Election Result: How I Found Peace

Throughout the past three years, I have featured on my pessimism over the idea of the United Kingdom leaving the European Union, and later expressed my concerns concerning the future of the National Health Service (NHS). This has always been due to our for-life medicine supplies, with my beloved Alex relying on Diazepam and other drugs to keep her neurotic disorder under control, and Warfarin, along with other drugs, including beta-blockers, to keep my heart pumping healthily after an aortic valve replacement procedure back in 2015.

Happy to say, at present, I'm more at peace with our present election result with Conservative Boris Johnson elected as Prime Minister.

But before I proceed further into this blog, it might be helpful to give a brief background of my upbringing, so what follows will fit into place more clearly.  

Both my parents were ardent socialists, with Dad, in particular, a republican. Here in the UK, a republican is someone who prefers an elected president as Head of State rather than a monarchy, who's heir to the Throne passes from generation to generation without ever facing an election. Therefore, on the political front, both my parents had always been committed to voting Labour.

As for me, I am more sympathetic to the Monarchy than my father was, but only on the borderline. When I see the Queen busy at her duties and fully committed to them, then I tend to feel that she has done a good job and therefore engender a greater sense of sympathy. But at other times, such as the divorce between Prince Charles and Diana, her fatality under a Paris subway, along with the scandal following Prince Andrew's friendship with a billionaire paedophile, besides with such global broadcasting of royal pageantry, giving the impression that Queen Elizabeth II is the most important Head of State in the world, surpassing all other national leaders, then the pendulum tends to swing the other way, and therefore I tend to favour republicanism. And that is my position at present.

Since I became a Christian believer exactly 47 years ago, I came across literature by Christian authors, mostly American. These included Dr John R. Rice, founder of The Sword of the Lord in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, along with Hal Lindsey and Tim LaHaye. All three having testified that capitalism is linked to the Bible while socialism opposes it. Indeed, they have a point. The father of both socialism and Russian communism was Karl Marx, a Jewish atheist who advocated collective ownership of all property and distribution of all wealth gotten by high taxation. Along with the banning of all religion, and private ownership of property both were made a criminal offence, as all churches were forced to close, and land and assets were forcibly seized from their owners under Marx's manifesto.

Such a brutal system proved to be a failure, as both Perestroika and Glasnost of the 1980s led to the eventual downfall of Soviet Communism, and the dismantling of the Berlin Wall during November 1991. As such, as a Christian, I believe that capitalism is not only a better system to serve this fallen world, but it's closer to the Bible than outright socialism.

Along with the 8th and 10th Commandments of the Decalogue (Exodus 20) emphasising respect for private property ownership, one of the best-known teachings of Jesus Christ was on the Parable of the Workers in the Vineyard, recorded in Matthew 20:1-16. Here, an agreement was made between a landowner and a group of hired workers of a penny for a full day's work, starting early in the morning. Then throughout the day, the landowner went out to hire more workers to make it possible to market his produce sooner, whilst still fresh. He then went out to collect further workers in the early evening, and they did just an hour's work. Then at payout time, everyone received a penny or denarius, regardless of the hours put in.

The idea of a penny seems utterly worthless in our present currency. It doesn't buy anything. Of such little worth, our Government had talked about abolishing it, along with our 2p coin and our tiddler 5p coin, but an uproar from the public had quickly shelved that idea. But as the denarius is a day's wages for a worker, the penny of Roman times must have fed him and his family.

It came as no surprise then when the early-starters kicked up a fuss over receiving the same amount of money as those who only worked an hour. Forgetting the original agreement made with the landowner, their protest earned a rebuke and a questioning of his generosity.

For most of my Christian lifetime, I have thought that the landowner's generosity applied only to those who worked from mid-afternoon onwards. But lately, I have come to believe that he was generous to all his employees by allowing them to earn a day's wages instead of watching them and their families go hungry. If this perception is true, then I have begun to understand the underlying motives of the English capitalists of the Victorian era, that period of English history which has been re-enacted in a series of BBC documentaries.

Often depicted as the epitome of cruelty, we watch as these proprietors and mill owners extract the most arduous of work from their employees for the smallest pay they feel to be right. The result is that the working families, including their children, goes through a hard day's graft, under the threat that their pay will be withheld if they don't work quick enough or their final product is below par.

But these capitalists saw themselves as Christians, in obedience to God based on their awareness of Matthew 20:1-16, along with other Scriptures endorsing the virtue of land ownership. Therefore they saw themselves as generous, allowing the poor to eat.

Boris Johnson after his election victory.

It's such an environment of the 19th Century when the rise of the Labour Party took its roots. However, there is a subtle difference between Labour and Socialism which even my late father might not have been able to tell apart. The former wishes to give greater care and respect, along with a decent pay among workers within capitalism, allowing the latter to exist. Socialism wishes to do away with capitalism altogether. As one who believes that capitalism is of greater benefit than socialism, I believe Labour has done a great deal of good among the workers. Not only has their pay had risen to considerable heights, but paid holidays eventually became the norm, along with the forming of the NHS in 1948 under Clement Atlee's Labour Government.

