Learning the Lesson

As I am fond of saying, there are essentially two ways to learn something: the easy way, and the hard way. I prefer the latter, as it hurts more so gets learned good and hard, rather than lasting only a short time and then the same mistake is repeated.

Despite that, I'd still save people all of that if they'd learn to accept what I write and say (as the majority do), even if it takes them outside their 'comfort zone' and causes them to re-appraise their own thinking. Those with fixed personal and corporate agendas usually cannot do this, or at best are so unwilling to do so that there is no point in pressing the matter, whatever it might be.

If I wanted to show how 'clever' I have seemed to be in recent years, I could easily list a whole range of statements, predictions and other pracle-like pronouncements I have been making consistently, and we could now easily see just how many of them have already panned out and others are obviously heading toward doing the same. Undoubtedly there are a few that didn't (such as the Lib Dem polling recovery after the 2014 Party Conference season – though there are signs, if too late to be very useful, of that now starting to happen) but it all goes to show that anyone with sme insight and a decent brain can work out what is likely to happen next, and why.

But no: the people always know best, and even I have been labelled as 'biased' (waits for everyone to stop laughing) if I dare to suggest anything that doesn't fit their worldview.

Thus I have been working mostly on getting people to think more for themselves, rather than (one might think) spoon-feeding them on this 'blog. What I have done here over the years was necessary, in order to lay down the proper foundation ahead of the period that is so soon to come.

That I did in considerable detail, but – as long-term readers will recall – wasn't with slanted, manipulated or fake materials to push a preferred view, but as openly as I could, so that readers were in a position to evaluate a situation for themselves. I might have guided the style of thinking, but it wasn't my way, by and large, to steer people's thinking in a specific, fixed direction. Occasionally there was a single, important issue that needed to dominate, but not often.

It was thus that, for unrelated reasons, I considered taking down  older material. The world had moved on anyway, and some of what was in that huge number of political posts was no doubt by then out of date in some specifics. Ultimately, though, the time had come for my readership to move on too – and, to be fair to them, they have done so. If they ever truly needed me at all, they certainly don't now – not in the way I had been posting. They've grown up...

So, where does that leave us? Should I still post the occasional political post here? I think so; and it is important to keep that option open. Others in this area, and elsewhere, are continuing to provide their own insights and experiences, and that has improved noticeably in my home area over the past two years – which is one reason why I have been happy to take more of a back seat approach over that period.

Folk are going to have to learn their own lessons, as in practice they always have when it comes right down to it, and it is as I have predicted: that those who have tried to fool us with easy and convenient 'sales pitches', when Police and Crime Commissioner candidates or upcoming political parties, these and others are coming unstuck and greater public/media exposure is revealing to the masses what some of us have known all along.

In the final analysis, all will be well...