A rather unfair society!

We eventually saw the finale of The Handmaid’s Tale. It was not so much a happy ending as a hopeful ending, hopeful that organisation was taking place to fight against the misogynistic, religious fundamentalist regime. Interestingly the people who were helping the handmaid make her escape still blessed her and wished her God speed. The religious fanatics might have ruined these people’s lives for them but they had not destroyed their faith in God!

As Handmaid June gave her baby into the safekeeping of Handmaid Emily and rejected her own chance to escape to Canada, were we to assume that she planned to work with the resistance organisations and try to rescue her other daughter? Or was it a cynical move on the part of the makers of the series, leaving options open for a third series?

In our own almost dystopian country, the Conservative Party conference is in full flow. Apparently in a packed meeting last night Jacob Rees-Mogg called Libya 'the people's republic of jam jar or something', referring to its name under Colonel Gaddafi, the Great Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriya.

He was speaking against a second referendum, a “people’s vote”, and mocking the idea of a “people’s” anything with a racist joke. I wonder if his listeners laughed.

I wonder how much more press coverage such a “joke” would have been given had a Labour Party person spoken that way. Just a thought!

Across the Atlantic the Kavanaugh nomination story rumbles on. This article talks about his links to Alex Kozinski, the first high-profile judge to be forced to resign in the #MeToo era.

What struck me most about this report was not so much stuff about Kavanaugh as things about the system for making progress in a legal career in the USA. - “People were warned about Kozinski, that he was sexually gross,” said one former law clerk who served for a judge who worked in close proximity to Kozinski. “But they traded in their life for a year so that they could get a Kennedy clerkship, and then you are set for life.”-

There is something wrong with a system where so much depends on getting the right clerkship or, in all sorts of professions, the right internship. Life remains unfair!

On the subject of unfairness, there is, of course, the tax question and the way some people, usually the ones who have the most, manage to avoid paying it. Now, I have never had much time for comedian, presenter, media personality Graham Norton. I have always found him extremely annoying and not very amusing. But then I came across this, which he is supposed to have said:

“I just don’t get the not-paying tax thing,” he says. “It’s just stupid and very short sighted. You see people who are worth a billion and they’re still doing tax dodges and you think how can you be bothered? These people who go to incredible lengths to dodge tax would be just as rich if they paid the tax - and would be living in a much nicer country. One where people were looked after, where crime was less, where housing was better and people were better educated. So the money you’ve saved on tax, you’re probably having to use to pay for barbed wire around your property. It seems totally wrong-headed.”

Graham Norton earns £600,000 plus, and is aware that he is one of the lucky one. He goes on:

“I don’t spend wildly. And life with money is much better than life without money, for sure. But being able to afford your tax is such a privileged position. I don’t like getting my tax bill - it still takes my breath away. But I know I can still pay my bills after I’d paid tax at the other end. The people who can’t afford to pay their bills have got no possibility of dodging it.”

Wow! Suddenly I find myself in total agreement with Graham Norton. And I have to admit that he is less annoying than Rees Mogg!