THE SATURDAY ESSAY: how liberal democracy in Britain turned into mob approval

DSCN0256 Elections are meant to be a competition between various Parties with differing views on how to maximise citizen potential, where the People consider their various merits and then vote accordingly. Media manipulation, ignorance, ideology, money, distraction and conformist education have handed power to unelected oligarchies. The Slog examines all the hard, recent evidence to prove this reality, and makes another appeal for ex-Parliamentary movements designed to reverse the process.

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The Daily Mail had a scoop last Thursday morning on the subject of inattentive US schoolteachers:

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Things have come to a pretty pass when a student is dead but nobody notices. Clearly, another student did not find sitting next to a corpse agreeable, and so he shot it. This was pointless behaviour, but then the US is a country which firmly believes weapons can solve any problem. So traumatised by the lax classroom standards was the armed assailant, he ‘then’ killed himself, and is ‘now’ dead as well. Not a tale one can end with, “and they all lived happily ever after”.

A terrible indictment of the teaching staff, but another feather in the cap of he who runs the Grieg Motel. One wonders what the function of Geordie’s cap is: certainly not to identify him as a dunce, because he is anything but stupid. Perhaps it is a Dutch cap he sports, to make it abundantly clear that he is a dick. We cannot tell. We can only judge GG by his output:

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No comment.

Globally, this has been a terrible year for ‘free’ media, open government, separate judiciaries, democratic tolerance and elective sovereignty in the West. By contrast, the Unelected States now emerging from their chrysalides in almost every country continue to make rolling progress forward in their bid to consume every green leaf in the garden.

The Daily Mail is a horrible newspaper, but it is far from alone. What was the lauded Fourth Estate of previous centuries is become a cacophony of tabloid titillation, celebrity obsession and pernicious fakery. It used to hold the Black Hats to account via strenuous investigation; in 2019, it is owned by a tiny oligarchy that engages in mutual onanism with the ruling classes.

Open government barely exists now in Spain. In France, the only open thing about Macron’s régime is the way it beats seven bells out of every citizen not too happy about being milch cows to supply the élite – themselves a soi-disant stratum of idiocy as incapable as ever of balancing the books.

In the US, an Alt State only too aware that grassy knolls are no longer tolerable decided from the off with President Trump that they woud have to find a “legal” way to get rid of him. In this too, the media acted as the catalyst for a stream of accusations and investigations that went precisely nowhere. Now at last, however, The Donald has been “caught” demanding that Ukraine’s government must investigate the Democratic Presidential candidate Joe Biden for his role in plotting to undermine Trump’s campaign during 2016….”or else”.

Blithely ignoring the fact that Joe has an unpleasant touchy-girlie habit – and may well be guilty of engineering foreign interference in an election himself – Congress swiftly decided that Trump had misused his power (which he had) to obtain….er, foreign interference in an election. An impeachment enquiry is now under way.

Barack Obama of course tried to do the same in the UK Brexit referendum of 2016, while US administrations have interfered in the democratic elections of almost every South American State at one time or another. But Trump is an evil scumbigotfascistsexpest, so he must be impeached.

In the highly unlikely event that Elizabeth Warren is chosen as the Democratic nominee and then beats a potentially torpedoed Donald, the unspeakably unelected will do for her too….in one way or another. Wall Street is already spending millions on advertising and PR to position her as some kind of cross between Eva Péron and Vanessa Redgrave: if elected, she will be hounded as ‘anteye murican’ because – more than any other credible US senator – she represents a genuine threat to the ruling oligarchy.

You see, the thing is, the Unelected corporocratic State doesn’t doesn’t giveAF about political labels, just so long as they own the winner in the White House. They owned Nixon, Reagan, the Bushes, the Clintons and Obama. They shot Kennedy, conspired with Iran to bury Carter, and now they want to impeach Trump. Be in no doubt, Biden is the man they want in 2020: that’s how he knew who to contact in Ukraine in the first place.

The only good thing that has come out of Cameron’s election with Clegg in 2010, and the three-year attempt to snub democracy since 2016, has been the multivariate revelation of just how powerful the Unelecteds are in the UK as well….and public apathy in the face of it.

We saw this in the way Murdoch’s Newscorp wriggled free of all but one charge against it for mass surveillance of private phones – and indeed in the manner of the “sentence” handed out to the sacrifical goat, which was more punctuation than sentence. Rebekah Brooks returned to become the UK CEO again, while Piers Morgan was Scrooge-like in his truth-saying…but now fronts ITV’s morning “news” farce.

