The writer is in Australia.
There’s a reason that the highest rated Sky Australia TV show is the Sunday morning Outsiders show, hosted by Rowan Dean, the fearless editor of the Speccie Australia. In part that’s because the prism through which that show tries to understand the world is a very powerful one. In today’s democracies there are the technocratic insiders. These people like to think of themselves as the “expert class”. In rough and ready terms this is the bureaucracy. This is the tertiary professoriate and Vice-Chancellors. This is the corporate top end of town. This is the NGO sector, including most of the churches. This is the lawyerly caste and judiciary with its love of undemocratic international law. This is the managerial class. And most definitely this is the legacy press or mainstream journalist caste. These are the people – and obviously I speak in general terms as there are nonconformists, iconoclasts, dissidents and mavericks in all groups – who believe that the expert class (a.k.a. themselves) generally makes better decisions than mere plebs (a.k.a. your average voters). Hence their commitment to democratic decision-making is thin, paper thin. The more of society’s calls that can be passed over to quangos, tribunals, unelected judges, supranational bodies, public health supremos, the WHO and various UN bodies, economic insiders, bureaucrats and the administrative state generally the better they like it. These are the insiders. The anywhere people.
By contrast, the outsiders are those who do not share the worldview of this insiders’ caste. These outsiders do not buy the economic claims made on behalf of mass immigration. They know they lose out when there’s cheap money, money printing, asset inflation, imported cheap labour and the rest. They want assimilation not the cultural relativist platitudes – the trite slogans that don’t stand up to any sort of examination – that undergird the West’s genuflecting at the altar of a now-discredited multiculturalism. They value patriotism and think their country one of the best ever to have existed, not some egregiously wicked outlier that requires near daily absolution in the form of virtue-signalling acknowledgements of country and de facto racist constitutional amendments. They despise the whole DEI industry and Net Zero idiocy, and not just because both are productivity and merit killers. They can tell you who is a man and who is a woman. As outsiders with heterodox views beyond the so-called Overton window, free speech is far more important to them than to insiders whose views are never likely to be silenced. (Why worry overly much about protecting free speech as an insider where your views align overwhelmingly with those of the mainstream media, the HR departments, the inner-city coffee shop crowd and are not regularly dubbed as racist or far-Right simply for being a millimetre different to the prevailing zeitgeist – albeit they were bog standard opinions a mere 30 years ago?)
And that brings me to the British, French and American elections. All of them are at least partially comprehensible through this lens of insiders versus outsiders. The fact is that in general terms, rich people and insiders no longer vote Right. They vote Left. Fifty or 60 years ago it was different. Not today. So any purportedly conservative party such as Britain’s Tories that goes to multiple elections since 2010 promising each time sharply to cut immigration and to fight the good fight against the woke barbarians, against the democracy-enervating lawyerly caste, against the identity politics brigade, against the Left-wing media, against the big spending, high taxing state, and after each election actually makes things worse on each front has to expect its core voters ultimately to revolt and simply to stop trusting anything it promises. So it was last week when Britain’s Conservative Government was deservedly smashed. (For what it is worth this is yet another Right-of-centre lockdownista Government to lose. Good! Lockdown thuggery, fear-mongering policies, crushing small businesses and genuflecting to a public health clerisy that got near on everything wrong is way, way worse coming from conservative governments who all should be voted out for this alone.)
This is not to say the slaughter of the Tories in Britain was an endorsement of the Labour party. It clearly was not. Keir Starmer’s Labour party won nearly two-thirds of the seats (411 out of 650) with just 33.8% of the vote – the lowest of any majority winner since 1919. That’s lower than Jeremy Corbyn got losing in 2017 and only one percentage point more (and half a million votes less) than Corbyn got losing again in 2019 (yet it’s 200 seats more). The voter turnout was also appallingly low, just under 60% of eligible voters. Meanwhile Nigel Farage’s Reform party did what it set out to do, namely to crush a supposedly conservative party that had governed down the line as a Tony Blair-type social democrat outfit with wokery in its DNA. Reform came from near on nothing to scoop up over 14% of the vote (to the Tories’ 23%). So together the two outpolled Labour comfortably. And recall that in 2019 Boris and the Tories took 43.6% of the vote.
