Friday 24 October 2014

Flexcit: a Nice Concise Explanation of a Very Complicated Process



I remember watching, as a boy, a programme in which the grandiose building schemes of the great landed aristocrats of the eighteenth century were presented and examined. One of the points made was that the movement away from the strictly formal gardens of the renaissance towards the informal parks that still surround baroque palaces and Palladian mansions required a shift to long-term thinking and the avenues of mature indigenous trees lining the approaches to those houses were planned and planted by men who knew they were never to see them in their full glory. That's rather what Richard North is doing in the video above. Unfortunately, we live in the age of the instant garden make-over and far too many voluble and opinionated people think that all we need do is grub up the knot garden and all will automatically be beautiful and verdant again.

I don't think an exit referendum can be won but if we have any chance at all of getting out Flexcit is it, and if the referendum is lost 'it' provides a solid base for the long march to the next one, should it ever come.

As an aside, it is disappointing to see so few under sixty present. I suppose that a yearning for freedom cannot grow in the hearts of the young until they have suffered decades of brutal oppression, as in eastern Europe before the iron curtain was hacked down. However, we haven't the time for a slow awakening: we are moving rapidly into an age in which technology makes any form of dissent impossible because it will literally be unthinkable.