Mark my words: overseas observers of life in the U.K. are about to get ringside seats for a period of seriously bad juju that is about to unfold. There is a breakdown coming in the relationship between the Government and the people, and things are going to get hostile. There will be tears; there will be a hard rain. We’re going to have to batten down the hatches and pray we make it through.
The hostility is going to come mostly from one direction: Government is going to get angry, and it is going to start soon. It is already apparent to everybody that Starmer’s Labour Party consists of – to use a good old-fashioned word that Orwell would have loved – prigs. The main message we are getting from them is that they are disappointed in us: for driving cars, for drinking alcohol, for wanting to get good educations for our children, for greedily hoarding wealth to pass onto our descendants, for amassing nest-eggs for retirement, for engaging in filthy habits like smoking and for voting ‘divisively’ in referenda. To call them dictatorial would be in a way to give them too much credit; it would be much more accurate to simply call them bossy. The image that comes to mind is that of a stuck-up and prissy schoolmaster or schoolmarm in a 1950s children’s novel set in a boarding school; the kind of person who would appear in a Jennings or Billy Bunter book to bluster, red-faced, about somebody having raided the currant bun supply in the tuck-shop. And the new Government’s understanding of the word ‘authority’ is that it derives from the power to do the political equivalent of giving class detentions. Collectively personified as a teacher, the new Cabinet would be the type who mistakes surly, resentful silence for respect, and laments very much the demise of the cane.
In a previous post – borrowing from C.S. Lewis – I used the word “unconciliatory” to describe Sir Keir Starmer, and I increasingly find it the most appropriate one when thinking about the tenor of governance to which we are now subject. Labour’s victory in the 2024 election was artificial and its well of support is ankle-deep; since only one in five of the electorate actually voted for the party it was already unpopular at the very point of taking office. Politicians who were not thoroughgoing mediocrities would, finding themselves in such a position, be prudent. They would recognise their priorities to be consolidation, calmness and concession – their aim would be to lay stable foundations for future governance with quiet competence. But the current crop do not really understand the word ‘prudence’, or like it. So we are patently not going to get that. We are instead going to get a programme of improvement imposed upon us from above: eat your greens, do your press-ups, and do as nanny says (oh, and hand over your pocket money while you’re at it).
This will all unravel very quickly. People will not get with the programme, because people never really do, and certainly not when it has been designed by those they actively mistrust and sense have nothing but disdain for them. And therefore, in short order, as the truth dawns on the Government that the people are not on board with its plan of action, the sense of disappointment it feels is going to turn to rage. This will in turn have the inevitable result, as the rage becomes nakedly apparent, that the population will start to kick back – mulishly, and hard.
Nobody will benefit from this, and nobody should welcome it; it will be poisonous. Genuinely extremist politics may very well surface as a result of the strife that will ensue. But the blame for that will squarely be at the Government’s feet – the result of a total, systematic failure to deal with the electorate as human beings rather than datapoints, cogs, crankshafts or sheep.
Adam Smith knew all about the dynamic underlying this kind of breakdown. In a passage from The Theory of Moral Sentiments, well-known to libertarian thinkers, Smith describes for us a character whom he calls the “man of system”, who, “apt to be very wise in his own conceit, and… enamoured with the supposed beauty of his own ideal plan of government”, forgets that there are “great interests” or “strong prejudices” that oppose it. Imagining that he can “arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chessboard”, he soon finds that the chess-pieces in fact have wills of their own, and resolutely refuse to stay put in the arrangement he sets out for them. His efforts, then, are very much likely to fail. This can be contrasted with the success of his antipode, the man of “humanity and benevolence”, who rather uses “reason and persuasion” to achieve change gradually and in such a way as to go with the grain of the society which he governs.
What often gets overlooked about this passage is Smith’s understanding of the overarching psychology. The important point about the “man of system” is that he is short-tempered and unbending: not only does he have a plan which he wishes to impose on society; he “cannot suffer the smallest deviation from any part of it”. And so, as Smith makes clear, the end result is a deterioration into “misery” for society at large. Government wants the population arranged in a certain order on the chessboard and working towards a certain result, but the population wants to play Snakes and Ladders instead. This makes not just for failure of the man of system’s plans in practical terms but for antagonism and anger. Government, the passage implies, comes to lose its temper with the population for its constant ‘deviation’ from the plan, and ultimately to despise those it governs as a consequence. Government therefore in the end purposefully, or through negligence, allows “the highest degree of disorder” to permeate society, almost (though Smith does not himself say this) as a punishment.
Smith’s ‘man of system’ passage is important because it clarifies for us that technocracy, which we tend to think of as dry and depersonalised, is actually intensely emotional and given to many insecurities and anxieties and much control-freakery. The technocrat governs through the application of purported expertise, and therefore – importantly – by definition always walks a knife-edge of legitimacy. If one is to derive one’s claim to govern solely on the basis that one is an expert, or can marshal expertise, then it follows that any challenge to that expertise is an existential threat. The technocrat always therefore endeavours to insulate himself from precisely such challenges, so that his position remains secure. But, believing that his plans and schemes are perfect, he strives to make sure they are implemented faithfully and competently – he can ‘suffer no deviation’ from them because a deviation may go awry and destabilise his claim to expert rule. Deviations are therefore despised: the technocrat always seeks to nip them in the bud if he can, and squash them where they have already begun.
The path from technocracy to rage is therefore an easy one to travel down. It is notable that the “man of humanity and benevolence”, who sits in opposition to the “man of system” in Smith’s schema, governs through “reason and persuasion”. The implication is that the “man of system” deploys neither. One does not reason with, or persuade, algorithms or automata. One simply operationalises them to achieve whatever outcome one desires. And, therefore, when they go wrong, one very rapidly gets angry: a machine which is not functioning correctly is not a disagreement to be negotiated but an affront – the result of bad design or a failure to follow instructions. If one is in the habit, then, of thinking of human beings as essentially akin to machines or tools – either instruments through which one’s plans are realised, or pieces of engineering to be repaired, upgraded and set into motion in coordination with others – then one similarly finds oneself attributing their ‘failures’ to design flaws, malfunctions or software bugs rather than disagreement or free will.
We are all familiar with the rage of the technocrat in this sense, because we have all been in the position to find ourselves getting angry with a recalcitrant and uncooperative gadget or device. “Stupid thing,” we mutter to ourselves, in a deranged fashion, as we fiddle with the offending item. “Why is it not working?” We sometimes have to forcefully restrain ourselves from flinging the rebellious object across the room. I have a vivid memory from my school days of an art teacher trying to cajole the mouse on a Commodore Amiga to move its pointer around a screen, suddenly losing control and hissing ferociously through his teeth, “Up YOURS!” at the thing in his hand, as though it had just dealt him a terrible and grievous insult (luckily for him, there were only three of us in the classroom at the time). The famous incident from Fawlty Towers, in which Basil subjects his broken-down car to a “damn good thrashing”, is only a notch or two above what each of us, in our darkest moments, has done or said to an innocent inanimate object that has irked us.
Purposive government, of the kind which Labour embodies, is therefore always liable to slip into petty vindictiveness and irritability. A Government with purposes to be realised is one that chiefly sees the population as comprising not fully formed human beings, but instruments for achievement of the purpose in question. And its mode of relating to those it governs is therefore that of a lever-puller, button-pusher or text-inputter; it does not compute them as fellow people with hopes and desires of their own. It naturally follows that when things go wrong, the fault must lie with the instruments – and, since instruments cannot be reasoned with or persuaded (never mind having opinions of their own that might be worth listening to), the obvious tendency is for government to slip into Basil Fawlty, “I’ll count to three!” mode. The ruler begins to get red in the face and start swearing. His response is not conciliatory because there is no conciliation with a malfunctioning or unresponsive machine. There is only blind indignation.
Regular readers will at this stage not be surprised to find me making reference to the observations of Iain McGilchrist. In The Master and His Emissary, McGilchrist, in painstaking detail, lays out for us the differences between the two hemispheres of the brain – deriving from the essential cleavage between the right hemisphere, which attends to the organism’s surroundings, and the left, which focuses on discrete objects for the purposes of grabbing and manipulating them. I have written much more extensively about McGilchrist’s work elsewhere, but for our current purposes it suffices to note that, while many emotions tend to be experienced in the right side of the brain, anger is much more a left hemisphere phenomenon:
What is striking is that anger, irritability and disgust stand out as the exceptions to right hemisphere dominance, fairly dependably lateralising to the left hemisphere.
This, you will have noticed, nicely confirms what we already intuit: that there is a close kinship between the technical manipulation of objects and the emotion of rage. The left hemisphere, whose job is to identify individual items with quick and dirty heuristics, and then take hold of them and make use of them (as food, as weapons, as tools, etc.), has absolutely no patience with, or time for, reasoning or persuasion. It wants to find, figure out, get and instrumentalise. And it hates to encounter resistance and has no capacity to understand or accept it. Anger is therefore always its instinctive response when things do not work out exactly as planned. It deploys rage because it literally knows no alternative.
The pattern, then, is obvious, and what lies in store for us is plain. We have a confluence of extremely unenviable circumstances: a highly technocratic government crewed by people of astonishing intellectual narrowness and superficiality, who are already strongly disliked by the population and for whom the feeling is entirely mutual, and a host of structural problems too long to even begin to list that have been kicked into the long grass by successive governments for a generation or more. We are going to get half-baked plans imposed upon us half-cocked, and when we fail to comply, we are going to find opprobrium being heaped on our heads, and ‘damn good thrashings’ to follow shortly after. This is a recipe for an extremely unpalatable and indigestible dish and we should worry very much about what will come out of the oven, politically, at the end of the current Parliament. The population will have no alternative but to spit out what they have been fed – and “the highest degree of disorder”, to go back to Smith, may very well follow. And then what?
Dr. David McGrogan is an Associate Professor of Law at Northumbria Law School. You can subscribe to his Substack – News From Uncibal – here.
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I don’t know about them being “prigs”. More like hypocrites – all the things they don’t want others to do, they do themselves. Socialism for thee, not for me.
I saw an X post call them a bunch of spiteful, immature, students who have never grown up. Seems a better descriptions. Prigs at least had standards they expected others to live up to.
The part that chimes best from all of this, is purposeful government. The trouble with Labour is, like the Conservatives before them, they are practically centrists, but spiritually Communist. So they have no real focus on doing centrist like things they don’t really want to do, but they are used to living in a system where they have to play the part. When you spend years pretending for the crowd that you a different from your true nature, habits are formed. You will continue for a while with this habits, not realising or fully appreciating the shackles are off. And already, even with this mental “constraint” we have witnessed an awful authoritarian tendency.
Another book comes to mind. Lord of the Flies. They will act in accord with their practical habits, for a period of time, but over time, due to the significant majority they have, I fear we will find Jack Merridew emerges. And that is because, thanks to woke culture, the “anchoring base” of civil practice has already moved so close to the precipice, there is les and less left to dismantle before the whole state apparatus slides off the edge.
On occasion, socialists to appear to do conservative things, like set up an advisory committee to encourage Business Development. But then, while the costs mount, the benefits never appear, because they don’t understand that it’s the motive that is important: the goal is more wealth creation, not the creation of wealth creating infrastructure.
I noticed it becoming common occurrence from around 2010.
The first two paragraphs put the point well – but then it all descends into academic complexity that dilutes its comprehensibility. We are preparing for the worst, and it’s time for politicians to decide how they are going to respond practically too. The ‘first hundred days’ of this so-called government look like being it last hundred days, after that, what? More ‘green’ lunacy?
That photo from the priceless “Basil Thrashing His Car” clip, one of my all-time favourites, was the only useful thing about this article, in my view.
In his long list of things the public are angry about, Dr. McGrogan carefully avoids The Elephant in the Room, and never mentions the Deliberate Mass Importation of Millions of Third World Grifters, mostly Muslim Men of Military Age, into the West, raping our children, murdering our people, and destroying our civilisation.
His attitude is reflected by the Lithuanian Foreign Minister commenting on the reasons for the “lurch to the far-right” in European elections:
“What we are seeing now is a European trend that is determined by many factors,” Landsbergis said in Vilnius on Tuesday.
“It has to do with the pandemic, then there is the war (in Ukraine), inflation, Russian disinformation, many other things and perhaps sometimes a lack of strategic leadership.”
Lithuanian foreign minister sees AfD success as European trend (msn.com)
No, Mr. Landsbergis and Dr. McGrogan, it has to do with The Great Replacement.
Well said.
Thank you!
Londoners hit back as Cleese says city is ‘no longer English’ | London Evening Standard | Evening Standard
He first said this in 2011/2012
Gosh, I had completely forgotten that! Thanks for the reminder.
I doubt the Russian disinformation, they are fully aware that any disinformation they might produce would be vastly substandard to the true reality of life in the current west.
Absolutely spot on!
Fair dos – I took the article to be about the character and psychology of the technocrat and specifically how they react to rejection of their will by the people.
It’s Socialism, Jim…
As John Grey and others have pointed out, Socialism is a pseudoreligious belief system, a post-Enlightenment replacement for Christianity.
But lacking in mystery and ritual, the things which bind a real religion and its adherents together, it’s always bound to fail.
Armed with that knowledge, you can actually expect the Spanish Inquisition…
‘Socialism is the ultimate big lie. While it falsely promises prosperity, equality, and security, it delivers the exact opposite: poverty, misery, inequality, and tyranny. Equality is achieved under socialism only in the sense that everyone is equal in his or her misery.’
Mark J Perry, American Enterprise Institute
“Equality is achieved under socialism only in the sense that everyone is equal in his or her misery”
Everyone except the Inner Party. Stalin lived in a palace and had country houses.
Just like Putin’s Palace, as the Great Russian Patriot Alexei Navalny pointed out.
Agreed – as the old saying goes ‘some more equal than others’.
Stalin certainly treated Churchill to a lavish lunch with all the trimmings with plenty of boose. Communism for who exactly!
And with poverty comes excess deaths and crime, so less security overall.
Whilst neither socialist nor communist it may be that streets of the average Russian city, town and village are safer for the general public than in Britain.
The main message we are getting from them is that they are disappointed in us …
Also, they are disappointed in the white working class for its failure to give the midde-class Left the revolution it was supposed to stage for the benefit of the middle-class Left. This “disappointment” is the source of the Left’s desperate scrabbling around for a new subservient client group to replace the white working class, and is the reason for the contemporary Left’s adoption of The Great Replacement as its fundamental policy.
I think what you are mentioning there was the first time that the Left started to abandon the working class, because as you say, they didn’t go along with the agenda and had ambitions of their own.
The working class was supposed to drive the world revolution under pressure from its own impoverishment. But the so-called social question (Soziale Frage) got answered in another way and hence, this supposedly revolutionary impetus fell by the wayside.
That’s the academic Left, and while some of it can be accurately classified as middle-class (and some not, like Millionaire Mitchie), that’s an accidental detail. Thatcher’s parents would have been classified as middle-class but probably not as academic.
How odd that the Tories seemed to embrace The Great Replacement strategy too!
I think it’s a bit more complicated than laying all the blame on the feet of the government, horrific as this and previous governments are.
The problem is that the population is deeply programmed to accept and embrace much of the insanity being unleashed on us. The zero carbon, the electric cars, the self debasement labelled as “tolerance” and “inclusion”.
It’s not just that Starmer behaves like a stern headmaster and treats the population like naughty children. It’s that the population has completely bought into life as permanent adolescents fully convinced that anything we do is naughty and wrong, although not completely sure why. And the population looks at those willing to raise their voice and stand up as if they were the bad kids of the class, incorrigible deviants that don’t realise they have to do as they’re told.
In short, the population is fully brainwashed and programmed.
That doesn’t mean reality won’t bite. It just means that when it does, it’s going to be very easy for Headmaster Starmer to direct eveyone’s anger at the naughty boys and make an example of them. As he’s already done.
It’s the cult of safetyism. Everything’s done by government in the interests of your “safety”, and is a profoundly socialistic concept.
We’ve now had around 100 years of the welfare state in this country. That’s where it starts: everything else follows.
Safetyism takes away individuals’ agency. The result is infantilisation of the population and the ever-increasing power of the state.
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/fear-mind-killer-americas-dangerous-obsession-safety
It’s definitely a vicious cycle. The more safety and security you get the more you feel you need. It’s an insatiable instinct.
The question is how to change the programming.
Indeed, and sadly it’s often not even safety and security but the illusion of those things.
If there was proper free speech these zealots would soon crumble, guess that’s why (X) is PE Number 1
This is worth a watch: https://youtu.be/XxONOUwOX80
That interview with the motorcycle mechanic challenging safety laws, which I haven’t watched yet, made me remember motorcycle enthusiast Fred Hill, a former WWII Motorcycle Despatch Rider, who was sent to prison 31 times for refusing to wear a motorcycle helmet. He died in prison aged 74.
“After retiring from teaching and incensed by the compulsory helmet law, Hill’s campaign against the UK compulsory wearing of motorcycle helmets intensified in 1976 after the Sikh community gained a religious exemption from the law. He made many speeches about equal treatment. He said that if one community did not have to wear helmets, then nobody should have to…”
“Memorial rides continue annually across the UK, allowing riders to show their gratitude and respect for Hill.[10][11]”
This was one of many examples of “Two-Tier Treatment” of Indigenous Britons and alien cultures in the UK.
Thanks – I had not heard of him before – sounds like a great bloke.
I should probably have known that things were going badly wrong when seatbelts were made a legal requirement.
The Italians had fun getting round their own seatbelt laws by wearing T-shirts with seat belts printed across them to look like the real thing.
Imagine Gregory Peck and Audrey Hepburn having to wear helmets while riding around Rome on that Vespa!
Italian Patriot Matteo Salvini, the True Leader of Italy, has recently been campaigning to save the Vespa as a cultural symbol of Italy.
That’s the Bike that you can throw of a Multi-Story and it will still run.
Wow— is that actually true?
It was on a Motoring documentary, not sure if they actually tried it.
Amazing snippet of information, that!
That’s the Bike that looks like it has been thrown off a Multi-Story car park.
🙂
Point made by Right Said Fred. Only a handful of based musicians.
Reminds me of the guy at the Airport who got arrested because he complained about a Muslim woman just walking through security with her head covered, he said how come she gets to do that etc. When the Police arrested him he said ‘Orwell has arrived at Heathrow.
There is also the case of the guy who build a house (or extended it) back in the 90s I think and had no planning. When they came to enforce the council edict, he shot one council worker with a revolver. The guy he shot was just there for mediation.
I enjoyed this interview. Some very interesting thoughts. Did you read his books as well?
Not read the books, no. The interview among other factors spurred me to start driving again after a break of 20+ years (city living and laziness).
Thanks for that – I hadn’t come across Matthew Crawford before.
Interesting that so many of his ideas dovetail neatly with what Nassim Taleb sets out in Skin in the Game, and his Incerto generally.
I am not familiar with Taleb
I came across this as the Unherd channel on YouTube was one of the few covering vaguely lockdown sceptical views
Making other people responsible for your safety. (beyond what is reasonable) well that is not freedom.