In my view this was necessary. The tired refrain of “we’re at least a smidgeon better than Labour” is just a recipe for a conservative Government that does nothing for conservatives and moves ever Leftward. Query: Name anything that 14 years of a Tory Government delivered for conservatives? If you get past one-and-half items then you and I have different definitions of “conservative”. At some point that sort of fecklessness and taking your core voters for mugs simply has to be punished and punished severely. The voters did that to Team Cameron/May/Johnson/Truss/Sunak. Yes, the next five years will be awful. But at least there is hope for improvement going forward. The Tony Abbott type line “we can work from inside to get the party back on track” has been shown by experience to be an empty promise. You just encourage the wets and Lefties who have taken over the party – a good few of whom are laughably trying to run the line that the British Tories had become too Right wing.
So congratulations to Mr. Farage and Reform, who were the second biggest winners in this election despite getting only five seats (the Lib Dems getting 72 seats on 600,000 fewer votes because their votes are all concentrated in chardonnay-sipping Teal type areas). I am prepared to bet the Tories now pick a far more conservative leader to try to woo back the over one-third of their base who deserted them.
Readers can apply the same template to the French election. It is outsiders abandoning established political parties. And in the U.S. as well. Donald Trump is despised by the great and the good because he actually advances and tries to implement policies for outsiders. Despite his immense wealth he is a consummate outsider. This threatens the establishment class. It causes the journalist class to become Pravda-like in its willingness to do anything to defend Joe Biden and the side of politics it personally prefers. Luckily after the pandemic nobody much amongst outsiders pays any attention to what the legacy media think or want. The most important election this year, or any year in decades, is the U.S. one in three and a half months. And things are looking better and better for the Don. Fingers crossed.
James Allan is the Garrick Professor of Law at Queensland University. This article first appeared in Spectator Australia.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
The idea that exposure to dirt and bacteria is something that many avoid at all costs. I always thought that exposure to germs was a way of improving/training your immune system. I cannot see that the move to a more sterile environment will be good for mankind. I recall my children playing in the mud and putting all sorts of things in their mouths when they were toddlers. Many years on, they remain healthy and appear to be no worse for avoiding the use of hand sanitizer and wet wipes.
Exactly that Mark! The human body will only build an immune system against things it is exposed to, mankind has died 60 billion deaths to earn his right to exist on this planet, clean and clinical environments are not natural environments.
My dear old Mum always used to come out with “you’ve got to eat a peck of dirt before you die boy.. stop moaning”..
Making too much sense there Mark..
We must be kind
And with an open mind
We must endeavour to find
A way-
To let the Germans know that when the war is over
They are not the ones who’ll have to pay.
We must be sweet-
And tactful and discreet
And when they’ve suffered defeat
We mustn’t let
Them feel upset
Or ever get
The feeling that we’re cross with them or hate them,
Our future policy must be to reinstate them.
Don’t let’s be beastly to the Germans
When our victory is ultimately won,
It was just those nasty Nazis who persuaded them to fight
And their Beethoven and Bach are really far worse than their bite
Let’s be meek to them-
And turn the other cheek to them
And try to bring out their latent sense of fun.
Let’s give them full air parity-
And treat the rats with charity,
But don’t let’s be beastly to the Hun.
Monro.. I’ve read plenty of your posts, some I’ve vehemently disagreed with, many I’ve taken on wholeheartedly and agreed with.. but this.. what is it with the Germans?
Have you never heard the term Perfidious Albion. Of course, the fact checkers and cleaners of the internet are now making this out to be nothing more than a meaningless trope, but it came about because of Britain’s devious/deceitful ways, especially via diplomacy. Let me say, nothings changed.
A good place to start is with WW1 and Churchill’s lust for Germany to be totally destroyed, backed up by Edward V11 no less. It was Britain and its hidden backers, not Germany, that connived and started both world wars, and now have a huge influential hand in what’s going on now, including Ukraine and the last phase in the complete destruction of Germany..
This is simply my response, as a europhile, though not e.u. phile, to all germanphobes, despite their role in creating the PCR test, hopelessly, quite possibly mendaciously, misused:
‘Don’t let’s be beastly to the hun’
Churchill didn’t play a major political role during WWI. Loyd-George did, however, with his idea of the knock-out blow as only acceptable war outcome which costed hundredthousands of people, at lot of them British, their lives. That was the guy who consistently (and brusquely) rejected everything which might lead to a negotiated quid-pro-quo peace.
