Analysed properly, new-news is a series of signposts

One way of thinking about a ‘new news’ story is to see it as a portent. By ‘new news’ I mean something off-the-wall and unexpected that isn’t a natural disaster. Last night at random I chose a week of Slogposts in October. I think you’ll agree they make the point pretty well. And the points they make individually are pretty awful.

October opened with a piece about sketchy evidence emerging of some rum policies being set in place at RBS by Stephen Hester and his chums. Within a fortnight this had turned into the SME-asset rape scandal involving most High Street banks.

This was swiftly followed by a glaring example of how, having helped create welfare needs, a US bank was now profiting from the money transmission involved in it. Unsurprisingly, the bank was JP Morgan Chase. Over the next three weeks across America, stories emerged of rich banks ripping off the Federal Government in schemes to do with housing relief and repossession patience. (The banks were secretly planning to ditch this last).

Jimmy Savile, it next emerged, had been a serial paedophile. I opined that this was unlikely. Cue 3,000 stories about abuse victims of Jimmy Savile. I accepted my mistake, but pointed out that his case was a distraction from the real meat and drink of sexual abuse. Guess what this has all turned into now.

Suddenly from left-field came a story about ‘irregularities’ in the award of the West Coast train fiasco. Sir Richard Branson, it seemed, was upset. An enquiry had been set up. I know how Branson works. It soon emerged that he had nobbled Cameron. The ‘irregularities’ have quietly disappeared into the mist.

The political conference season began to the sound of yawning citizens and the snores of the cynical. There were the usual ethereally empty promises. By the end of it, no fewer than seven top MSM columnists of note had observed just how irrelevant the Conferences now seemed, and how every Party’s support at grass roots had declined dramatically.

Soon afterwards, the atrocities of Bashar Assad began to fill almost every newspaper in Britain. I started picking up new angles on the US interest (and interference) in Greek politics. A month later, Greek socialist Alexis Tsipras is actively talking to the Americans, and we have seen perhaps the most brazenly orchestrated Anglo-American propaganda war against Assad, and in favour of the rebels who wish to remove him, in recent history. And of course, ‘spillage’ of the war into Turkish territory.

Towards the end of that week, stories emerged from the massive Earls Court development project in London. These concerned poor residents being bribed and bullied into supporting the plan, which is yet another of the many children in Boris Johnson’s overcrowded slum of a brain. Since then BoJo has continued his policy of Cameron-baiting, limelight-hogging and idiotic pronouncements in favour of the Bad Guys. (Yesterday’s piece about Lord McAlpine was a classic). Johnson continues to emerge as the one UK pol openly following a strategy of barrack-room populism alongside assiduous licking of every neocon he can snuffle out from beneath the damp fungus of our culture. It is a quite remarkable example of polished but brutal bass neck.

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A week in snapshot can thus be cropped, and conclusions drawn, as follows. The banks are switching from discreet to daylight robbery. Paedophilia rings are viewed by the Establishment in the same way that the FBI’s Hoover regarded the Mafia: a myth. The media overall view it as a celebrity story, and have little interest in it beyond that. Crony capitalism is stepping out of the shadows and into everything from the NHS to our education system. Our civil service isn’t that different to the Greek version. The UK political Party construct is no longer integrated at all into our social culture: if it resembles anything today, it is an alien who got caught fitting some new masks. Anglo-American wolf-and-puppy foreign policy in the Eastern Med and Middle East is heading for a showdown nobody needs. And woe betide British liberties if Boris Johnson ever gets control of the Conservative Party.

Now of course, Greece, Spain, the EU, the US election, the NHS crisis, the economic crisis and the financial crisis all provided hacks with the fodder for several thousand square miles of reportage devoid of any real insight, foresight, analysis or broader context. But the new-news I pick out above is the stuff to watch, because it acts as a vital clue about which particular land of Silk and Money we are heading for next. And the process continues.

The central point of The Slog (and a million other similar sites) is to render this path to Hell a self-denying prophecy. But if the signpost marked Globalist Sociopathy is to be pulled up and burned on the bonfire of inanities, Radical Reality will finally have to penetrate even the most distracted brain.

This is in turn going to require dramatic changes in behaviour at all levels. In my own personal life (which isn’t in great shape at the moment) the last few months have involved cathartic decisions about tackling the last vestiges of denial, and focussing on survival in every sense. Many others will face the same decisions: the choice they make will, I’m afraid, decide which side they’re on.

Taking sides – I admit – does not sit well with a blogger constantly asking people to dump old tribalisms and forge new ideas. But while it’s ironic, it isn’t contradictory. I want to ditch the habitual socio-political and economic commitments, and give everyone a choice: to be engaged in at least some small degree in the process of restoring citizen sovereignty….or to stay put in the moaning, glazed-eyed “yeh whatever” isolation they seem to find so cynically smart.

Whether you are UKIP or LibDem, Socialist Workers’ Party or BNP, Tory or Labour, there is one reality I suspect over 85% of Britons would now accept: we the citizens are not sovereign – and in fact, most powerful people in public life are working for the forces antithetical to that sovereignty. The Government is with Them, not Us.

The Them spectrum is a rainbow of undeserved privilege. Multinational tax-evaders, frontal-lobe behaviour bankers, unelected media owners, intolerant religious fanatics, secretive groups, exclusive clubs, bent mandarin pension-embezzlers, GCHQ, corrupt policemen, Brussels eurocratic accounts fiddlers, overpaid footballers, over-exposed celebrities, corrupting lobbyists, health-provision carpet-baggers, covert trade union controllers…and above all, the legislators there to do Their bidding and ignore Our innocent monetary and cultural impoverishment.

What can we count as victories from here on, if and when they occur? That would take a book to describe. But some elements would I think be far more significant than others. A sensible approach to incarceration for the criminal poor, with far more hard-nosed application of redemption strategies, would be good. So too would far more executive-level crooks banged up and learning some humility in another part of that system. Putting an end to all political contributions and exercising strict limits on lobbying would be a major step forward….as would voting reform designed to break the stranglehold of the Party machines.

But at base, we simply cannot get away from the prime needs: to clear out those ‘in charge’ who have lost the plot (and have no new one except self-enrichment); to establish a clear equality before the law; to put citizens first and increase their responsibilities; to free ourselves from the fascists across the Channel; to make multinationals pay their way; to depoliticise the police; to drastically reduce State surveillance; to abandon multiculturalism; and to make everyone high or low, rich or poor, truly accountable.

Two forms of comment thread will now be unleashed upon me: accusations of being a Nazi Communist out of touch with the real world, and grumbles about the lack of detail. To which I have two answers: leave the politics of the 1930s behind you, and read the pages shown at the top of the site while using the search engine.

Above all, what ‘new-news’ measures millimetre by millimetre is cultural change. Over the last fifty years, we have moved from a socially stable, ethical guilt, and largely monogamous model to one where familial and community units are falling apart, ethics are for wimps, and sexual libertinism is admired. I freely admit that my generation must take a huge share of the responsibility for that, given its massive influence on both the 1960s and 1980s. But the task now is to stop denying that adverse change has occurred, and release ourselves from the chains of archaic loyalties.

For the blogosphere, I think, the objective remains the same outside of pure selling. That is, constant, regularly repeated, and evidenced case histories observing that the Kings are in the altogether, and we can see their bollocks.