3H thinking

Hard-headed and humane philosophy

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Covering Nick Griffin in excrement didn't cover anyone else in glory.

 

Society needs help....but does it need Social Services?

 

My Dad's oldest friend (long since dead, sadly) was a chap called George Royle. A first from Cambridge, he was for many years the Head of Social Services in Liverpool. He used to say that the biggest lie of the twentieth century was "I'm your social worker and I'm here to help you".

In the light of recent revelations (both here and elsewhere) in relation to Britain social care systems, the anecdote is in danger of sounding flip, perhaps even in poor taste. But most of us have long accepted that there are care workers (poorly paid, under-educated and sometimes abusive beyond belief) and social workers - highly educated, better-paid, left-wing on the whole, and often unable to speak anything beyond strangulated cod-psychology English.

Both personally and professionally, I've had occasion to meet and deal with all manner of such social services staff over the last five years. Every last one of them has seemed to me pedantic, process-driven, unable to get beyond cliches, and fiercely protective of their turf. Most of them told me lies (for reasons ranging from a quiet life and budget restraints through to arse-covering) and quite a few of them showed the sort of inflexibility I'd previously only associated with traffic wardens.

But that's just my sample-of-one: what do the porfessionals think?

Well, GPs accuse them of running from gunfire, as do quite a lot of hospital nurses. But the overwhelming response from all the services with which they interreact is one of 'for God's sake don't involve social services, or we'll be here forever'. Aside from the two groups already outlined, I have been given precisely this response by police, hospital consultants, memory clinics, child-minders, and the private aged-care sector. And as for the charge - often made by social workers themselves - that people saying such things have something to hide - my own experiences and the overall facts to hand simply don't support the accusation.

The track-record of social services in the field of quality control in general (and spotting abusers in particular) is dreadful - be they bad guys in other systemic areas, or the friends and relatives of their clients. Indeed, if judges like Stephen Wildblood at Exeter County Court weren't so keen to stick gagging orders on social service cock-ups, many more would come to light.

During the period preceding the death of Haringey's Baby P, Sharon Shoesmith was given many ringing declarations of encouragement and praise for her standards - while the DSS itself gave her middle to high scores on providing the necessary services. Throughout Staffordshire during the 1980s, it was human right lawyers like Richard Wise who blew the whistle on physical and sexual abuse, not the social services. In Plymouth, the Rocking Horse Nursery paedophile ring once again took them entirely by surprise: and in other infamous social work diagnoses, there is evidence that they see abuse where it isn't - as was previously so in Newcastle, Scotland and Blackburn. The nby story featuring Barbara Richards' ghastly life at the hands of these people would be enough to make anyone weep - but it is, trust me, only one among many thousands of others.

While there remain grave doubts about the competence of such people, however, what I want to raise now is another question entirely: 'Competent to do what?' What exactly do they think they should be doing?

Don't waste your time going to the various social services websites - or indeed to the ads they place in various publications inviting job applications: both are completely impenetrable, whether one judges them by known function definition, or simply linguistics.

For example, Barnet social services ('Putting the community first' - where else might a social worker put it?) was at the time of writing advertising a position as Assessment and Enablement Officer. This was the job description:

'In driving the personalisation agenda through direct work with service users, you can have a huge potential impact on them and their carers/families. You will be an initial point of contact who actively engages with people who want to access social work services, conduct individual assessments and facilitate self assessments. Following the enablement approach, you’ll then plan and set up appropriate personalised and outcome-led packages of support that maximise long-term independence and choice and minimise ongoing support and whole life care costs. You will also conduct regular reviews of support plans through structured reassessments, to put in place any necessary revisions.'

This needs no further comment from me, although the drone-clone who wrote it needs to be seriously reprogrammed. Fair enough, I know ads like these are an old target: but after twenty years of universal abuse, have they changed? I suspect the answer is yes - they've got worse.

And herein lies the core of this issue: the profession itself works very hard to make sure that nobody knows exactly what it's working very hard at - and thus quality controllers must employ an equally dense definition of whether they've succeeded or failed in bringing this mysterious goal towards which they are heading any nearer. Sorry, small attack of the social work adverts there.

Today, the only time we find out what they've done wrong is when a Baby P or a Gareth Myatt dies, or two kids jump off a bridge. This is far too late - and, more to the point, not what we should want to know. What we need to ask is 'Are these people doing any good at all?' and 'Is there a better way of ensuring good, humanitarian social care?' In this context, social workers too become a self-perpetuating Establishment: they are unlikely to reinvent themselves, and they certainly won't abolish themselves.

I have a very simple two-part hypothesis based on the evidence to hand and my own experiences. First too many agencies trying to put society right produces endless turf wars - but crucially, somebody else to blame for inaction. The whole approach needs streamlining, and then management by people who can define goals in a more concrete manner than the flim-flam mission statements currently available.

Second - and this is The Big One - I think we need to ask ourselves whether, outside of very clear mental health issues, the State (or official buildings of any kind) are the correct mechanisms and domiciles to use when it comes to 'caring' for vulnerable people. Put another way, by and large social workers get in the way more than they light the way - and once a 'system' is up and running, there are those who will exploit it, as well as others in turn too busy or insensitive to notice what's going on.

I do not doubt that these conclusions will leave me open to yet more accusations of Nazi affiliation. Well, so be it: but if I may dent that argument for one final paragraph, I would include the vast majority of criminals in that definition of 'vulnerable'.

Yes, it's official: I am soft on prisons. The very obvious reasons for this are first, they palpably don't work; and second, they cost a fortune...as the current Home Secretary is currently discovering. Even setting aside the fact that he forgot the soundbite as soon as he'd uttered it, Blair was wrong in 1997 when he did his 'tough on' shtick. There's no point in being tough on crime - once committed, like the tragic social care suicide, it is far too late. The need is for better prevention of crime - via radically rethought social and policing methods. (Not, I might add, by policemen imagining that the too are 'really' social workers).

Some sort of social-problem diagnosis system must and should play a massive part in this prevention process. But I would submit that the current one has been found wanting over and over again. The time has come to look for a radically new approach.

 

New Labour boycotting Marr? The blogosphere will boycott them.

 

It was instructive reading the national paper comment threads last week following New Labour's pathetic threat to boycott Andrew Marr. Boys will be boys and all that, but it's time the knitting circle calmed down and accepted the way the wind's blowing. Had they too read, knitted and pearled those threads, they'd realise immediately how relieved 90% of the public would be if nobody ever interviewed a politician again.

Forty years of media training have reduced such encounters to nothing more than urban media types trying to lassoo the ether created by Spin junkies. For myself, I find Marr's Sunday show fascinating when truly interesting people like Dame Joan Bakewell and David Attenborough are talking about newspaper stories, feminism or species depletion. Once poor Andrew starts trying to deal with the techniques of distraction and obfuscation in which the Establishment indulges interminably in 2009 Britain, the whole thing comes across like Gary Kasparov pondering for two years whether or not to move that Rook: nice if you're a Russian chess freak, but tedious for real people.

