Fangs ain’t wot they used ter be

All across Britain today there are self-appointed wolves busy tearing off bits of the judicial and governance system with their unpleasantly visceral teeth.

They come in all the sizes and all the colours. They’re variously social work consultants, bent family-problem shrinks, ex-coppers, MPs, spin-doctors, privatised “medical strategists” and soi-disant experts about one thing or another….but they all have one key feature in common: they’re all sheisters on the make.

What they offer the British people is a taster of things to come: a world in which real educational standards are so diluted, qualifications so easily obtained, and risible excuses so easily accepted by a pliant media set, anyone can set up doing whatever they want…just so long as they’re On Message.

For the Goves and Hunts of this world, these people will be called Welfare Assessment Consultants or Educational Practice Counsellors. On behalf of the Milibands and Blair-heirs, they might award themselves titles such as Climate Change Management Officers, or perhaps Paedophile Danger Detection Agencies. But they will in reality represent one sector to be lumped under a simple heading: drongos in charge of executing populist wrong-headedness…for munneeee.

In some ways, I suspect our society was always doomed to end up like this, once we let people like Thatcher, Blair, Harman, Osborne and Fallon dictate the agenda and sanctify the shibboleths. After all, if you dilute community values, promote spin over content, cling to discredited methodologies, put elections before fiscal survival and quietly pervert capitalism’s financial systems, the inevitable result is a world in which the risk-taking thinkers in search of a real solution for tomorrow give way to the money-making wankers in search of a mendaciously-obtained profit today.

In the Cruel Britannia of 2014, the Law is no longer there to maintain standards, stand up for the citizen and execute formal policy on behalf of the greatest number. It exists today in order to disable opposition, repay political donors, and prosecute bigoted aims for a tiny number of idiots and sociopaths.

Perhaps one of the sickest jokes in the kaleidoscope of bollocks via which we have been sold this illegality is the Freedom of Information Act. My new best friend Mark Williams-Thomas offered this triumphalist response to yesterday’s Slogpost highlighting two FOI requests about his past:

So it’s a sort of Freedom of Information commitment about everything that doesn’t include the antics of coppers, media moguls, senior Ministers, Whitehall pinstripes, Family Court judges, and the Ministry of Justice. George Orwell, eat your heart out.

In this our once decent country, in these the dwindling days of powerful liberty and proper representation left to us, there are things going on that people of good heart do not want to think about or confront. This is, of course, why the wolves are getting away with it. Some examples would include:

• Using elements in the local government, export and diplomatic sectors to traffic children into a life of unspeakable misery
• Employing three-onto-one Gestapo interrogation tactics to bully the innocent into signing things that are then leaked to key sections of the pro-government media
• Burying NHS reports that show an impending insolvency in the hope of accelerating that very end result for purely political reasons
• Ringing known nuisance-accusers to ask them if they’d like to accuse a suspect thus far displaying disappointingly little in the way of guilt
• Secretly filming celebrity clients imbibing A-class drugs as a means of blackmailing them into conveniently pleading guilty to lesser charges
• Destabilising key ministers as a means of replacing them with others more to the liking of the security services, media owners, or the police…with (spookily) all three of these beneficiaries variously taking a role in proceedings.

I could carry on with this list for hours, but it would only become tedious. People close to the events involved know precisely who and what I’m referring to. The problem is that the vast swathe of decent middle England believes that it’s all propaganda and baseless blogosphere conspiracy theory. We have – in equal measure – the extremes of Left and Right to thank for this: cry wolf once too often, and the wolves get to do what they’re at now – gorge themselves upon individual freedoms.

We have two concurrent trends here: the privatisation of politics, alongside the politicisation of all the key means of control and persuasion. The result is an increasingly dystopian nightmare ruled by the archetypal National Socialist belief that Might is Right, and ethics are for the weak.

It has been achieved in classic style – not so much as a conspiracy, but rather as a confidence trick perpetrated by Establishment members with congruent aims.

That is to say, those reading the media have been first dumbed by titillation and celebrity obsession, had their discernment desensitised by robotic, poor-quality education, and been depoliticised by pointing them towards endless mirages involving material gratification.

Thus distracted, they have looked on like so many lobotomy victims as wars have been fought based on illegal premises, Parliament sidetracked, the Rule of Law corrupted, the police politicised, and Equality before the law almost entirely obliterated.

Bankers pass Go by moving backwards, get double the £200, and do not go to Jail. Media gargoyles perjure themselves and threaten the State in public, and their Reward is Mayfair and Park Lane forever. Multinationals leap the Income Tax square, and are given all the Stations. Not for nothing is this game called Monopoly.

Newscorp supporters now hold all the key roles that affect the citizen: tax law, economic policy, the Metropolitan Police, Health, Education, and access to capital. In turn, this same globally destructive betrayer of free competition and civilised behaviour is closely linked to almost all of these self-privatised wolves. Murdoch’s bastards supply them with dirt and point out political targets, and the result is a slaughter of the innocents.

How many of the goggle-eyed souldead – somewhere between six and twelve maybe – have I actually­­­ met over the last ten years? Most of them are self-made….or to be more precise, self-proclaimed. They all share the same leniency towards themselves: they’re only human, they had to exaggerate a bit to get on, they deserve it more, they’re doing good in the long term….and so on and so on. Actually they’re all about as subtle as a flying brick, and most of them are profoundly stupid. Like so many with serious pathological problems, a tendency to overestimate their selling power and cunning winds up catching them out in the end.

But today, that doesn’t matter. They get “cleared” at best….or left entirely alone at worst – because they’re on the side of the High and Mighty. Tim Yeo and Grant Shapps were “cleared” of brutally obvious misconduct. Ed Balls has miraculously avoided any feeling of the collar over the Coop scandal. So too did Jeremy Hunt over the BskyB bid. As for Michael Gove and Boris Johnson, well, quite frankly they could ritually f**k a pig in Piccadilly and get away with it.

Maybe ‘wolves’ is an overdone collective noun, but it is the only one that gives them full discredit. I could dub them Raubritters, or perhaps Vigilantes: but those people often have, at the very least, a bit of class. Wolves as a term is the only one that quite sums up the feral, vicious and unremorseful nature of the current crop.

I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating: we are arrived in Ancient Rome. Thanks to Blair and his ilk, barbarians have degrees now. They’re well beyond the gates…they shot through the suburbs like a dose of Salts, and now they’re in the Senate….or bodyguarding the Senators.

It’s almost certainly an inevitable symptom of post-Imperial decline into the depravity of the over-promoted. But damn them all to Hell, I will take a Caligula or two down before I’m done with it.

Earlier at The Slog: