Margo Grimshaw

Margo Grimshaw is a long standing public figure in Blackburn. She owned pubs and nightclubs in the town that I used to frequent. She has made money and lost money on various business ventures in the area. Now she is a columnist for the Lancashire Evening Telegraph.

I read the Telegraph because it is our local paper, however I'm not a big fan. It's very unashamedly left wing and forever publishing stories about how terrible the cuts are.

Strangely enough for a columnist in the LET, Margo seems to be somewhat of a Libertarian. I suppose being successful in business and paying your own way in life while creating the same opportunities for others, comes from a system of values based on freedom rather than state intervention.

I've been increasingly impressed with Margos articles, particularly one about students paying the rent and another on common sense.

Her latest one is about certain, high profile gaffes, that have been made recently by politicians. It's entitled,

Free speech? It can be a bit of a fallacy

and I shamelessly reproduce it, in full, here:

FREE speech, it’s a bit of a fallacy!
We all desperately want to talk about things that concern us, such as religion, housing, benefits, immigration, the economy, the war in Afghanistan, because there are things about all those subjects that worry us and which we aren’t entirely happy about.
But, can we discuss them openly without fear of someone saying ‘hey, you’re stepping out of line if you don’t agree with the politically given’?
We can’t, because we are told not to speak about benefit scroungers, because then you’re stepping on the downtrodden toes of the poor; if you discuss religion, you’re an unbelieving atheist and you must, on no account, bring up the subject of immigration, for whatever it is you have to say will be misconstrued as racist.
Rational debate on what is, or is not, good for us and the country is not allowed, so we must accept whatever the government decides is right and just keep our opinions to ourselves!
But, it seems, we are not the only ones.
For even those in high office have been in trouble this week for speaking their minds — which for a politician is a nice change and, as you are well aware, a very rare occurrence.
So, the belief we have free speech has been shown not to exist — and been blatantly demonstrated by the fact that Lord Young and Howard Flight have been reprimanded and demoted for saying out loud what they believed.
And now there’s talk of a ‘happiness’ survey to assess how happy we are and how it affects our daily lives.
Funny thing to measure, happiness. To me it can often be retrospective, for many times we only realise that we’ve been happy after the event.
Happiness can be fleeting, fragile and destroyed in a moment, by bad news or a sad event, so I think contentment might be a better aim, which is a little more permanent and probably easier to maintain.