Posted by Ivan Rendall on 26 March 2016 in Blogging
So, Helen may be about to become assertive.
Not before time: the domestic abuse storyline is terrific but it has become a bit attenuated. With her decision to have the baby in hospital and her “Goodnight Mr Rob…” assertion Helen’s getting on the road to delivering the liberated mind which will ultimately be Rob’s undoing.
But, have the Archers’ writing team managed to turn the government into a group of national control freaks in the process?
Ministers are beginning to sound like Rob. For example, on Education, it’s only six years until everything is based on their ‘Academy’ ethos. Instead of accountable local councillors running schools, it will be a bunch of free-market, “my way or no way” profit-mongers who will decide what is best for all children based on a curriculum dreamt up in their controlling, manipulative, me-based, Titchener-like minds.
Like the Titchener system, if their system doesn’t work for the rest of us, it’s our fault. All we need to do is take more of the medicine they prescribe and do what their fawning mothers say because we are infants – so there!
Kirsty needs to go and talk to mums and dads who want to have a say in their own children’s education, their own maternity arrangements, health service, local environment, their own priorities for welfare expenditure.
Kirsty the true friend, can see the reality of Helen being alternately patronised and bullied by a cruel, narrow-gauge mind such as Robs. Can she shift the same kind of minds in government, minds who think that the way they have financialised society – housing, welfare, disability, care for the elderly, prisons, transport… and that anything they do towards their goal justifies their means.
Helen is a metaphor for most of us: supine until the full ghastliness of the way we are grazed by those in political and economic power, grazed by those with see us only as producers and consumers and just want more and more power and they don’t mind who they crush as long as more of us are made to bend to their will.
Wherever Rob is going, and let’s hope it’s North Korea at least, let the brigade of “I know best and if you don’t give way to me and do what I say, then I’ll curl up, put my thumb in my mouth (twitter won’t let me use the s word) and have a kiddy-fit” go there too.
VIVA EL KIRSTY !
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