I was skim-reading idly through the UK Budget proposals in the early evening yesterday. It read a little like the crumbling Covid19 narrative – contradictory, denialist and at times surreal. Rishi Sunak has gone for a Keynesian spending approach while ignoring the one thing Keynes said such a gamble required: “that the national finances should be in good order”. Inflation has arrived, the Bank of England will put rates up next month for sure, spending power will be crippled by the tax increases, the borrowing requirement reflects an empty Treasury…and there is infrastructural spending being thrown to all points of the compass. ‘Sunak kicks dead horse up the arse and adds handicap weights for good measure’ might have been a better headline.
But fear not: this isn’t going to be yet another Budget post. Think of the Budget as merely a final piece in the collage going back to the distant past of 1960s hippyism…and, while you’re at it, give some thought to the possibility of a snap election in the near future.
The mid to late Sixties was a period of profound looniness; of trying to levitate the Albert Hall, of tuning in, turning on and dropping out, of a dawning Aquarian age, and a belief that one could create a culture based on “if it feels good, do it”. Charlie Manson took the crazies up on the idea, and Sharon Tate wound up dead. 1967 saw flower-power in San Francisco, and a hard-drugs epidemic in the Haights within three years. There was Woodstock….but there was also the murderous Hell’s Angels concert at Altamont: stardust and golden but not really on the way back to a Garden of Eden.
In fact, it was the Dawning of the Age of Hilarious and Precarious rather than Aquarius – of models for a “counter-culture” that were at best flakey and at worst pernicious. The Age continues to this day, based as it is on a consistent stream of one thing: that a sound society can be created on the basis of wildly unscientific belief systems fuelled solely by incontinent displays of “compassionate” virtue.
In the UK, 1970 saw the last of the genuine baby boomers released back into the community from their radical economics University courses and lecturers. They mainly went into local government and teaching, each of which in their own ways created Michael Foot Labour, crushing defeat for the Left and taxpayers’ money being spent on fraternal donations to Breznhev’s Soviet Union. Lambeth somewhat pompously declared itself in 1977 to be a Nuclear- Free Zone, albeit also a grit-free zone during winter. Nearly eighty years into the USSR, Cuba, China and other econo-liberty disasters, the ideologues were unmoved by the facts…and carried on regardless. (If you’re getting echoes of Covidiocy in all this, good: that’s the idea)
Bizarrely, the anti-Left theorists were (and remain) just as loopy as the Left, the only difference being that their virtue signals are emitted from a fog of cynical dry ice rather than the fierce light of blind idealism. The Earth is not a global village, and never will be; wealth does not trickle down, it gushes up; unregulated stock markets do not decide, they cheat; privatised essential social services lead only to bigger profits for a few, not for the benefit of society as a whole; mercantile neoliberalism is not Utopian, it is geopolitically suicidal; globalist big business does not make the Third World more “equal” to the West, it kills jobs, eliminates entrepreneurialism and destroys satisfaction in craftsmanship; monetarism does not balance the books, because financial market demands for rapid ROI encourage loose money; and internet hitech does not lead to more leisure time, but rather to a preference for the unreal – a perfect soil in which the seeds of confusion can germinate.
The bottom line is that, since roughly 1963 and bullets flying backwards in Dealey Plaza, we have all been fed outrageous impossibilities from every direction….and rather than contemplate the ghastly Truth, a huge proportion of the population has become inured to the less stressful process of believing in nonsense.
As the Twentieth century sped onwards, there was no let-up in this process…not least because several communities – investment banking, marketing, military intelligence and government – began to see the expanding comfort blanket of self-applied naivety as the basis for exploiting everything from plausible deniability and fearful confusion to counterfeit certainty. Had Johnathan Swift been born in 1980, he might have called his most celebrated work Gullible Travels.
Such “spin” was made flesh in the soundbites of Tony Blair, the serial lies of his sociopathic creature Alastair Campbell, and the puerile invention of New Labour by former adman Philip Gould. It was put to music by the now rather sick-sounding pop song Things can only Get Better.
