1. Why do you think me a celebrity? Is it because some of my writing is in university textbooks and translated into Chinese?
2. Am I therefore fit to be among the rich usurers, politicians, research chemists, footballers, actors and popular entertainers who are 95 % of the other celebrities your QUANGO is approaching? Are a few disinterested writers and artists needed to give other worshipers of the Bitch Goddess respectable company?
3. Are you prepared to tell the school children you seek to indoctrinate that many of the world’s greatest people have died — like the majority of the world’s poorest — in a state of miserable neglect? Jesus is the most famous example, tortured to death as a criminal by the Romans, his last words a despairing cry at his abandonment by the God of Love he had wished for all mankind. Herman Melville’s first two books brought him early money and fame, but when writing Moby Dick — America’s greatest novel — he told his wife’s parents that this book would NOT succeed, and wrote into it that, It is failure, not success, that tests the truly great hearts. Melville died neglected and forgotten by all but a few, not knowing that his last great work Billy Bud would ever be published. I will not add John Clare, Van Gogh and countless others who were treated as failures in their own lifetimes. Before he died even Leonardo da Vinci despaired of having finished anything worthwhile.
I make your firm a free present of this letter. If school children read it along with the other results of your celebrity questionnaire, I may not have written in vain.
“Yours truly etcetera. Email it Sarah. Here comes another.
“To the Manager of the Co-Operative Bank,
Mingulay Street Branch, Glasgow
Dear Sir or Madam,
I opened an account with your bank in 1952 on receiving my first education grant through your Sauchiehall Street branch, a service I expected to enjoy for the rest of my life. I wish now to transfer my account to the Airdrie Savings Bank for two reasons, both connected with my hatred of banks and lawyers who advertise and tout for business like car salesmen, travel agencies and other greedy huxters who nowadays pollute radio, television, film theatres, street hoardings and every other means of communication. In my youth British bankers and lawyers did not do such things. I liked the Co-Op Bank because it was then part of a marketing scheme for the working classes created by nineteenth century socialists. And I liked you declaring an ethical investment policy that would stop the Co-Op Bank profiting from weapon and torture-instrument making, and from support of undemocratic governments. Here is why I have changed my mind.
1. You started sending me leaflets illustrated with the faces of handsome young men and women looking full of happy wonder and astonishment by the easy terms on which you were prepared to lend them money. I come from respectable working class people who believed that getting into debt was a crime that would lead to eternal damnation. I no longer share my parents’ religious faith, but still share their attitude to debt.
2. At the same time other leaflets came from you without pictures, but in sober, even stately prose it suggested I invested my money in close consultation with a Close Brothers Group of Wealth Managers in the city of London money market, Close Brothers who promised to increase my money by investing it in safe ways not run by your less wealthy savers. I know as well as you and these Close Brothers that the only safe money market is managed by bastards who depend on warfare and drug dealing, and have invested the pension funds of our university teachers and probably most other institutions in them.
3. Moreover,” says Gumbler, and falls silent. His secretary types that. After a while he says, “Delete marginal numbers and Moreover. Last paragraph coming up.
“I am therefore transferring my money to the Airdrie Savings Bank, founded in 1835 the only independent savings bank left in our disUnited Kingdom. When every other Scottish bank united with the Trustee Savings Bank and then floated on the London Stock Exchange, Airdrie did not. It survived obscure and local until 2010 when six merchant bankers each put a million pounds in it. They must have thought that a way to protect their money when the present capitalist system collapses in the near future. Yours truly, etcetera. Check these details with Wikipedia before sending it off, Sarah. Next letter.”
“To the Rates Department
Glasgow City Council
Dear Sirs and /or Madams,
I have received your annual rates demand along with a leaflet headed Pay Up For Glasgow, which is quite unnecessary since for many years I have paid automatically by standing order. I write to complain about an even more useless pamphlet with a beautiful scenic view of a Scottish loch which turns out to be an advertisement for a private company now owning the Scottish water supply and which, through an international grid, also supplies England with water and, less directly, France. Glasgow civil servants (like our ruling Labour Party councillors) are likely too young and ignorant to know the history of our municipal water supply, which was once an inspiration to every intelligent citizen.
“Loch Katrine in the lonely heart of the Trossachs mountains became Scotland’s main tourist after Walter Scott made it the setting of his poem The Lady of the Lake. In 1859 Queen Victoria crossed it by the steamer Rob Roy to the mouth of a tunnel where she turned a handle. Water started flowing through seventeen miles of tunnel past Ben Venue and Ben Lomond to the great reservoir above Milngavie from which it descended to the whole city of Glasgow. This steady supply of pure water had been achieved by a Liberal local government against three sorts of Tory opponents.
1. Share holders of private water companies who said a single municipal water supply would undermine their profits and the principle of free competition.
2. Prosperous citizens who found it cheaper to rent pure water privately than pay rates to a municipality that would supply everyone cheaply.
3. The British Admiralty who, because Loch Katrine’s overspill was a source of the River Forth, feared the Firth of Forth might silt up, thus depriving the Royal Navy of its most important dock and harbour north of the Humber.
On the other side the Liberals argued that:
1. The steam engines Glasgow exported needed more pure water than private companies could supply. Muddy water in a workman’s tubes might kill him, but labour was cheap. Muddy water in an engine’s tubes could break it down, and machines were dear.
2. Typhus, typhoid and cholera epidemics began among the overcrowded and poor who could seldom pay for good water, so maybe God was punishing them for that, but the diseases often spread to respectable householders.
3. The Admiralty was wrong.
So Glasgow became the industrial city with the best municipal water supply in the United Kingdom and escaped the 1866 cholera epidemic that attacked the rest of the country. For decades a local Liberal government made Glasgow the world’s foremost city in public water supplies, public lighting, transport, libraries, hospitals, almost everything except housing. Only when the Scottish Independent Labour Party got a place in the London parliament while also taking over Glasgow were the first and best local housing schemes created.
“You have grown up in a completely privatised world, but as public servants you have no right to be distributing an advertising brochure for a private company that has grabbed all of Scotland’s great municipal heritage. Your only job now is to police it and ensure it is providing the public service you have relinquished. Do you really think the brochure proves the company is doing its job well? Are you fools who don’t know that EVERY private company pays smart agencies of copywriters and artists to persuade most of us of its wonderful achievements, while blinding us to its crimes and failures? Or are you scoundrels with shares in Scottish Water? I am eager to be informed. Yours etcetera.