We live in an age of deep incongruity. On the one hand, our public life is increasingly characterised by hubristic claims to be able to subject every facet of creation itself to our will – to master ‘artificial intelligence’ and create sentience; to defeat disease; to manage and control the climate; to transcend biology; to cheat death. On the other, what we experience in our daily lives, as we encounter the world around us, is palpable decline and deterioration – a feeling that civilisation itself is becoming tattered and frayed.
We manage to ignore this odd mismatch between grandiosity and neglect most of the time. But there are moments when the border between the two starts to dissolve and we are able to glimpse some seepage. One such occasion took place for me the other day on a visit to the town centre of Birkenhead, near where I grew up.
How to best describe Birkenhead? It has always been a place with a rough, gritty, seedy streak to it – presumably even when, long ago, it had jobs (it was once a big shipbuilding centre and has a vast, now largely desolate, dockland). I have never known a trip there not to have a feeling of edginess to it; even when I was a teenager with a part-time job at a shop in the main shopping precinct, it felt to me like a place tinged with unease – imbued with an undercurrent of unexpressed malevolence that felt as though it might at any moment erupt into baleful life.
In fairness to it, Birkenhead has some justification for its air of seething resentment. Since the 1960s, when the port began to enter into precipitous decline, it has simply not had jobs worthy of the name – it had an unemployment rate well above 50% by the early 1990s. And although it has some ‘posh bits’ around the outskirts, it must now surely rank, at least statistically, among the worst places in the country in which to live. The North End is one of only five out of 32,844 Lower-Layer Super Output Areas in England to have been ranked in the bottom 100 ‘most deprived neighbourhoods’ in the country for the last 20 years. And other areas of the town, such as Bidston, New Ferry and Rock Ferry, are not in a much better position. As is always the case in down-at-heel places, there are still signs of life here and there, and still plenty of people who ‘burn so bright whilst you can only wonder why’. But it is by and large a hard, mean town filled with hard, mean inhabitants.
At the same time, however, Birkenhead has also always been a place soaked in cultural memories of a time when the average British town felt prosperous, secure, hopeful and confident. Its main park, the first publicly funded civic park in the world, built in 1847, was the inspiration for Central Park in New York and is still impressive. The town is dotted here and there with architectural jewels – the central library; the Williamson art gallery; Hamilton Square (a stunning Georgian square that looks as though it has been plucked out of Edinburgh or Bath); the elegant Town Hall. And there is a strange grandeur to a drive around its grid of wide streets, which nowadays have a bleak aspect (a kind of Detroit or St. Louis in miniature) but still manage to convey the impression that this was once ‘somewhere’.
In short, Birkenhead is in the throes of deep and long-term decline that seems impossible to arrest, but it somehow manages to evoke in the visitor the sense that England was once a country that behaved as though it had a future. It is a place, that is, where people used to have civic pride, and acted on it in the built environment – a place where, for all its current deprivation, a better past can still be glimpsed, if one squints very hard and knows exactly where to look.
This makes the sense of deterioration which permeates the town all the sadder. It is one thing to go to a place that is impoverished and nasty. But it is quite another to go to a place that was once patently not impoverished and nasty, and yet now is. And the impoverishment and nastiness is getting worse. Birkenhead has never been entirely safe – I’ve seen people glassed and/or bottled there on nights out on several occasions, back in the ‘good old days’ – but it is now the type of town where the local police feel the need to put posters like this up on the main entrance to the shopping malls:
And there is a hard edge even to a mid-morning stroll up the high street. In the aforementioned ‘good old days’, drug use was acknowledged and widespread, but covert. Now, it is in the open. A man was standing in a fugue state outside Boots as I walked past, high as a kite on something – the woman he was with, slightly more awake, managed to summon the energy to call a smartly-dressed man a “cunt”, apparently at random, as he scurried by. (This indeed caused him to scurry considerably faster.) Further on, a crackhead was striding up and down muttering to himself and endeavouring to make eye contact with people around him. A friend, who I met later on, described how he had recently come across somebody shooting up in a toilet cubicle in a nearby bakery; on being roused from his nod by the staff and told he couldn’t do this in their customer facilities the man wiped his bleary eyes and then remarked, crossly, “Where do you expect me to do it?”