In the last year, however, I've realised that there is a far bigger democratic issue at stake here. It is this: the vast majority of politicians now (not counting Gordon's shortlived attempt to give good phone) perceive but one target audience for their worse-than-bark soundbites: the telly stations, the big websites, and the major national press. The ability to appeal direct to ordinary people via the Blogosphere eludes them - probably because the sphere is interactive. Bloggers answer back: and if there's one thing the Establishment hates, it's Joe Blogger answering back.

Alastair Campbell recognises how wrong his clients are. With artlessly unconscious irony, he remarked on a C4 programme recently that "the trouble with the internet is that it's hard to manage". C4's own Krishnan-Guru Murthy laid down a gauntlet at the Labour Conference by proposing this motion for his Twitter fringe debate last week: 'The internet is not for governance, it is for the Opposition'.

I think the creation of this motion title to be a work of pure genius. And my perception in this context is that politicos have suddenly found themselves between a crock and a hard place. While they understand how to manipulate the old media, even they are catching on to its decimation. But rather than truly embracing the New as a place where they can contribute on equal terms, the elite's intrinsic need to control knows not what to do. So the reaction is crude: 'we must smear the sphere, and thus neutralise our fear'.

This will never work. Not only do these folks lack the wisdom of Canute, they are themselves nothing more than obsequious courtiers at the Palace of the One-eyed Man. Brown is no longer ruler of The Kingdom of the Blind: the scales have fallen from the optical equipment of all those ordinary (but as ever, quite extraordinary) British citizens who will no longer go along with Blairite nonsense - especially that which included the ridiculous 'our greatest ever Chancellor' as a soubriquet for his Enemy-friend Gordon.

Over the next decade, I would like to see Big Interviews with small minds become a thing of the past. Being a guarded optimist, I think this quite likely. The internet - like the FA Cup - will always have the potential to be a great leveller. The most likely attribute required for any politician needing to partake in this media future will be humility. How refreshing - and good for our liberties - that will be.

An abbreviated version of this piece was first published at the Guardian's blogspot.

 

COMMON SENSE AND RECOURSE TO THE LAW

 

 

ON THE SUBJECT OF TIME, AND TAKING THE PISS

 

Time is the most influential thing in the Universe. In fact, without it nothing else - light, physicality, heat, electrical energy, chemistry and Life - could exist. Time created our material existence.

The Universe these days casually described as infinite was once so infinitessimally small, it could not be seen by the naked eye - had an eye (naked or otherwise) existed. It was a sub-atomic particle of such density, no amount of parellels involving London buses or grains of sand on a beach could even begin to describe its tininess. But then it became unstable and BANG! there was a Big Bang.

Before the Big Bang there was no Time, but the bang created it by the simple process of exploding outwards and thus creating the first ever series of events. Before then, nothing happened because there was no series of anything: there was just 'is'. An infinity of absolutely nothing whatsoever happening, such as to make a Beckett play seem like your average Wild West B-Movie.

This - and many other nonsensical ideas - is what much of the scientific community would have us all believe created everything that exists today. Or rather, doesn't exist today: because Time, events, things and even we are all illusions. Illusions created by the creation of Time - which is of course itself an illusion.

The 'of course' is ironic. Without irony it's hard to take quantum science seriously. Even with irony, it's little more than a series of daft and contradictory ideas.

For example: 'Before Big Bang there was no Time'. Small flaw in this theory: without Time, no catalyst of chemical change could take place to create instability and explosion. So either there was Time before Big Bang. Or Big Bang is a naff idea.

I tackled my physics teacher Les Lumley with this in 1962. It's not that I was a genius or anything - several of us had spotted the theory's gaping Black Hole - and he went away to think about it. I suspect it had occurred to him too, because he didn't look surprised, and we never got an answer.

However, I'm not a science-rubbisher: far from it, the whole subject of quantum mechanics and sub-atomic physics fascinates me. Because most of it has been backed up by solid field research; and because it chimes precisely with the intuitive preachings of pretty well all the major prophets. But there remains this enormous problem with Time in general, and the Big Bang in particular.

The human mind is incapable of imagining anything being created without some form of concerted and/or methodical system having been involved. 'If there was a Big Bang' we think, 'then something must have caused it'. And the 'cause without intelligence' thing satisifies few if any of us. I have listened to several eminent people telling me that this is merely a function of the human brain's limitiations - but I don't buy it. My common sense tells me that this is a matter of pure logic, not brainpower.

I've already outlined the simple chemical reality that no explosion can take place without Time first of all creating the conditions for a reaction. However, in a Newtonian Universe all experiments carried out correctly are replicable in all places and under all parallel circumstances by others. But in the Einsteinian Universe, this no longer holds good as a principle: in the sub-atomic realm, every experiment can and does produce a different result. And here's the spooky bit: it seems to be the presence of intelligence emanating from different individuals which creates the changes in outcome.

This supports the idea of an illusion in which things may change randomly. But it also lends itself to my own hypothesis: something or somebody somewhere is taking the piss.

If this strikes you as flippant, you should think again. Shortly before his death in the 1950s, Einstein was asked what trying to discover the secrets of the Universe was like. He replied, "It's like playing chess against a Grandmaster who moves the pieces when you're not looking". Or put another way, something or somebody somewhere is taking the piss.

The truth is that I've stuck to my Piss-Taking theory of the Universe since I first came up with it in the late 1970s. Everything that's been discovered since - the French Aspect experiments of 1986, the confirmation of Einstein's belief in electromagnetic waves, and the acceptance that in a realm where Time is of almost zero importance it's all bollocks really - has confirmed it.

I actually think it's entirely possible that the Universe was created by a teenage God somewhere getting his homework very badly wrong. That afterwards, philosophical teachers thought 'What the Hell, let's see what happens'. And that after even that, one especially bitter and twisted teacher - the one who, in my day, always got you to decline Latin verbs while tugging at your sideburns - suggested to the others what a cool concept it would be to keep the products of this experiment guessing about what the Bejesus was going on...using the simple principle of constantly changing what the Bejesus was going on.

All this said, it remains interesting to me that (as a bloke who's suffered from anxiety for much of his life) the one great truth I've stumbled upon over six decades is that banishing Time is the best way to calm down. To remain in what Tolle calls Now and the Busddhists call Presence is the best form of meditation I've yet discovered.

All of which suggests that Time is a bad thing. And the One who created it was a very naughty boy.

 

23% OF GLOBAL NET WORTH LATER, THEY HAVEN'T LEARNED ANYTHING

'FSA steps back from pay rules for banks' (FT,12.8.09)

It seemed to me that nby's return from holiday was a good moment to take stock of the global economic and fiscal situation. And although it may seem at first sight that such a piece doesn't belong in a philosophy column, there are no rules of which I'm aware saying that philosophy has to be unworldly. On the contrary: for me, philosophy has always been about how we hierarchise our personal and social priorities and needs - in short, how we choose to live in the world, and why we do so.

