What I really mean by globalists, elitists and corporatists
A couple of weeks ago someone chastised me on Twitter for using the term Deep State to explain Donald Trump's Damascene conversion over Syrian regime change. Apparently the concept that the US Administration may be beholden to secretive cliques with close ties to the military industrial complex is a mere conspiracy theory perpetuated by Russian propagandists. All sane analysts know the US State Department has only ever supported the causes of liberal democracy and human rights abroad, if we exclude occasional strategic alliances with our enemy's enemies who turned out to be worse than our enemy. So by this logic General Dwight D Eisenhower was a mere conspiracy theorist at the height of the Cold War. Indeed most of the evidence I've encountered about the Deep State comes from Americans such as former Reagan Advisor Dr Paul Craig Roberts and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh. Of course, the wheelers and dealers behind the Deep State deny its existence. They're merely exercising a little pressure on whoever happens to be in the White House.
I find it very hard to write about current macro-political developments without using the misunderstood adjective globalist or its related abstract nouns. I know it's hackneyed and many will dismiss my musings as those of a mad isolationist who simply wants to stop the world and return to a harsh primordial habitat. I guess globalism is a more of a philosophy, while globalisation is a phenomenon that results almost inevitably from rapid technological and economic changes. However, I cannot think of alternative terms that others would not misconstrue to an even greater extent. The real bone of contention here is not whether greater planetary interconnectedness is a good thing or not, but who is in control and for what purpose? Do we all need to adopt the same cultural paradigms and discard traditions that evolved gradually over hundreds of generations or can we harness recent technological advances to preserve the best of humanity's diverse cultures while allowing different peoples to experiment in new cultural expressions? Do we want a multipolar world with a mosaic of intersecting but socially cohesive communities or do we want a homogenised unipolar world?. In common usage globalist may refer to many things:
Corporate globalist A supporter of the hegemony of transnational corporations over national or regional organisations.
Political globalist A supporter of greater convergence of existing national and supranational governments. A political globalist may cite the phenomenon of corporate globalisation as a reason for the transfer of power from small nation states to larger regional blocs and only big organisations can counteract multinational businesses.
Global idealists Advocates of one world love free of all barriers that divide different groups of people. Such wishful thinkers imagine the whole world as a hippie commune and fail to see how breaking down one type of barrier, such as borders between countries, can lead to the erection of new barriers such as electrified fences around private properties when rapid cultural integration does not go as planned. Global idealists will often decry corporatists or mega-statists, especially when the global elites seek to transfer more power to greedy corporations and limit personal freedoms through greater surveillance.
Elitists favour a hierarchical society controlled by a small group of privileged individuals who consider themselves both morally and intellectually superior to the rest of humanity. Traditionally such people would favour nation states as the best means of preserving their power. However, today the globally connected rich prefer globalism to circumvent local democracies and expand their commercial empires. While a medieval elitist might want a principality to protect his castle, a postmodern elitist just buys an exclusive resort anywhere in the world as long as it's well protected and is easily accessible via private helicopter or yacht.
Internationalists, by contrast, advocate a multipolar world thats seeks to harmonise the practical needs of greater cooperation between communities and countries with people's desire for greater self-determination and gradual cultural evolution.