The main drag on this particular day was not so much threatening, though, as depressing – a place where the human smile (never mind the ‘please’ or the ‘thank you’) is an endangered species; where people stagger or shuffle rather than walk; where every colour seems to meet the eye after having passed through a haze of grey; where faces seem prematurely aged and withered. The trappings of British urban consumer commercial life, such as it is, were just about clinging on – Superdrug, Costa, B&M, Waterstones, Next, JD Sport, The Works – as though to connect Birkenhead umbilically to the weakening pulse of the national economy. But there were empty units everywhere; I overheard an elderly woman remark to her partner, pointing towards one end of the high street, that “there aren’t even no charity shops up that way no more”.
Also in evidence, as is the case across much of Merseyside, was a generalised acceptance of low-level criminality that one (still, so far) doesn’t encounter around much of the rest of the country. More or less the first conversation I heard, waiting in the queue to be served at a Tesco Express, was a knowledgeable discussion between a staff member and customer regarding the ins-and-outs of identifying a batch of counterfeit £20 notes known to be ‘doing the rounds’. They might for all the world have been chatting about the weekend’s football. There is a sense that crime is a fact of life, a bit like the weather, and which it would be as useless to try to eliminate as would be an attempt to stop the rain from falling; the best that one can do is the equivalent of buying a decent umbrella so as to mitigate its effects.
This was confirmed to me as I ducked into – God help me – the large local branch of Primark. Here, I discovered an innovation. Birkenhead, like the rest of the country, is experiencing a spike in shoplifting. But many of its town centre shops have embraced the march of self-service checkouts – which are annoying and stress-inducing to use, but which have the advantage of not having to have national insurance paid on their behalf or being entitled to an ever-ascending minimum wage. How is one to reconcile the need to prevent and deter theft and the imperative to keep staff costs down? It turns out the answer is to install security gates at the checkouts which literally will not let you leave the area without scanning a barcode on your receipt to evidence your purchase. You are, in other words, in Primark in Birkenhead in 2024 (I assume other branches deploy the same technology) presumptively a thief; it is for you to prove otherwise.
It was impossible not to notice the sheer strangeness of the juxtaposition between the experience of actually being in Primark in Birkenhead and the gargantuan wall displays in the shop itself, which everywhere trumpeted the company’s commitment to the well-being of nothing less than the actual planet:
This, I later learned, stems from a rebrand which Primark recently embarked on, through which it is trying to improve its image through greenwashing and warm fuzzies:
From its website:
We are working towards a better planet. That means helping to reduce fashion waste by making clothes that last longer and can be recycled, using only cotton that’s organic, recycled or sourced through our Primark Sustainable Cotton Programme, and cutting out single-use plastic.
We will work with our suppliers to halve our carbon footprint, using greener energy sources and helping bring back nature with more regenerative farming practices, less water and less chemicals.
We are working to improve the lives of the people who make our clothes. That’s why we’re pursuing a living wage for the workers in our supply chain and creating opportunities for women across our supply chain.
And we will do all of this whilst staying affordable. Because we want everyone to be in on change, so no one is left behind.
Using our scale and low prices for good.
Towards a better planet that is affordable for all.
In this, though, to be scrupulously fair, Primark is only following current trends, wherein ‘the planet’ is presented as something that is simultaneously threatened by the very existence of human beings, while at the same time being something that is conceived as a field of improvement – something to make ‘better’. Never mind that ‘the planet’ proper will still be here billions of years after we are gone and that we are about as relevant to its ongoing existence as a few grains of sands being blown about on a beach. The phrase has become a kind of catch-all term for human existence – what is ‘good for the planet’ essentially meaning ‘nice things that give us a warm glow’ and what is ‘bad for the planet’ meaning anything which one ought to be ashamed of (the exact nature of the source of shame fluctuating from moment to moment). A quick Google search reveals it being used by other fashion retailers such as River Island and Shein, and in the context of construction, fitting out and refurbishment, beverages, flat-pack furniture, retail banking and flooring. You can even find out how to communicate science for a ‘better planet’ with an MSc at one of the nation’s leading universities. Naturally, politicians love the expression, and Eurocrats yet more so – a few years back we were treated to a trial balloon for the slogan ‘make the planet great again’ (it didn’t catch on).