In the Telegraph last Tuesday (11.8.09), arch neo-liberalist Irwin Steltzer offered his usual aplogaeia for the status quo and the American Way. Not merely for the fun of blowing my own sad trumpet, I insert below the comment I wrote in his blog column thread. Chiefly, I think it acts as a good starting point - and summary of where most open minds are at today:

Mr Seltzer demonstrates admirably why he is a curate's egg.
On the one hand, he analyses his postbag with a clarity that exceeds any other summary I've seen on the subject of why mature readers are fed up of incompetent fascists telling them what to do.
But on the other, as always he states the American case with no room for the British one. And (I am bound to remark) as an older head himself, Mr Stelzer has been comprehensively wrong throughout much of the current disasters. But then, as an unashamed neo-liberalist, he would be.
I suspect REAL people in the UK are waiting for some IDEAS about what to do next - as opposed to acres of 'there is no alternative' and jargon-ridden process from both Westminster and Washington.
And please Irwin, no more admiration for Ronnie, OK? Great foreign policy, dumb financial agenda.
What Mr S and all the soi-disant elite need to grasp remains very simple: trickle-down economics and command economics don't work. Globalised banking is a crock. Bourses are an insane way to raise money. Macro-business and monetarism lead to declining creativity and lousy balance in all walks of life. The world's strongest growth period was under the mixed economies of 1952-1975. Everything Milt Friedman was given to play with produced utter disaster.
Marx, Keynes,Reagan,Thatcher, Friedman and Blair are all yesterday's men: what capitalism (and the culture it generates) must do very soon is find a new purpose for itself....beyond enriching an obscenely tiny minority of quasi-autistic Masters of the Universe.
A great many Telegraph readers feel like this, because they were www.notbornyesterday.org

I say 'where most open minds are' with closely-guarded pessimism, because there aren't many of us. One is Ken Rogoff at Harvard, former Chief Economist at the IMF, who wrote the piece at http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/rogoff59 . His prose are considerably gentler than mine, but he is making all the same points.

That said, an odd exercise has been going on for the last two years. Nby has written at (too much) length about it, but I need to reiterate it briefly here. The first bloke to pick up on this was Perry Worsthorne in the Spectator, when he said that bankers had come to represent a similar threat to freedom in the Naughties as the Trade Unions did in the Seventies. Dear Peregrine was too narrow in his choice of collective noun, because it should really have read 'the socio-economic elite'. Of course, he is just a tad right-wing, and would thus shrink from saying that the whole Establishment needs blowing up. But I remain convinced not that there is a conspiracy involved, but rather what I'd term a concerted effort to 'frame' all criticism in a small space called hairy, fart-recycling demonstrators and unpleasant Lefties. It sort of runs along the worn-shiny tramlines of 'there is no alternative and you're just a naive idealist'.

Steadily over the last year (especially in the States) a majority of albeit motley opponents to The System have begun to throw away 'left' and 'right' as words, and instead use more threatening consensus insults like 'disgusting', 'madness', 'grossly unfair', 'amoral' and even 'unforgivable' about everything from City bonuses and MPs' expenses to bank bailouts and the consumer debt culture. When I wrote a piece for a small magazine in March arguing 'a system with no better answer than to double the patient's toxic dose is no system at all', I was overwhelmed by how supportive the comment thread was afterwards - and how it covered all ages, classes and voting intentions.

In the US last Autumn (as Hank 'chicken licken' Paulson insisted on his knees that the planet would spiral out of its orbit without an immediate $890 billion* for Wall Street) literally millions of electors jammed Congressional phone and email systems with one succinct promise: 'rescue these SOBs, and it's the last vote you'll get from me'. Wow - power to the People. And in our own rather laggard and indifferent manner, at Norwich North last month those who did or didn't vote gave out the same message. To have a by-election just months from The Big One in which seven in ten of those entitled to vote supported none of the three main Parties is unprecedented in nearly eight hundred years of Parliamentary democracy in these islands. (See the previous posting below for a more detailed analysis)

However, for me the feature which is already setting the post 2008 world apart from its predecessor is the on the one hand eclectic nature of the alienation, but on the other the consistency of diagnosis. Be it shadowing every male decision-maker with a female in Parliament or insitutional incompetence in Haringey, Freddie Goodwin's deluded arrogance or the speed with which bankers have started grinning again, people can be heard over and over saying the same stuff in focus groups as colours their rants in blog threads: 'Who are these fat, overpaid, bonkers, controlling, greedy, crooked clowns without a scintilla of common decency or sense in their midst?'

Now like it or not, with a bailout in total that cost 23% of world GDP (and fifteen NHSs in the UK) the socio-fiscal can no longer be even artificially separated from the economic. But rather than heeding the fury of those 'beneath' them and the reality of the mess, the Elites have chosen to make precisely that separation. There is but a rice-paper between Obama on the one hand and Brown on the other refusing not only to accept an inevitable impact, but upping their commitment to it in order to 'stay cool with' their voting franchises.

Among those responsible for putting our leaders into office, there are at least signs of sanity. While the most incontinent credit card users have changed nothing in their behaviour (their debts are being consolidated, but continue to rise) most people have pulled horns in very quickly on both sides of the Atlantic. These are the folks from all walks of life who went along with feelgood and the spending culture as long as sites like nby appeared to be barking up the wrong tree, and possibly mad. Once Lehman went under they flocked to the site, doubling the hits in November 2008.

This is the majority to which I refer: only a small percentage became subscribers, but hits (once Google accepted they'd got all their links wrong) stayed at 60% higher than before the crisis. Subscription is also up 32%, but that's irrelevant apart from the warm effect on my ego: these people are not on the whole joiners. They're not Greens or policy wonks, they're not active in anything very much (apart from, increasingly, Facebook). But the one thing they all have in common is an almost total lack of faith in - to be broad once more - The System. When my elder brother (a lifelong Tory and enthusisatic supporter of global capitalism) says to me "Yer know our kid, this just isn't right - they're takin' the piss" you know that something is badly wrong.

The bottom line, I suspect, is that the feminists and globalists and neo-liberalists and all the rest of the Wishful Unthinking Tendency (WUTs) have learned absolutely nothing: they are as patronising, secretive, hopelessly fake and utterly out of touch as they always were. The 'opinion leader' media (as I survey them, endlessly sad and fascinated day by day) don't get it either. Only the Economist and one or two FT thinkers like Martin Wolf continue to raise the question raised elsewhere on this site in Down the Road Apiece : given more and more debt and printing more and more money can only ever be very short-term answers (if we are to avoid killing currency confidence and latent demand forever) what will come after Quantitative Easing? Because after that, only the tired process of bumbling fat blokes is left: when it comes to new ideas, the cupboard is bare. (Even Robert 'Downing Street Line' Peston has sussed this one)

The answer from the WUTs, you will be unsurprised to learn, is that we won't need the QE2 anyway, because everything's tickerty-boo now: the economy's turning round, share prices are rising, and the Global financial crisis is behind us.

