They lost a lot of soldiers, but it certainly cleared the minefield.”How does this tie up with the beef crisis back home?”There is no beef crisis,” says Professor Quentin “It is only the Tory government who are creating one. It was always said, though I never knew how true it was, that when Russian generals wanted to clear a minefield, they set the Russian infantry walking through it. Even if these things seem to work in the short term, they never work out for the best and often create more problems than you had before… Think of Afghanistan. Think of Stalin’s final solution for getting rid of all small farmers in Russia Think of … oh, I don’t know, think of the Americans’ plan for getting rid of almost everyone in North Vietnam. But this is no solution at all.”
The speaker is Ivor Quentin, Professor of Drastic Solutions at the University of Milton Keynes. He has been keeping his eye on the proposals to exterminate all cows over a certain age in Britain, and, frankly, he finds the whole thing madness at the highest level.
“Frankly,” he says, “I find the whole thing madness at the highest level.
But then, you might say that almost all drastic solutions are madness at the highest level. Think of Hitler’s final solution for getting rid of the Jews. But reviving shareholder populism, if that is the Government’s ploy, is a non-starter.. “The attitude of the Tory government to the cow population of Britain is a bit like the attitude of Boris Yeltsin to the population of Chechnya. Shoot and bomb them until there are so few left that people think the problem has been solved.
The rise of private pension provision, encouraged by the Government itself, alters the geography of ownership and benefit The way companies are run demands scrutiny. Appearing to be the friend of the small investor sounds merely opportunistic.The other reason is deeper. New Labour has made a rhetorical splash with its musings about a “stakeholder” society. It is actually little more than a mish-mash of old Labour fraternity, new communitarianism, European social partnership and a nod and a wink toward profit-related pay. But what return fire do the Tories have? Global trends in capitalism and the changing patterns of ownership they have brought make relaunching shareholder democracy well-nigh impossible.
