The other day, David McGrogan wrote an excellent piece for this site called ‘Why the Labour Party Will Win‘. He pointed out that we are subject to a cycle of hope and disappointment when it comes to government. After the farce of the Tory years it is inevitable that the voting public will turn to something else as a reaction, and that will in turn lead to its own disappointment.
All those who march proudly into the House of Commons in a few weeks, the new Government strutting along with self-righteous zeal, will soon hit the obstructive wall of reality.
On December 19th 1666, Samuel Pepys wrote in his celebrated diary after meeting an acquaintance at Westminster:
Sir R[ichard] Ford did make me understand how the House of Commons is a beast not to be understood. It being impossible to know beforehand the success almost of any small plain thing. There being so many to think and speak to any business and they of so uncertain minds and interests and passions.
I’m in the unusual position of being able to read his shorthand so I’ve just transcribed that passage from the original text, and that is what it says. It’s a brilliant observation which is as pertinent now as it was then.
The difference today of course is that politicians and government have far greater pretensions than they had in Samuel Pepys’s day. When the Plague hit in 1665 no-one in power had the slightest idea what to do except decamp to the countryside. When the Great Fire burned down most of London in 1666 it was down to Charles II and his brother James, Duke of York to lead the blowing up of houses to create fire breaks. But really all they could do was wait for the wind to change and let the conflagration burn itself out.
In our present age, politicians and government fall over themselves to pretend they are in control. They aren’t, but it doesn’t stop them coming up with all sorts of schemes as part of the masquerade. Various commentators have popped recently to point out how most of our present ills can be tied in some way to the measures adopted during Covid. It doesn’t matter what you think about Covid and whether it was real or not. What matters is what the Government did.
Net Zero is much the same. The illusion of state power over the natural world. Hubris beyond belief and doomed almost certainly to making things worse, only at vastly elevated expense and economic ruin.
The best column I read was Janet Daley’s piercing ‘The toxic legacy of lockdown is destroying our political system‘ because what she flagged up is the remarkable mystery of how lockdowns and the wreckage they caused have been virtually eliminated from the entire election campaign:
Locking people up in their homes and paying them not to work destroyed the possibility of creating new wealth and saw governments print mountains of money that debased the currency. Energy bills were subsidised by even more money from the Treasury.
But the governing party was not alone in its responsibility for creating this disaster. Labour was not only complicit in these plans, it was positively exuberant about them. Indeed, Sir Keir wanted earlier lockdown, more lockdown and longer lockdown.
It is truly extraordinary. The outgoing Government came to power considerably less than five years ago, but it seems like a century now, given the fallout that has followed.
But we face a probable new Labour Government by the end of this week. The shape of that victory is at the time of moment no more than the shadow of a dream. Within 48 hours the result will be a fact, set in stone for all time.
A shift to the Left is qualitatively different from a shift to the Right. I was cast back to the winter of 1977-8 and the firemen’s strike. I was at university (Durham). I was fascinated by my first introduction to the preposterous world of privileged students (we had grants back then, and our fees were paid by our individual local authorities) believing they had some sort of absurd affiliation and co-identity with the firemen’s cause. Sound familiar?
I made the mistake one morning at breakfast in my hall of residence of attempting to summarise the various ways of looking at the strike and whether it could be justified or was unreasonable. Another student, whom I had thought of as a friend, was enraged. His face became riven with anger and revulsion – do bear in mind I had not actually adopted a position myself – and he blurted out “you disgust me!” and threw his fist at me. He missed luckily, but he picked up his breakfast and stormed off. He never spoke to me again.
This is one of the features of the juvenile Left: a tendency to monocular vision, total intolerance of other views and also the belief in some sort of collective identity. The truth is the absolute opposite.
There is no such thing as the Left. What passes for the Left is a hopelessly inchoate ragbag of movements all dedicated in some way to idiosyncratic causes, only held together by not being in government. Each believes its particular trope and ideology is the path to utopia, but they are all fundamentally at each others’ throats. People’s Front of Judea and Judaean People’s Front and all that. Splitter!
I had a friend who was an unreconstructed Trotskyite. We got on well and I enjoyed our chats. I found him amusing but he took himself very seriously. He lived in a world which saw “Tory plots” at every turn, but he reserved his real ire for any faction of the Left not exactly on the same page as his brand of revolution. He’s dead now, but I treasure the memory of him expostulating:
You know what Guy, I hate Tony Blair so much that I hate him even more than I hate Margaret Thatcher. That’s how much I hate him.