I’m not going to debate with you via this forum, its not the place. However I’ve been thinking of some of the books I’ve read on the subject which expose the lies behind the history we’ve all been told since the event by the establishments historians.
The lies continue to this day.. including the role of Lloyd George you portray in your post
Try to get hold of a copy of Hidden History by Gerry Docherty and Jim Macgregor. Its superbly written, and the research is impeccable. There’s more but that book certainly opened my eyes to whole different perspective.
My take on WW1 is pretty much that which was expressed in Whinfrey’s Last Case (from Michael Palin’s excellent series, Ripping Yarns).
I have no idea which establishment historians told you what. My sources are mostly German and have been published between 1914 and about 1938.
Well they swallowed the wrong juice on Lloyd George and Churchill then. Pity that.. some truth from that side would have been helpful.
Perfidious Albion to the end eh!
That’s apparently a bit difficult to understand, but neither British nor American propaganda played any actual role in continental Europe prior to 1945. Churchill did not play any important role in British politics prior to WWII. During the first world-war, he was a navy functionary responsible for the disastrous Gallipoli-expedition and later, involved with development and construction of the first tanks (as part of the landship committee).
The book you mentioned has the following marketing text associated with it (excerpt):
[…]
the guilt of the secret cabal of very rich and powerful men in London responsible for the most heinous crime perpetrated on humanity. For ten years, they plotted the destruction of Germany as the first stage of their plan to take control of the world.
[…]
Our understanding of these events has been firmly trapped in a web of falsehood and duplicity carefully constructed by the victors at Versailles in 1919 and maintained by compliant historians ever since.
One will immediately recognize the usual, current US trope of the evil billionaire globalists here. Prior to the first world war, that’s a seriously bizarre story: Nobody in Britain needed to plot taking over the world as Britain essentially ruled the world. The victors of Versailles also certainly didn’t have any influence on books like
Die geheime Vorgeschichte des Weltkrieges
Dr. Hans F. Helmolt, Leipzig, 1914
[The secret history of the run-up to the great war, Dr. (doctor) is German for PhD]
Excerpt (translated from German by me):
Every war has at least one or more hidden causes and a more or less superficial pretext. The causes of the current world war are – minus the ever-present French longing for revanche – the panislavist machinations of Russia seeking to smash Austria-Hungary and the British desire to get rid of its most successful global economic competitor, the German Empire.
[…]
The murder of the Austrian heir to the throne, archduke Franz-Ferdinand, and his wife, the duchess Sophie of Hohenberg, by Serbian terrorists in Sarajevo on the 28th of June 1914 was the pretext.
The book is generally consistent with the notion that eventually getting rid of the German competition was not-so-secret goal of British politics since about 1905 and that Edward VII was prominently involved in the diplomatic isolation of Germany prior to 1914. It just paints a more differentiated politcal picture of Europe at that time, leaves out the allusions to present-day US domestic political topics (billionaire globalists etc) and doesn’t insert Churchill into a place where he doesn’t belong because, to the US target audience of 2014, that’s an ancient British politician who must have been somehow involved with commissioning of Noah’s ark they have heard of somewhere. It’s also obviously German war propaganda, and hence, also to be taken cum grano salis.
Draconically enforced restrictions regarding what German historians must and must not publish about also didn’t come into place until after the second world war, hence, there’s also a lot of German stuff that’s guaranteed to be free from allied war propaganda published until then.
The late George Carlin explains this brilliantly in GERMS..
https://youtu.be/l_L6AS1Huno
And this was way before Covid!
Yeah.. gotta love George. My personal favourite is the American Dream.. classic, and so on the money..
Germphobia was a starting point. I see a few people use the cleaning station at Tesco, but not many. I’ve never bothered. In the early days of the scamdemic I was back living with my elderly parents (I’d moved back from London nine months earlier) so I did the handwashing when I got home from the shops as a concession to my Mum, who was worried. When I dashed up to London in the middle of the lockdowns, wearing a mask exemption lanyard, I used the alcohol hand cleaning stations, because, frankly, the Tube is filthy and always has been. I wasn’t worried about COVID-19: I suffer from stomach trouble and being able to kill the bacteria on my hands was fine by me!
