A tale of two Brexits
Philip Roddis
I am in many ways a fully paid up member of the liberal middle classes, even if I appear to have gone off the rails of late. Ours is an extreme world. How else describe one of such staggering and racially slanted inequality, and decades of war by its richest and most powerful nations on those poorer and weaker?
A world, moreover, whose systemic addiction to ‘economic growth’ – as measured in more stuff made, more stuff sold, more stuff junked and above all more private profits accrued – brings us closer with each passing day to environmental disaster?
It is a measure of the success of our media, and other agencies of opinion manufacture, in the normalising of these things that those who denounce them are easily dismissed as extremists. As novelist Dresden James put it:
When a well-packaged web of lies has been sold gradually to the masses over generations, the truth will seem utterly preposterous and its speaker a raving lunatic.
Correction. It is not the calling out of dysfunctional inequality, destitution in the global south, wars on the weak and reckless disregard for nature which draws the “extremist” label. Those who do so are not merely tolerated. They perform a vital function – witness the media fêting of Greta Thunberg – as proof of our healthily pluralistic and truly open society.
No, the extremist moniker is reserved for those who locate, in ways irrefutable and by that fact to be dismissed a priori, the root causes in capitalism’s intrinsic laws of motion.
So what has this to do with Brexit?
This. Most of my friends are also in the liberal middle class. They don’t much care for capitalism but few see the extent of its rapaciously totalitarian nature. There’s a reason for that.
We live in comfort. We do interesting and well paid work, own homes in leafy neighbourhoods, enjoy travel, the arts, international cuisine and all round cappuccino cosmopolitanism.
We deplore racism and xenophobia, and rightly so, but then why wouldn’t we? Unlike those “racists” and “morons” who voted Leave, we don’t compete with immigrants for social housing or low paid jobs.
Our lives furnish ideal conditions for internalising dubious but self serving assumptions without even being aware we are doing so. We suppose, to greater or lesser extent and with greater or lesser self awareness, ourselves to be less racist than workers at a Lincolnshire canning factory or Middlesborough call centre. Not because of more favourable material circumstances, mind, but because we are more civilised.
In our heart of hearts we believe ourselves better than them.
There’s more. Not only are we complacent in putting our “greater tolerance of difference” down to idealist factors and ignoring material drivers. We are also selective in this putative tolerance. We’ll be enraged and rightly so at Boris Johnson’s ‘picaninnies’ and ‘letterboxes’ oafisms, and Trump’s ‘pussy grab’ boorishness.
But we’ll take at face value the official explanations of wars[1] on a global south whose victims are dark skinned and disproportionately female; a global south whose leaders stand directly or indirectly in the path of northern capital’s freedom to exploit its wealth. Such naivity, even of many on the Left, follows as night on day from failure to grasp the nature of capitalism in its highest stage of imperialism.
Such is our complacency on the one hand, our naivity on the other, that we see Leave voters as nasty and stupid, and the European Union as both internationalist and – to quote from Owen Smith in the Guardian last April – “a defender of workers, human rights and the environment”.
(Or, quixotically, an institution that can be transformed into such – a project I’ve more than once likened to turning the US Empire into a progressive force.)
I’ve given in other posts, most recently this, my reasons for describing the EU as ‘a capitalist-imperialist club, and as such antithetical to the interests of workers’.
I won’t torture you here by doing so again. Or by restating my reasons for fearing Brexit – given the balance of class forces now prevailing – in spite of what I know the EU to be .
Here I simply want to make more explicitly a point I’ve been hammering away at in asides and footnotes since before the Referendum of 2016. Of far more significance than whether Britain stays or goes, or even whether the EU implodes through its irreconcilable tensions, are deep divisions now apparent within the West.
Those divisions, containable during the long postwar boom by super-exploitation of the global south, are now at danger level.
We asked for signs. The signs were sent. My list is far from exhaustive but consider these.
One, trickledown economics, prime legitimator of the Thatcher/Reagan ditching of Keynes in favour of the Chicago School[2], stand disproved by big data and the power to crunch it.
Two, the blue collar job for life of the social contract has been replaced – in what is mendaciously referred to as our ‘post-industrial’ world[3] – by soaring casualisation and an attendant precariat.
Three, the upsets to liberalism, neoliberalism and globalisation by voter defiance in the US Election 2016, the close shave of Scotland 2014 and Brexit 2016. Four, the upsets to liberalism, neoliberalism and globalisation brought by the rise of both Left and Right populism.
What Tariq Ali called the Extreme Centre is under threat.
*
With all this in mind, let me tell you a story. Two to be precise.
Last week I spent two days canoeing the River Trent from Nottingham to Newark. It came to pass that on the evening of day one I tied up at a waterside pub for a meal and pint. The place being busy, I shared a table with a couple in their fifties.
The next ninety minutes were most agreeable. We had much in common – interest in canoeing, well paid jobs with attendant benefits, Asian travel, grown up daughters and, of course, liberal disposition. When it came time for us all to go, we rose to shake hands as I voiced my pleasure at so unexpected an interlude. Likewise, said the man, then paused a second:
And we haven’t yet mentioned the B-word – but we are passionate Remainers.
Clearly he recognised the truth of the claim I made in sentence one of this post. Seeing in me a fellow member of the liberal middle classes, he deemed it safe to put his cards on the table.
We sat down again, he saying his piece, she doing the same. Wthout going into fine detail – all this took place inside five minutes – I said mine, summarising my position as “between a rock and a hard place”.
No offence was taken on either side; indeed, they seemed genuinely to enjoy my depiction of the EU as “about as internationalist as the Freemasons”. I doubt we’ll meet ever again but, in the event we do, I’m sure it will be an equally enjoyable encounter.
They went home. I went to sleep on my canoe.
Next day I woke early, to be on the water at seven. Before eight I had my first lock to negotiate, bypassing one of the Trent’s weirs and whitewater stretches. In the course of getting out and putting back in, I struck up a conversation with a group of anglers: tough looking blokes in army fatigues camping on a thin strip of land between lock, and river proper. As boy and young man I used to fish myself, and can hold my own on the topic provided we don’t get too detailed. A lot has changed since my day.
In thick West Midlands accents reminiscent of the Peaky Blinders, they confirmed my guess that they were after barbel, weight for weight Britain’s most powerful freshwater fish, and present in numbers which – as with otters, salmon and diverse bird species – mark how far a once grossly polluted Trent has bounced back after the relocation of heavy industry to the global south.
But here’s the interesting bit. I was commenting on the numbers of cormorants, especially on and below weirs like the one we now looked down over: me because I’d been forced out of the water; these guys because barbel favour fast stretches. Whereas I see the cormorants’ return as a Good Thing, they do not.
This has nothing to do with class. You’ll find the same sentiment on prime trout streams costing tens of thousands of pounds a season to fish. What unites anglers across the UK, transcending social class, is a desire to gain exemption from protected status for certain birds.[4] Some want to shoot cormorants and herons – otters too, given half a chance – whose dietary requirements pose a threat, real or perceived, to their pastime.
Knowing all this, I’d kept my tone neutral on the cormorants – I don’t go canoeing for the fun of picking arguments with everyone I meet. But what interested me was the way one of the barbel men’s predictable response on cormorants – predictable, I repeat, not on ground of class but of hobby – merged seamlessy into something else.
Yeah, they’d all be in tears if we shot one, wouldn’t they. Remainer arseholes the lot of ’em.
