A term one hears a lot these days is cognitive dissonance. I’m guilty of using it myself, but like many contemporary linguistics it’s becoming something behind which people in public life can hide. Much of what we see today in politics, business and economic theory is simply the double standards involved in making it up as they go along.
More innocently, most cognitive dissonance is not open-mindedness anyway, it’s muddle. Both the outdated Right and Left ideologues do their best to brush aside such thought anarchy, but at times it is so obvious as to be ridiculous. The Right, for example, espouses an economic system based on minimal government interference and low taxes, but all across the globe its outcomes have been pretty much the same: forced nationalisation and emptied treasuries resulting in higher taxes that delay recovery. In turn, the fanatics pour forth at length about free-market globalism which (under the simplest interrogation) turns out to be mercantile monopolism. Newscorp, for example, seems unable to thrive without putting up walls and keeping out intruders…by fair means or foul.
The Left is equally confused. A keen supporter of feminism, its overwhelming tendency is to provide knee-jerk support for Islam in general and Arabs in particular, despite the fact that the unchanging consequence of Islamism is women living in appalling bondage and men behaving badly. Equally, it demands an end to the greedy society, but only knows one method: that of redistributing wealth….in the face of a Himalayan quantity of evidence to show that this usually produces the twin evils of tax evasion and welfare dependency. The Left abhors unearned privilege at the top, but props it up at the bottom.
Today’s news easily delivers micro evidence of muddle. The Daily Star this morning says that “a massive” 70% of Brits want immigration to be stopped or slashed, but doesn’t consider the lunacy behind importing skilled labour, the education policies that produced the skill-gap, or the neoliberalism it likes so much that is reducing the jobs available in the first place.
The Guardian digs up a damning case about cuts having reduced flood protection for parts of Somerset, Kent and Devon worth millions of pounds, but flatly refuses to discuss the Eunatic eco-drivel that caused it long before Osborne was in office.
The Barclay-twin owned Daily Telegraph’s problem is not so much muddle as dilemma: it loathes Camerlot, but not quite as much as it abominates social liberals. So today it has a go at the PM via Philip Hammond, whose anti-Cameron prime ministerial ambitions are well-known – he having ordered a review conducted by the army and its volunteer helpers. Good old Phil, he’s an action man unlike that fluffy Old Etonian. But the Terrible Twins know full well that without an enormous upweighting of working class support, the maths for 2015 would never support a Government run by the rabid Right of the Party…so we get a piece headed ‘Tories can be the new workers’ Party’. Figure that one out if you can.
As for Dave himself, he really is drowning in the dark waters made muddy by the sort of muddle honed by a 5-year course at the Spinners College of Further Muddle. He sort of likes the EU so won’t mention The Directives, sort of dislikes quangos like the EA, but daren’t fire them lest the full story of flood plain building comes out, daren’t take help from the Dutch because it looks like he’s lost control…and daren’t castigate Labour MEPs, because most Tory MPs also voted against flood protection in favour of flood management.
His latest desperate gambit this morning is covered in the repellent sort of sediment that always drops to the bottom of the barrel: a £10m “lifeline for flood-hit businesses”. There are bankers in the City carting home bonuses bigger than that. Ten million quid in 2014. Dear oh dear oh dear. Tell ’em to put another pullover on Dave, that’s the ticket.
Related at yesterday’s Slog: The strange case of Miliband of MI5
The Slog 