Few could doubt that the ability to communicate freely and instantly with anyone connected to the worldwide web is a good thing. It could help us learn from each other and resolve potential conflicts peacefully and amicably, as long as we respect that others may have very a different perspective. A true humanitarian does not seek to change other peoples, but learn from them, sharing knowledge and experience, but not imposing a new way of life. Some practices may seem vile or immoral, from our perspective. We may view the treatment of women and homosexuals in some majority Muslim countries with abhorrence. Many global idealists see it as their mission to liberate women and gays in these countries. Naive global idealism can easily yield to full support for military adventurism especially when justified by human rights concerns. However, a devout Muslim could by the same logic justify intervention in Western Europe to thwart the perceived evils of abortion, sexual promiscuity, stupefaction, gambling and usury. If you've ever tried to debate contentious topics such as abortion, you'll know what I mean. Pro-lifers will condemn pro-choicers as mass murderers, while the latter will denounce the former as religious zealots and apologists for misogyny and child abuse. In a multipolar world the citizens of one country could agree to ban abortion (except in cases of rape or where the mother's life in danger), while those in another country could allow it as the lesser of two evils. However, globalists would advocate a universal set of laws on such matters. If one can universally allow women's freedom of choice on abortion, one can also universally outlaw it, which may in practice lead many women to resort to shoddy backstreet clinics or dangerous abortion pills. The same logic applies to sexual mores. If we had a global referendum on the legal status of adult homosexuality or the death penalty, the outcome may shock Western liberals and recent demographic trends will only increase the number of people in ethno-religious communities that not only denounce homosexuality, but favour capital punishment. Mass migration, a phenomenon that globalists of all hues welcome, undermines traditional nation states, but creates new parallel communities with divergent cultural outlooks. To accommodate these communities, the authorities have to roll back the gains of the last three to four generations of social progress to a more laid-back and tolerant society. Communal tolerance only works with high levels of mutual trust and shared values. Until recently mixed gender social nudity was common in many locales in Scandinavia, Germany and the Netherlands. Now such venues have to be sectioned off to avoid conflicts with the countries' growing Muslim communities. The recently elected Austrian President, Alexander van der Bellen, suggested that all women should wear veils in solidarity with those who have to cover their heads and faces for religious reasons. The trouble with universalism is it all seems fine in theory if the world converges on the cultural expressions and practices that you favour. In the near future divergence from the universally enforced norm will be a privilege afforded only to the lucky few. Sir Richard Branson can carry on lecturing us on the wonders of globalism from the privacy of his own private island. I wonder how many refugees from Middle East war zones Sir Richard has welcomed onto Necker Island.
I expect no prizes for forecasting the Conservative Party will win Theresa May's Snap General Election on 8th June. That's because none of the opposition parties offer viable alternatives that can convince ordinary pragmatic voters uninterested in foreign policy and who do not have an ideological commitment to socialism, environmentalism or universalism. If, like me, you loathe all power-hungry elites, this election will disappoint you, but is likely to mark the end of an era for the old political theatrics of Workers vs Bosses. In this election many traditional Labour voters, after perhaps toying with UKIP in 2015 will switch to the once-hated Tories, while many affluent professionals and trendy bosses will vote strategically for more openly globalist parties. They can do this safely because they know Left Labour and the Greens do not stand a chance in hell of winning a parliamentary majority. The BBC has gone to great lengths to publicise Gina Miller's anti-Brexit tactical voting campaign. Billionaire Richard Branson, who owns private Caribbean island and has his company headquarters in non-EU Switzerland, has publicly expressed his support for Ms Miller's high-profile campaign. Former Prime Minister, Tony Blair, has urged voters to back the LibDems and pro-EU Tories against Left Labour candidates. If the Liberal Democrats manage to win 50 or more seats, expect a wholesale defection of Blairite Labour MPs to Tim Farron's grouping with Corbyn's Labour reduced to a rump of fifty-odd Labour loyalists and social idealists more akin to Germany's Die Linke (the Left Party) than her majesty's respected opposition. We could even see a few defections from the ranks of Theresa May's Conservatives to the new Neoliberal Elitist Party, which by the next election in 2022 may be a serious contender for government. The likes of Anna Soubry and Kenneth Clarke sing from the same hymn sheet as Nick Clegg and Vince Cable.
Meanwhile the Tory's gaffe-prone Foreign Secretary, Boris Johnson, recycles blatant disinformation about Syria to lend his full support to President Trump's Damascene conversion to Neoconservative military adventurism and destabilisation. We will soon be back to the good old Whigs and Tories, one representing the more worldly business classes and other the more patriotic landed gentry. Of course in those days only the privileged few could vote. Now only the correctly socialised professional classes can be trusted to participate in political debate. Ever since the EU Referendum, the neoliberal media has kept reminding us how Remain voters tended to be better educated and younger than their leave-voting compatriots. The Guardian ever so subtly pushes the narrative that rightwing populism appeals mainly to Sun and Daily Mail reading thickos. George Monbiot, who once admirably exposed the corruption of big business in his 2001 book Captive State: The Corporate Takeover of Britain, now acts as a cheerleader and enforcer of the new left-branded corporate censorship of all views that challenge orthodoxy. His latest campaign targets those of us who refuse to believe the Syrian Government deliberately deployed chemical weapons in the recent attack on rebel-held Khan Sheikhun. Who benefits from the destabilisation of the Middle East and more fake news to justify more military intervention? None other than the same global corporations, Mr Monbiot once condemned.