Superficially this seems a non sequitur but at a deeper and more visceral level it made profound sense. Yes, maybe I’m making too much of so short, so narrowly confined and so statistically insignificant an exchange. But I can’t help sensing in these two encounters something running wider, deeper and with toxic implications. The gulf between white and blue collar is not entirely synonymous with that between winners and losers in the globalisation project, of which the EU is an utterly reactionary driver. But nor is it easily separable.
Which wouldn’t matter half as much if that gulf hadn’t grown so alarmingly wide, as measured by at least three of the four indicators set out earlier. I sense trouble ahead, regardless of – and so much more consequential than – whether Britain Stays or Leaves.
NOTES:-
[1] I count economic sanctions, which kill in millions, as warfare too.
[2] I’m not here to defend Keynesianism. The shift from demand-side to supply-side economics strikes me as significant less as a root cause of current woes than as an indicator on the one hand of capitalism in crisis, on the other of its ability to make workers pay for that fact.
[3] The smokestack industries have not been rendered obsolete. They have shifted to the global south, with its cheaper labour, capital-friendly repression and leaders willing to let those they rule bear the brunt of environmental mayhem wrought by prioritising – pious platitudes to the contrary notwithstanding – private profits over every other consideration.
[4] Conservationist Chris Packham, of BBC Springwatch, campaigns extensively on the ease with which such exemptions are granted. This has brought him opprobrium.
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I have always harbored the suspicion that the whole Brexit thing was a response to the EU starting to take a very long, hard, look at the UK’s ‘financial services’ industry. There’s good grounds for suggesting that a lot of this industry is non-productive, its a parasite sucking value from productive effort (and tax revenue from countries’ treasuries) and as we’ve seen in 2007-8 it also has the potential to cause economic disaster. Its not an easy business to understand or regulate, its designed to be opaque, so the wheels grind slowly (and they’re probably gummed up as much as practicable) but they are turning.
The masterstroke was convincing a lot of people that its all about national sovereignty, control of borders and the like.
Brexit or Remain, Brittania has lost her marbles; she thinks she still rules the waves. Clip from today’s Saker:
“Remember the Stena Impero? This is the tanker the IRGC arrested after the Empire committed an act of piracy on the high seas and seized the Iranian tanker Grace 1. Col Cassad posted a good summary of this info-battle, blow by blow (corrected machine translation):
Britain, at the instigation of the US, seizes the Iranian tanker Grace 1 and demands from Iran guarantees that it in any case does not go to Syria.
Iran, in response, captures the British tanker Stena Impero and says it will not retreat until the British releases Grace 1. British ships that guarded merchant ships in the Strait of Hormuz were warned that they would be destroyed if they interfered with the IRGC’s actions.
After 2 months, Britain officially releases Grace 1, which is renamed Adrian Darya 1. It raised the Iranian flag and changed the crew.
The British government says the tanker is released under Iran’s obligations not to unload the tanker at the Syrian port of Banias or anywhere else in Syria. Iran denies this.
Adrian Darya 1 reaches the coast of Syria and after a few days on the beam of Banias, unloads its cargo in Syria. The Iranian government says it has not made any commitments to anyone.
After Adrian Darya 1 left Syria, Iran announced that it was ready to release the British tanker. The goal has been achieved.”
Remember Winston Churchill? “If Britannia has to choose between the mainland of Europe and the open sea, we shall choose the Open Sea”. The roar from this great windbag still rumbles on in Britannia’s dazed ears, obscurely guiding her feeble senile steps.
I thought the seizing of the tanker by the British military and taking it to Gibraltar might cause problems with the EU. The status of Gibraltar is one of those Empire left overs that’s easy to put on the back burner while the UK and Spain are both EU members but with a rancorous Brexit process the Spanish might not be so interested in letting these sleeping dogs lie. After all, post Brexit Gibraltar needs a ‘hard’ border – a nuisance to everyone and an affront to the Spanish. So the UK might be the US’s poodle but I wouldn’t have expected much action from the EU assisting them in implementing sanctions against Syria or Iran.
Martin, the EU (with or without the UK) is irrelevant to this issue. The point is: in the old days one gunboat would have been sufficient to teach the woggies a lesson; but here we have Britannia sending not one but two gunboats to the Persian gulf, and the Persians politely ignoring them (see para 3 above).
Brexit is a red herring. In or out of the EU, our real problem mental re-adjustment. The Empiah is ageing: Britannia is losing her marbles and John Bull is losing his balls. A younger and fresher national mindset has long been overdue.
The Spanish position would be stronger if they returned Ceuta and Melilla to their rightful owners.
Tory counsellor’s twitter page shut down following this tweet.
https://dorseteye.com/tory-counsellors-twitter-page-shut-down-following-this-tweet/
Liam Billington was the Tory councillor who made the remark about Jo Cox, but the vile tweet against Angela Rayner was by a Daniel Goshawk, who is a serving member of the British Army and has a conviction for assaulting a woman.
https://www.oxfordmail.co.uk/news/16959939.scales-of-justice-the-latest-results-from-oxford-and-banbury-magistrates-courts/
https://twitter.com/AngelaRayner/status/1177131180782751744
To judge by recent donations to the Conservative party, some very rich people approve of Boris Johnson’s policies.
https://www.electoralcommission.org.uk/who-we-are-and-what-we-do/financial-reporting/donations-and-loans/view-donations-and-loans/information-about-donors
Brexit is a right wing corporate coup.
Do all you supporters of it align yourself with Johnson, Mogg, Farage?
They are so on the side of the working class.
Look up the Atlas network, and the Legatum institute.
The asset strip of the UK is coming.
Exactly Frank. I simply can’t understand why most people cannot see this.
What is even more alarming is that Corbyn and many of our Marxist friends here on OffG are supporting and enabling this “right wing corporate coup”, some inadvertently so, but some deluded into thinking they can win then next election…Pompeo made it clear that the US will not allow him to become PM.
It’s a staggering state of affairs and just shows how pervasive and persuasive the fascist propaganda machine really is. Are we in for a re-run of the 1930s?
wow.
Is that even an argument?
Do you align youself with Blair, wife beaters, sexual predators in your Remain party?
Maybe you prefer to align yourself with Blair, Benn, Soros, Soubry, Berger.
Fixit…..two wings – same birdy…..and it’s descending worldwide, as gotta be brought down for it to be reset, re-organized and re-directed – but this time, with clipped wings….left flightless, powerless, staggering around under the New green financialized sky of Agenda 2030.
What?
Lots of emotive words here. Being enraged by them instead of contemplating the result that’s being attempted is too facile and arrogant.
E.g. Boris’ “letterbox” article was supporting the right of everyone to wear what they want – however ridiculous they may appear to others.
We hear lots about insults and virtue-signalling these days.
The 1st allows hearers to feel agrieved, consequently hating the speaker and justifying bad behaviour towards them.
The 2nd allows the speaker to arrogantly look down their nose at others.
Both are equally bad for society. Ripping it apart hence preventing understanding and sympathy.
Piccaninies and watermelon smiles.
He is a racist piece of shit.
Bring back Biggles.
“Any Englishman is worth 2 Huns, 3 Frenchmen, and a dozen darkies.”
Philip, overall a good article.
“We suppose, to greater or lesser extent and with greater or lesser self awareness, ourselves to be less racist than workers at a Lincolnshire canning factory or Middlesborough call centre.”
You see, I voted Brexit as did my wife, so did some of my friends who are from very different walks of life. You have given two sectors – canning/call sector – which entail vastly different work but which are both at the botton end of the pay scale. You may not realise that there are other sectors which have been affected by open borders/limitless supplies of labour, and they are highly skilled sectors such as teaching, science, accountancy etc.