No matter that Blair had pulled off the remarkable feat of getting Labour into power. This chum of mine rode through life on the crest of a wave powered by hate. He defined everything by how much he hated it. He defined historical figures by how much he hated them, and he could explain how much he hated any variant of Left ideology other than his own. Oh yes, he was an archaeologist, and he particularly hated the archaeologist and now GB News presenter Neil Oliver for being a “disgusting traitor”.
This is what Keir Starmer will probably face on Friday. The euphoria will dissipate in hours. The factions, all greedily counting down the hours until Friday morning, will emerge from the darkness and the unravelling will start.
Labour’s dream of exerting yet more control over our lives (though after the Conservatives it will be a tough call to outdo them) will, as it always does, decompose quickly in the face of the infighting and hate that will erupt. The fake unity will evaporate when confronted by events and the political hatred, of the type only Leftist movements can really pull off when battling it out for pre-eminence among themselves, will take over.
Every dog must have its day. In truth, the new Government will do some good and probably a great deal of bad. But whatever it does it will be a great deal less than it claimed it would do, and it will lead to disappointment and disillusion. If Labour wins, the tone will be that brand of spiralling internecine self-destruction it specialises in.
We are on the cusp of change except that, as always, nothing will change at all except the colours of the wind.
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ICC issues a demand that Sir Winston Churchill be disinterred and put on trial for defying the National SOCIALISTS.
Hahahaha! This could happen!!
Absolutely. New research shows he authorized an attack on peace-loving Germany.
Dresden, Cologne, Hamburg… thousand bomber raids = genocide.
War is a dirty business. You quote three attacks. The German people weren’t rounded up and put to death by their millions. The merits of mass bombing on population centres in terms of the duration of the war can be discussed both ways. Genocide, it wasn’t.
It was a planned genocide which didn’t work out as the planners had hoped because it took them too long to master the technology to a sufficient degree to accomplish what they had hope to achieve. There was no reason to round anyone up as people were simply targetted in their homes in densely populated areas after someone had figured out that these would “burn well.”
The military merits of aerial mass slaughter of civilians to break their morale don’t need to be discussed. In cases the necessity of a land campaign until almost all of Germany had been occupied didn’t already make this clear, US “morale bombing” in total overdrive, followed by a hasty withdrawal from the war theatre in SE Asia has answered this question: There are no military benefits.
Apart from that, intentional mass slaughter of civilians is a war crime. Intentional destruction of civilian infrastructure to accomplish mass slaughter of civilians (the dambustet raids) is a war crime. And firebombing of cities to accomplish mass slaughter of civilians is a war crime as well.
There are also a few million German civilians who fell victim to Russian ethnic cleansing of eastern middle Europe.
About time the Israeli genocidal maniacs were arrested.
As I type this the ‘votes’ on GlassHalfFull‘s comment: thumbs up show minus 3 and the thumbs down show minus eight. I have no idea what minus 3 thumbs up means or how it can be done.
I once ‘liked’ somebody’s comment and it stayed on zero. People have pointed the mystery of the thumbs out before. It’s further evidence to me how pointless they are because they don’t even function properly and change/influence absolutely nothing. Most sane DS subscribers will be back posting what they want, whenever they want, irrespective of how many little red/green numbers they collect, so why have them in the first place?
The only thing I like your comment is that you and your up-voters are funding the DS.
Why?
You don’t seem to be gaining any agreement here at least.
Well here we are again. It is a regrettable loss of lives, but genocide it isn’t. The maniacs are Hamas and Hezbollah who indoctrinate their kids and put AK47’s in their hands, and dynamite around their waists. Don’t bother replying…
It’s my duty to reply to correct your falsehoods.
Even Jewish experts on genocide and the holocaust agree that Israel is committing “genocide”.
●”It is no longer possible to deny that Israel was engaged in systematic war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocidal actions”
Professor Bartov, a former IDF soldier, is considered one of the world’s leading specialists on the subject of genocide.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/aug/13/israel-gaza-historian-omer-bartov
●”Yes, it is genocide. This is exactly what genocide looks like”
Amos Goldberg, professor of Holocaust History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, wrote the following article about the situation in Gaza for an Israeli online magazine.
https://www.jewishvoiceforlabour.org.uk/article/prof-amos-goldberg-yes-it-is-genocide/
●”A textbook case of genocide”
Raz Segal is an Israeli who is Associate Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies and Endowed Professor in the Study of Genocide
https://jewishcurrents.org/a-textbook-case-of-genocide
A range of views are available, but cutting and pasting stuff from naysayers on the internet isn’t changing my mind. I believe the Israeli’s have got this right, and that the ICC is nothing more than another do-good court acting beyond its remit. Please dont reply. I wont be posting again on this thread.
