United we stand, divided we fall

This post is early today, because I’m off down to see close chums in Cahors. Now you see, if I was a politician, I’d say “This post is ahead of schedule because I’ve beaten my targets”. Whereas the truth is, I’m skiving off at 4pm to stay overnight with friends, which means we can all get hysterically drunk without having to worry about les flics on the way home.

Nevertheless, the post is more important than most to me, as I will try to explain.

Trust – or rather, the lack of it – has become a central issue for all of us over the last two decades. It’s one of the reasons I thought yesterday’s farcical verdict in the Jeremy Forrest Case was particularly dumb when set in the context of a child-teacher downloading images of kids in their underwear. Why is a known porn user more trustworthy than a bloke who shagged a student who was, in effect, almost a woman? My view is, “Neither of them are, so fire them”. But the porn-star got his job back, and Forrest got five years. Go figure.

We have to be able to trust people we don’t know that well (or are getting to know better) but in our current situation – with its deadly combination of paedophile concerns, economic collapse, Sovereign thieving and the technology of the internet – trust is becoming well nigh impossible. I have news for you folks: the last culture in which nobody could be trusted was called East Germany. I can tell you from personal experience, it wasn’t a nice place to live.

Let me lay out for you some of the trust lines that have been broken since I was a young man. The genders don’t trust each other any more. The old don’t trust the young any more – and vice versa. Many internet users no longer trust the traditional news media. The EU member States don’t trust each other. Supplicants don’t trust priests, parents can’t trust teachers, and nobody trusts politicians, police or bankers.

As most of you are aware, I do not believe in most cases that evidence of concerted action proves conspiracy as most of us would understand it. I think that what happens very often, however, is that powerful groups see threats to their existence looming over the horizon…and so they all do pretty much the same thing. But there is no conspiracy. The Thatcher government clung to the belief that all trade unions were out to destroy the capitalist system, but that was bunk: what they did was quite rightly see their highly privileged block-vote, anti-democratic closed shop under threat from the Baroness – and so they all organised their members in their own way.

I think that’s what the political Establishment is doing at the moment, for instance. Most senior pols in all the Parties know perfectly well that at both local and Westminster level, they have more than their fair share of paedophiles. They also know that some of the trails lead to Royalty, the Security Services, blackmail, criminal cover-ups and the like. So sometimes in groups but mostly on instinct, they smother any and all evidence of it – because it could bring the entire edifice down. (Don’t forget, it was a disgusted civil servant who leaked the MPs expenses details: afterwards there was an attempt to shred everything, but by then it was too late). What I absolutely do not believe in is the idea of elders and inner sanctums and Catholic antichrists and Police Masons all holding nightly Satanic rituals while eating the entrails of their victims.

But the fact is that many people do believe that, and many previously trusted institutions do cover up evidence. Now, if it was merely restricted to abhorrent sexual practices, it would be bad enough: but that’s not what we have now. We have data being ‘lost’, feeble excuses given about why information was ‘wrong’, unpopular measures in the Budget being omitted from the Chancellor’s address, Green Belt preservation being ignored. What we have now is self-protection as a very poor replacement for Benthamite governance – that is, something at least designed to benefit the maximum number of citizens in a manner suggestive of being good for the human community.

The list of things and people I trust has, in the last two years, dropped close to zero. Some of that is down to my own peculiarly unsettled personal life, but most of it is the direct result of watching public figures behaving like utter arses – and yet somehow completely unaware of the fact that we noticed. It really matters very little whether that person be Bob Diamond, Jack Dromey, Ed Balls, Piers Morgan, David Cameron, Rupert Murdoch, Jeremy Hunt, Paul Tucker, Barack Obama, Antonis Samaras or Wolfang Schäuble. These people can’t be trusted to behave well.

So at the moment, there are many things we can see this self-styled ‘élite’ of hogs doing to save themselves. But I see them as doing so, as I say, largely on an individual and small-group basis: I don’t perceive a globally organised plot to enslave all the rest of us. More to the point –  even if there was, I don’t see how they’d stand the ghost of a chance of pulling it off. These people are not cool plotters: they are narrow, dysfunctional, greedy, desperate people who can see scales falling from citizen eyes everywhere.

Such things would include destroying gold’s value (and then inflating it once enough is in the central banks), manipulating rates, directionalising markets, depressing interest rates, printing money, depressing wages to make them more competitive, buying top-end assets, stealing depositor and pension monies etc etc. They always have a carefully prepared reason why they’ve done it – and once examined, it always turns out to be bollocks.

But one thing I see above all as happening….and here too, while some of it is being deliberately stoked up, most of it is a natural reaction to feeling threatened. I think different citizen groups are starting to turn on each other; and the result is disastrously divisive.

This is particularly obvious in almost all contemporary debates on The Big Issues. Climate Change exchanges consist of playground trashing between equally extreme ideologies. Those wanting to withdraw from/stay in the EU are “obviously mad” or “swivel-eyed”. You’re either a Labour wanker or Tory scum. The NHS must either be maintained intact or demolished completely. Economically, it’s full on austerity or gigantic levels of stimulation. Paedophilia is either an invention of ne’re-do-well weirdos or a daily occurrence in every MP’s private office. No one ‘side’ trusts the other side to have anything but the most base of motives. It is tribalism in the very worst sense of the word.

But equally disturbing to me is the return to demographically-based politics of envy and resentment. Everyone today thinks others are doing better out of the system than they are. Baby-boomers have had it too easy, we’re paying for your pensions, women want it all ways, the young are feckless, black women in the workplace are trouble, too many people are welfare scroungers, avoiding tax is a cardinal sin….on and on it goes. It is all based on fear, while much of it is an unpleasant mix of self-pity and propaganda.

In the final years of Germany’s Weimar Republic, three great ‘enemies’ were held up as ‘to blame’ by the bourgeois classes: foreigners because of Versailles, Jews, and Communists. Guess what three things Hitler vowed to get rid of?

This is my bottom line, really. By the time the German liberal-Left put together a genuine United Front against the Nazis, it was too late. By the time the Tsars accepted the need for democracy to stop the Bolsheviks, it was too late. Now in the European Union, the political extremes in Greece, Holland and Italy have already failed to produce solidarity against a Troika of lunatics and hedge funds. In the UK, an out-and-out first fight in the Conservative Party has stopped Britain from getting the Hell away from the European Union.

It may not seem like it to many people just yet, but believe me the heyday of influential single-person blogging is long gone. Guido Fawkes, Iain Dale and Old Holborn are all doing other things now. The Leveson Enquiry somehow pulled off the coup of taking an anti-Murdoch committee and turning it into the wannabe nemesis of the blogosphere. The Establishment politicians and media owners want us controlled, and as long as 4 million libertarian bloggers are determined to go it alone, the Ruling Classes will get their way. For the ruling classes don’t just rule: they divide.

Divide and rule. Rarely a conspiracy, but just as effective. Everyone of radical views online should heed the warning.

Earlier at The Slog: The use of Planning Ministers as foundation materials.