My wife is a research scientist with a MSc in biology. I work in a specialised area of accountancy and we are both half a dozen years away from an age where we retire – if that would indeed be financially possible.
We have both been made redundant, out of work for long periods in the past ten years and we are now earning a good £10K less than we were ten years ago.
At my wife’s current company, there are workers educated to degree standard, doing important, cutting edge research work, earning £17K a year.
There are many of them from Eastern Europe, so why are they prepared to work for so little? The average wage in Eastern Europe is around £4K around 4 times less than it is here.
The simple answer is, that many of them are single, they live with half a dozen others in cramped accomodation, and they intend to move back to their own countries in a few years when they have saved enough to buy a house.
So, who benefits out of this situation?
Well, it certainly isn’t my wife or the other UK born workers who have seen their wages plummet.
It certainly isn’t the UK economy, because there isn’t much being paid in tax or NI.
It is the employers who are benefitting and the buy to let landlords, b oth of whom have a steady supply of resources.
Freedom of movement has caused this problem and has brought hardship and misery to many UK born people.
This has absolutely nothing to do with racism or xenophobia, it has everything to do with the experiences and well founded fears of ordinary people.
This is the crux of the argument against the EU. The original EC was a customs union of similar states — similar wages, similar standards of living and so on — so having open borders made sense. Expanding into Eastern Europe did nobody any favors; it was done purely to spite the Russians with the EU acting a sort of proxy NATO. It opened the floodgates for people from Eastern Europe who were willing to work for low pay because it was still a lot more than they’d be getting in their home countries.
The unanswered question is “Why is only the UK adversely affected by this?”. The answer is — I think — that only the UK allowed unfettered immigration from Eastern Europe. Everyone else regulates it.
The UK and Ireland opened their doors immediately, the other EU countries kept with the 10 year “moratorium” on freedom of movement on the East European workers.
British companies have profited massively from these educated, motivated, cheap workers. The ordinary Brit has not. That said, I prefer to interface with a positive thinking, industrious foreigner than a gobby, whinging, lazy local.
I am sorry Frank if that really is your attitude, particularly the last line, because it shows that you have not been affected at all by freedom of movement, job loss, nearly losing your home, all because some employers put profits before the livelihoods of UK born workers.
Andy, yes I have been affected by immigration, and I made the point that the ordinary Brit has not profited from this situation.
My last line refers to customer service skills, as a passing comment.
Hey, are the locals deplorable, too?
With Brexit, my hunch is, at this stage in the game, it’s a case of “better the Devil you know than the Devil you don’t”. This world is fucked and horrible. There are three nations which stand out as being the most fucked up and horrible. Britain, The USA and Israel. The Establishments of these nations are beyond words, in terms the evil they have inflicted on this Earth during and since the 20th Century. The EU, shit as it is, does offer a layer of protection to THE BRITISH PEOPLE, from their own Establishment. Brexit will give that Establishment the chance to do whatever the fuck they like, no limts, no rules, with Israel and the USA eyeing up the prey, licking their lips, ready for dinner. Hands up who wants Israel and the USA to have yet more infuence over the destiny of this nation? No, me neither. But that is precisely what we will be getting, make no mistake. More war, more security industry, more crap. The place is awash with lowest common denominator, toxic, cheap shit as it is.
But the truth is of course, that neither of these options are acceptable. It’s a choice between a poke in the right eye, or a poke in the left eye. Change is what is required, big change, but the people are programmed not to do this. They are so clever, the controllers, they have everyone running around in the gerbil wheels and from where I’m standing, they love their gerbil wheels, so change isn’t coming.
Do any of us really know who is running the show here? Who really controls the EU? Who really controls the US, or Britain, or the 5 Eyes? We haven’t got a fucking clue, in all honesty, and anyone who thinks they do know, is kidding themselves. There are networks of secret societies and religions and occultist sects and families and bloodlines and who knows what else that really is part of this, but for most, is totally invisible.
We live in the spirit world. We need to start truly living in that world, the God world, the world of magic. Understand nature, understand the magic. The establishment are playing magic tricks, because they can, and it’s fun for them. 9/11 was a magic trick. Brexit is a trick. Might be real, might be divide and rule. We just don’t know. Stay in the EU, they win. Leave the EU, they win. Their whole system is based on trickery. They trick people. We’ve all been tricked, in one way or another
Ah! So you like the EU because it’s undemocratic? Interesting …
The EU is more democratic, you should read more widely.
“The USA and Israel. The Establishments of these nations are beyond words, in terms the evil they have inflicted on this Earth during and since the 20th Century.”
You must have somehow missed out on the Holocaust, the Pogroms, Pol Pot, the Rwandan Genocide, Armenian Genocide, Japanese invasion of China, Ugandan civil war, etc. etc. etc.
No, all that combined isn’t a drop in the bucket by comparison.
The EU has broken all records in grovelling to the YEWSA and its Zionist controllers. It is ever ready to kowtow to Zionist controlled Washington’s latest genocidal sanctions and supply some cannon fodder for whatever ill starred military adventure they dream up next.
911 is the emergency telephone number in the US.
You can’t really get more blunt than that.
I mean, how fecking stupid do people have to be in order to understand that 9/11 was a complete inside job?!
No, it was not an inside job, it was expertly organised by a foreign state, and we can probably guess which one…the one with very high support in the US, and lots of agents there who can pull the right triggers to stand-down key defence elements during the attack they organised.
That country showed just how powerful and influential and evil it can be, the country led by those “who are against Christ” some would say.
@Frank Speaker: “led by those “who are against Christ” some would say”.
I would say that the two most prominent 911 Leaders — “Shrub” Bush and “TB” Liar — were definitely “against Christ”.
You cannot serve both God and Mammon. — New Testament
Interesting post – and it has helped me to reflect on a deep unease about myself, my generation, my social status etc.
I was born in the 60s and I now look back at the three decades that followed i.e. up till the late 80s, as a time of affluence. The people of my generation lived in a world where the biggest topics under discussion circled around entertainment – which pop groups, TV programmes, movies, actors were “in” or “out”. Politics was something that, on looking back, we viewed as spectacle. Everything was a pose. This isn’t something I would have realised at the time. Looking back now it all seems so excruciatingly naïve e.g. to assume that the toothless puppet show “Spitting Image” heralded, or even embodied, some kind of revolution. And not to realise that the ridicule of “stupid” politicians was part of their job description.
And such is the genius of the system that it actually seems to encourage the population to think themselves really subversive and radical, to have them all sneer at the papers and news bulletins and yet, deep down, everyone still trusts the media anyway. The noises of protest have become a kind of instinctively assumed pose which no-one really believes. The underlying belief, which made all this self-deception possible, is that we were living in the best of all possible worlds since we had achieved a balance between “Left “ and “Right”. And we believed that this world could go on forever.
Then came 9/11 whose effect was so aptly described by John McMurtry as the “resetting” of global protest to zero. Of course this massive fraud achieved far more than that: namely the surge of a wave of reaction and regression that would have been incredible even a year before. And the remoulding of the public consciousness ever since then has been astonishing to watch. And yet even to say this is to generate a rosy view of the time before. And this might be the most difficult thing for my generation to do i.e. to realise we had been living in a false world all along.
