I’m not sure many of you will be that interested in the election for Westphalia, but it bears examination because of wider ramifications:
The key points that apply almost everywhere in the West now are:
- Two Establishment Parties neck and neck
- Harder Left is nowhere
- About a third don’t vote for either of the Biggies
Taking point 1, this is true of France, but neither made it through to the 2nd round last time. Macron, however, is a stooge who pretends to be both at once….ergo, he defeats the anti-élite candidate.
As for Point 2, the Corbynistas would do well to note that they are now seen as further Left, and thus marginal. Back to Point 1, the two Parties were neck and neck in 2015, but the new Labour shift has considerably less electoral appeal.
Finally, again Point 3 is most marked in France, where 54% of voters did not go either PS or Republicain. In Britain, up to 40% abstain completely. This time, those who vote in the UK will give about 70% to the Establishment Parties…but that’s because UKIP isn’t making any effort: last time, over half the population did not vote for the élite.
In the US, the popular vote rarely strays beyond 52/48 in Presidential elections, there is no real Left, and this time over half didn’t vote for either Party – they voted Trump, who is neither GOP or Democrat, but mainly a populist with a lot of money.
In Italy, chaos is approaching, but if one sees Brussels as The Establishment (as in pro-EU Parties) they have zero chance of forming a majority Government…not even in alliance.
In Spain, a standoff has at last ended, but in the last poll nearly 70% declared themselves “unhappy with the situation now”.
As for Greece of course, nobody cares what the People think – but last time out, they blew Brussels a raspberry to the tune of nearly 60%. Since then, the Syriza government has become increasingly detested….because it caved in to the EC bully-boys.
Trump now looks set to sell out to the neocons. In the UK, a neocon Party will be elected and lurch further towards globalist fascism, while Labour will probably split up. In France, a neocon plant is now on-message with the former DDR Jügendfuhrerin in Berlin…who has never really been anything other than America’s safe bet.
But what the electorates of these countries are telling the political class is that they are disgruntled with both national and supranational policies.
These politicians can only continue their ideological missions from here on by repression, censorship and increasingly dictatorial laws.
Read the paragraphs that precede this conclusion, and tell me if and where I’m wrong. I will listen, and I will sleep easier tonight. Well, a bit easier maybe. But as Doyle had his hero Holmes say, “When all other possibilities have been exhausted, the remaining one is the answer”. Obviously, I don’t see dictatorship as the answer; but I do see it as the near-inevitable consequence.
Of late, I’ve been spending a lot more time on Facebook. Not “on” it in terms of participation (I keep that to a minimum) so much as analysing what one gets back in terms of recruiting like minds. The truth, folks – and maybe the goons at Twitter now really do need to wake up – is that FB delivers me a regular hitload over twice the size of that from Twitter.
But of course inevitably, one gets sucked into the content. And after a while, it gradually dawns on one what FB really is – viz, a namedropper’s paradise where you can show your peers how well you’ve done.
You don’t have to behave like that on there, but most people do. ‘Jonti and I at La Grande Bouffe in Antibes’, ‘Breaking bread with the Pope, liked him but her I could take or leave’ and ‘Listening to the Presidential Address at Liberty passing out, just awesome’ or similar make up an awful lot of the entries. There are not many saying ‘Just arrived en masse in Westminster to smash the old order and then march on Buckingham Palace’.
In short, Facebook is the smug middle. I don’t say that as a Class Warrior, as I’m not one of those and never have been: rather, I see only one side of what Disraeli called around 1850 ‘two nations’ there. The sad truth is that the great majority of Facebookers have near to no concept at all of what “struggling to survive” really means. Thirty-eight years of neocon social economics and Globalist Friedmanite business have produced an Überbau where 35% of the population never see the bottom half, and the last 3% (who own 95% of all the capital) know precisely what’s happening but don’t care.
It is these people who prop up the Mayflower Conservative Party. They are not the ‘idiots’ or ‘fascist scum’ so beloved of Labour’s 180,000: they are largely apolitical, and they simply do not accept the picture of hardship and degradation presented by the Left. They are, for what it’s worth, still hopelessly ignorant about the state of the Greek populous, and woefully misinformed about whose fault the dangerous tragedy there really is.