There is something almost frighteningly perverse about a society which contains places in it that look like the North End of Birkenhead and yet whose elites can barely shut up about their asinine commitments to making the planet better. Britain is, manifestly and with alarming rapidity, declining. The rapidity is not evenly distributed, and there are big islands of bourgeois security (many of them not more than 15 minutes’ drive from Birkenhead town centre) where it is still possible to have a wonderful time sipping expensive IPAs in hipster pubs that serve food that includes ingredients like kale.
But in every respect one can think of – in terms of its economy, education system, physical infrastructure, birth rate, public health, crime rate and standard of living – the country is getting worse. We do not seem, collectively or individually, to have any ideas whatsoever about how to stop this decline, let alone reverse it, nor the wherewithal to put such ideas into effect. At times, it seems like we can barely tie our own shoe laces anymore. And yet we have the gall to describe ourselves as working to improve the planet as such. What does one say about such a country as this?
When I was a child, I used to page through an old copy of an Arthur Rackham-illustrated edition of Aesop’s Fables (1912), with an introduction by G.K. Chesterton, that sat on my parents’ bookshelf. The closing paragraph has always stuck with me. It reads as follows:
Man, in his simpler states, always felt that he himself was something too mysterious to be drawn. But the legend he carved… was everywhere the same; and whether fables began with Æsop or began with Adam, whether they were German and mediæval as Reynard the Fox, or as French and Renaissance as La Fontaine, the upshot is everywhere essentially the same: that superiority is always insolent, because it is always accidental; that pride goes before a fall; and that there is such a thing as being too clever by half. You will not find any other legend but this written upon the rocks by any hand of man. There is every type and time of fable: but there is only one moral to the fable; because there is only one moral to everything. [Emphases added]
This is a statement sure to outrage any anthropologist, classicist or comparative religionist. But we are, have no doubt, currently living out its essential message, and seeing its truth unfurl before us in real time. A society can for some time be ruled by a class of people who tell themselves that they are making the ‘planet’ better while the day-to-day, ‘lived experience’ of ordinary people in that society gets worse and worse. But it cannot go on that way indefinitely. Eventually, the only moral to everything will reassert itself, pride will be followed by a fall, and the insolence of the superior will be revealed – probably painfully.
It is to be hoped that this will happen through the ballot box. But I don’t take it as a racing certainty. At the moment, the gambit which everybody in our chattering classes seems to be banking on is that, by some miracle, making ‘the planet’ better will also make life better on Birkenhead high street, through vastly improved productivity achieved with AI; through green jobs, cheap energy, etc.; through a promised end to the bugbears of mainstream middle-class culture circa 2024; and through a rehashed, souped-up, activist State. I don’t know that there are many normal people who really believe any of this, least of all the population of Birkenhead. But when even this desperate fantasy is demonstrated to be false there is going to be a crisis – and a confrontation. And one suspects that the subsequent demonstration of Chesterton’s truism – that there is such a thing as being too clever by half – is not going to be at all pretty. In this respect at least, though, the people of Birkenhead are well-prepared. They’ve been living through a slow-motion crisis for generations.
Dr. David McGrogan is an Associate Professor of Law at Northumbria Law School. You can subscribe to his Substack – News From Uncibal – here.
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.
well they add to the tidal wave of evidence that lockdowns don’t work and do more harm than good – huge harm
Nanny State Britain: Boris Johnson to Introduce Junk Food Credit Score App
https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2021/07/26/nanny-state-boris-johnson-to-introduce-junk-food-credit-score-app/
Stand in South Hill Park Bracknell every Sunday from 10am meet fellow anti lockdown freedom lovers, keep yourself sane, make new friends and have a laugh.