In the new century, we’ve been asked to believe in fictitious WOMD, farcical Novochok, Piers Morgan’s innocence of Hackgate capers, Rupert Murdoch’s complete unawareness of Newscorp phone hacking, the innocence of a paedophile brothel at Elm House, Jeremy Hunt’s “I did nothing wrong” defence over the BSkyB takeover, Yes We Can from Barack Obama, No We Can’t from Theresa May, the election chances of unreconstructed Stalinist Jeremy Corbyn, a WA faithful to Brexit, the words of a proven pathological Prime Minister, the Democratic Values of the EU, and protection of public health provision in the light of a near-harmless “naturally occurring” flu variant and a mendaciously described “vaccine”, the word of a Pharma lifer that the jabs would only be used on the vulnerable; and finally, the need to renew totalitarian powers to fight that variant now proven to be harmless when attacked with cheap and cheerful Ivermectin.
And so – via the US approval of Pfizer jabs among 5-11 year olds – we arrive back at the present day to the bewildering sight of a UK fiscal budget designed to stimulate economic growth with money we no longer have….but so as not to overheat the growth, higher taxes, less disposable income, stock market meltdown, and trotting inflation about to break into a full gallop.
The 7in8 have cheerfully believed conspiracy media-hyped BS that has been proven false time and time again….but dare to suggest that reality today, and you will be branded a nutjob conspiracy theorist by every title from the New York Times to the Jewish Chronicle. Not entirely fair, I fancy you might think; as such, it puts me in mind of the old gag about an unarmed negro in the Amphitheatre of ancient Rome who is buried up to his neck in the sand and left to face a raging bull. The giant animal charges straight at the poor unfortunate, but he manages to dodge the bull’s horns and – in one deft movement – bites the bovine’s balls off.
There is a roar from the crowd, but the Emperor signals for silence.
“Fight fair you black bastard,” he yells.
As I finally climbed into bed last night, I went one last time to Twitter and posted, “I smell a snap election in the air”. It hasn’t evoked much in the way of a response – which doesn’t surprise me, because it sounds like a daft idea.
But is it? Consider these factors:
*Gordon Brown considered a snap election in 2008. He bottled out; several Labour MPs I knew at the time were convinced that Brown would’ve won had he gone for it
*The longer BoJo leaves the decision, the more apparent both the insanity of Britain’s plight and the unthinkable evil surrounding mandatory jabs will have come to light
*A month ago, the Commons approved the abolition of Fixed Term Parliaments. The Bill is now well into its Second Reading in the Lords (late September last update) and currently seems likely to proceed to a largely formal (rather than controversial) debate – that is, the detail rather than the overall concept. It could well get the seal of Royal Approval by the end of November. Boris has a track record of pre-Christmas electoral success
*Both the formal Opposition Party and the extra-Parliamentary “Resistance” are hopelessly split: to a cunning opportunist like BoJo, the situation may well look like the keys to the Chocolate Factory.
Whether his natural impatience comes into play or not, I feel I must end with one continuing appeal, and it is this: the 1in8 badly need their El Alamein moment. Let me expand on that.
From 1939 until almost the end of 1942, the Nazi military machine enjoyed an image of unassailable invincibility. Then in November 1942, at the Battle of El Alamein, Allied General Montgomery ended that myth by leaving Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Korps in disarray.
Churchill called this “Not the beginning of the end for Nazism…but probably the end of the beginning”.
I continue to think that focused pressure on Dame Katy Bingham’s untenable position as hare and hound in the fake vaccine scam could become our El Alamein victory. Following my tweeting of yesterday about making her face (as a Government appointee) accountability for woefully misleading assertions, the tweet set a new Slog record of 93 RTs and 116 Likes.
The iron is hot: let’s start to strike it. Mail me on saulbollocks@protonmail.com if you want to take part.
Thanks for persevering with this longer than usual post.
The time is not 13:50 CET on 28th October 2021. The Time is now.
The Slog 