A Case for Mr Foyle?

I’ve recently been enjoying the new series of our favourite detective drama – Foyle’s War. The latest episodes are set in the post WW2 context of the start of the Cold War. It was a time when most people had little money and few possessions and there was a much higher level of public debt than there is now.
So what was the response of the then government to this? It was to create the National Health Service and invest in the nation’s depleted infrastructure, lifting public spirits with public service. If our present government was transported back to those days, what would we have seen? No doubts there: “More austerity, another round of deep cuts right away except for lower taxes for the wealthy”.
Of course they would have expressed confidence that the private sector would rush in and fill the gap, having been so badly ‘crowded out’. And if this didn’t work, then clearly another round of austerity for ordinary people would be needed. And so on.
Clearly viciously counter-productive, yet that is the mindset we see today. And what is the result? A flatlining economy, an ever-widening gap between poor and rich and negative penny-pinching, instead of inspirational views of the future all round.
And this mindset has infected the opposition, so timid and over-cautious in their approach and nowhere near bold enough in their policies as far as we know them. It seems you can hardly get a tissue paper between the political parties these days which in my view accounts for much of the disillusionment and low turnouts at elections.
The cutting and negativity is not confined to this country of course as the continued misery in the Eurozone reminds us, culminating most recently in the theft of savings in Cyprus.
What we are seeing are policies so bad that they suggest some kind of communicable mental health issue in governments. I’ve suggested in earlier postings some of the measures that could be taken in this country if the will and courage were there, but at present they are not.
I’m not sure of what Mr Foyle would have made of all this beyond the sure perception that it’s all downright criminal!