Join our Stand in the Park – Bracknell – Telegram Group
http://t.me/astandintheparkbracknell
HOME EDUCATION – Ex-Primary School Teacher on Resistance GB YouTube Channel:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZ5oS2ejye0
https://www.hopesussex.co.uk/our-mission
“No doubt vaccines have played a part”
I’m not so lacking in doubt, if anything maxx-vaxx spurred on the virus.
“No doubt vaccines have played a part”
yes, and hopefully the drug pushers will receive their just deserts
Presumably seasonality is also playing a role, and vaccines are getting the credit.
Median decrease in transmission in summer is 42%, attributable solely to seasonality, according to this article:
https://www.news-medical.net/news/20210615/Does-SARS-CoV-2-show-seasonal-variation-in-transmission-in-temperate-countries.aspx
Does the 2021 curve look like 2020?
The “vaccines” that aren’t vaccines, will only ever get credits. Officially they can do no wrong.
Yes, maxx-vaxx certainly spurred on the deaths, but hey ho, they just don’t care.
How this guy’s head is not on a pikestaff on Tower Bridge is beyond me.
Give it it time and his head will be and it will have lots of company.
I might start up a line of Prof Pantsdown dartboards
Inflatable ones.
“I think it’s probably too early to start gloating, but it does look as though the gloomsters on SAGE – not to mention the doomsters on Independent SAGE – got the modelling badly wrong. “
FFS. When have they got it right?
The trouble here is that too many ATL articles implicitly take wild assertions too seriously, instead of cutting the nonsense off at the root.
How many articles are still treating the terms ‘cases’ and ‘infections’ seriously, instead of immediately just putting the record straight about definitions.
As with children – don’t give them attention. It just encourages.
I’d be careful with the analysis of lockdown 3 because stating that it started on 6 Jan is a little disingenuous. Recall that the November lockdown ended in Tiers with Tier 3 and Tier 4 being essentially a full lockdown. School was out of session for most of December, so the fact that lockdown entailed not going to school made no difference.
I remember that we were put into Tier 4 before Christmas and the only difference between before and after Boris’ 6 Jan lockdown announcement was that we lost the hope that the children would soon be able to see their friends. But nothing actually changed for us.
I would say that the December wave grew and fell under a persistent lockdown which began in November: remember how they cancelled xmas on us except for one day where they deigned to allow us to meet people?
So right. So many U-urns and changing draconian restrictions that it is difficult to remember.
Also remember that we will open up “once the over 70s are vaccinated”
They don’t prove that lockdowns do not work – equally they certainly provide little evidence that they do work.
They add to the increasing body of evidence that lockdowns do not work is what my slightly painfully astride the fence view tells me.
Particularly on the argument that lockdowns just defer and extend the pain
I keep looking at Sweden which didnt have so much as a wave but a very long neap high tide of cases and, maybe, through that got a deal more herd immunity. The proof or otherise will be whether Indian variant takes off in Sweden in a big way.
Can someone with a better grasp of figures than I have just clear up a few things for me?
These “cases” are positive PCR tests, am I right?
Mike Yeadon estimates that the possibility of false positives could be above 90%, when the test is improperly used, i.e. more than 20 cycles, correct?
Standard Covid testing is using 40 cycles or more. Is this still the case?
If so, why are we giving credence to ANY numbers churned out by any official body?
Is there any proof whatsoever that we are dealing with Covid 19 here and not just the next seasonal ‘flu?
I think 25>28 is the upper limit, but it appears they’re being run up into the high 30’s.
Then there’s LFT tests, which are just basically the same as a pregnancy test, only far, far less accurate.
Basically lot’s of positive tests, combined with lots of seasonal viruses, hangovers, hay fever etc
They have been at 45 cycles throughout in the UK, as evidenced by a FOI request to a Manchester trust. In other words, utter utter garbage, designed to propel a fake pandemic.