This is the lost Labour opportunity defined: I get more hits from comfortable Middle England than from Twitter (off a much smaller base, by the way) because I don’t sound like an intolerant, foul-mouthed yob….and because I advocate a Decency Alliance of united opposition to the Government. The minority who feel that way on FB are more than enough to keep the Slog membership ticking higher. Also my name isn’t Tim Farron.
Of course Labour’s vote share has gone up this time: those left behind are getting desperate, and UKIP are sitting out the dance. But the 35-40% middle who aren’t particularly feeling the pinch offer a rock solid majority for giving May her “Brexit mandate” – a helping hand she doesn’t need anyway. Never in British political history has the “name” of an election been such an irrelevance to the key topics of debate.
Rephrasing Lincoln’s adage about ‘you can fool the People’ etc, the greedy élites work on the basis of “You can’t boil all of the People all at once”. It’s OK to boil all the lobsters slowly because their media aren’t that on the ball. But if you boil too many human citizens in a Sovereign country – slowly or quickly – all at once, believe it or not even today’s astonishingly dumbed down electorates will notice.
If getting on for 40% of electors either stay away or vote for minority/ID politicians – and 35% in the Middle support the status quo, the quo will win every time. As poor dear Diane Abacus has proved beyond reasonable doubt, the Left prefers slogans to empirical numbers: they’re a touch hazy on reality.
This all works fine until the electing nuisance is out of the way. But the moment when fanatics like the Eurogroupe and IMF later start floating a 10% across the board ‘financial tax’ on bank deposits, the entire “plan” falls apart. I use inverted commas there, because I still firmly believe there is no NWO plan being worked out by several bald blokes stroking white cats in a silo somewhere. What we have here is upwards of a dozen élites with similar needs (power, war and wealth) and thus similar interests. Indeed, the very absence of A Master Plan is why further robbery will explode in their faces.
Yesterday at Newswire, a piece ran claiming that Fifi Lagarde at the IMF is once more punting a 10% levy on eurozone bank deposits. The blog was completely unsubstantiated and struck most people as tosh – myself included. But when asked in 2012, some eleven major States from Australia via Austria to Spain and France admitted that yes, they did indeed have bailin plans. Our own UK late and unlamented Chancellor fessed up, I have to say, with great enthusiasm: perhaps he’d just honked a line. Interesting, however, was the almost total lack of evidenced cooperation between States.
Now here again, the “don’t piss everyone off at once” strategy has worked so far. Cyprus was completely carpetbagged, but hey – Cyprus, what’s that? Some little place somewhere and the wine sucks, who cares? It was only when Dijessledumber called it “a template” that the banking élite panicked…..and Wolfie Wheelchair had to remind Jeroan he had relatives in Germany. The tall tonsorial artiste then shut up very quickly.
This is, however, the point after which the strategy hits the buffers. By it’s nature, the eurozone cannot force a bailin on one country at a time à la Grecque: the EU and US banks are now so far above belonging to one sovereign or another, the smash and grab raid would have to hit at least four lots of bank customers throughout the First World.
Then and only then will everyone over 45 with their own home go ballistic. And when – as we’ve seen already in Italy – it becomes clear that no national politician on the planet wants to carry it out, there will be a hasty retreat and much pretending that Position B as now established is really the old Position A with new branding.
Having said all that, don’t assume that politicians won’t test the water. I feel pretty confident that Macron wouldn’t shrink from it: neither would Boris Johnson or Theresa May. Neither (in reality) would Trump, who obviously has a keen sense of smell when it comes to Grassy Knolls. As for the likes of Fallon, Hunt, Hammond and Duncan-Smith, they would positively relish a once-and-for-all showdown.
So many opportunities to slow down the progress of those John Major called “the Bastards” have been missed over the last seven years, it saddens me just to think of them: Labour’s brainless tribalism, the SNP’s selfish demands, the limp-wristed nature of so many Waspis, Ed Balls’s infantile behaviour in 2010, and now the UKIP decision to sit out this election. In my opinion, all of these have played into May’s hands.
The only thing to carry with us at all times is that the mad people will fail, because their preferred approach will evoke disorder on a scale to make the Poll Tax revolt look like a Waspi bring and buy sale.
The Slog 