And there’s the catch: most of the people around me still seem to be living in that old illusion. Only today, a guy at work was sneering with relish at Donald Trump and saying that that Greta Thunberg had him “on the run”. Others still recycle the old Right Wing platitudes about “the nanny state”, “spending within your means”, “rights without responsibilities” etc.
Meanwhile the Brexit fiasco may be the most devious divide-and-rule strategy yet devised. Because one thing that the Remain and Leave campaigns have in common is that they offer a “solution” within the confines not only of capitalism but within the confines of neoliberal capitalism. The divisions witnessed by Philip Roddis are an indication of something extremely ugly in the making. We may be on the precipice of horrors unimagined. And I can already hear the media bleating about “the darkness within human nature” etc.
The younger generations are the ones I feel sorriest for. They know they have nothing to look forward to – while dinosaurs like me are gazing with rapt sentimentality at a world that never was. And what keeps ringing in my ears are the words “After me, the flood” – described by Trotsky as the motto of all doomed orders.
‘Then came 9/11 whose effect was so aptly described by John McMurtry as the “resetting” of global protest to zero. […] And this might be the most difficult thing for my generation to do i.e. to realise we had been living in a false world all along.’
The less realistic the view of the world held by those prior to the morning of 9/11/2001 EST, the more likely they are to define that moment as the biggest event in the history of the western world since Thomas Alva Edison electrocuted an elephant, if not something equally mind boggling that occurred even earlier, and concurrence with that view as comprising a “litmus test” that distinguishes true radicals from shitocriticals seeking to soil the communal nest. The more realistic the view of the world held by those prior to 9/11, the more likely they are to see the ‘collapse’ of its monuments to capitalism as only a more violent than usual demonstration of what had been obvious for well over a century; about as important in itself as the electrocution of an elephant by a rapacious exploiter of the system of invisible oppression and callous cruelty that the twin towers celebrated. In the minds of the former, desolates suddenly left wandering in the desolation of the false dreams of their capitalistic idolatory, there is one of the places where such fascism grows.
“what had been obvious for well over a century”
More obvious to whom? I haven’t lived for over a century and I suspect you haven’t either. Granted that it may have been obvious from accumulated writings – but there are all sorts of accumulated writings and those born into a society i.e. all of us, are limited by what we are taught and the various articles we encounter there.
Granted that the violence visited on New York on that infamous date is easily dwarfed by what other nations face daily but the issue is that 9/11 was so relentlessly used as a pretext for everything that came thereafter in the Western media e.g. GWB’s proposal to attack Iraq – which was the true “waking call” that alerted me to the illusory nature of the world I was living in.
‘”what had been obvious for well over a century”
More obvious to whom’
Marx? Engels? Bakunin? Even Kropotkin? And at least several thousand others since. How much time have you got for this? William Blake? Chomsky? Hedges? Me since the early 1960s…
“I haven’t lived for over a century and I suspect you haven’t either.”
I am far, far closer to my telegram/email/instagram/whatever from the Queen (assuming I manage to outlive her) than I am from the gold watch I missed out on because it seemed pointless to give one to myself. Some of the staff chipped in for a few nice trinkets and a slice of cake, though. And thank you for the complimentary suspicion. At my age, every little helps.
“Granted that it may have been obvious from accumulated writings – but there are all sorts of accumulated writings and those born into a society i.e. all of us, are limited by what we are taught and the various articles we encounter there.”
https://youtu.be/t4CRCJUmWsM
“Granted that the violence visited on New York on that infamous date is easily dwarfed by what other nations face daily but the issue is that 9/11 […] was h was the true “waking call” that alerted ME to the illusory nature of the world I was living in.” (Relevant emphasis added.)
To quote the inimitable Dr Gene Scott as though thd words were mine:
I believe we are talking at cross purposes. I agree with what you say. I was responding to what I took to be a sneering attitude to the unenlightened. Of course Marx saw it all coming – or, at least, he understood the dynamic of the system well enough. I think he would have been astonished at how long capitalism has lasted and at the mutations it has been through. All I meant is that everyone starts from the society they are born into and inherit it’s norms and presuppositions. And we in the West have grown up in a warm little cocoon of manufactured dreams. That was shattered for me over the Iraq issue. After which, I realised that my previous existence had amounted to a complacent self-absorption allied to fixating over entertainment trivia. I had a basically frivolous approach – even to serious issues. I think of it as a kind of “pop conditioning”.
But most, if not indeed all, of the people I meet every day are still living in the cocoon. When I started to question the 9/11 narrative, my wife considered me one of “the nuts”. Then we watched a sceptical video on the topic and she admitted there was indeed something weird going on. A day later she was back to considering me one of “the nuts”. Now that’s a sobering tale. It’s all down to mental habits. You can be turned around by reason and admit you were fooled by bullshit. But if you’ve been wallowing in the bullshit long enough, you will simply relapse sooner or later. And the propagandists are well aware of this.
Philip Roddis’s article mentions chatting with different groups of people and notes that he had no intention of starting up an argument with either – knowing full well that such a thing would be not only futile but counterproductive. This is what I too have discovered to my cost.
Excellent contributions George Mc
“I believe we are talking at cross purposes.”
You might be right but
“I was responding to what I took to be a sneering attitude to the unenlightened. ”
suggests otherwise, as the sum total of my post to which you responded is contained in two short sections, both concerning your comment “And this might be the most difficult thing for my generation to do i.e. to realise we had been living in a false world all along”, namely the section beginning: ‘The less realistic the view of the world held by those prior to the morning of 9/11/2001 EST, the more likely they are…’ and the next section beginning ‘The more realistic the view of the world held by those prior to 9/11, the more likely they are…’, both of which pretty clearly refer only to the group that would, in your nomenclature, rate as the “enlightened”, whether that enlightening was pre- or post-9/11. No semantic room in either section for what you “took” to be a “sneering attitude to the unenlightened”.
So “cross purposes”? Perhaps not. And if not, what?
Yeah whatever.
Are you sure it never was? I’m even more of a dinosaur, being one of the baby-boomers, born when there was still rationing, but not having to worry about it. By the time I would have been truly aware of such things, things were genuinely improving, in material standards. We’d “never had it so good”. Almost everything seemed to be getting better. And I’ve had long discussions with my mother who lived through the depression – her father was unemployed for many years, with 6 children to worry about – and then wartime, with its privations. She talks about 12 hour shifts in an aircraft factory, walking great distances in the blackout to get the bus to and from work, the feeling of almost permanent hunger as there never seemed to be enough to eat – there was a canteen at the factory, but she couldn’t afford to go there; her paypacket was handed over to mother to help feed the rest of the family.
Compare her early life to mine; definitely not living in luxury, but definitely no shortage of food or clothes either. And then when the sixties came along, material prosperity was evident all around, and then of course the musical and cultural revolution. We thought we were in heaven. We didn’t have to fight or endure a war: we had the luxury of being able to protest against one, many thousands of miles away in which “our boys” were not taking part.
So I look back on my early life and that of most of those around me with both sentimentality and affection, and realise that a lot of it was directly due to the “Keynsianism” which Philip Roddis appears to denigrate, but which in those days of the post-war consensus, both major political parties practised.
Supposedly, Keynsianism broke down in the 1970s, and according to Callaghan and Healey, it had stopped working. In fact, it was simply abandoned, because of the infection of the gospel of Monetarism, as Neoliberalism was called in those days. We have sort of been fighting that battle ever since, or rather, fighting with one hand behind our backs, because the Left can’t decide whether it is Keynsian or Neoliberal. So for example, we have the Labour Party on the one hand preaching its new gospel of Financial Credibility (essentially all about balanced budgets, and still giving overall control to the BoE), but on the other hand promising to lavish spending on the NHS and nationalising the railways and public utilities (which in any case will not be properly possible if the UK remains in the (Neoliberal) EU as the Labour Party wants to do).