As to the last part of that, I agree with them. What they don't seem to comprehend is that - having cost a quite mind-boggling fortune to pull off - it will be replaced by regionally varied econo-fiscal crises of far greater profundity in terms of their knock-on effects upon most of the things we value today: liberty, a welfare safety net, and some form of universal healthcare. Obama is being smeared from head to toe about US health insurance, the NHS is already cutting care to pay for the PFI bill, nobody has the answer to an older and more demented population, nobody knows what to do about the poor half of retiring post-war Baby Boomers, and in Japan there are strong signs that folks with some very different ideas about how to proceed may soon be in Government. And lest we get too smug here, remember that over a third of all Norwich North voters rejected every last dimension of Establishment policy - immigration, the EU, spending more on social care, and even tolerance of other cultures. The whole kit and caboodle was dissed.

The world has never seen change on this scale before. Supranationalism ploughing on in the face of localism, planetary damage coming to the boil, water scarcity which can only get worse, global power shifting to the East, western society coming unglued at familial and community levels, a technological adrenalin-rush laying every emphasis on Right Now, a commercial crisis barely one quarter over, and the growth everywhere of harder and harder attitudes towards those we assumed knew what they were doing, but now appear not to have really understood anything about the anatomyical arrangement of elbow and backside.

The globalised banking domino-fiasco of 2007-8 (predicted here and in thousands of other places) was the warning bell. Most voters have, I think, heard it: in poll after poll, they refuse to accept the brainless optimism of those who think Japanese knotweeds are the very green shoots we seek. But as for the self-styled masterful people on the trading floors and in the legislatures, well - they're busy sticking 'Business as Usual' signs on their wobbly film-set shopfronts.

There is no point in predicting the end of what passes for technological civilisation as we know it, because that is highly unlikely to happen. If China finds itself in a position to hold the rest of us to ransom, there remains an American nuclear option still forty times more than the requirement for mutually assured destruction; and anyway, as a global superpower peopled by highly intelligent and industrious citizens, China has far too much to lose even today. Further, I remain of the view that once capitalist research discovers a way to make money out of desalination, it will do so. The effects of this in turn on the eco-balance in our oceans will then have to be faced: but that is another bridge for, probably, another century.

What is going to change forever however - and call an old bloke mad, but this seems to me as plain as the lengthening nose on Lord Mandelson's face - is the currently assumed presence of two things: large central and supranational government; and a capitalist system sustained by the suicidal models of ever-increasing volume and consumer debt.

As to the first, it would require a thick volume for me to trot out all the reasons why the corporatist State is a dinosaur faced with the triumviral problems of very small brain, very unwieldy body, and rapidly approaching meteor. The Sun headline is dominated by the words tax, waste, bankruptcy and exponentially declining efficacy. Other factors include internet 'demo' power passing to the individual (for all its air-headed nature now, Twitter is showing what the future might hold); an unstoppable backlash against the dependency 'I'm entitled' culture; an inevitable communitising - perhaps even familialising - of spending power, based again on web-driven affinity groups; the desire of most Homo sapiens to be relatively free of dictatorial snooping; and leading into the second area below, the eventual snipping of the pernicious umbilical cord that currently connects the corrupt cadres in big business and big government. The ultimate turkey Gordon Brown can gobble globalglobalglobalglobal until the highland cattle come home: the future is most emphatically not globalist, for the simple reason that Earth's citizens don't want it to be.

It is the denial of those who have everything to lose from new-model economics which will in the end (for a time at least) become rather messy, and very scarey. While neo-liberalist bankers still want the market to decide, they turn to the world's Treasuries when the market does something terminally silly. Equally, while the hubris-fuelled gargoyles of government wish to continue insisting that they can lift us out of poverty, old cars and everything dangerous, when that's no longer affordable they will turn to those very same bankers. Clearly, one day soon this is going to be a case of Oliver Twist asking for more from Wilkins Micawber. When this push comes to shove, Mr Micawber will try his utmost to convince truly free thinkers that "something will turn up". And when that in turn fails to wash, the two will conspire to ensure that the system must be saved from the very people it is allegedly designed to benefit. In this sense, the twisted logic of liberal democrats and free marketeers is every bit as surreal as that of the Soviet era - and just as mendacious in its use of the words 'free' and 'liberal'.

For myself, I am torn: on the one hand still well able to remember the at times hysterically painful experience of having mercurial civil servants and compulsive marketers as clients, I also feel ill at ease with Greens and communitarians whom (it often seems to me) couldn't organise a sexathon in a Viagra factory. I strongly suspect that millions of others share this view: neither Yuppie nor Swampy, they simply want sound administration, good practical solutions and common sense to prevail. If we had electoral systems in the major democracies designed to allow the natural emergence of this view in the form of a new Party, we would have little to fear: it might never gain power (perhaps it shouldn't anyway) but it would have a restraining influence on the mad folks. Patently obviously, we don't have such systems - and this is where in some cultures civil unrest on a hitherto unexperienced scale could well occur. As an immediate UK example, I would cite the recently reported clumsy attempts to prepare a system making householders pay tax for having good views, efficient insulation, new roofs, nice gardens and good furniture. It is government gone mad, and the People would spit it out as they did Thatcher's poll tax.

I'm sorry this has gone on a bit. In the soundbite, online culture of 'six hundred maximum please love - and no long words', it is often assumed that everything can be boiled down to a bit of froth. Well, it can't: I'm all for elegantly neat and simple solutions, but the problem needs to be audited with both depth and breadth. For New Labour (and the Obamites are showing similar signs already) it works the other way round: stuff the problem, what's going to look like a solution? Obviously, neither gesture politics nor Micawber economics can deal with a step-change of this complexity and scale.

One or two lessons have been understood, but not by those who aspire to be our Headmasters and taskmasters: they have learned nothing. I believe there will be violence, and I'm sure the surveillance State will try to stamp it out. But it is our lucky fate to have incompetent idiots unable to get their jackboots on, let alone tread on anything with them. In the meantime, what we will have learned is how to put unbearable web-based pressure on both commerce and government. In time, they will grasp that this process has taken place - and thus no longer wish to do a job with no power. Only then will true power over its own destiny return to the commumnity at local level. After that, we'll have nobody to blame but ourselves.

 

 

ROTTEN BOROUGHS AND PLAGUE VILLAGES

  

While the UK media have focused almost entirely on the short-term Party implications of the Conservative gain in Norwich, for those of us using constitutional awareness and research statistics as the weapons of analysis, the result takes on an entirely different perspective.