Who will oppose our Machievellian Bosses?
The real question is who will oppose the devious machinations of our ruling elites and who will stand up for the workers who do not want to end up as welfare dependents? Left Labour have lost all credibility. They champion oversized comprehensive schools that fail bright working class kids, more social workers, non-traditional family units, high levels of immigration, more mental health monitoring and only lend lip-service to nurturing a new generation of software developers, engineers and doctors, all professions dominated by graduates of private schools. That's because the elites behind Corbyn's Left Labour really do not trust plebs at all. They think we're little more than low-IQ simpletons, a lumpenproletariat who fail to realise the benefits of the new socialised utopia they plan to build with a little help from their corporate buddies in the tech industry. So when Labour promise to build a million new homes (to cope with a growing population) or boost spending on our NHS, we're supposed to believe them.
Things look only slightly different on the French side of the English Channel because the conservative vote is divided between the cautious middle classes who do not want to rock the boat and the angry working classes and petite bourgeoisie. Nonetheless the electorate looks set to endorse a globalist warmongering banker because practically the whole mainstream media has tarnished the rival candidate, Marine Le Pen, with her party's past association with historically disgraced Vichy Regime and her protectionist economic policies. I expect mass abstentions in the second round, but Macron will offer his compatriots only half-hearted promises to protect their interests as his cronies open up France to global corporations. Some 47% of French voters opted for candidates openly opposed to corporate globalisation (Marine Le Pen, Jean Luc Melenchon, Nicolas Dupont-Aignan and François Asselineau). Around 20% supported the Conservative Republican candidate who promised to assert France's autonomy within the EU. Only 24% supported the likely winner of the second round. Whatever Theresa May's public posturing on the EU and immigration may be, the British and American elites are banking on a resounding Macron victory. They cannot allow any alternatives to the hegemony of transnational corporations unless it can be carefully managed. In Britain the elites panicked last year because they realised the working classes had rebelled against their plan to phase out viable nation states. However, the EU itself was only one way to achieve their long-term goal. Tory grandees thus agreed to resurrect the concept of British exceptionalism and negotiate a new Mid Atlantic settlement, where Britain is effectively no longer half in the EU, but midway between the EU and a future trading association with the US. Besides Britain had served its role as the EU's strongest advocate of global free trade and thus helped weaken the continent's once proud nation states. The British Foreign Policy elite have long sought to drive their vision of globalisation by destabilising or neutering their main rivals. With Germany firmly under the control of openly globalist politcians (both main contenders for this year's general election, Angela Merkel and Martin Schulz, want even tighter European integration with open borders and both supported the now defunct TTIP agreement too), the EU no longer needs the UK to steer it in a neoliberal direction. Moreover, the US and UK will benefit most as German politcians attempt to impose fiscal rectitude on Southern and Eastern Europe.
If your sole concern were the ecological impact of hydraulic fracturing, you might just vote Green or Left Labour. If your main concern were ridding the UK of expensive nuclear warheads that will fail to protect us against any real world threats Greens and SNP may be options. However, these are not the primary concerns of ordinary working people, who actually want their government to defend their country and to ensure the lights stay on. As bad as fracking may be, power cuts caused by unreliable wind and solar power can kill many more.