The younger generations are the ones I feel sorriest for. They know they have nothing to look forward to
I worry about them, of course – I have grown-up children and a grandchild – but I could not disagree with you more about them having nothing to look forward to. They just need to keep their heads and not go along with every crazy fashion – political, cultural or environmental – that comes along, and always ask the question, as Paxman memorably put it: “why is this bastard lying to me”, except that sadly, we and they now have to ask that question not just about politicians, but about journalists, reporters, activists and pundits of all sorts.
oops, my “blockquote” didn’t work. In the above:
were not my words, but were quoting George Mc.
“…were not my words, but were quoting George Mc.”
No they weren’t; they were quoting Mike Ellwood.
Thank you for your comment. The picture you present is an attractive one which I would like to believe. However – this is the way I now see it:
When I said “world that never was” I did not mean that there had been no advances. There certainly had been and these advances resulted in a world of affluence that had never before existed and possibly not even imagined. It was a very pleasant world indeed – for the ones fortunate enough to be born into it. The “never was” bit referred to the basic nature of the system supporting us. You say,
“Keynsianism broke down in the 1970s, and according to Callaghan and Healey, it had stopped working. In fact, it was simply abandoned, because of the infection of the gospel of Monetarism, as Neoliberalism was called in those days.”
As if this Monetarism/Neoliberalism was a nasty aberration coming from “outside”. But I would say that Keynesianism was only ever a ploy to shore up capitalism by sharing out some of the profits among the general population – this being the cause of that previously mentioned unprecedented world of affluence. The basic reason for this ploy was to stave off any threat from what was then a troublesome strong worker movement – but, such was the strength of the American economy after WW2, that the capitalist system could afford to splash some of the wealth around. This sharing even helped to expand on profits through the creation of an affluent workforce eager (or, to be more precise, conditioned) to spend spend spend on whatever fashions and crazes could be incessantly cooked up by the system.
(And there’s a less palatable part of the narrative in that third world exploitation was a necessary prop for our affluence – hence the constant atrocities committed overseas.)
Thus when Callaghan and Healey candidly said that Keynesianism “had stopped working”, they were revealing a dirty truth i.e. that the benefits enjoyed by the majority in the West were never the aim of the system. These benefits were more in the nature of fortuitous effects that the system could permit for a while. The system’s true aim was the continual expansion of the wealth of a parasitical elite. This expansion is now being threated by rival centres abroad while, at the same time, the revolutionary threat from below is now deemed neutered. And so every concession or, to be more accurate, bribe that the system delivered to the masses can be taken back.
My one hope is that the propaganda system relentlessly works not only to deceive the populace but also to sow despair. Things may not be as bad with the general public as they are made out to be i.e. perhaps there aren’t so many ferociously reactionary bigots etc as are made out in the press. Perhaps people are smarter than they are made to appear. And a friend just insisted I watch a bit of a Greta Thunberg speech, expecting me to roar with laughter at the obvious stage managing of it. Well it was clearly a piece of utter contrivance – but what surprised me (and also bothered my friend when I commented on it) was that much of what she was saying was actually true i.e. “fairy-tale of eternal economic growth”. I am deeply suspicious of a obvious show put on by the very forces responsible for the deepening crisis – and yet the very fact they have to include at least a minimal acknowledgement of truth is something – dare I say? – hopeful.
George,
I find your analysis very interesting, although my instinct is to disagree, at least with some of it. But you’ve given me food for thought. I will re-read and ponder.
My gut reaction is to say, yes, there is something rotten about capitalism, and it should never be “unbridled”. The government, democratically elected, of course, should be in control (and so, indirectly, very indirectly we might all agree), the people (the electorate), should therefore be in control. I think we as a nation will now be forced by recent events to consider more generally how our democracy should work. It seems that many of us would agree that it’s not working terribly well at the moment, although our individual reasons for thinking that might be quite different.
Speaking personally, I would have (via my democratically elected government and local government) much more control over things like planning and house-building, and of course much more control over banking and the financial sector, putting the small percentage of it that is used for productive purposes into public ownership, and eliminating most of the speculative side of it. Railways and natural monopoly utilities should also be in public ownership. I wouldn’t abolish private schools, but I’d do all in my power to make state schools at least as good as the best private schools. That would cost money of course, but it would need more than just throwing money at the problem. It needs a serious re-think about what we want out of our educational system (at all levels). I think I do share your suspicion of capitalism, but I was brought up to believe in a mixed economy, and I think it’s possible to get the mix right if we work hard. Thus, for example, I’m more than happy to support small private businesses, so long as they treat their employees well. But the larger the enterprise, probably the more the government (on behalf of the people) should be keeping an eye on them.
As for the fairy-tale of eternal economic growth, I must say, this was a disagreement I used to have with the Green Party when I was a member. For one thing, if there is population growth, then you must have economic growth, or are you prepared to tell people that, sorry folks, you’re just going to have to get poorer and poorer. OR: sorry folks, you can’t have as many kids as you’d like. But the other aspect is that there is, at least in theory, such a thing as sustainable growth. Not saying it’s easy. It is a challenge, and will be hard work to achieve, like many of the challenges that we face.
The simplest way I can explain my position is to say this:
There are two systems at play here: the life system in which products are made for use and money serves as the middle term between products i.e. production is the thing-in-itself. The other system is the capital system in which products are made for exchange and therefore the products become the middle term between money flows i.e. money or, to be more precise, the constant expansion of money is the thing-in-itself. The latter system is the one that is ascendant in our society. Everything around us serves this. The fabled “economic growth” we keep hearing about is simply this constant expansion of money.
If people really worked to produce the necessities of life, they would have stopped long ago. Or at the very least they would have slowed down – especially considering that fact that we have more advanced technology now than ever before. The problem is that all the products of this technology were never intended to help anyone. The products are made for the sake of expanding money for a tiny parasitical elite. This is how capitalism works. It is directly antithetical to the life interests of the vast majority. Indeed it is directly antithetical to life itself. Even the ones grubbing up the profits are relentlessly driven under constant fear of falling behind.
Superb post – Chapeau!
A naivety,perh.,but one carefully managed by those pulling down astronomical salaries.Clever men,typically,with terrific connections!
I notice that mainstream media are the voice for the sustainability of the lie – that contrives to persist as a systemic substitution for truth.
The idea that such a media are sometimes free to challenge the evils of the world but otherwise used to mask or hide them by false flagging to others is not credible in my view – though there May be leaks or moments where something outside the narrative dictate comes through.
So when I read the article above, I quickly came to a jarring dissonance of mainstream suckle that shows – to me at least – how compartmentalised a mind can be from pattern recognition, when the same ruse runs in different forms.
In all the divisive identities being generated or reiterated the underlying issues are rarely in awareness or understood. ‘Democracy’ and ‘Freedom of speech’ can operate as a kind of opinionated identity that runs within belief structure or world view, that others are actively manipulating or ‘engineering’ through media, education, legislation and corporate inducements to dependency and controlled scarcity.
H G Wells put it as the division of humans into predator and prey – but I see both of these are two sides of one coin.