That is what I have seen with other FOI request responses. I also remember the WHO Gold Standard CT rate is set very high, perhaps 40? Kary Mullis went on record to disavow it’s use as a mass testing mechanism – and he should know, RIP. If you want to have a leitmotif for this entire fraudulent scandal is the knowledge that Governments know the RT PCR “Gold Standard” is not fit for purpose but these criminals still persist with their blatant lies.
Make that 45
Thanks
That is even worse; Dr MY and others have confirmed anything over ?25 is utterly useless and we all know it is not a test of infectiousness..
The CDC wants to replace the PCR test, as it seems the test can’t distinguish CV-19 from the seasonal flu.
It can’t distinguish CV-19 from grapefruit juice.
We knew lockdowns didn’t work very soon after this started
I think we’ve known that from at least the 17th century.
I now know around ten people, who over the last few weeks have had the rona, all of whom were under forty ( most much younger ) and either had recently had 1st, or 2nd dose.
Putting on my tin foil hat for a minute. Were all these models based on a high vaccine uptake in the younger groups? It’s been common knowledge for months now, that the jabs are linked somehow to post dose spikes. So were they planning on huge numbers of cases, driven by large vaccine uptake, which hasn’t happened?
The Jabs give you blood clots as well as suppressed immune systems. If you’re at low risk from COVID you’d be crazy to get jabbed.
I sat next to three students who were talking about getting released from isolation that day, after positive tests. One was discussing symptoms that did indeed sound like the Rona (acute loss of taste and smell). One described a sore throat – which I believe is not a common symptom. He still had the sore throat apparently even after two weeks and a negative test. So likely not Rona related – perhaps spliff related? The final one reported that his main symptom was a horrible rash – so that’s a “vaccine” side effect, right? All three would have been very recently jabbed.
Aside from those three, I know of a handful of recent positives (most over 60 and long since vaxxed). They passed it on within their households (antibodies depleted with no t-cell immunity?).
Nanny State Britain: Boris Johnson to Introduce Junk Food Credit Score App
https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2021/07/26/nanny-state-boris-johnson-to-introduce-junk-food-credit-score-app/
Stand in South Hill Park Bracknell every Sunday from 10am meet fellow anti lockdown freedom lovers, keep yourself sane, make new friends and have a laugh.
Join our Stand in the Park – Bracknell – Telegram Group
http://t.me/astandintheparkbracknell
HOME EDUCATION – Ex-Primary School Teacher on Resistance GB YouTube Channel:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZ5oS2ejye0
https://www.hopesussex.co.uk/our-mission
Let’s see how the usual suspects can explain this away…
They will just avoid debate and discussion, helped by their chums in the media. In a month it will be like it never happened and they can start over again.
Have facts ever mattered? Will they ever matter?
Take the shot, get your pass, shut your mouth.
“No doubt vaccines have played a part“
If so, then why did “cases” fall similarly after each and every major surge in “cases”?
A few observations: since we now know 90.1% of adults have antibodies (and we can expect at least 50% for under 18s given central infection rates), the population of possible infections is falling to less than 5m. That doesn’t include those who don’t have antibodies but do have other immunity. For continued climbs in positive tests (won’t call them cases) you have to have these 5m linked to one another. Viruses need link chains to spread effectively. Is that still present? It seems increasingly unlikely.
I don’t think Freedom Day has happened. Last week on holiday in Eastborne and now back in Oxford I see masks as prevalent as before the 19th (especially among the young). Which, I’m fine with as it’s their freedom. But it means that a decline in infections will likely be chalked up to mask use, which is not possible given known issues.
Clearly we are testing far less (only 700k today). I’ve always believed we need % positive tests, and that by PCR and other types. The LFTs are not being used by children (why we did that at all?), though we are seeing more tests from adults as they try and travel. So the distribution of testing might also impact things.
But exit waves haven’t generally proven to occur, and this decline needs to be celebrated. We want to see it keep going down. But why we publish the numbers when all we care about is hospitalization I don’t know. The government can keep the positive test data for planning, but the public just needs % positive and bed numbers. One day this will all end…when the media has a new story to observe over.
“ But why we publish the numbers when all we care about is hospitalization I don’t know.” Because the people running the show are evil.