At first glance, the result is simply a sweeping victory for Cameron’s Tories: by any definition, turning a safe-ish Government seat into an Opposition majority of 7,348 is not so much a big swing as a deadly right hook for New Labour.

But we live in strange times. The result is, on closer examination of the numbers, the victory of a far more fundamental shift.

First off, viewed as a judgement on UK government and political policy, the result is a disaster for those who would regard themselves as the Establishment in 2009. Excluding the more tangential candidates, total votes cast against the EU, immigrants, Parliamentary ethics, globalist economics and a voting system dominated by two main Parties came to 14,655. This was bigger than Ms Smith’s total (itself nowhere near a majority of all votes cast) but more to the point, a whopping two-fifths of all those who voted.

Further, over half the electorate didn’t vote at all. That’s not so unusual in mid-term by-elections, but a very unhealthy sign when feelings are running this high less than a year before a General Election. One extrapolation must surely be that an enormous proportion of the electorate no longer feel there is any point at all in voting. Given the constituency size, Chloe Smith goes forth to Westminster with the support of 18% of adults who live there. There were eighteenth century rotten boroughs with more democracy than that.

The Liberal Democrats in turn (despite a brave post-declaration cheer) can take little cheer from their vote. They beat the UK Independence Party – a one-issue, demographically narrow and expenses-scandal scarred Party – by just 195 votes. Libdem MEP Sarah Ludford earlier this year described UKIP as peopled by those who ‘hate everything Europe stands for….all they do is rave and vote no’; while David Cameron dismissed them as ‘BNP Lite…a bunch of fruitcakes and loonies and closet racists mostly’. Well, the Monster Raving Racist tendency – viz, UKIP + the BNP combined – attracted more votes than the Liberal Democrats in Norwich North.

At Conservative HQ, this by-election result will go down as another scalp for the Cameroons. Among the plotters on New Labour’s back benches it will yet again cause mutterings and mumblings, and lower morale even further – if such might be possible. But for those who fear for the survival of our system without radical and convincing reform – which so far has not been forthcoming – it will be seen as the most convincing evidence yet that MPs have woefully underestimated the apathy and disillusion that is at large in contemporary Britain.

This is why. Taking the three soi-disant main Parties’ by-election votes this time, just three in ten of those entitled to vote offered their support for any part at all of the House of Commons status quo. Or put another way, what the embittered folks tend to call ‘the system’ was ignored by 68% of the electorate. That’s a lot of alienated people.

Jack Straw spoke to various parts of the UK media earlier this week, expressing his view that the MPs’ expenses reform legislation was ‘a better Bill’ for having the criminal prosecution elements of it removed. The response from Norwich North is that the Westminster Village is now more than simply out of touch: it is a village isolated by a deadly plague it seems unable to cure.

 

END OF EMPIRE

 

CLIMATE, CULTURE & RACE

INTRODUCTION

IS IT A GAME? AND IF SO,WHAT IS IT?

'What game d'you think you're playing?' She cried right from the heart

'You missed me, am I too late?" "No, jump up on the cart".

From the popular song 'My old Man's a Dustman' (Lonnie Donegan, 1958)

I was more than slightly amused the other day to hear a 'loyal' Labour MP referring to the Prime Minister as 'a man on top of his game'. It smacked of the syndrome decribed in the piece below, but more than anything else it made my head start playing with the word 'game'. The word has several meanings, but three above all: a type of meat that is still hunted; a team activity in sport; and a distraction played for amusement, of little or no relevance to big life issues. These are listed in order of seriousness.

Gordon Brown has a powerful whiff of game about him at the moment. Already shot several times, he is hanging upside down until such time as another, better bird can be found - at which time he will be eaten....or thrown away. And yet despite that, you could never describe him as 'a game bird'. Mr Brown is, as everyone but him now realises, a dead duck.

Team sport is one of the ways in which human beings sublimate their brain-wired tendencies towards violence. Although once in South America some years back soccer very nearly resulted in a war between two countries, on the whole it is an acting out of tribal affiliation in which people sometimes get hurt - but very rarely killed. And yet violence between opposing football supporters underlines the reality of its essentially tribal nature. In terms of sheer money, it is of the utmost importance these days; but if you're not that interested in money for its own sake, then team sports are a restorative diversion and nothing more.

The 'parlour game' version of the term usually means either an electronic or board-based game. These can allow us to act out fantasies about defeating space invaders and monsters from an alternative world; or fulfil dreams about having lots of money (Monopoly), being very brainy (Trivial Pursuits), enjoying a life of Piracy (Buccaneer) and so forth. With this sort of game, I would say we have replaced the mortal combat of the amphitheatre: they are a fight to the death for primacy of one individual. (The amphitheatre in its days also replaced the more destructive elements of choosing tribal chiefs that had preceded the greater discipline -f rebublican Rome)

It seems to me that every version of the word 'game' reflects three vital parts of human nature in turn: the desire to killfor survival, the enjoyment of pack safety, and the tendency to become destructive when not given enough serious stuff to think about.

Since God was a boy, politics has been about all three. So too (for most) has the competition of liberal capitalist business. And equally, the social class system works on the exact same principle. Some of it is a deadly game, some of it the secure jubilation of being on the winning team - and some of it the joyous feeling of superiority human beings get from looking down on the less successful. We have leaders, we have clubs, we have schools, we have captains, we have accents, we have qualifications, we have shoots, and we have awards ceremonies. Everything is some form of game in the end.

However, the future of our species and the planet it inhabits is the only game in town these days. And my observation is that in a few cases the players have forgotten the rules, in many cases they have never known the rules, and among a disturbingly high number of citizens, the rules are of no interest to them at all - beyond how they can be broken to their personal advantage.

For the past forty years or more, most people in the West have 'jumped up on the cart' (as the Lonnie Donegan song had it) without thinking too much about its destination or contents. A few have more recently realised we are going to Hell in a handcart at every level - socially, economically, constitutionally, ethically, reproductively and planetarily. But the vast majority of folks remain blissfully unaware - or disbelieving - of the consequences of this. (For a more pointed, perhaps darker, look at the local UK farce, see the article which follows)

As for politicians and business leaders, they are still playing the old games without the remotest clue as to how they can adapt to the new one....the only one worth playing. If you survey the world from Washington via Rio to Tokyo, Moscow, London, Brussels and Beijing, despite the oratory and good intentions of President Obama, the old game-plans are still there - respectively: maintaining US hegemony, dominating a continent, retaining social order, expanding towards old borders, unbridled central Statism, pointless federalism and outright resources-driven imperialism.

Here in Britain, it is depressing indeed to watch an autistic mathematician arguing the toss with a gag-man. And while the Lidem leader is more pointed in his criticisms of this cosy two-tribe Club, he too remains unwilling to talk about the utter irrelevance of almost all of it.