The early Liberal movement was largely a – then new- middle class movement that includes some disaffected aristocratic lineage perhaps – seeking to undermine a heartless and cruel aristocratic inherited model of ‘right to rule’ – with the idea of organising society where sovereignty operates from the bottom up – or at least in the people and not a top down directive of a blind predatory god-class.
The forms can be changed but the underlying archetypes persist – and at first we think we have escaped the bad old days are are set fair for a better world – but the blindness in forms is the capacity to be phished or seduced to identify them as if themselves reality. Any and every form of life or truth can me masked in or taken out of context for marketing mind-capture or weaponising the unwary to effect their own destruction – so as to effectively take power from their willingness to give it away to some ‘saving crusade’ of identity reinforcement.
Identity is key. All else proceeds from it. Therefore to identify truly is a true foundation and to lose that to a divisive or conflicted self under whatever narrative justification is to be ‘hacked’ and running within frameworks of thought and belief that have never been truly brought to question or evaluation.
The idea of humans as running on a template is also the idea of systems management of humans via the engineering of the template -that we might call conditioned presumptions and beliefs running as the ‘reality’ under which and in which to adapt. The carrot of funding or career and the stick of rejection or exclusion can induce the uptake of a toxic life-choice alongside a demonisation of the life-sustaining. This I have witnessed.
US and EU are two of many styles of systems management. Neither represents freedom from enforced monocultural top down ‘economics’, that effects regulatory capture of the institutions that are part of support for human civilisation – such as to weaponise them for the marketing or indeed farming of humans – at least those found to serve a use.
The idea of independence as a freedom for associating interdependently in terms of common interests and shared values is the mask of the system-management of corporate cartel monopolies – but always hiding an agenda of control. Fears and guilts are used to capture and manipulate sympathetic identification. Also known as propaganda or emotionally targeted manipulative deceit.
The idea of freeing from deceit in order to then discover open and clear cultural expression – not in isolation but in mutual honouring rather than imposing ‘deals’ drafted by armies of lawyers operating the dark arts of seeming to serve health, safety, protection and security, while effectively transferring wealth and power to the few who seek to be on the arc of survival in a dead world sinking fast.
The ‘blind to life’ cannot share a vision but only cannibalise or parasitically feed off the vision of that which yet stirs with passion for life – and so it is that those who rise in the hope of life are betrayed at first without recognising they now effect the role they once campaigned against – for the framing of the trap dictates all else be subjugated for survival – and anything else is framed out while we ‘save the world’ or any other system of false profits.
There IS no leaving or remaining. These are not real choices. Changes are already unfolding to script and the circus operates the folding of the narrative.
Real choice starts with a true identification. Running on a false can be ‘sustained’ for as long as it can be held credible, meaningful or profitable. How far into degradation and pain of loss are we each and together willing to deliver and be delivered unto under the surface presentation of a personal or exceptional sense of self specialness or survival in psychic emotional frame of defended identity against its own shadow or denials?
The United States, with the support of NATO, tested the modification of the B61 atomic bomb in August.
A bomb for Iran? U.S. tests new nuclear weapon
@Junaid: In other words, “Remainer” versus “Brexiteer” is the 21st century “U” versus “non-U” in-game. Will Brittania ever stop gazing at her navel?
As I said commenting on another article earlier. Since the referendum outed so any fake Socialists, I now have a deep and abiding loathing of so called Liberal centrists.
So, are the so-called ‘elite’ organising a deal with the EU (sub branch of global neolib empire) that EU will not examine proceeds of war crimes concealed in offshore bank accounts ?
Only wondering.
How about the Bilderburg Group/meetings?
The current chairman of the group is Henri de la Croix de Castries, ex chairman and CEO of AXA and son of Count Francois de la Croix de Castries.
I’m a card carrying Liberal in CANADA. My ancestry came from the UK, and I am related to Sir Isaac Newton via my grandmother’s side. I grew up in Toronto & Ottawa as a Liberal with Liberal parents in a largely Liberal suburb that has been dominated by Liberals for four decades thus far. Dear old dad was a Chartered Accountant & mother dear was a Poet/Producer/Writer who was raised by a well to do publisher in Toronto during the 30s.
I have a college diploma in Mechanical Engineering & an Honours B.A. in Experimental Psychology. Unfortunately, I have lived in abject poverty for my entire life. I have never had full time work for longer than four months duration at any one time during those decades of abject poverty. My student loan debts were intractable and I ended up in bankruptcy due to a lack of gainful employment throughout life. I have been sitting in isolation for much longer than Nelson Mandela had to endure it. Furthermore, I decided to become a Progressive Conservative about twenty years ago to see if there was any difference between being a Liberal vs. a Progressive Conservative vis-a-vis full time prospects for employment only to realize that there is no difference whatsoever when it comes to gainful employment.
Assuming that Liberals live in the lap of luxury like those in middle class England do is narrow minded and wholly arrogant. Moreover, as one that currently resides in a working class urban ghetto in Ottawa CANADA I, for one, can assure all that the Liberal middle class extends to working class urban ghettos as many middle class Liberals like myself have had no disposable income gains over our lifetimes or discretionary incomes gains throughout.
Most of my life has been spent sitting in a chair in abject poverty with isolation being much worse than Nelson Mandela experienced during his lifetime. Today my teeth are falling out from stress & diet related disease. I cannot afford to even replace my missing teeth which leaves me in a position of even greater isolation given that I can no longer socialize in public due to my less than middle class appearance.
I am still a Liberal supporter today and would never support the right-wing Conservatives even if my life depended on it. I am not a supporter of the Green Party or their manifesto for change but some of their platform planks are pragmatic whereas the other parties are much less pragmatic when it comes to our shared environment. Assuming that Liberalism is wholly a middle class enterprise throughout the world is to assume incorrectly & inaccurately if we measure middle class status & political orientation with a yardstick of perception that emanates out of middle class Liberal England/UK via Neoliberal adherents that have enough money to canoe along centuries old canals that are lined with middle class Liberally minded pubs that cater to Liberally minded patrons with enough cash in their pockets to purchase a beer & meal.
The last time I dined in a restaurant was over 35 years ago.
Abject poverty is wholly a Liberal existence.
MOU
MOU, as a Canadian you must have read The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice, by economics prof Stephen Leacock of McGill U. I have just discovered it. Great stuff. His ideas for Social Justice seem very similar to Distributionism, by his English contemporaries Chester-Belloc (early 1900s). The trio were neither Liberals nor Socialist but Compassionate Conservatives; and they had a Dickensian sense of humour which earned more than enough to “bring in their beer” but tended to obscure their prescience of the Anglo world’s predicament after another century of Capitalism red in tooth and claw.
I read one of Stephen Leacock’s absurdist humour books when I was at school. I had no idea he was an economics professor!
Mike, you should read his book (or listen to it at bedtime via Librivox). It is quietly humorous as well as serious, like all the best humour; and refreshingly short. In his final chapter Leacock predicts the Welfare Capitalism which worked so well after WW2 — until ‘The Empire Struck Back’ by launching Ronny Raygun and Maggie Snatcher. Leacock was a Conservative; his proposals for Social Justice appealed both to Conservative PM Harold MacMillan and to Socialist PM Harold Wilson: tax the rich until they flee, pay workers enough to buy the things that they and other workers make, shorten the working day to 4 hours, spend less on fripperies and more on essentials; most essential is nurture of the young, both physically and mentally.
“Every jest is an earnest in the womb of time” — GBS
Thanks Vexarb. I may well do that! Used to be quite a fan of Librivox, though haven’t used it in a while.