However, when the second round of lockdowns and the mask mandates got going, as someone whose job became ‘work from home’ I didn’t leave the house for 18 months other than to dash up to Tesco to do click and collect for ten minutes a week. I wasn’t scared: I was too disgusted at the British public to be able to look at any of them, frankly. I accepted the confinement, because I was working sometimes seven days a week, plus had a big garden to look after. The likes of the ‘circuit breaker’ were something to spit poison about and wind up the Adam Hills and Yvonne Johnsons of the 77th Brigade mob on the Telegraph website comments, but I wasn’t aware of them particularly!
The medium to long term psychological damage is clear though: I still have to make myself leave the house, even to go for a walk. I go into Tesco again now, but it feels weird. I’m not agoraphobic, but I’ve become accustomed to staying within an environment I can feel I can control. I don’t drink, so I don’t go to pubs and there are no coffee shops where I live. I feel sense of oppression out there though, like I know the Government can remove my liberty at the stroke of a pen. I know I need to go to London to see some clients to boost my work – my local clients that I was building down here all got put out of business by the lockdowns – but I can’t motivate myself to go there. I can’t be bothered to face all the people. I know I have too snap out of it, but it’s really difficult. What I want is to move somewhere remote and rural where I can wander around on my own all day and ignore the existence of any government.
My cousin-once-removed, in her 70s, is now full-blown agoraphobic. She never leaves the house; she was prone to depression before COVID-19 and the psy-op aspect of COVID-19 has probably effed up the remainder of her life. A delightful, very sweet-natured, lady my Mum worked with years ago, now in her 40s, watched the TV obsessively during lockdowns, believed everything she was told (had to be carried from the lounge sobbing in terror by her husband after Hancock, Whitty and Vallance did their press conferences) and is desperately trying to overcome agoraphobia. Before anyone mocks her, she’s a lovely person and I would punch in the nose anyone who makes a girl like her cry: she was just particularly vulnerable to the psy-op. She’s apparently now managing to go for a walk around the block if someone goes with her.
So the germphobia in children is not something I’m surprised at. It was the primary focus of the psy-op and provided the gateway to exploit many other neuroses that may have lain dormant in vulnerable people, particularly claustrophobia and agoraphobia. And what better way to bring in 15-minute cities than create a population that suffers from germphobia, agoraphobia and a lack of drive to go anywhere? It makes it easy to close all but three airports by 2030 and abolish all commercial air travel by 2050, as well as slash car ownership.
Children of 10 years old and under have spent a significant portion of their lives under full-blown totalitarian government, their teachers have encouraged them to be afraid, have told white kids they’re oppressors, are teaching them sexual perversion and telling them that they aren’t the sex they’re born. People use ‘deprogramming’ when sorting out victims of religious cults. We need the same for our populations post-COVID-19.
A very interesting post. Thanks for opening up on your personal experience of that time..
Of course it pre-dates that period and it is tied up with misguided notions of private but it was a perfect rationale for many to go the whole hog. Best not to be angry with such people because it’s an easy mistake to make for the feeble-minded – basic sensible precautions become a search for the absolute. I have become more filthy and proud in the last few years and I see the opprtunity to soil myself as a privilege, essentially a learning experience. It’s easy to get people to become more earthy again. This neurotic tendency towards the sanitary is very superficial and doesn’t satisfy the soul at all.
Will today’s children, and future generations, ever forgive us?
If they don’t then it’s wholly understandable
I often blame myself and my generation for letting it get this far.. The corruption at the political level is truly off the scale, a draconian authoritarian state, zero democracy a society ruined.
I should have tried harder to prevent us getting to this point..
The point of no return..
I’m not overly worried. As a piano teacher after lockdowns ended I instituted a hand-washing rule before the lessons began (as soon as I could persuade people to return and forsake the cursed Zoom) I’ve since dropped the requirement.
But I can state quite confidently that the majority of the children I see daily are as reassuringly grungy, ink-stained and sweaty as they always used to be. There will always be a neurotic few, but they would probably freak out at something else if there had not been a war on germs.
We evolved with “germs”. We need them. The number of germs inside us are in the hundreds of trillions – outnumbering our own cells by a factor of at least ten.
Just ask any expert immunologist what happens to their specially bred “germ free mice” kept in a germ free environment and fed germ free food…
Been to a gp’s office lately? No evidence of hand washing there. My husband now has a post op infection of his ear. Skin cancer removed in a filthy exam room of a “dermatology” clinic. Next thing a whopping skin infection. Cleanliness is not one of Britain’s strong points. I can tell you that after living here for 26 years.