Yes there is attempted genocide – by Hamas and Hezbollah trying to erase Israel from the map.
Is this deja vu? What happened with the last arrest warrant?
These kids haven’t got a hope in hell of turning out like decent human beings when they attend UNRWA Jihadi School, have they? Indoctrinated to hate from birth and doomed, courtesy of their Jew-obsessed death cult, destined to be like one of their terrorist, psycho heroes. Sad;
”EXPOSED: We have obtained exclusive interviews of Palestinian students revealing what they learn in UNRWA schools. Meet Mohammad: “The solution for Jerusalem? We kill the Jews. We get rid of the Jews. Inshallah, Jews will be wiped out from all of Palestine by the grace of Allah.”
https://x.com/HillelNeuer/status/1859550369967223197
https://x.com/KenBelt3/status/1859567580706439326
Here are your darling Israeli Jews singing the following (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DvTyg1kJGzM):
Let the IDF win and f*** the Arabs,
Ole, ole, ole, ole,
Why is school out in Gaza?
There are no children left there.
The amazing thing was the Jews obviously have such a clout in our media world that they managed to turn the hooliganism in Amsterdam around so as to depict the Israeli perpetrators as the victims! And everybody fell for it – or was told to fall for it.
And here again is the wonderful IDF dressing up in sexy panties and generally having a ball blowing up people’s houses: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gEo813rYm8g.
The day before yesterday Israel bombed Damascus and yesterday Palmyra (also Syria), all in addition to all of Lebanon, not to mention at home in Gaza.
All in the name of self-defence?!
Of course, this is in addition to the ongoing genocide in Gaza, where the IDF is assisting (other) criminal gangs in stealing humanitarian aid deliveries so that they can sell the materials at extortionate prices to the starving Palestinians.
And we are supposed to praise all Jews? Can you inform me why?
Israel has been at war with Syria for decades, I think it might date from 1948.
I am being unfair since not all Jews will support the Israeli actions. But AIPAC has all US politicians in its pocket and apparently a rich Jewish lady donated $100 million to the Trump campaign, which will ensure a strong pro-Israel presidency. Netanyahu has nothing to fear.
Yes i can…… Zionist indoctrination….
By judging them for defending Israel from self-confessed genocidal terrorists, they condemn themselves.
So will the leadership of Hamas be on the warrant list any time soon, in relation to the events of October 7th 2023?
Also still waiting (unexpectantly) for Tony Blair to join the list one day..
Now can we have arrest warrants for Putin & Zelensky for Genocide Against Slavs, and for assassinating political opponents?
And arrest warrants for Lula & Moraes for crimes against the Brazilian People, attempted assassination of the true leader Jair Bolsonaro, and arranging a Fake Coup, just like Erdogan did in Turkey, as an excuse to arrest military patriots?
And arrest warrants for Tony Blair & Gordon Brown?
That’ll do for a start…
In other news: ICC’s latest report says the holocaust was also perpetrated by the Jews. Calls for reparations to be paid to Germany to redress the historical injustice.
Signed by committee chairman B.E. Zebub
I guess I’m asking myself the same question many others are too:
Why not Blair and Bush for their illegal invasion of Iraq which has led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands and the displacement of millions, or Obama for drone strikes all over the middle east, or Cameron and Sarkozy for bombing Libya and overthrowing the government leading to the deaths of thousands. Or Xi Jingpin for the arbitrary internment of hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs in western China.
Eventually these contradictions become impossible to ignore.
Oh well that will dissapoint all the war loving, pro- pointless death and destruction zealots on here… And thats about all of them….
Always surprising how many deranged folks there are around….
And if you’re going to respond…. Prove the point that it isnt pointless……….
Its quite clear to any sane person that Israel want the Palestinians gone…….
https://fb.watch/v-dftjxTJA/
All reactionaries are paper tigers. Like being savaged by a dead sheep.
I think the Israeli Ministers will manage to survive it.
Why is Tony Blair not wanted by the ICC for war crimes?
The smell of Anti Semitism is very strong,
Will Xi of China also get an arrest warrant?
He has comitted crimes.