Sixteen days ago, I posted here with the headline, ‘Now that our media have been weaponised, liberal democracy is no longer feasible’.
I still feel that the great majority of the British electorate either believe braindead ideological catechisms, or the last thing the MSM said. They’re either narrow-minded, ill-informed, misinformed or just plain not informed….and they lack either the discernment or analytical skills to question what they’re told – or the balls to disagree publicly.
Plato was right: you can’t have a democracy if the voters are ignorant of the facts, and too easily distracted by circuses. That way lies the dictatorship of mobs, rote-repeating the spin of the totalitarian élites.
Despite the fact that 1 in 5 Brits have already lost their jobs (a far more frightening stat than anything to come out about Contrick19), a staggering 84% of the electorate support lockdown. So already, people like me are outnumbered 5-1 when they say “Lockdown was not necessary, and will prove catastrophically unaffordable”.
Here in France, lockdown measures are far more aggressively illiberal than the British version – and confinement fatigue is starting to bite – but the general mood – 88% – remains one of it being a patriotic duty to ‘obey the rules’.
However, a recent poll shows that 3 in 4 know they were lied to about masks being “useless” – a lie directly propagated by Emmanuel Macron on February 27th to give the Government time to replenish stocks. I have long felt that the average gallic thinker is both more numerous, aware and outspoken than the British counterpart. But almost nobody here is questioning the strategic logic of lockdown, or the overreaction to a virus which, for 98.8% of us, represents no mortal danger at all.
In turn, 88% of Italians and 87% of Spaniards support lockdown despite the Worldometer evidence that it has done worse than soft lockdown [the US] or no lockdown [Sweden] in reducing cases or saving lives.
Truth is, kneejerk fear of Big Numbers outshouts factual percentages….and the main “Old” media have been more than happy to exploit that.
Both tabloid/Establishment press titles and broadcasters have chosen to ‘cover’ Covid19 events and dramas rather than investigate and ask embarassing questions about stats that don’t suggest the need for an emergency of any kind – or the future of liberty threatened by the creeping unelected State’s desire for control. In France, only the startling news that Macron was developing a smartphone app to check out individual disobedience to the curfew laws aroused any press condemnation.
Yesterday, the media Dumbometer reached a new low here when La Dépeche reported how Covid19 had ‘changed everything about the frequency and round-trip distance/time involved in food shopping’. C19 has nothing to do with it: people are shopping that way because they are forbidden to shop in any other way by law.
This morning, the Sunday Times ran a ‘lockdown exit update’ that consisted entirely of Hancock thinks this, Gove thinks that, Sedwill thinks the other….a lowbrow, superficial stream of gossip that didn’t address lockdown illogic in any shape or form. It evoked this comment from me:
Not a single reader engaged with it. Yet the first point I make there – the shambolic Whitehall performance – is nowhere to be seen in the main media. People in the UK care sector tell me (1) there are no medigel wash points in most home entrances and (2) many are still allowing family visitors.
I have a personal friend whose wife is a care worker in such an establishment. They rang her Friday to say she has to stay away because they’ve got C19. So my friends went to a testing centre in Kent.
They were greeted by an administrator who asked had they got an appointment (no) and had they got symptoms (no). So she said, “Come back when you have”.
What in the name of all that’s scientific is a f**king health administrator doing giving Page One disgracefully ignorant advice like that?
If I can be very blunt for a para or two, a liberal democracy is fine when thinking for oneself among the electorate based on discernible facts is the norm: private opinions are arrived at, and people vote on that basis.
Measuring the public opinion of ideologues, yobs, the Underclass and mathematically lazy Smuggies is not a monitor of The People: it is merely a scoreboard recording the endless media Test Match between rival spin doctors, social media fact-benders and censors, hidden commercial agendas, and geopolitical spooks.
What used to be at least an attempt at liberal democracy has become technological mendacity.
No honour in public life, revolving doors between Whitehall and Goldman Sachs, zero creativity applied to the issues, no weighing up of the pros and cons – and above all, bureaucratic follow through like Dunkirk without the little boats.
Put that hubble-bubble in charge of a citizenry that votes based on its ideology, wallet, loins or newspaper, and you arrive at precisely where we are now: exploitative, monopolistic cynicism heading for a totalitarian sci-fi horror.
The antidotes are there for any thinking person to see: radical education reform laying emphasis on facts not fancy, and the encouragement of creative thinking rather than process conformity; a radical purge at every level of the civil service and strict regulation of revolving doors; the removal of all money, lobbying, donations and advertising from Party politics and the legislature; the abandonment of neoliberal globalism in favour of mutualist entrepreneurial capitalism; a total ban on all tax ‘deals’ between big business and the HMRC; the abolition of Parliamentary legal instruments; the total depoliticisation of our civil police forces; and a full, written Constitution with specialist adjudicatory Courts free by law from any political influence.
There’s just one problem: I can’t think of a single movement, Party or bottom-up grassroots figure interested in signing up to that….let alone trying to make it happen.
The Slog 