Absolutely terrific article.
A couple of days ago I awoke with a similar realisation but my perspective is slightly different. Kneel is of course a distinctively narrow minded acolyte of the Davos Deviants (DD’s) so once he has been given his orders he will blindly see them through not least because he has not an ounce of compassion or empathy in his body and seeks only to please his masters. What of the rest?
I make the assumption that beyond their sense of entitlement following election to the H of C most MP’s are still vaguely reminiscent of the ordinary man in the street and with vaguely similar aspirations although post election somewhat inflated; they still retain a degree of humanity. Now for the DD’s humanity and compassion are distinctly surplus to requirements, the aim is to create ‘Us and Them.’
Kneel has already informed us where his allegiances lie – Davos – so he has no problem following the script but what about the rest of the Cabinet and the grunts, the MP’s? Simple. In order to bring Ministers in particular on board circumstances have to be arranged in which said ministers are hated as much as Kneel himself is hated. How is this to be achieved?
The solution is being played out before us. Kneel’s government is enacting policies virtually on a daily basis which are intended to divide and enrage people. The list is too long to itemise in full but…
Cancelling winter fuel payments, outrageous pay awards to public sector workers, cushy sinecures for labour supporters, ridiculous eco initiatives coupled with nonsense rises in fuel prices, no smoking outside pubs, trans ideology, failure to obtain GP appointments, failing public services, potholes, two-tier policing and justice, unlimited illegal immigration, etc, etc,etc
Net result the nominal Ministers responsible for the above are genuinely hated by the electorate and are made aware of this. So the scant remains of decency which some in government ministers remained is washed away and they genuinely lose all compassion for the people they were elected to serve. Treating them harshly therefore appears entirely justified and so the business of hurting and perhaps killing can be really ramped up.
The government is being engineered such that it turns the people against it and it in turn turns against the people. As Dr McGrogan concludes the result will be mayhem.
The government is being played just as much as we are and the result will be bitter and bloody.
https://order-order.com/2024/09/04/labours-non-dom-tax-set-to-lose-treasury-1-billion/
And just to confirm the madness Reeves’ determination to eject wealth and thereby further immiserate the country is having the desired effect.
https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/starmers-war-on-free-speech-leaves-uncle-sam-aghast/
And here is the view of this country from the American perspective. It’s not pretty.
Agreed. He has the same mindset as Rudold Hoess (who ran Auswitz) whose only concern about the “process” he was following was to make it as efficient as possible.
Starmer isn’t genocidal, but his only concern about the task he is fulfilling for the WEF is to make sure it is as efficient as possible and to punish anyone who makes that more difficult for him.
Cromwell attempted to embed the Puritans’ dictatorial, bigoted, joyless governance in the country. He was replaced by King Charles II; the Puritan were ousted and the country partied again. He was given the moniker The Merry Monarch.
I doubt if Starmer and his authoritarian hypocrites have ever read Kipling, but they should.
The Norman and the Saxon
https://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/poem/poems_normansaxon.htm
“The Saxon is not like us Normans
His manners are not so polite
But he never means anything serious
Til he talks about justice and right
When he stands like an ox in the furrow
With his sullen eyes set on your own
And grumbles “this isn’t fair dealings”
My son, leave the Saxon alone”
Every action they make will have an equal, and opposite, reaction.
Saw this video last night. This is one of those people like Auditing Britain who go around filming in the public. He was in Manchester and rightly said how dystopian it has become with drunks & druggies hanging around. He also chatted with a pregnant homeless woman; get to the back of the queue, we have vulnerable young men who just got off a boat to look after!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z8pQzA_pyXM
https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/dolans-digest-first-days-of-starmer-last-days-of-the-uk/
Simon Dolan’s view of Kneel and his government. As usual skimming the surface.
