Kmflett's Blog

The Ambridge Socialist

23^rd May

No sympathy for ruling class hooligan Alice. Prosecute her now!

It has been another week of crisis in Ambridge for Alice and a widening circle of people impacted by her actions.

It culminated with Alice being refused service in the village shop (she wanted a bottle of vodka) & then smashing the shop window with a brick. She was interviewed by the ever (not on the ball) Borsetshire police, apologised and that was apparently that. Brian Aldridge has offered to pay for the damage and clear up.

There are complex and intertwining issues of gender and class at work.

The Ambridge Socialist has sympathy with Alice, a new mother unable to cope for a potential range of reasons. We are certainly not of the Priti Patel lock them up tendency. That said if it had been a supporter of the Ambridge Socialist who bricked the village shop over its refusal to stop selling the S*n rather than a member of the Ambridge ruling class, we suspect matters would have gone rather further than a word at the police station.

Indeed according the always authoritative Academic Archers FB page the Ambridge ruling class got a free pass here. The decision whether to prosecute is for the CPS not Inspector Knacker and while they may well take the wishes of victims of a crime into account, criminal damage is often considered a serious enough matter to prosecute come what may.

The story has dominated BBC coverage of Ambridge for a while and there are other issues that deserve attention however.

Tories to pay senior farmers to retire. Ambridge will be decimated

The Government has unveiled a scheme to get farmers of a certain age to retire with a payment so that younger farmers more open to modern ideas like GM crops and so on can make their way.

Needless to say the sums proposed were rather larger than redundancy payouts (capped at £15K) and also needless to say the Tories aren’t actually providing any new money just having a rejig. Finally in the obvious points area, rich farmers will get more- potentially up to £100K than less well-off ones with smaller holdings.

The money probably isn’t enough to get farmers to retire without also selling or shutting down the farm but it could surely impact a swathe of Ambridge’s ruling class from David Archer and Brian Aldridge to Justin Elliott.