We can learn powerful lessons from Gulliver ...
Noel Edmonds, TV presenter Ralph Fiennes, actor Dan Petrescu, former footballer and manager, Gary Anderson, darts player, Vanessa Paradis, actress/model, Leigh Halfpenny, Welsh rugby player, Jordin Sparks, singer, THE recent letter with reference to Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels brought back memories for me.
Often thought of as a kids’ book it is one of Swift’s bitterest satires on “that animal called man.”
He wrote it because of the politics of our first de facto Prime Minister Robert Walpole.
In the first book he satirises the little people or Lilliputians for their petty small mindedness but in his second book, to which your writer refers - the Brobdignagians giants are wonderful, generous warm-hearted people, and I quite like the thought of living in a country like that.
Swift’s two other books about the flying island of Laputa and people marked with a red spot who will never die has echoes of the dementia task which Mrs May was quite keen on, as I remember.
Also in book three, a tailor makes a man a suit by taking his temperature and testing his altitude and, unsurprisingly, the suit does not fit.
Philip Hammond and Ian Duncan Smith please note!
The last book reduces mankind as worse than animals - the yahoo’s in their behaviour.
He praises the Houynhnhnams (horses) for their respect and kindness to one another and perhaps this is something we should all take on board as we approach Christmas and what could be a turbulent new year! Taking a break ... Mark Mercer took these photos of Canadian geese which had dropped in at Bolster Moor and spent most of the day there. He counted 92. WELL, we didn’t have to wait long for the next instalment of Mr Martinek’s ill-informed blathering.
The question that needs to be asked is whether he is just naive or worse?
He conveniently ignores the bigotry of the chief advocate of Brexit who was Nigel Farage, a man who doesn’t even have the decency to refuse to accept a circa £70k pension from the EU he claims to despise.
He also ignores the fact that the Leave campaign was financed and orchestrated by the mega-rich promoting the politics of hate and unleashing the racism of the far right.
All the super rich want is a return to a little England in which they increase their stranglehold on power and influence while increasing their wealth at the expense of working people.
They want rid of inconvenient workplace regulation which prevents the exploitation of employees and, of course, they want to prevent the introduction of legislation proposed by the EU which will make it more difficult for them to avoid paying their appropriate level of taxation.
The reality is that the Leave campaign, supposedly led by “men of the people”, was actually a construct to ensure the real Establishment elite remain in the ascendency