Alone with three dogs .......

The question raised by the title of this blog is of course, can this blogger be trusted to care responsibly for three dogs?

Well to answer that question you would need to talk to the dogs in question, but, as the band Three Dog Night told it in their 1970's hit, Joy to the World:

If I were the king of the world
Tell you what I'd do
I'd throw away the cars and the bars and the war
Make sweet love to you

Sing it now

Joy to the world
All the boys and girls
Joy to the fishes in the deep blue sea Joy to you and me

You know I love the ladies

Love to have my fun

I'm a high flyer and a rainbow rider

A straight shootin' son-of-a-gun

I said a straight shootin' son-of-a-gun

At the moment the dogs are sleeping and as we are advised, sleeping dogs should always be left to lie, so whilst they sleep, I blog.

I tend to blog when an idea, having irritated me for a while, develops into a more fully formed theory of almost anything. 

During almost the whole of the time that I lived in the North East of England in Newcastle the dominant political agenda arose from the philosophy of a certain lady from Grantham.

But where did that agenda come from.

I have raised this idea in my blog before but it cannot be stated too  many times. Growing up in Manchester in the fifties grandparents, parents, siblings, relatives, neighbours, were almost universally known as 'our', 'our Mam', 'our Dad', our kid', 'our house', 'our street', the word 'our' is defined in my dictionary as:

'belonging to or associated with the speaker and one or more other people previously mentioned or easily identified'.

That is to say it was corporate, co-operative, shared, owned jointly or belonging to us all.

The antithesis is, as Marx (Karl not Groucho) wrote, private property:

'which has made us so stupid and one sided that an object is only ours when we have  it - when it exists for us as capital' ...... Karl Marx Private Property and Communism (1844)

So who paved the way for Thatcherism, the political philosophy which replaced ours with mine?

The answer is not 'written in the wind'. 

It is however from the writings of a musician from Liverpool, where like my urban Manchester, 'our' would have been the dominant refrain that was heard, came the philosophical underpinnings of Thatcher's revolution:

'All I can hear

I me mine, I me mine, I me mine

Even those tears

I me mine. I me mine, I me mine

No-one's frightened of playing it

Ev'ryone's saying it,

Flowing more freely than wine,

Al through' the day I me mine.

Not so much wine as the grapes of wrath I suspect. Grapes that we are still plucking in benefit sanctions, unemployment, the rise of the robots, house prices, pricing those called millennials out of the market entirely, increased homelessness, worklessness anxiety, poor mental health, society dragged through a hedge fund backwards, rendered as Marx states it so clearly, stupid.

Once a society is broken down into a collection of individuals, corporate strength is weakened, negotiating strengths are undermined and the collective is abandoned along with the barricades, and the class war is lost.

Or to put it another way, society has 'gone to the dogs', to be understood metaphorically as: 'taken a distinct turn for the worse.