Damned if we do - damned if we don't....a small saga.

Due to recent events, I have been trying to wrap my brain around all this mess we are facing these days. I may be childish and naive as I do not quite understand the international monetary business of this world, let alone politics! So in order to attempt to understand what is happening, I simplified it all and came up with a small story about a small family run icecream business in Wales......This is a very simple version of how I understand the situation:

 

Once upon a time there was a farmer that in his spare time made the best icecream in Wales. His icecream was so delicious that he was famed all through out the land and people came from far away places just to get a taste. Shops started to order the icecream and before long business men approached the farmer that wanted to open up subsidiaries in other places in the United Kingdom based on his recipe. The farmer agreed to sell rights to his icecream and a few small manufacturers were opened up before long. One in Aberdeen and another in Manchester. They produced the farmers recipe and sold a lot of icecream in their regions. But the business men became a little greedy and devised a new recipe for a new type of icecream even more delicious. They started mass producing the icecream and sold a lot of it in their home counties. The farmer was not a part of this new recipe and had nothing to do with it. 

However, one day a batch of the icecream got contaminated, the milk and cream from a local health authority approved source (totally seperate from the farmers source) was traced to be the culprit and many people got seriously ill as a result. Both subsidiaries in Manchester and Aberdeen were shut down immediately and the poor farmers icecream business too as a result. 

But the matter was still unresolved. People that suffered from the tainted icecream needed to be compensated but the health authorities that should have been awake and monitoring the local food sources didn't want to accept the blame. They blamed the farmer and his local health authority as they were monitoring him. As a small county in the UK the Welsh health authority tried to promote peace and participate in accepting accountability even though they had no jurisdiction in the regions from where the contaminated ingredients where sourced, based on the origins of the icecream company on the whole. The other health authorities, recognising their victory in passing the blame, used that fact to demand the compensation to be paid by the Welsh authorities. The Welsh council as a result faced a huge debt to the other counties involved to the tune of 40.000 pounds per family in Wales. The UK government stepped in and sided with Manchester and Aberdeen and threatened to cut off all ties to Wales, stop all other business with Wales and isolate the county from the rest of the UK, if they did not pay. Businesses went bankrupt, people lost their jobs and livelyhood. The local council was pinned between a rock and a hard place, damned if they paid the debt, damned if they didn't....The UK government was adamant in it's claim and forced the authorities to agree to a repayment scheme that would continue to make life really hard for all the families in Wales for many years to come. The council only agreed to this scheme because the option not to would mean even more hardship for everyone in the region....everyone that did not have anything to do with the icecream business......

Then the mayor stepped in and refused to sign confirmation on this scheme and decided to let the people of Wales vote on the matter.....vote on how to pay the compensation back, not whether, as the local health authority had already asumed responsibility........there still was not much choice in the matter

To be continued........

Athugasemdir

[Bjarndís Helena Mitchell, 8.1.2010 kl. 14:51]

Maybe, due to the scale of the problem at hand and the big picture, the location should not be the whole of Wales, but maybe Wigam or a small village! I don't know....