“a total, systematic failure to deal with the electorate as human beings rather than…sheep.” The previous government’s behavioural scientists were astonished, and delighted, to find that the people were like sheep.
The problem is gaslighting, whereby people are forced to question their own sanity. The cause of this is always deliberate lies. We are told we need a passport to travel, and yet watch indignantly and helplessly as many thousands, mostly paperless men of military age, enter our country. Which in itself is extremely disconcerting and incredible. We are told there is a housing shortage, as these same people and legal newcomers are accommodated, likewise, we are told the NHS is struggling but its service is not withheld from people who have effectively invaded the country, tacitly aided by the RNLI and Border Force. We are told two people of the same sex can procreate, that DEI must take priority over spending cuts, that it’s fine to get divorced without having to advise the other party unless a settlement needs to be discussed, that smoking will kill you, but euthanasia might well be a good thing and made legal. That we can insult Christianity but not Islam.
Teachers are subjected to all kinds of checks while having or wanting to teach explicit sexual behaviour, together with a swill of drivel about a variety of imaginary different sexes. We are told there will be two classes of people; the contributing class and the receiving class and that this is only fair. Taxes and NI paid by public sector workers have originated in the private sector from private enterprise’s taxation. The public sector has no other source of funding, but we are told its generous pensions will be protected, just as the PM’s is by Act of Parliament, while means-testing for the State Pension is on the cards for the private sector, meaning National Insurance and even SERPS were just another lie. Only poverty will be rewarded.
We are told the smash and grab policies of this apology for a Government will bring about “growth” (like a tumour) when anyone with a modicum of experience in business knows it will just leave the country looking like a store that has been looted. Geese that have been killed lay nothing and certainly not golden eggs. We are told that our politicians want the best for us whilst in true grandmother’s footsteps fashion they have gradually taken control of accumulated assets and imposed draconian rules on divestment to keep Death Taxes high. All trust is gone and only lies and deception remain in our post-truth age. The author has no solution and neither do I except to suggest that this chaos is being engineered deliberately in order to crush it once and for all.
An excellent comment. Shame that whilst all the evidence you set out above is in plain site for all to see (and has been for many, many years) yet the majority of people who do vote still do so for establishment parties who take their orders from unelected powerful corporations, NGOs and foundations.
To sum up the article – they are evil.
2TT’s irritability, chippiness and general lack of humour and Reeves’ obvious nervousness are two bruises Reform should never stop punching. They are there for the taking if only the correct approach is taken.
Rather long-winded.
What most commentators don’t grasp is Labour don’t care. They have an agenda and are getting on with it.
Labour voters who decided to ‘punish the Tories’ and Tory voters who stayed home could/should have voted Reform,
The country gets the government it deserves, always.
The Cabinet are hardly up to playing Snakes and Ladders, let alone Chess.
Bob nails it…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pndhO5DcSI0
Thanks for that link. I have never been a big Dylan fan and didn’t know this song. Seems to sum up where we are at though
Another fitting tune is SAXON Ministry of Fools. “come the revolution, you’ll be first against the wall”…We can dream.
Dreaming is the vehicle to action. Hello Ron fellow Metaller and Head Banger. The Ministry of Fools song nails it. Biff Byford‘s voice never fails to rouse me
To borrow something else from C S Lewis, there’s the schoolteacher, Miss Prizzle (Prince Caspian, pp 215).
She is a mistress at a school that typifies the humourless, authoritarian regime that rules Narnia in this story. In these schools, children wear uncomfortable uniforms, and the pupils are given order marks for talking ‘nonsense’ (that is, for speaking the truth).
The sort of ‘History’ that is taught under this oppressive regime is ‘duller than the truest history you ever read and less true than the most exiting adventure story.’
Under this regime, Narnians are ‘a people in hiding’. In the absence of any rescuer, in their desperation some turn to sorcery (aka ‘populism’) and werewolves (aka ‘strong leaders’). Others try to find solace in racialism because of the uncaring treatment of the rulers. The troubles the regime encounters are blamed on the, almost mythical, Narnian ‘natives’ (aka ‘the far-Right’).
