#2: A government class that works for the few, not the many

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Government borrowing can’t do much beyond leaving our grandchildren with a fiat money millstone on their backs and chains for every limb. The Slog looks at why real change won’t take place in Whiteminster until Whiteminster is a completely different place.

Eurostat has just released data showing that, in the year 2000, EU citizens would have had to labour an average of 32.9 years to feel they had “enough” to retire from full-time work. Almost exactly a year later, the euro currency was introduced.

By 2014, a respected group of respected Cambridge economic scholars concluded that the eurozone is ‘an unfolding disaster waiting to to happen’.

Today, in November 2019, the number of years required has increased to 36.2 …an increase of 11%. Were this trend to continue unaltered, by 2053 your kids/grandchildren will be working for 44.2 years in pursuit of the same aim.

But this number is, of course, only a very misleading average. Based on solid demographic evidence of income and wealth distribution in the EU, that would leave three in ten of our population working unto death.

Now far be it from me to suggest that the European Union sets itself low standards: on the contrary, it embraces very high standards indeed. As the opening articles of the Lisbon Treaty state:

‘The Union is founded on the values of respect for human dignity, freedom, democracy, equality, the rule of law and respect for human rights……The Union’s aim is to promote  the well-being of its peoples….. It shall work for the sustainable development of Europe based on balanced economic growth and price stability, a highly competitive social market economy, aiming at full employment and social progress.”

So on that basis, it’s not going terribly well is it?

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Don’t get me wrong: this is not just another Brussels-knocking Brexiteer piece…..although if it was, the charge of hypocrisy on the part of the privileged élite would be fully justified.

The thing I’m trying yet again to point out here is that, as long as our political classes are in thrall to ideologies based on power-lust rather than reality, any Constitution or Treaty or Accord anywhere is only ever going to be so much hogwash.

The financialisation, mechanisation, virtualisation and yet rear-view mirror rationalisation of commerce in the 21st century cannot possibly lead to the fulfilment of the greatest possible number of citizens because human beings prefer to do stuff they find satisfying…and as each year goes by, there is less and less for them to do in return for money. Mass workforce, factory-line capitalism was never going to do that either, but those days are long-gone in the West: indeed, one of the reasons why the Labour Party has such a goodies-bag of a 2019 election manifesto, and depends on spouting ludicrous nonsense about tiny miorities, is that its support isn’t based on the oppressed labourer any more.

Absolutely no ingenuity, creativity or imagination is being applied by the British governing classes to the following pretty blatant factors:

• The robotisation of production and distribution should have led to a transfer of excess private profits into Treasuries thus able to cut taxes – and invest in new light industries: to both employ skilled people and reduce the UK’s dependence on financial services exports.
• Instead, there has been a massive shift of power: from labour to first, financialised capitalism; and second, unfeasible personal wealth based on fiat currencies. Evasion of top-level corporate taxes and then robbery by the banking sector of welfare monies instead led to the 3% syndrome at the top, still workless but more or less unaffected 7% at the bottom, and the squeezing of the lower-middle worker, admin, clerking and self-employed classes in between.
• As real disposable consumer incomes fell, treasuries emptied and thus real sales growth collapsed – all perfectly foreseeable consequences of a consumer economy starving its consumers – we have seen the rise and then further accelerated rise of debt in all its forms right up until today, wherein this titanic rocket ship has comfortably left the planet (and grounded monetary gravity) far, far behind.

Such governing innovation is not being applied because Westmister and Whitehall enjoy privileged metropolitan lives as a self-styled élite that consists, to be exact, of producing nothing except promisory notes every few years…..following a pre-Parliamentary life blissfully free of the need to contribute to gdp.

The land above the law that I call Whiteminster is – as we have seen since 2016 – nothing but a giant overhead: an overhead doing nothing for the 90%, but everything that pressure groups and lobbying consultancies demand in return for bribes, donations, electoral support, and comfy seats on quoted boards of directors.

An overhead that steals from elderly women, but promises £80 billion in unaudited spend on welfare goodies or fuzzily imprecise infrastructural investment.

An overhead that taxes bedrooms and declares severely disabled people fit for work, but blithely gives away £39 billion in money to a mob of socially perverted blackmailers in a dysfunctional currency union.

An overhead that has – on the one occasion that The real People got to speak their mind – used every spin medium, slush fund, mad billionaire and Parliamentary trick to overturn that decision.

An overhead whose Chancellor barely scraped a GCSE in maths, completely misread interest rate futures and approved the HS2 money pit that will allow Zil Laners to get to Manchester ten minutes earlier.

No Party or Coalition can address these problems, because all of them flatly deny their existence. No political body would anyway, because it would mean their demise. No Whitehall security service would stand by and watch it happen without intervention.

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Finally, a brand new set of bellows has appeared over the last few years to pump this gathering tempest up into a perfect storm: social media. These media censor at will without regulation, collect data used widely by government surveillance services and internet crooks, become wealthy on advertising whose effectiveness is far from proven,  play an increasingly large part in the epidemiology of misleading political publicity, and provide endless distraction from reality.

They are one of the twin demons we face – and demonic enough to gladly cooperate in helping the forces of physical as well as virtual repression to do their dirty work: politicised police, standing EU armies, anti-terrorist squads and their like.

The other demon (tweedle dumber than tweedle dumm) is of course rigid catechism in the form of unsubstantiable belief and ideology: globalist neoliberalism, internationalist crypto-Marxism and recruiter Islamism.

Islam goes forward largely unhindered because the Conservatives want the oil and the arms sales that go along with the deal; Labour glorifies them because they all vote Labour. The political Establishment lives off the 3% and pays its own salaries. And the security services know all of the burial sites, sexual quirks and bribes in all the sizes and all the colours.

Twenty per cent of voters in the UK remain undecided about their correct course of action. My advice is this:

• Don’t expect your vote to do anything much for you
• If you have solid gold Brexiteer candidates, vote for them
• If you have a Brexit saboteur, vote for whoever stands to beat them
• If your MP is an ideonutjob but unassailable, vote for an Independent
• If your MP is implicated in the Backkto60/Waspi swindle, vote for the best challenger
• If your MP is in a LibDem marginal, vote anything but LibDem.

Then, when the dust has settled, have the best Christmas you can.

And in the New Year, await political carnage and global debt disaster.

Then decide you’ve had enough. You’re mad as Hell, and you’re not gonna take it any more.

(More advice to follow in due course)