The Most Important Book I've Read This Year

Hello there. Hope you're feeling well today.

Let me set the scene for you. It's Sunday afternoon and surprisingly the sun is shining. It's pleasant out there...but I'm inside the house blinds shut.

I should be cutting the grass for the final time before we move out (probably)...but that can wait until Tuesday.I'm inside.

Wife/daughter are out. Next weekend wife and I will be doing a final blitz of the stuff barring the barest of essentials to be packed before the move. The world is my oyster....and I'm inside.....reading.

Not since American Psycho have I read a book that I just had to complete. As a reader it's a rare feeling when a book grips you to that extent. Where almost everything else just has to stop.

As I chatted about yesterday Robert Tressell's novel The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists grips from the first chapter because though it was written in 1911 the message seems astonishingly relevant in the Jackboot Britain that has stealthily been created in recent months. I won't detail what happens in the rest of the novel. I wouldn't spoil things for you. But it shows a vision of a Britain that already exists post Brexit and will only get worse.

For whoever in Britain has been supposed to have "taken control" post Brexit it won't be ordinary people, that's for certain.

And let us be clear here the "Philanthropists" of the title are firstly the people who accept lower standards in their lives for fear of the consequences of rebellion ,that I understand and have acted this way in the past. However there are also those ordinary people who vote Conservative in the UK or Trump in the US  believing that they are natural right wing voters and yet these are the very people who will probably be badly affected by the consequences of their action.

It's not perfect. A bit of editing would have helped. And it's vision of socialism seems quaint now when people such as in Wales have voted for Labour to control towns, cities etc and have been disappointed to have found them as arrogant as Conservatives. It was one of the reasons that I decided to join Plaid Cymru.

However its importance in this age of Jackboot Britain cannot be over emphasised. It describes a Britain where the ordinary are at the mercy of those with money, where the media is biased to the right wing and nothing, absolutely nothing is beyond the needs of avarice.

Good people voted for Brexit and were misled. This novel shows the consequences of a town that rich men rule.

This novel's time has come again. Read it before you find it conveniently unavailable.

The next book to read is Jack O'Judgement by Edgar Wallace. Something tells me I'm not going to be as enthusiastic about this one.

Until the next time.