An Urge to Utter - 2016

I was listening to the radio the other day and the programme was about Harriet Martineau who, from a non-conformist background in Norwich, became one of the best known writers from the nineteenth century.

It doesn't say much about me when I say I hadn't heard of her. But that would be the same to the person in Liverpool who, having heard I was an actor, made it quite clear, and told me so, that she had never heard of me.

Harriet Martineau followed, what is called, neccessitarianism* and had an urge to utter.

Yes – an urge to utter.

I probably have that urge, which is why I write on here now and again. Lots of us have urges to utter and I heard a famous poet on the radio who said that she has been planning a novel for years. You've heard plenty of people say that so what stops them? They have the urge to utter but don't want to be judged too harshly so, even though they write columns and poetry they don't want to be judged for anything of length just in case it's no good.

Harriet Martineau was very controversial and was an early feminist although it seems rather a late date to be an early feminist when the earth has been here for many millions of years. The older you think it is the less religion means to you.

But it's both easy and hard to realise just what a necessitarian actually is; maybe it is someone who looks out to the universe and accepts all the messages they get from it and acts accordingly doing what is necessary - or gets locked up for being a danger to themselves and other people.

Maybe that's why Trump was elected and not Clinton and Brexit was voted for when it seemed that sensible people were voting to remain in the European Community.

In both cases people went in to the polling booth with a pin and stuck it into the space where their hand was guided as if from Mars (what is necessary) – that's the only excuse I can think.

Someone said on the BBC World Service the other night, that in a few months time people will say they saw what was happening and they knew Trump would win. Well . . . .

I know that when I have looked at elections – and I lived in America for five presidential elections – I have noticed that as soon as one of the candidates finds a catch phrase they win. It doesn't happen all the time as with John Kerry when he said help is on the way – it just wasn't good enough to beat Bush who was the sitting president.

Al Gore wouldn't seek the help of President Bill Clinton as he was a bit puritanical and didn't want to be associated with a president who had been impeached even though he was found not guilty, but that catch phrase was there; this time it was fuzzy math when Bush retaliated to Gore's maths.

So as soon as I heard that the catch phrase “inherited from the Labour Government” I knew the Conservatives were going to win each time they have used it. You see each time a catch phrase is used the party or person it is used against doesn't question it; and they should.

In the referendum – a plebiscite which was never ever used here before 1974 – as soon as the leave campaign started saying take back control I knew it was all over. Nobody answered it.

At the moment the government here is trying to take back all the rights we had before the referendum – we already had those rights so why vote to leave? Oh yes!! The same disease America has – immigration. In a country where everybody is an immigrant they were swayed by Trump's rhetoric, the leave campaigners here were swayed by a really evil person called Nigel Farage who warned that millions and millions of immigrants would want to come and live in Britain. Farage is one of those opportunist people that history throws up now and again; the gang of four (here) who left the Labour Party in 1983 to form an alliance with the Liberal Party. (Liberal here, by the way, is not the same as in America but is middle of the road). They were opportunists but as soon as they actually took the opportunity in 2010 and joined with the conservatives it was their death knell as they lost nearly all their seats in the commons last year in the General Election.

As to Trump, he used the same popularist speeches that some people may have had at the back of their minds; people whom you might scratch and they'd be racist. The 'Donald' wasn't in a straight jacket and dictated to by PR men and women or the men in grey suits he was himself. Hillary Clinton wasn't. I noticed two leaders of the Labour Party giving great speeches recently – Ed Milliand and Gordon Brown – but when they were leaders they were puppets.

I am totally against Trump I don't think he has any of the qualifications for the job but he is good on television and that's why he won.

But the good people in America will vote for anything: I remember three years after I moved there, there was an election for the Sheriff of Los Angeles County. The man in office was a certain Sheriff Sherman Block and he was challenged by Lee Baca. The first time the election took place there was no majority so they had to have a 'run off.'

A few days before the second election was to happen the 74 year old Sheriff Block, fell in his bathroom and died.

The run off election took place in November 1998 even though Sheriff Block had died on October 1998. Instead of cancelling the election the authorities allowed it to go ahead and seven hundred and three thousand, one hundred and seventy eight people voted for a dead man. Seven hundred and three thousand, one hundred and seventy eight people.

This year – 2016 – over seventeen million people in Great Britian – seventeen million turkeys, or Santa Clauses voted to cancel Christmas. In other words voted to leave The Common Market or, as it is now called, The European Community. Since then it has been mentioned on the news and in news and current affairs programmes every day – every single day.

And that's the way we end the year – not knowing what we want and we leave 2016 knowing that we lost some great people and the greatest of them all.

Mohamed Ali.

* Necessitarianism is a metaphysical principle that denies all mere possibility; there is exactly one way for the world to be.

It is the strongest member of a family of principles, including hard determinism, each of which deny libertarian free will, reasoning that human actions are predetermined by external or internal antecedents. Necessitarianism is stronger than hard determinism, because even the hard determinist would grant that the causal chain constituting the world might have been different as a whole, even though each member of that series could not have been different, given its antecedent causes.

Anthony Collins was the foremost defender of Necessitarianism. His brief Inquiry Concerning Human Liberty (1715) was a key statement of the determinist standpoint.

The Century Dictionary defined it in 1889–91 as belief that the will is not free, but instead subject to external antecedent causes or natural laws of cause and effect.