ISTR one of the stories in the book I read, was about a young minister of religion who was terrified of offending people. He was invited to stay with some people on an open-ended basis, and didn’t know how to leave! He was too shy to tell them he was ready to go, and ended up a virtual prisoner! 😉 (I’ve never been to those extremes, but I hate to be the first one to leave any gathering… 🙂 ).
Here’s another THING, that is more of a THING than Brexit ever was.
In America they have the False Claims Act (Qui Tam)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_Claims_Act
Who’s more likley to get this puppy up and running? I can’t see anyone else but Jeremy doing it.
Can you imagine the screaming?
Would PFI look doggy if False Claims Act was running?
Can you imagine the screaming over at the EU if this was suggested?
BREXIT AINT A THING.
The problem with public opinion – and the resultant feverish factionalisation …is that it has been intentionally fomented. There is a very clear position that almost all the public would agree on – if the debate had been fully informed. Let’s suspend hostilities: and examine the context of the Constitutional position we have to uphold. For which I cross-posted the relevant context below. Further to Lord James’ ‘Black Vulture’ questions: I would submit the evidence for ceding UK military forces to non-leadership vassalship of the EU. The evidence was collected by Professor Gwythian Prins from the colloquially named ‘KitKat tapes’. We are being marshaled into ‘ever more Europe’ and the ‘EU Defence Force’ by a silent bureaucratic coup which no one voted for.
https://briefingsforbrexit.com/escaping-from-hotel-california/
If we can put aside personal preference: perhaps we can agree we are being lied to and betrayed by our elected representatives? The issues raised by Lord James below – and in the House of Lords – change the calculus of the public debate by informing it. For which Lord James has been subjected to nothing but harassment – starting with Lord Blunkett who immediately pressured him to retract.
Who wants an EU Defence Union – commanded by Ursula von der Leyen (for God knows whom) – to which UK Forces will be non-leadership subalterns? Will our thermonuclear deterrent be the ECBs nuclear deterrent? The whole debate has been skewed toward issues that are not aligned with the core deal. The core deal is going ahead whatever the sugar coating – the fake chocolate outer of the KitKat (in the analogy) – superficial deal that we agree. Did anyone vote for that? Does our common betrayal come above or below intentionally ill-informed personal opinion?
Then there is the Constitutional position which perjures the Monarchy if we remain. I’m not arguing we Leave: I’m arguing we restore our rightful sovereignty as the People …then decide. The Constitutional precedent of overturning our democratic mandate leaves us under the heel of an ascendant Parliamentary authoritarianism. Which is a bigger consideration than Leave or Remain. There are no good options there. But undermining our own sovereignty is the worst option of all. With tensions running high – the best we can do is have an informed debate. The debate so far has been sub-optimal as Parliamentary authoritarians have deliberately skewed the debate to get the result they want. What about the result we want? A full anf frank exchange of views vcan only ever occur if we are in full possession of the facts. Lord James’ ‘Black Vulture’ questions demand answers and full disclosure. By ‘samuzdat’ means if necessary.
The factionalisation is a bureaucratic tool of manufactured dissent. To which the only response can be unity. Unity in telling them to fuck the fuck off. Let the sovereign People decide. We can have the Leave/Remain debate another day when all the actual facts are on display. To get those facts we need a new open system of governance: for which we have the Constitutional power of reform. Use it or lose it. If we cannot unite and decide: it will be decided for us behind closed doors. KitKat anyone?
As a Brexiteer, what has happend was not a surprise. It was always going to be, but unlike most people who got sidetracked on this little issue, I didn’t because
a) I expected it and more importantly
b) it AINT A THING.
Tell you what is A THING.
1) Recognising the state of Palestine. Restricting goods from the Occupied Territories. Stopping arms sales to Israel.
Now that’s a THING and worthy of all Brexiteers/Remainers getting behind Jeremy Corbyn, who’d see those THINGS addressed. Of course the by product will be screaming and whinning from certain individuals, but there is always more than one upside.
Maybe, just maybe if he’s in, he’ll work with Bernie Sanders/Tulsi Gabbard and Russia to get stuff sorted around the World.
And, that’s just one THING amongst the many that are more of A THING than Brexit ever was.
Bravo, TFS! As a Remainer I’m with you.
Nope. Read it again. Im a Brexiteer. End of Story.
I choose Jeremy C and THINGS More important than the Brexit issue.
i didnt think i was being too nuanced…..
But you will be overruled by the Supremos, don’t you see it?
But Jeremy Corbyn will find it incredibly difficult to do many of THE THINGS he wants to do while the UK remains in the EU. Does that therefore not make Brexit also A THING?
Well he obviously doesn’t think so or he would have had a word with the Remainers in his party.
Either way, do you not think he has enough THINGS to be getting on with that are not dependant on being in or out and ARE A THING?
I think his main worry should be how not to get stabbed in the back by Tom Watson, or in the front by Jess Phillips.
[Cross-posted as contextual]
Talking of dangerous precedents: talk of a Constitution with no reference to the Magna Carta is a huge Constitutional obfuscation. All our rights – including the Bill of Rights – are founded on the Great Charter. It entails our Common Law jurisprudence – trial by jury; etc – to which all subsequent Statute Law is inferior. But the greatest enshrined principle is the Sovereignty of the People. If we cede that sovereignty to Parliamentarian tyranny we are done.
I am not going to argue whether the Great Charter et al constitutes a written Constitution – it does. There are sites – such as the British Constitution Society that argue that for me. Any fellow UK Column subbie knows the position. I will remind Kit that I pointed out that we are at least a decade into a cross-party agenda to have a written Constitution. I pointed out that some of the clauses for the government to forfeit life in defense of the rule of law. Welcome to Palestine, Talking of dangerous precedents: talk of a Constitution with no reference to the Magna Carta is a huge Constitutional obfuscation. All our rights – including the Bill of Rights – are founded on the Great Charter. It entails our Common Law jurisprudence – trial by jury; etc – to which all subsequent Statute Law is inferior. But the greatest enshrined principle is the Sovereignty of the People. If we cede that sovereignty to Parliamentarian tyranny we are done.
I am not going to argue whether the Great Charter et al constitutes a written Constitution – it does. There are sites – such as the British Constitution Society that argue that for me. Any fellow UK Column subbie knows the position. I will remind Kit that I pointed out that we are at least a decade into a cross-party agenda to have a written Constitution. I pointed out that some Comrades, if we cede our Sovereignty so lightly to Parliament. We have a Constitution to defend against that.
As usual: there is a bigger agenda. That of the ongoing administrative coup to usurp our rightful sovereignty. Ms Miller assumes the mantle of the latest Parliamentary authoritarian who wishes to subvert the will of the People. As usual, many of the People cheerlead her on: not knowing the Constitutional rights and civil liberties they give away.
We do have a written Constitution. The position is clear and unequivocal: they work for us. We vote: they carry out the vote. Think long and hard before you engage to subvert that position. It is your own rights – enshrined in the Great Charter – that you involuntarily cede to Parliamentary authoritarians. Julian Assange is a primordial example of the subversion of the right of Habeas Corpus (he shouldn’t be out on bail: he never should have been in jail). Operation Temperer saw the army on the streets in peacetime. The EU violates our right to withdraw our consent to have a standing army in peacetime. Statute after statute have subverted the principles of Common Law. The list goes on and on. We lose everything if we do not realise we have a Constitution.
