I spoke to my brother two days ago. His daughter lives in San Francisco, and is going through the kind of divorce that makes a war zone look tepid. He said he was depressed about not being able to see his granchildren for a still undefined period of time.
This morning I spoke to my younger daughter in Sydney. She’s close to tears a lot of the time because her mum can’t get there to help with the new baby, and her insane government has now sealed Australia off until mid 2021 at the earliest. I feel pretty much the same…..shut out and pissed off.
I’m a pretty convivial sort of chap, but these bloody masks are infecting my larynx on a daily basis. The mask rules here in France are much stricter than in the UK, and 49 million citizens are back under lockdown.
It is only ten weeks since Macron told the French that another lockdown would destroy France. I don’t know how he really feels about it, but I know that my elder daughter in the UK runs a b2b estate agency business in London, and while she remains one of the smiliest people on the planet, I think behind the mask (literal and metaphorical) she’s worried sick about the latest tier 3 crap pinning London business to the floor.
Tesco’s alcohol sales during the March-July 2020 Lockdown period doubled. This is reflected in recent market research numbers showing a 23% increase in what PHE calls “dangerous drinking” at home. The NHS also records a 12% increase in antipressant prescriptions.
Yesterday, I posted here about the service-destruction and chaos that now exists in an NHS whose administrators are either too lazy or stupid to do the sums necessary to see that only 0.9% of cases at most will turn into hospitalisation. The simple reality – and it’s now undeniable – is that people are dying in our country from real killer diseases because frightened politicians and sociopathic Pharmcos talk glibly about case rates of a disease that kills almost nobody below the age of 55.
The bottom line conclusions are even more simple than the pieman on his way to the fair:
- Lockdown is a strategy that shows no evidence of being effective, and every sign of creating dangerous levels of anxiety that lead to mental illness and reality alteration
- The projections of effect on the NHS have never come to pass, and with clear signs already that the Second Wave is a dribble, we are in danger of destroying our social health system’s functionality
- The economic damage now facing us is so brutally obvious, we won’t even be able to afford a social health system in the first place.
We are faced with two potential interpretations of “What’s going on?” Either our civil servants, politicians, soi-disant expert epidemiologists, business leaders and vaccination interests are simpletons; or there is a much bigger picture beginning to form on the fuzzy screen of globalised Davos banking, and its much vaunted ‘Big Reset’.
I reject the first interpretation as being, frankly, plain silly. Yet we who point out the avalanche of evidence pointing at the second alternative are dismissed by some 85% of the electorates and media producers in the First World as “looney conspiranoids”. I do have to sit back sometimes and laugh until my socks part company from my feet.
However, most of the foregoing analysis is familiar to we of the awake rather than woke tendency. The Big Issues for me now are twofold….and on the whole, they have so far been largely ignored. What this Weekend Essay asks is as follows:
- How long can we continue with a mediocre and over-generalist political class being under the thumb of the revolving-doors corporatocracy?
- How long can we continue with universal suffrage as the bedrock of our democracy, when its obvious apathy and ignorance are destroying almost every Civil Right those voters have?
As you can see, these are dark corners in deep waters. Within such places are monsters with sharp teeth. But dystopia is almost upon us: the time for dipping our toes gingerly into these waters passed many years ago.
Veteran Sloggers will remember the number of times I have pointed out the nature of our elected MPs: lawyers are 960% over-represented, over 60% of them have never had a job in the productive economy, and 0% of them have a degree in social anthropology.
These facts are, I have long felt, absolutely key to the blundering naivety that displays itself in the nit-picky, poor commercial perspective and Covid strategies that have been so easily accepted by – and brainlessly offered to – the Political Class. (I hasten to make clear, by the way, that these observations apply to all the Parties with MPs in the Commons).
Specifically, if you have not even a passing knowledge of the human animal and its social intercourse needs, you will order a Lockdown and not think twice about the effects….until its too late.
If you came to maturity following birth into the upper middle class (with the keys to Eton and Oxbridge) the chances are you will be somewhat intellectually arrogant and have no understanding at all of what it’s like being cooped up in a council flat for three months.
If you never held down a commercial job before going into politics, then it seems highly unlikely that you know (for example) what a con most futurology or econometric models are, and why they are wrong roughly 95% of the time.
You will also have zero understanding of how to hire people, and thus end up generating this headline from last Thursday’s Times:
My only question here is why anyone would ask Nicky Morgan or George Osborne to run a Beetle Drive, let alone a corporate vipers’ nest like the BBC. But the politicians we elect choose from their tribe….and in doing so, they are appointing the blind as mountain guides to the blind – who became blinded in the first place by the cod-certainty of unsettled science on offer from tartan paint salesmen hired by Whitehall.
Our Prime Minister is a lazy classicist whose capacious memory enables him to quote huge passages from Homer’s Iliad, but not how to press a calculator and see through the nonsensical idea that ill-defined Covid case numbers must be divided by one hundred when thinking about hospital beds.
