Response to Daniel Finklestein: Mob mentality or eccentric growing up?

Response to Daniel Finklestein: Mob mentality or eccentric growing up?

Daniel Finklestein does what good columnists should do – make us feel, see and think angles that don’t naturally occur to us.  And he does so wittily.

In his MPs? Well, I can’t trust anyone. Not even you.  it is deliciously witty, and disturbing.  He asks us to consider whether we are guilty of mob mentality in joying in a whole serious of tut-tutting against a whole range of groups.

Well I’ve enjoyed adding whatever oomph I could do the raucous indignation re MP’s expenses.  Not because I think that the crime is very important or the solution very complex, but because I have felt, from the time Thatcher crucified countless working-class villages and families, followed by an illegal war followed the credit-crunching robber-bankers, ‘they’ve had it coming to them’.

At last we’ve got the means to dish it out.  And it has been served up by the Torygraph as well – irony of ironies, £300,000 of irony.

No it’s not at all about moats, and light-bulbs and porn rentals.  It’s simply a perverse way to do what we can’t do in a grown-up way – become a grown-up modern country.

But DF I’ve (we’ve?) waited half-a-century not just to join in the dishing-out but to see my beloved country, England, manage to get itself into a modern state (preferably not someone else’s, as in Iraq).

The fact that the Scots got a superior system, as did the Germans after WWIII, is irony upon irony.  I don’t want to have to wait another fifty years.

It’s now or never.  When do we want it? – now, now, now. It’s not mobbery it’s just the eccentric, class-oppressed English trying to grow up.