At the end of the day people want secure employment, a purpose in life, a sense of belonging, safe neighbourhoods and functioning but unobstrusive services. People do not necessarily want more social workers and more mental health nurses, required mainly because successive governments have subsidised dysfunctional lifestyle choices. Labour and SNP essentially promise higher spending on welfare and public services without explaining how they will raise the additional revenue. If Labour can persuade big business to pay more tax, then so surely can the Tories. Even scrapping Trident would not fund the kind of bleeding hearts altruism that Momentum (Left Labour) and Green activists demand. Their virtue-signalling on hunger in the UK or child refugees denied entry to this country is naive beyond belief. As uninformed as many working class voters may be about the machinations of our ruling elites in the Middle East, most have a reasonably good hunch that more interventionism and more mass migration (a consequence of the former) will only make matters worse. Moreover, the same multibillionaires whom Labour claim they want to tax are also those most in favour of open borders and free trade. Take for example the classic betes noires of Starbucks and Amazon. Not only do they legally dodge billions in taxes, often as advised by high-profile audit firms such as Deloitte or Price Waterhouse Coopers, they also rely on a malleable and hyper-mobile labour force. Meanwhile Amazon is busy developing technology to replace most of their workforce with smart robots. A government could in theory just raise sales taxes on large retailers like Starbucks or Amazon, who would then pass the cost onto consumers to retain their profit margin or find other ways to reduce costs such as outsourcing labour or more automation. Indeed as labour becomes more expendable and the economy depends more and more on complex technological synergy that only large organisations can provide, the only way to raise living standards in your country is to invest in high-tech skills. The trouble is the professional classes closer to levers of power and more likely to be involved in the hiring process have long written off large chunks of their native working classes. We see this trend not just in Britain, but across Europe. While more resourceful youngsters can always migrate to regions with higher salaries and employment levels, the autochthonous or settled underclasses tend to stay put. When will the elites finally admit they don't care about their local underclasses, except as guinea pigs in a Huxleyan social engineering experiment that values compliance more than creativity or independence of mind? The outcome of June's general election will only temporarily restore faith in the British establishment united around a one-nation Conservative Party. Waiting in the wings are the true radicals, the hyper-Blairites, regrouping around the Liberal Democrats, while Left Labour and the Greens serve mainly as vanguard forces for socio-cultural change. Vote strategically to ensure we have a viable opposition, especially adversaries that seek to expose elitist schemes. There are still a few maverick or rather free-thinking MPs left willing to challenge elite agendas, but who have to toe the party line on other issues of the day.
I wish I could rally behind one of the major or minor parties in Theresa May's Snap General Election. To be honest, I have only ever voted as a protest, to show that the citizenry is somehow politically aware, but unhappy with our rulers' mischievous actions and plans. The alternative is to spoil your ballot paper or simply abstain altogether. In reality it doesn't seem to matter which party or coalition wins a majority of seats. We get more of the same. All elected politicians can do is negotiate with the real power brokers in banking cartels, corporate boardrooms and transnational organisations and promise their voters a bigger slice of the global pie. However, thanks to automation, globalisation of trade and extreme labour mobility, large multinationals can hold national governments to ransom.
So who if anyone will I vote for in this election? To vote Conservative, as sensible as some of their rhetoric may superficially sound, would only empower their corporate backers, who are currently devising strategies to leave the European Union, but to keep us in an amorphous World Union, because they've probably realised the EU is failing as a regional brand of global convergence. The Conservative Foreign Secretary, Boris Johnson, is more interested in pursuing US and Israeli foreign policy in the Middle East and spreading disinformation about Syria, Russia and Iran than he is in defending British jobs except for a few thousand employed in manufacturing fighter jets for the Saudi Air Force. I had briefly and very naively hoped that Boris would steer the UK away from its irresponsible support for mendacious military adventurism, alas his oratory skills have thus far only served the interests of the same neocon cabal that welcomed the USA's escalation of military confrontation with its foes. The Tories can only play the national unity card because the main opposition parties show little or no allegiance to the cultural identity and long-term economic interests of the settled population. The Brexit means Brexit mantra has become a charade and merely an excuse to prepare Britain for a new global role in wake of the EU's inevitable collapse as it fails to deal with record youth unemployment, a migrant crisis, mass migration from North Africa and Middle East and culture clashes between native peoples and growing Islamic communities.