“I see masks as prevalent as before the 19th (especially among the young). Which, I’m fine with as it’s their freedom.” Sorry, no, masks are de facto mandatory in many workplaces, on TFL and close to mandatory in many other settings unless you want to spend your life battling others. And they are inextricably bound up with the Big Lie. They need to be denounced as vigorously as they were encouraged. They are also still mandatory in many parts of the UK, may become so again in England, and are mandatory all over the world.
“Which, I’m fine with as it’s their freedom“
The kind of “freedom” that young people had in communist dictatorships, to display attitudes in accordance with their systematic state indoctrination.
I’ve always believed we need % positive tests, and that by PCR and other types.
Sorry that is rubbish; not even the UK Government believe RT PCR positive tests are reliable – as they state on the .gov website in answer to many FoI requests on this subject.Such responses consistently state that other clinical assessments are necessary and these PCR tests cannot be relied on in isolation – because they do not distinguish between dead or active material ( and do not test for infectiousness!!!!!). Why do people persist in believing the out and out lies about mass testing when not even the Government believe it is “of value”…?
Yet so many countries and regions join in the mandatory vaccination surge.
Why if its clearly apparent that the ‘delta wave’ is abating and in any case is mild?
Could it because they don’t want any non-vaxed anywhere to represent a ‘control group’ when the visible increase in ADE becomes its own epidemic?
Leaving aside ADE, the existence of a control group that shows no more ill effects from covid than the vaxxed would be a huge problem for the pushers
It’s not worth running around this unless it’s to form a case in law. We all know this is the biggest corruption of government and institutions since … I don’t know when! It is bordering on insanity or evil depending on your religious bent but even as a non-believer I think evil sums it up best.
Evil from the perpetrators and gross negligence from those willingly going along with it because they are either enjoying domination or just want to be in the tribe. This is has all the makings of turning into sadism and genocide either by intent or by sheer ignorance and bad science.
> We have long argued that the ebb and flow of the
> virus isn’t affected by state interventions
how can you ger covid if you meet no persons? thtough the phone or the internet?
In exactly the same way you can step into dog shit without meeting a dog.
Cue ‘story’ about there being a shortage of tests… to justify the reduced positive test result numbers, of course.
Neil Ferguson, based on modelling, predicts that Liverpool will beat Manchester United 1500-1495
Testing has fallen since schools broke up, but I expect it to rise again as people return from holidays in amber list countries shortly and have to take their Day 2 tests.
But why are positive test results being quoted rather than the number of positive results per 100,000 tests?
Toby Young will be aware that Prof Michael Levitt accurately predicted the trajectory of the virus early on in the pandemic. As for the idea of compiling a list of the lockdown zealots who deserve ridicule it will be “exponential” in length and could be laid out across the Great Wall of China. Lockdown idiocy has become a global industry.
If I was as stupid as Lockdown Ferguson by now I would be working as a rag and bone man. It might be more successful for him- dozy bastard
Why is nobody commenting on seasonality being a BIG factor? This time last year “the thing” had virtually disappeared, was there an experimental gene therapy treatment around? Don’t remember one, do you? Why all this praise for something (even in the daily sceptic) that’s killing and maiming people worldwide I genuinely don’t understand.
Please please don’t stop vilifying Prof. Lockdown. The damage he has caused this country is incalculable (lockdown policy, mad cow disease and God knows what else) and he must be brought to book.
Toby, once again the perception is that you are being far too kind with regards to what is criminal incompetence which has impacted all our lives. How can a man with his record of failure, stretching back to the foot and mouth crisis, still be in a job and still be commanding airtime? This joker, with his amateur, spaghetti code ‘models’, predicted an IFR of 3% for COVID 19 infections initially and it all followed from there. He really is in the same predictive league as those misguided souls predicting the end of the world is nigh. His models have been the pretext for every health, economic, and political horror that has followed since the lab escape and there should be a reckoning.
Of course it could be that fewer people are getting tested as they’ve correctly guessed that testing = cases which perpetuates the nonsense.
Bastard should be in jail! We hanged William Joyce for being a propagandist.