Then Aslan bursts in spreading jollity, and leads figures from classical myth, who Lewis intends to represent wholesome fun, if not exactly merrie England, on a tour of liberation. A man beating a boy with a stick becomes the material he is abusing, and the boy joins Aslan. Just as the man was hard, he becomes a soft flowering tree in an example of merciful justice.
At another school, a mistress of a different sort thinks it’s her soulless duty to continue to teach arithmetic to ungrateful, gluttonous boys who only want to report her to the inspector for her lack of enthusiasm. At the sight of Aslan, the boys run away only to turn into pigs, and the teacher joins the Lion.
What will come at the end of Labour’s first parliament? Probably not jollity. Sir K has referred to the need for social justice for the poor and for people of colour in the light of the Grenfell report. Of course, it would help justice if people, whoever they are, didn’t claim monetary compensation that they were not entitled to.
Nevertheless, Sir K clearly doesn’t regard all the people as objects, even if social justice is to be attained by the arrangement of the building blocks of society into some auspicious combination that ‘works’.
It cannot but be wondered if this is the self-same justice that should have been brought to the girls and young women and their parents whose piteous cries for help were systematically and callously ignored when they were the prey of male gangs for the latter’s sexual gratification and dominance. There’s social justice for some and for others there’s ‘anaesthetic for the communities’. But anaesthetic isn’t medicine; nor is it even junk food.
For me, the change is very simple. We have replaced thinkers and dreamers with big ideas, with managers who are charged with implementing other peoples ideas.
For the Prime Minister to give a ‘State of the Nation’ speech about how the country is so broken it will require 10 years to fix it, and then spend his first three months, not in explaining the big plan (clue: there isn’t one…) but in pissing about with spiteful bits of peripheral legislation that do nothing much for anyone or anything, is rather telling..
While gifting billions to other countries’ then wondering why there was a ‘black hole’ that that already knew about.
Yes putting £12 billion for „climate aid“ to other countries to good uses at home would go some way to plugging it
Oh bring it on, we will win they will lose . 1689 all over again.
You’ve made my day.
I love your optimism…but I don’t share it…
I misread ‘chessboard’ as ‘cheeseboard’ and was transported back to the Mandelson/Blair era when evil at least had a bit of retro style.
However, I seriously doubt that many of the current cabinet know their way around a chessboard at all.
To me it seems like the agenda has several built-in ‘tipping points’, when there is the danger of the politicians being tipped out onto the street where they belong. But the first of which doesn’t arrive until 2030 or even after, when they come for our cars.
“Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.” : Ben Franklin
They will become victims of the civil war that they will cause.
Suppose that will get me locked up under two tier Stalin’s evil dictatorship.
Very wise words and IMO a spot on analysis of where we are heading in the present and very near future.
Message for two-tier Keir. You’ll NEVER defeat the people.
“Deviations are therefore despised: the technocrat always seeks to nip them in the bud if he can, and squash them where they have already begun.”
As a knowledgeable ‘Climate Denier’ is comfortable with the Scientific aspects of the subject, when the ruling technicrats accuse him of deviating from the Green Agenda, his right brain can still be the Master, while the technicrat enters left brain mode, and attempts to fit the Laws of Physics to his agenda.
It’s become amusing, even though we are heading into an economic abyss.
It’s all there is left to do, while the technocrats learn that Technology is nothing without Engineers, and all that goes with it.
This new Labour govt reminds me of the TV programme The Prisoner, where people are stripped of their identity, reduced to a number, and effectively imprisoned with no free will. I AM NOT A NUMBER!
There’s a great meme idea there… you never see ‘number 1’ if I recall correctly… Two-Tier could be them…
“astonishing intellectual narrowness”
What a great description of those who, though intelligent, cannot grasp anything outside their narrow expertise.