The new game comes more clearly into focus with every year, but one would be hard-pushed to present any of the above concerns as humanity being 'on the ball'. The fact is, this is the Big League; nobody in authority is ahead of the game. And if we as electors and parents and grandparents don't teach those at the top what the new rules are, it will be Game Over before anyone realises.

 

THE FLIGHT FROM REALITY

 

THE PROTECTION RACKET

 

From the tribe to the State, from divine Kings to Parliaments, from Runnymede to the Welfare State – in the history of government, how high has the electorate been up the food chain?

 

How long have we had government now – three thousand years? Four thousand? I ask this question only because increasingly these days, I’m trying to figure out precisely what the advantages are for we, the long-suffering citizens.

And I'm quite happy to go right back to the start - to the first ideas of government. I think the difference between ‘me big strong, hit you unless do as told’ as a form of tribal leadership, and government as such, is first that there’s more than one person (or family) in charge of stuff in the latter case; and second, there’s often a set of ideas that get beyond the physical assault dimension.

One can’t be sure about this, but much of the ancient evidence suggests that a lot of heads got bashed into submission in tribes, which then went off in search of other tribes to bash. Lord knows how many millennia that ran for, but eventually – either because everyone was exhausted, or somebody bashed everyone else simultaneously – we get the birth of a nation….which then goes off to look for other nations to bash, until we arrive at the Empires, Hitler, and Soviet Communism, where Rest of the World-bashing was the order of the day.

We are gradually realising in the West that British, French, German and Dutch imperialism merely interrupted this natural process in black Africa. Still at the ‘step outside and say that’ inter-tribal punch-up stage when the Europeans arrived, the Africans were suddenly confronted with pink folks who had run out of people to bash. So even before an argument could start, they found themselves clubbed into slavery.Readers who think this an insensitive piece of racism in search of a gag should think again. The departure of the white man from Africa simply allowed the locals to start where they left off: the continent’s history since then has been an uninterrupted pavanne of bloody conflict based almost entirely on tribal interests and rivalries. The idea that the white man caused this is quite incorrect; but that he set back the process four hundred years is undeniable.

Meanwhile, elsewhere there were kings, chiefs, witch finders general…the title matters very little. Although first of all in Greece (and then in Rome at the height of the Republic) it occurred to the thinking minority that the leaders tended to get carried away with their own importance, both Empires imploded in the end and the lesson of power-sharing was lost. Although they took many of the leader’s powers away and placed them in the hands of legislatures, eventually the dictators and militarists realised that a diet of bread and circuses was all the mob needed to persuade them that Senates get in the way too much and we don’t need them anyway. This is almost exactly the advice given by the clown ‘Lord’ Birt to Tony Blair in 2003, but we’re getting ahead of ourselves here.

In fact, we must fast-forward to 1215 to find a modern example of the concept of a legislature with real power. But at Runnymede, England in that year, King John was somewhat gruffly informed by his noblemen that there would either be a Parlement or a beheading. Wisely, John chose the former option. For me, this is more or less when real modern-age government began: that is, about the time taxes became things beyond a means of simply financing all the other-bashing. Although this is a gross over-simplification, apart from brief intervals after that, most of Europe adopted similar legislatures over time. Some were window dressing and some had real power, but ultimately the so-called ‘divine right of Kings’ fell out of favour, because it ended in tears, bloodshed and bankruptcy far too often.

However, it is only since the mid nineteenth century that government has meant anything beyond a vague ‘protecting the citizen’ role. The first ‘welfare’ as such started under the UK’s L iberal Party in 1911 – but only then under pressure from the growing power of the Labour Party. After that – and the Bolshevik revolution in Russia – there was acceptance that the condition of the people was a direct government responsibility….or else. And then after 1945, most European nations had a consensus of left-leaning social democracy.

Now there’s a very important point here: not only did most modern government adopt this responsibility as a form of self-defence (against Communism) but it took them seven hundred and forty years to get round to it in any serious sense. The USA never did, and even under Obama there is already criticism of money designated for social rather than economic and infrastructural uses. It is only over the last sixty years in Britain that the voters have owed anything to government beyond the right to be blown apart dashing from one pointless trench to another. Furthermore, the Kennedy Democrat/Euro-consensus lasted just twenty-five years, after which Reagan and Thatcher turned back in the opposite direction. They promised to make the citizen better off – ie richer – and while the trick worked for a while, it has collapsed twice in the last thirty years (this last time with disastrous consequences for everyone except the super-rich).

What they (and then Blair and Bush and Brown and Merkel) gave the Anglo-Saxon nations was more money. But there were two caveats: mountainous debt, and the strong likelihood that in time this money would be near-worthless.

In short, looking after the governed is not a role government has set itself with what you might call any urgency or consistency in the years since the thirteenth century. And as we are all seeing today in the UK, they are very quick to forget who works for whom….whatever their political persuasion. When faced with the reality of their general unhelpfulness in the face of adversity, our leaders tend to fall back on two answers: ‘not our fault’; and ‘ah yes, but don’t forget we’re still protecting you’. So we need to examine each of those responses in turn.

‘Not my fault’ is of course Gordon Brown’s get-out of choice, but surely no ‘leader’ can opt out of responsibility on the basis of ‘not my fault’ – otherwise, Hitler would’ve won, thanks to politicians saying ‘I didn’t start anti-Semitism and German lebensraum nationalism, ergo not my fault’. Neville Chamberlain tried this approach, but in the end even he had to give it up as a non-starter. Often, the ‘not my fault’ defence falls down on the more straightforward basis of being a downright lie. In the case of Brown, this would apply to Britain’s shortage of gold. When it comes to the British Party system, it would apply equally to voter apathy (‘they’re all crooked, boring arseholes, so why bother?') and our woefully poor educational standards. That this dreadful state of affairs is the direct result of their spineless and corrupt actions is – for everyone else – no longer even a matter for serious debate.

But it’s in the protection arena that those in charge are not so much ringmasters as clowns. And at this juncture we come face to face with my double-whammy gripe: most of the bogey-men who might gobble us up seem to me the products of lively government imagination; whereas the real dangers and nutters don’t appear to take much fright from any of the recriminations, warnings and preparations emitted by the Elite on an almost daily basis.

When it comes to Al Qeida, for example, I’m joined at the hip to the Sunday Times’s Rod Liddle, who wrote in The Spectator (September 13 th 2008), ‘Muslim terrorists are the most cowardly, stupid enemy we have ever faced’. Harsh but fair, Rodders, and I hope the police escort isn’t getting you down too much. He’s right of course, but he should’ve added that without a Tsunami of scare-tactics orchestrated by the Home Office and their allies in MI6, nobody would ever have imagined otherwise: most Islamic bombers burn to death and bugger up their operations without harming anyone or anything. No wonder they’ve adopted the suicide bomber approach: as a last-resort way to hide incompetence, it has no equal. The idea (as I’ve written many times before) that a finely honed and rigidly disciplined global covert army of Arab SAS will kill all of us unless we bow to the idea of ID cards is about as potty as propositions get. The Islamic bombing campaign (while its recruitment techniques are an abomination of cynicism and psychopathy) is literally a case of giving twenty thousand monkeys a typewriter: sooner or later one chimp will type ‘BANG!’, and people will die.

