More schaden, less freude

Another grey morning, and another gentle 25 minute forestry run.

When either Germany or the UK is down in some kind of trouble, the media in the other country will often take the opportunity to deliver a thorough kicking, with more or less justification. Given the shared Saxon roots of many English & Germans (ref), this seems a little unsupportive but, on the other hand, family arguments can last a long time.

A recent example in Spiegel Online, British democracy is a farce, is both justified and not. The title comes from Die Tageszeitung, which is suggesting that the revelations of complicity between News Corporation, government, and senior police officers have shown us Britons what a charade our democracy is. Well, frankly, some of us had one or two doubts about it already. Our famous mother of parliaments can sometimes easily be mistaken for a lumbering binary megalith which spends too much time cynically whoring itself, to the electorate when elections are in view, and to the real power brokers when they are not. Those brokers include of course the captains of News Corporation and other media groups, but also of banks & supermarkets, and of the nuclear, oil, alcohol, tobacco, armaments, & motor car industries. Even today, in the midst of this particularly sordid crisis, David Cameron is on a "trade mission" to South Africa with a planeload of CEOs (ref) to promote Western-style capitalism in sub-Saharan Africa. All in the interest of alleviating poverty, obviously.
Not being a political historian, it’s difficult to say definitively when the rot set in but, seen from the sidelines, the rise of this particular brand of free-market politics seemed to coincide with Margaret Thatcher's ascendancy in 1979.