Jeremy Hunt lied to Parliament about his role in Newscorp perfidy, and Boris Johnson lied about trying to smother the Met Police investigation into it. The two men five years later fought for leadership of the Conservative Party; the latter is now Prime Minister. It’s difficult to avoid giggling in some ways.

During the inbetween years, Theresa May got to know those nice people at the Home Office – along with their bosses in military intelligence. While Jihadists murdered at will across the length and breadth of Britain, she put forward the idea of making non-violent extremism a crime: that is, pointing out that Pakistani Muslims have been grooming, abusing and raping underage girls and getting away with it. UK Intelligence strategy remains fixated on arms and oil in the Middle East, and fixed with supergloe to whatever the US Alt State’s neocon objectives might be.

When David Cameron failed to keep Britain chained in the Brussels dungeon, Mrs May’s new best friends lifted her into Downing Street. She ceded all EU negotiating power to a lifelong rabid eurofederalist called Ollie Robbins, and placed the UK’s top NATO spook Sir Mark Sedwill into the twin roles of Whitehall supremo and Cabinet Secretary….the better to ensure a clean, Sovereign Brexit, obviously.

Caught with various euromembers in his back passage, Mr Robbins left to work for Goldman Sachs. Sedwill is still in place. So powerful is this British Beria (look it up) the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom dare not move against him: and so wired into the Establishment is the blocist Remain mentality, this *Leave* PM has been forced to accept a Tory Remainer candidate in Broxtowe to help rid us of….a Tory Remain deserter in the shape of Anna Soubry. If you’re not giggling uncontrollably by now, I beg you to try: it’s very good for reducing high bp.

Free speech is, it goes without saying, at the core of liberal democracy. So too, I should add, is the existence of an entirely civil and politically neutral police force. In a sound liberal democracy, the police exist to protect the citizen from criminal attack and unaccountable power. Their role when faced with socio-political demonstrations is to stop violence in all its forms…..not to curtail the use of free speech.

It follows (if you accept my definition) that Britons no longer live under a liberal democracy.

Former Labour Deputy Leader Tom Watson earlier this year went out of his way to apply privileged pressure to social media allowing those with contrarian views to express them. Mostly, the media complied. No policeman in any shape or form felt Watson’s collar for this blatant use of unaccountable power to restrict free speech. Watson has now stood down as an MP – not because of public pressure, but because Jezzer Corbyn and his gangster’s Moll Mo Mentum think he isn’t censorious enough.

The Boys in Blue are no longer civil police officers: they are officious seekers after homophobes, hate criminals and Islamophobes. They have become politicised. Special police squads “working for” Mayor Khan in London visit the homes of those who criticise appeasement of Islam. When working for Mayor Johnson, they conspired to cover up the depraved sexual activities at the Elm House children’s home.

For decades – in every location from Plymouth to Bristol via Rotherham and West Yorkshire – they turned a politically-tuned blind eye to the worst kind of despicable anti-social misogyny. And in order to defend their core voters, the Labour Party went along with it.

They do not work to protect Us. They work to defend every last insanity emitted by Them.

Last but not least (more probably “most”) we have seen Scottish Courts got at by SNP influence, and the British Supreme Court ruling against Boris Johnson’s prorogation of Parliament on the grounds of (a) illegality – it was perfectly legal – and (b) Johnson having lied to the Queen about why he wanted it. It seems that all eleven SC Judges had bugged the BoJo/Brenda audience and penetrated the PM’s thought processes in order to reach this conclusion. If so, I am profoundly concerned about the leap forward of invasive technology being employed in the country of my birth. If not, the unanimous decision of the Court against Boris was and remains an unmitigated disgrace. The abject failure of the MSM to analyse such a Page One example of inadmissable conjecture is in turn another reason to put the media barons in the dock.

It remains only for me to point out yet again that nine of the eleven Supreme Court judges stand to lose annual six-figure sums if the UK quits the EU. Wallets are important and handy portable money devices. But when everyone in power votes with the wallet rather than the conscience, civilisation is doomed.