Since then, the NHS has been the sticking point in every election manifesto, especially in the last few decades. And it was the issue of the NHS that has made me develop a deep distrust of Boris Johnson's attitude towards the NHS, with his intention for privatisation, together with his Brexit campaign.

It has all started with David Cameron's February 2016 declaration of a Referendum to be held on the 23rd June of that year. Two brothers who both attended Eton College, Nigel and Alex Noaks, were two businessmen who had an interest in psychological profiling. The older of the two, Alex, was also a former executive of the Tory Party's favourite advertising agency - Saatchi & Saatchi. In due course, another Etonian, Alexander Nix, joined the brothers after forming a company, Cambridge Analytica (CA), whose purpose was to persuade swing voters to support a particular candidate or issue and to win elections. 

As a result, in 2016, the Trump campaign, sponsored by wealthy businessmen such as Ted Cruz and billionaire Robert Mercer, was successful in winning the majority of the American electorate to vote for Donald Trump. Then afterwards, the main Brexit group, Vote Leave, which received £100,000 from one of its donors, billionaire Paul Marshall, along with donations adding up to millions of pounds made from other businessmen; and the website Leave.EU. sponsored CA to enlighten the nation to vote to leave the EU. 

Three tactics were used. One was to do with the NHS, with Boris Johnson promising that with the weekly £350,000,000 paid into the European Union, this instead can be used to fund the NHS. However, the then UK Independence Party (UKIP) leader Nigel Farage saw that Johnson's NHS argument was too overwhelming to be a realistic tactic, so he ventured on the second of the three tactics - immigration. Farage emphasised how the crisis caused by the 2015 Refugee Crisis into mainland Europe from Turkey and Lybia was the setting for his Breaking Point campaign, featuring a queue of refugees attempting to enter Croatia. This campaign was also heavily supercharged by Cambridge Analytica.

The third psychological tactic used by the CA was the idea that by leaving the EU, the British can reclaim its Bulldog spirit. This British Bulldog spirit mentality most likely had its appeal for the Labour strongholds of the North of England, where heavy industry such as coal and steel once held dominance.*

The Referendum came and went with Brexit the clear winner, albeit by just a small 52/48% margin. David Cameron resigned from his PM post on the same day, Theresa May took over as PM and Boris Johnson declared that the weekly £350,000,000 meant for the NHS were absolute rubbish, before setting off to play cricket with Lord Althorpe, another Etonian. Indeed, with the heavy influence of Etonian-run Cambridge Analytica, Boris Johnson, also an Etonian, used deception to fool the public. On a spiritual basis, this is a serious matter when considering what Jesus said that the Devil is the father of lies (John 8:44).

With this lie, my distrust for Johnson grew as he took over Theresa May's resignation on June 7th, 2019. After he won the post as leader of the Tory Party on the 24th of July 2019, one of his vows was:

I will sooner die in a ditch than not take the UK out of the EU by October 31st.

October 31st came and went and the UK was still in the EU. Then the matter arose of a document, produced by Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, about the NHS being on the table among other trading agreements with the USA. This document was composed under Theresa May's administration and therefore vehemently denied by both Donald Trump and Boris Johnson alike.

With the Tories winning the December 2019 election with an 80 seat majority, I took a look into the Daily Mail newspaper of Saturday, December 14th, the day after the election result was given. He had promised a sum of thirty-four billion pounds! At first, I wasn't sure whether the paper meant the total sum of that amount throughout the whole five-year Parliament, or otherwise. It was later that this enormous amount of money, £34,000,000,000,000, was his annual contribution a small fact the paper did not mention.

It's an enormous promise, which apparently dwarfs the weekly £350,000,000 he says he would save from having to pay for EU membership after Brexit. If £34 billion per year is what he has promised, which he says will be legally binding through a law to be passed through Parliament, then I truly hope he will stick to his promise in the years to come!

Then there are the Labour strongholds, particularly in the industrial North of England. For up to a hundred years, no Tory candidate would ever be delivered to Parliament. For these regions to give their support for the Tories to deliver Brexit is an astonishing accomplishment. But this, I believe, is a borrowed vote, lent on condition that Brexit gets done. Tamper with the NHS to their detriment, and the Tories will become toast, especially after the Labour Party had changed its leader.

All this is a tremendous sigh of relief! But in truth, my trust must be in God alone. The One who holds everything in his hands and even uses the earth as his footstool. This is the real source of peace - a trust in God for his daily provision including medical care. He alone is the Saviour, the source of salvation, the gift of eternal life given to everyone who believes.

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*Good information is found in the paperback: Posh Boys, how English Public Schools ruin Britain, by Robert Verkaik, 2018, Reprinted 2019, Oneworld Publications