No surprise then that, in order to up the batting average, Muslim terrorists choose the most crowded places they can find. And then, to ensure that the fuse goes all the way to the end without fizzling out, they stay to watch. The truth is that Al Q’eida is a rag-bag of argumentative cells - with unwanted add-ons who use the branding’s cachet as and when it suits their book. But even this shower were quick enough off the mark to bam boozle the security forces in 2005. And when it looked for a second like we might actually catch one in the act, our police shot the subject thirty-eight times in the head. We are, after all, dealing with those who have magical powers, and thus thirty-eight silver bullets in the brain are de rigueur. Shame the bloke turned out to be a South American student.

Things have got to a pretty pass when we are reduced to creating fear about birds, but starting in late 2007 this is precisely what happened. ‘Bird Flu is here!’ yelled the Express after one unfortunate swan flapped his way across the Channel and then collapsed dead onto our shores. What if the Deadly Virus skipped from one species to another? What if it skipped to humans? Well, very probably most of us would die, but none of us did because neither speculative event came to pass. This year we have Swine Flu from Mexico, and the virus has indeed spread very quickly. But once again the what-if brigade have been at it – despite the fact that no healthy person outside central and north America has yet succumbed to its deadly symptoms, ie a heavy cold. Time may yet prove me wrong of course, but even if it does I shall not repent: we have had so many agents of alleged global plague in my lifetime, I shall simply take the view that every professional Job stands a decent chance of being right in the end, albeit just the once.

But while the governments take credit for controlling these outbreaks, in reality they are contained on the ground thanks to the genuine skills, foresight and dedication of both public and private health agencies. Federal and National departments supply little beyond funds and news conferences: the real thinking and doing work is carried out by organisations which are – at their closest – on the outer fringes of government. Also of course, the viruses wind up fizzling out because (if tackled properly and early) they are not really dangerous to most of us at all.

 

So much for the invented bad karma: what about the really nasty things and people in the world – how are the Establishment dealing with those? The answer is ‘not very much at all really, all things considered’. The list of potential disasters being more numerous than a Gordon Brown Parliamentary answer, it would be just as well at this point to summarise each in turn and then conclude about the degree of protection we’re receiving.

Population control. If we halved the world population, most of our major species/planet problems would be reduced or solved at a stroke. To date just one government – the nasty one in Beijing – has tried to tackle it. They haven’t really succeeded. As far as we know from published information, no major government is even discussing it.

Global Warming. 62% of global warming is caused by Homo sapiens and the livestock which are bred and reared for its diet (see above). To date, only the Swedes (and to a lesser extent the French) are anywhere near self-sufficiency in carbon-neutral energy provision. Most governments have set targets, none of which are anywhere near enough, and all of which to date have been missed.

Energy depletion. The very fossil fuels which our growing population exploits to feed itself have resulted in a whopper of an ozone hole plus the mass release of greenhouse gases. Belatedly, advanced governments are clambering hastily onto the nuclear bandwagon as a medium term solution, but even this is non-replaceable: people forget that there is only a small amount of uranium on and under the Earth. Wind power is being ludicrously hyped, and wave power (despite much greater potential) increasingly abandoned.

The obvious long-term answer is the huge hot shiny thing that sits in the sky and blasts out free energy of staggering dimensions. When asked, the UK Government replies to enquiries about solar power with woffle such as ‘feasibility study’ and ‘early assessment of the upsides’. In other words, no real research is taking place. The Americans, Australians and Chinese are doing so, but for the time being their main focus by far is on grabbing what’s left of the dwindling fossil-energy supplies. (See later under Chinese Imperialism)

Water scarcity. The problems with global water supply are as follows: Most of it is saline; of the rest, most of it evaporates or lands in remote areas; while the human population has grown 5000% in 50,000 years (and most of that in the last fifty) the amount of water on the planet remains unchanged; water companies have failed to invest properly in infrastructure, and so much of that being delivered is wasted; only 5% of the world’s population has access to the fifteen gallons a day of clean water it is estimated each human being needs to allow for hygiene, combating disease and staying alive; the climate is heating up and drought becoming more commonplace; no measures of great significance have been enacted by governments to either improve the reservoiring of water or reduce household consumption.

In my view, the water issue ties for first place as a global problem with population control – and of course they are mutually interdependent.

The British water industry is in private hands, control of its investment and profiteering are toothless, and the Environment department has no fleshed-out plans to improve conservation.

Islamic militancy. I refuse to use the ‘ist’ word, on the obvious grounds that it is a cynical invention to disguise the fact that many Islamics are merely fellow-travellers who privately approve of what mad Islamists are doing.

I noted earlier that the World Terrorist Threat bogey is nonsense. But the actively aggressive intention of Islam to convert everyone else to their mediaeval beliefs – and refusal to accept the social mores of those countries in which they settle – are problems which will remain intractable until non-Islamic governments accept that there is no compromising with ruthless and deluded fanatics.

In Britain, the appeasement of Islam continues – although it was slowed down by the 2005 bombings. The pc-riddled Establishment refuses to grasp the nettle, and has done nothing to persuade our Muslim population that their long-term aims are quite simply unachievable in a mono-cultural democratic State.

The new US President Barack Obama has taken the line of ‘dialogue’ in dealing with the mad folks. My hunch is that this is an ‘OK, but at least I tried’ strategy which will, in the end, justify more drastic action as and when it is becomes necessary – as it inevitably will. If this is not Obama’s real motive, then the policy is hopelessly misguided.

Chinese Imperialism. The Chinese Government remains as enigmatic as always. It is difficult to see whether their creeping territorial and financial colonisation of Black Africa is motivated by the short-term need to secure access to dwindling raw materials, or merely part of a longer-term desire for global domination.

Either way, to date our ‘protection’ against their expansionism has been a big fat zero. Not a single piece of suppression (in T ibet) or obvious financial invasion (in South Africa) has even raised a peep of protest in the West. And whatever a nation’s aims, the ability to realise them without any opposition whatever will always encourage the appetite.

While many fear Russian expansionism in the same way, the data suggest that Russia remains an economic basket-case armed with poorly made and largely outdated weaponry. It’s only bargaining chip is oil, which – in the face of zero EU ‘protection’ of our interests – they have been allowed to use to some advantage. But oil is a yesterday energy, and the RF’s window of opportunity is closing rapidly. We are more likely in the medium-term future to be rescuing the Russians rather than fighting them.