The Constitutional position is clear. We vote: they act. If they do not act as we voted: we petition the Crown (not the Queen: the sitting tenant monarch who draws her authority from our consent). The Queen can prorogue Parliament for good: until we get a government that will carry out our democratic will. If the Crown will nor act on our behalf: we get rid of the sitting tenant (as we have done six times before) and get a new monarch. Remaining in the EU constitutes perjury by the Queen and Treason for Parliament. For which her abdication is the only proper redress.
https://www.ukcolumn.org/article/lord-james-remaining-eu-will-constitute-perjury-queen
All this talk of Constitutional crisis stems from the fact that we have been intentionally misinformed about the Constitution. If we get informed: we can retain sovereignty.of the People. Then, if the People so choose: we can then decide what we want to do. By which time: the EU should have collapsed. In further deference of Lord James: absolutely no one – but him – has included EU Defence Union in the calculus of the Parliamentary debate. No one voted to cede our military to a non-leadership secondment to the EU. His ‘Black Vulture’ questions demand answers – so that we, the People, can decide in an informed manner (the absolute minimum requirement for a functioning democracy).
https://www.ukcolumn.org/article/lord-james-sets-out-what-we-will-lose-under-any-eu-deal
If we cede our authority – and forget that we have a Constitution that enshrines that sovereignty in Common Law – and let the likes of Ms Miller, Hale, and the other Parliamentarian authoritarians decide for us …we’re done as a sovereign force. A sovereign force most of us never knew we had. Nevertheless, we will miss it when it is gone and they suspend Habeas Corpus for dissidents, and assume the right to forfeit life to maintain the paramilitary police state. We are all Julian now.
Whoops: that got a bit garbled in the copy in haste transference. You’ll have to read it on the other forum, if you are interested.
It’s OK, BigB, I get your drift; and it’s all the clearer for being repeated. Good to be reminded of Magna Carta and Sovereignty of The People; throws New Light on GKC’s praise of the Middle Ages:
“Magna Carta was it hight / Charter of The Peoples’ right.”
Essentially, by sleight of hand and deliberate misinformation: the public have been debating something other than Brexit (without the exit). It’s the old Herman/Chomsky manufacturing of dissent/consent – by equal measure. Whilst we are concerned with causing lasting public rifts and opening wounds that may never heal – debating the issues the Overton Window has led us to focus on (using personalities; the Courts; and Parliament as props to construct a Spectacular soap opera) …exeunt stage right and that is where the deal is taking place.
Lord James has been harassed by the police in order that he retract his statement in the Lords two weeks ago. This confirmed to me what I already knew: more Europe and EU Military Unification is the whole deal, and nothing but the deal. If this became public: there would be more or less a very calm and measured unified British outrage. Someone might swear, or something to express the British reserve revolutionary spirit.
Well, Lord James and some retired senior Army and Navy officials – such as Sir Julian Thompson and Sandy Woodward – are beginning to make the right noises and cause a stir. As much as I am anti-Establishment: they need our support to make these issues public. Also, I’m a pacifist. Ultimately, I stand against armies and nuclear weapons. But the precedent being set transcends any ultimate view. If the UK cannot unite against the ruling classes and their Parliamentarian advocates on the issue of ceding our sovereignty and our military to the EU – as if it were there God given right to own us and dispose of our collective unifying principle – our autonomy and sovereignty (what little remains – but we can work on getting the rest back later) …as if it were their chattels.
Well, they can fuck the fuck off. Which I would hope that nearly the entire country could unite in saying. If we do not demur now, we go gently into the good night as Broken Britain. The bureaucratic coup Blair catalysed (with the so-called ‘End of Parliament Act’ among others) will be all but complete.
To whit: UK Column are doing a ‘Brexit Special’ on Friday to air these issues. Watch it if you can. If we all inform our own little networks: the truth may go viral. Then we may get our sovereignty back. Then we can have a fully informed debate about where we want to go. And if the EU is still extant by then: we can rejoin – if that is the fully informed consensus of the sovereign People.
Essentially: the debate we have had is null and void – until all facts and all agendas are on the table. Ceding our sovereignty over our Armed Forces was not on the ballot. Had it been: the answer would have been a singular and resounding No! A nation state without its military, foreign, defence, and security policy is not a sovereign nation state. I’m pretty sure no one wold vote for that.
I find the constitutional thing fascinating. Have you ever had the opportunity to talk to David Starkey about this kind of thing?
UKColumn though….no disrespect intended, but aren’t they all a bunch of right-wing-nutters…?
[If] we can retain sovereignty of the intolerables. Then, if the intolerable so choose: the intolerable can decide for themselves instead of leaving it to the what is best for them. the thing to avoid is the impact on your thesis of the law of vote cancellation.. assume 4,020,000 intolerable, voters if you like, allowed to vote. All live in one of two human containers where in each the information environment is totally controlled. The leftist half are allowed to see leftist things and hate the rightist things and the other half are allowed to see rights things, and hate the leftist things. When they vote they for leftist or rightist as their container has been taught, so the vote of 4,000,000 intolerable is 2000000 for the leftist side and 2000000 for the rights side, net vote = zero.
then the exceptional (wealthy, corporate lords, members of the government, the military, and foreign controlled local puppets<= all of whom vote as instructed long before the election. So because of divide and conquer strategy its the exceptionalist that win every election, unless the intolerable get together, ignore their container conditioning and advance to class=human things will only get worse.
Once the vote was cast: it can’t be uncast. It has to be respected. All debate stops, in effect – the position is Constitutionally clear. We are are own worst enemies for carrying on the debate. The actual Constitutional position for Parliamentarians who do not wish to execute the mandate is clear: resign or commit High Treason. Not rhetorical High Treason. Actual Hight Treason.
Threes years on and vote cancellation is concretised by inaction. The Constitutional crisis has nothing to do with the vote anymore. It has everything to do with the bureaucratic and administrative coup that is using the vote for anti-Constitutional and Treasonous means. The vote had nothing to do with EU Military Unification or the EU Defence Union. These issues – long-term Establishment agendas – have been surreptitiously advanced by means of secretive stealth …whilst the People have been engaged elsewhere in relatively ineffectual debate on matters that will not address the subterfuge. The old bureaucratic bait and switch.
Whilst we are further factionalising ourselves along ancient geographic and demographic faultlines: our UK Forces are being used as nothing more than leverage to get the deal Whitehall wants. Which I would surmise to be exemption from jurisprudence and scrutiny for the City: sovereignty, military, Constitution, and country be dammed. In other words: they are taking the piss out of us.
We have a Constitutional crisis and a representational legitimation crisis. Which, if this cannot be already defined as a form of bureaucratic tyranny …will soon progress unchecked to a more overt tyranny. Will we all look beyond our self-made containers to see we have been played for fools? When the EU Defence Force is presented as a done deal – which it already was at the Munich Security Conference by Fredericka Mogherini – and finally the penny drops what Brexit was all about …there is going to be a lot of even more pissed off people in the UK. The ones who naively thought they were getting their sovereignty back.
I’d love the entire container or silo mentality to break down: so we could all see that our best interests are being subverted by Parliamentarians. Current and subsequent generations have been and will be taught that we have no written Constitution. Which will be accepted: because Parliamentarians always like to keep the People informed. A self-informed People can take the power of Parliament away. If only we could unite to view that our best interests are not served by denigrating each other. Our best interests are served by uniting against the Treason of others. The only way we will get our sovereignty back is if we take it back.
Oh, well. I guess we better get back to arguing so they can get on with giving our military and our sovereignty away. As though it was theirs as a bargaining chip in the first place,