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Those of you paying full attention will have spotted that I just took all the vital elements of a free, democratic State and analysed why – apart from a sliver here and a shard there – they’ve all been severely damaged. Equality before the Law, for example, was always a questionable virtue that the British awarded themselves. In 2019, it simply doesn’t exist: those who sit on the bench are bent, period.

As a teenager, I was always impressed by the much-used aphorism, “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for many good men to do nothing”. But that was when the World was young, an enormous percentage of media were still shades of colour in a vast rainbow, and education was designed to encourage not just learning, but also investigation of received truths…..what an old boss of mine in advertising used to call “reading around the subject”.

To be wicked for a second, “thinking”. Not knee-jerking, soundbiting, chanting or marching, but thinking.

There was less time-starvation back then. Zero hours spent punching keyboards, taking mobile phone calls, reading texts and emails, following Downton Abbey and going online to “save time”. No zero-hours contracts demanding you come in to work now. 

And so today, far too many good-hearted UK citizens (when the chips are down) do nothing: sometimes there are good reasons for that, usually there aren’t. But in truth, it takes more than good men and women doing nothing for totalitarian rule to triumph; there are two further elements of telling importance:

  • There have to be a lot of naive voters of little or no discernment – what Lenin called “Useful idiots” – to unwittingly opt for evil
  • There have to be uninformed, misinformed and ideologically rigid people who haven’t seen (or don’t believe) the evidence pointing to evil

In the West, to a greater or lesser extent, the varietal existence of desperation, tiredness, apathy, fluffiness, ignorance, confusion, distraction and conformity has advanced to a point where we don’t have mob rule as yet, but the Establishment certainly looks for mob approval.

Plato would’ve been appalled, as he believed ignorant people should not have a say. So too would Socrates, who believed that virtue came from knowledge. Aristotle – who felt philosophy was inseparable from reasoning – would almost certainly have condemned every ideologue as, by definition, dictatorial and culturally dangerous.

George Orwell would without doubt have excoriated Johnson, Corbyn, Swinson, Farage and Lucas as people of narrow viewpoints and constipated thought patterns. I don’t even want to think about what he would’ve made of Harriet Harman, Jess Phillips, David Lammy, Dominic Grieve, Owen Jones, Nicky Morgan, Diane Abbott, David Cameron, George Osborne, Ken Clarke and Anna Soubry; but I suspect there is a play in there somewhere that a younger Alan Bennett could have turned into riotous fun.

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We can all nurse our various analyses about this unfortunate collision between globalist Mammon, technology and media explosion on the one hand, and narrow education, deregulated working practices or “Belief Need” on the other. But perhaps all peacefully radical philosophers can agree on one thing: as a species – less so in Asia and Africa, but certainly in the West – we are not going to get any future fulfilment for The Greatest Number of Citizens from a patronising Establishment seeking only mob approval. Down that via lies bread and circuses (unlimited welfare and free broadband if you will) followed inevitably by a complete breakdown of social cohesion.

But but but….just because Britons are living through the tertiary stages of fin de l’empire does not mean that we have to suffer the fate of Rome. The thinking decent minority needs to find a movement that can persuade the conformist tendency to face reality.

The end of Nazi Germany and its immediate aftermath proved beyond any reasonable doubt that ‘brainwashing’ as a concept – far from being a life sentence – is relatively easily reversible. At the risk of being endlessly repetitive, yet another political Party is not the answer: elections in the UK from here on are solely for making an unequivocal protest about how obscenely unrepresentative those elections are. They offer us nothing more than the opportunity to reject ideological unreality and punish privileged injustice.

No: we need some form of peaceful but nuisance-making apolitical movement that will warn everyone against wannabe Demigods, and deliver a politico-cultural system whose sole building block is the Human Being.

We need an influential thinking minority devoid of blind belief, but acutely aware of consequences.

Call this idealism if you like. But as a famous US adman said, “If you don’t aim for the stars, you’ll wind up with your ass in a ditch”. Maybe Boris Johnson will indeed end up dead in a ditch; such is the fate of all cynics.

Real reformers don’t want the stars: a near miss that fulfils the vast majority is good enough for them. They don’t believe in the perfection of Homo sapiens, but they do want our species to be content enough to be compassionate: about the plight of less fortunate men and women, but also about the need to study in depth and breadth about the best way to interact with every life form on this, our one and only planet.

e = mc² suggests that – at least for the foreseeable scientific future – we are stuck with life on Earth.

That reality needs men and women with their feet on the ground.

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