Financial meltdown. This subject has been done to death. Suffice to say that while the financial institutions and their managements have been given total protection, it has been with our money. Some of their now valueless investment products have been ‘guaranteed’ by governments – but here too the shielding of all of us from technical bankruptcy has been done using our paid taxes, and at the cost of debt we cannot realistically expect to service.

The 2008 banking collapse was a classic case of one privileged elite baling out another. The citizens – the governed – are the ones who have paid to be protected. But the protective shield is made of increasingly devalued paper.

Economic slump. While hard to separate from the previous point, the failure of debt- driven, consumption-orientated capitalism is clear for anyone with normal vision to observe. While in the UK New Labour insists that the poorest and over-mortgaged, the unemployed and graduate classes, are being protected (‘lifted out of poverty’) the claim is a lie which would be obscene were it not so comical.

The Government offered no warning, no advice and no budgetary change of policy to alleviate the coming pain. Hiding behind the ridiculous idea that ‘nobody could’ve seen it coming’, the Establishment is even now in denial about our over-dependence on financial services (62%), lack of agriculture (2%), hopeless exporting performance despite a cheaper currency, and utter lack of preparation for the new economic era into which we are now very painfully passing.

The Brown government’s only defence is fantasist invention – ‘far better equipped to handle the coming crisis than any other nation’ – alongside denial of the discredited nature of two-thirds of our source of national income.

Community/family breakdown and the drug culture. The largest share of hard drugs come into Britain from Colombia and Afghanistan. The US is at last treating the Colombian barons as a serious through to our civilisation. The UK government is in Afghanistan, but so far failing to achieve the destruction of drug crops. The Chinese cynically allow the third source – Asia – to carry on supplying the West with social and medical poison. Drug-associated gun crime is through the roof in our inner cities, recreational use continues to increase: many now argue that so much of the Establishment is either using drugs or uninterested in the subject, the epidemiology of regular drug usage is unstoppable.

Thus far we have been given no protection against this beyond stuttering actions by anti-drugs police who lack funds and morale.

There are many, many causes beyond recreational or addictive drug usage for family and community breakdown, but the major part of the blame for it must be laid at the door of political class. This section of society (a) helped encourage (and refused to condemn) it (b) sucked more and more power out of communities and into a disgracefully wasteful Westminster money-pit (c) ignored the statistics recording the accelerating fall in standards of socio-sexual behaviour (d) spectacularly failed to make young males pay the price for feckless relationships (e) made accommodation for many of the resultant single-parent families a social priority and then (f) adopted the spin approach to denying a problem existed – the classic ‘this is not a situation I recognise on the ground’.

Only the Liberal Democrats in the UK have solid proposals for how to tackle the problem, although the Cameron Conservatives are willing to accept the dissolution of society’s glue as one of the biggest problems Britain faces. To date, however, no Party has either outlined an action plan or talked of creating a Department dedicated to tackling it.

Protection? A collapsing judicial system, a bursting prison system, falling levels of violent crime detection, and police being handed idiotic income targets.

 

It’s all rather depressing, isn’t it? Except that it is more than just depressing: pathetic is more the word that springs to my mind. But ultimately, the description closest to the empirical nature of the governing/governed deal is scam. If you doubt this, let me sum up. For the best part of eight hundred years now, first England and then Britain has been ruled by folks who protected us by taxing us….and then inviting us to get killed for the privilege of being taxed and British. (In the naval sense, if we said ‘no thanks’, they went down to our pubs and did some more of the bashing thing until we were unconscious – waking up later on board His Majesty’s Vessel with a painful headache and a strong chance of losing a limb.)

Only when it looked at first like a fairer system might do them out of an easy life did our Leaders provide us with pensions and free health services – the respective catches being that the pensions were both taxed and devaluing year by year, while the Health ‘service’ quickly evolved into a system under which we were fed crap out-of-copyright drugs and told everything was alright when it quite clearly wasn’t….despite having paid for it month in month out for the best part of forty years. Since 1940, we have been left unprotected from the Nazis (Dunkirk), atomic warfare (‘Protect and Survive’), drug companies (Thalidomide), pollution (killer smogs), workplace coercion (the Unions), loss of home (negative equity), savings value (inflation), savings value again (Brown’s Dawn Raid in 1998), community destruction (multiple food retailers), commercial cheating (Rip-Off Britain), savings value yet again (stock market crash 1989), and once more with the stock market crash (2008), mass unemployment (global slump 2009), double-charging (banks), interest/loan rate manipulation (banks again), massive debt (banker bailout 2007-2009), loss of monetary value yet again (1966 and 2009), tax waste (NHS, EU et al), crooked investment banks (packaged toxic debt 2008-2009) and last but not least, crooked legislators (the expenses scandal, 2009).

From start to finish of this process of being our governers, the Civil Service and its index-linked pension bill got bigger and bigger every year without exception.

As the process unfolded, Britain became the most watched, taxed, unequal, bombed, secretive, commercially crooked and legally illiberal society in Western Europe.

And at the end of that process of being shepherded and shielded, the average British citizen found him and herself saddled with an ignorant, crime-riddled, violent, drunken, deluded, materially obsessed, selfish and debt-ridden culture Above this mess, however, were just under 650 elected legislators variously abusing, defrauding, betraying, ignoring and despising the very people who had put them there in the first place.

And lying ahead were structural problems of manufacturing base, farming capacity, water conservation, Arab and Chinese economic power, astronomical national debt, filthy energy production, the biggest tax rises in history, a devaluing currency, feral children, poorly integrated immigrants, a crisis in State pensions, potential hyper-inflation, and an ageing population for whom the care options were becoming increasingly unacceptable.

The inevitable conclusion one has to reach is that the role of government as working on behalf of the People to protect them is an invention necessary to justify a few people at the top taking the piss. Presented as the raison d'etre of government, 'protection' is in fact an excuse for the madness to continue.

There is no 'deal' - new or otherwise - and there never was. There is only a Sting, entirely reliant on two factors to make it viable: apathy in the citizenry, and increasingly repressive powers to shut up anyone who cries shame.

Finally - at five to midnight - the British electorate has woken up. Well, some of it has: the majority are still distracted by braindead television featuring dysfunctional fame-wannabes: me Simon Cowell, lion - you Susan Boyle, Christian.

But the anger will subside. And then the quiet repression alongside soothing bullshit will return - until people are given truly local power to change their communities for the better; until civics is taught as a key subject in schools; until real willingness is shown by voters to dismantle the privilege enjoyed by the few; until MPs finally learn that question-avoidance dusgusts people; until the voting system offers more democracy and choice to the People; until a new role is found for work, employment and post-Crash capitalism; and above all, until the values of our culture go back to an understanding that there is more to life than consumption.

 

EVERY SMALL MINORITY IS AN INTOLERANT MAJORITY IN THE MAKING

GOOD AND BAD IS A TWO-WAY STREET