The Campbell Academy Blog (70)

Pigs at the trough

I watched with interest this week as Rishi Sunak decided to sell away his climate commitments, or at least the ones his party had brought in.

He was very convincing in his speech, which I listened to on the radio as I was stuck in a traffic jam, understanding that he couldn't ask families in the United Kingdom to bear the burden of the cost of putting in ground source heat pumps or changing to electric cars before they could afford to.

The difficulty is that it looks as if he's trying to save an election defeat by adding sweetness to people in their pockets.

Watching the recruitment crisis in the United Kingdom and the attitudes to the workforce of people after the pandemic, when everybody had a chance to sit at home for a while in the sunshine and not do much while the government paid the money (which businesses are now paying back in much higher corporation tax) is so short-term, it's hard to believe.

Even more than ever, lots of people look like they're just pigs at the trough, as the farmer just shovels in more of the stuff from the bucket into the trough, and they never even need to lift their heads to see what's happening but just continue to eat.

The interesting thing about this is that if the clever pig lifted his head, it might see that just further down the road, with a little bit more effort, was a better trough or a bigger trough or one with fewer pigs at it.

The other thing that the pig doesn't realise is that the only reason it's being fed is to be slaughtered at the other end.

The inability to delay gratification for even a short while to make the world or society a little bit better will be the death of us, metaphorically and literally.

It's time to act on the important things, not the unimportant ones.

It doesn't matter how many streaming services you've got or how many times a week you can have fast food delivered to your door.

What's important is keeping society together and moving things forward in the correct direction, but it does seem that lots and lots of people simply will never get that.