in Versailles and why not, haven't seen anyone suggesting they want to revive their past.
 

czechmate

Member
Mixed Farmer
Must admit being of a certain age, I love all the retro nostalgia that the UK obsessively loves to bathe in. Where else in the world can you visit so many steam railways, traction engine and tractor rallies, stately homes, industrial archaeology sites, war reenactments, living museums etc. However, looking from the outside in, you do get the feeling that the UK has now reduced itself to a theme park for Chinese and Japanese tourists, which is also rather sad or is it in fact the golden future? :scratchhead:

i must admit, we were looking at art at the weekend in the Dordogne ...
It was 20-21 thousand years old 🤔
 

SFI - What % were you taking out of production?

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Red Tractor drops launch of green farming scheme amid anger from farmers

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As reported in Independent


quote: “Red Tractor has confirmed it is dropping plans to launch its green farming assurance standard in April“

read the TFF thread here: https://thefarmingforum.co.uk/index.php?threads/gfc-was-to-go-ahead-now-not-going-ahead.405234/
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