Clearly, such legislators must be replaced by a more skilled and representative group not dependent on blood money for their Party organisations to continue functioning.
However, the associated problem with the electorate is that – no matter how many times Ministers shove a yardbrush up the anus of average voters – they keep on voting for whoever the New Messiah is that year.
I offer up another simple observation: if our electorates had a level of discernment beyond that of a twelve-year-old addicted to Britain’s Got Talent, then the problem with our legislators wouldn’t exist.
There have been many contributory factors leading to voter ignorance, suggestibility and general dysfunction – mediocre educational standards, Rupert Murdoch, silly vicars, politicised strangling of debate, banal entertainment formats, media mendacity and so forth – but simply identifying them is to fall into the common medical trap of confusing diagnosis with cure.
We have an electorate and a legislature that can’t think for themselves, only of themselves. Socio-economic policy and voting preferences are thus based entirely on relevance to the individual wallet.
It’s not just that liberal democracy cannot grow in that soil; it is doomed to wither. There can be no consensus, only division.
In the UK, the socialists put their ideology before the nation. Islamics put their God before the nation. The Tories put money before the nation. The Greens put their largely unfounded ecology disaster ravings before the nation. The Scots put their parochial freedom fantasies before the nation. The security services put blocist ambitions of hegemony before the nation. And the mediatechies put their data collection and censorship before the nation.
Hardly surprising, therefore, that – pulled as it is in seven directions at once – there is no Nation any more: merely a poor wretch being executed in the most horribly mediaeval way imaginable.
If you’re getting a tad tumescent by now, I suggest you don’t bother with the rest of this essay – because the solution I offer up for real people is not the bully-boy jingoist claptrap that sometimes sets itself up as Nationalism.
On the contrary, my way out of this mess is to recognise that we remain a tribal species, but a tribe of 73 million simply cannot be held together in a multicultural society. Having banged on about this for a little over fifteen years, I have to say I think opinion is headed in my direction. Mind you, I do have a history of mental illness.
The future is communitarian, not globalist. It is small and entrepreneurial, not Behemoth-like and monopolist. It is mutualist capitalism, not citizen-duping Superstate crypto Marxism.
Way back in 1978, myself and five other blokes founded a communications agency called Aspect. It was decidedly anti-globalist, and opposed to the idea of ‘one size fits all’ steamroller publicity solutions. We wanted to make the smaller more entrepreneurial brands famous by offering the best value solution – be it an instore promotion, PR, innovative use of “ambient” media, distribution-driving trade incentives or good old advertising that set out to engage, rather than treat people like consumption sheep.
It was a 360-degree comms consultancy when the internet was still a security services germination….and it was at least twenty years ahead of its time
The name was coined by Iain Wight. The driving entrepeneurial force was a Geordie When the Boat comes In character called Chris Davies. The other founders were myself (the man who wrote the ‘This is what we’re about’ stuff), a Scot by the name of Douglas Seddon who had more commercial creativity than most, the brilliant art director and late-night Fitzrovia drinking legend John Davis, and his writing partner Malachy Quinn – an Irishman whose larger than life existence was cut tragically short by a brain tumour.
If there was one thing that held us all together it was this: you can’t ‘bolt on’ culture by merging two giants with no culture beyond money. We were opposed to Big, and lovers of Giant Killers.
Like most premature ideas, it failed in the end. But that vision is still alive and well inside my head…for while the internet could be the Devil to damn us all, it also has the capacity – at an intranet community level – to damn the Devil and all his works.
To restate my vision for Britain: I think we will be far better off as an offshore mini-group of devolved-power cantons. Just as Switzerland has its banking power and mountainous defences, so we have our water defences, nuclear capacity and financial power to fund an independent econo-political diplomatic policy of zero geopolitical alignment based on high margin craftsman produced luxury products aimed at (for the near future) the growing Second and Third World middle classes.
In short, what I advocate is a switch over time from the United Kingdom to the Indepedently Cantonic Republic of the British Isles. Above all, I am for the abolition of power-grabs by English self-styled élites in favour of power devolved to all the naturally formed endemic tribes of the British Isles.
I think the Royal Family will have to up its game, or go quietly into exile.
I think over-demanding immigrant groups will have to join in, or leave.
I think we should ignore the mad “stuck-on” stupidity of UN migrant directives, and adopt a feet-on-Earth approach to Third World wealth creation that doesn’t involve swamping the First World with humans who will be, at best, overwhelmed by such a wannabe Deity idea.
I know there are weaknesses in my solution, and I realise perfectly well that draconian approaches often lead to Marxist outcomes. But at its core, cultural Marxism (like Globalist bourse capitalism) is a Big Crushes Small ideology.
For myself, I prefer balanced social anthropology to the deranged catechism of closed-ranks ideology.
Any and all constructive and zero-obscene-insult comment threads are hereby invited.
The Slog 