Rhetoric and Special Interests
Never before have the interests of the professional elites differed so much from those of the huddled masses. Until recently the affluent professional and business classes actually needed the working classes as we called the bulk of the population reliant on hard graft and mediocre wages. The 1950s, 60s and 70s saw a rapid improvement in the living standards and technical expertise of ordinary working people. The 80s and 90s saw many former blue collar workers transition to the new information economy, but then the seemingly unstoppable pace of technological and social transformation led to the outsourcing or automation of new jobs. The working class had become expendable. Meanwhile the professional classes fell in love with globalisation. It meant not just more affordable travel and holiday villas, but inexpensive nannies and plumbers as well as more attractive bar staff. Just as some upper-middle class Britons did well in the country's colonies before the 1950s, taking advantage of their perceived academic superiority and their ability to exploit the gullibility of locals, today's professional classes love cosmopolitan diversity as long as they can afford to protect themselves from its worst excesses and need not compete at the bottom end of wage scale. To succeed in today's dynamic job market you need some distinctive talents that set you apart from your competitors. Otherwise for all your efforts and perseverance your job can easily be outsourced or automated. Would you rather buy coffee from an impersonal vending machine that gets the job done or from a grumpy old man with little charisma? Just as low-end jobs have become more insecure than ever, our establishment politicians want to deregulate the labour market even more. Have they learned nothing from the EU Referendum? 52% of voters did not support leaving the EU superstate because we hate the French, dislike Italian food or mean any harm to the good people of Poland, Bulgaria or Portugal. No, we voted leave mainly to protect jobs for our people rather than letting big business turn the country into a rich man's playground interspersed with ghettoes of new migrant workers and workless native underclasses. However, it is important to understand that the belittling and deskilling of the working classes is not just a European phenomenon. Just as Welsh steelworkers can lose out to cheap Chinese imports, Chinese steelworkers will sooner or later yield to robotisation. Simply leaving the EU will not rebalance the labour market especially as successive governments have failed to invest in training key professional categories such as medical staff.
How does this unfolding global reality stack up with the rhetoric of the most prominent political parties here in the UK? Oddly Theresa May's support for tougher immigration controls, leaving the EU (a prerequisite for the former pledge), selective state education and common sense economics resonate with much of the English middle classes. Corbyn may score a few points on military adventurism (if given airtime in the mainstream media) and the NHS, but few would trust Labour on economic competence. Without a strong economy, the government would have to cut public services even more as millions of Greeks, Italians and Spaniards have learned in recent years.
Alphas, Betas, Gammas, Deltas and Epsilons
Modern sociologists no longer split people into working, middle and upper classes. Instead they prefer A, B, C1, C2, D and E. A-grade individuals form an elite of high-earning top professionals probably less than 4% of the population. They're the kind of people who can easily afford to buy a property of an exclusive area of London and may have a holiday home abroad. E-graders are effectively the workless underclasses trapped in a vicious cycle of welfare dependency, low attainment and emotional insecurity. They form around 8% of British citizens. D-graders are unskilled or semiskilled workers, i.e. the kind of people most affected by outsourcing and migrant labour, but who also depend on in-work benefits. This larger group, currently around 15% of adults, could easily join E-graders if they fail to learn the more intellectually demanding skills of the information age. C1 and C2-graders may think of themselves as middle class, but are usually struggling to make ends meet. They may be better educated and better paid than D-graders, but often only a few pay cheques from bankruptcy and homelessness. Together this grouping accounts for half the population. That leaves only group B, approx. 20–25% of the population, a motley crew of intermediate managers, administrators and mediocre professionals, the kind of people who are doing alright and more likely to welcome recent socio-economic changes.
Traditionally Labour did very well groups E, D and C2 and well enough in C1 to win elections, while the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats did best in the top three grades. Whatever your tribal loyalties may be or whatever you may think of Britain's foreign policies, the basic question most of ask is "to what extent will a party's likely policies benefit my family and my community?" Labour advocates higher spending on social welfare, but looser immigration controls and hence greater labour market competition. Thus if you're stuck in group E, Labour may still seem the most attractive option. You will be the first to lose out from planned and future cuts of welfare provision and may not like the prospect of low-paid non-jobs. However, this group is also statistically the least likely to vote at all and the most likely to switch to anti-establishment candidates, especially those who can appeal to identity politics. Unfortunately, as Labour is seen as weak on extreme labour mobility, Labour have lost most traditional working class voters in groups D, C2 and C1, except those ideologically committed to socialism (very few these days) or whose ethnographic-cultural identity leads them to favour continued high levels of net migration. Under Tony Blair and later Gordon Brown and to a lesser extent under Ed Miliband, Labour could still rely on a large chunk of the wishful thinking middle classes, the kind of people who want a fairer society built on strong economic foundations. However, the Blairite roadshow has now migrated to Liberal Democrats (who once opposed a Blairite war) and pro-EU faction of the Tory Party. After a disastrous performance in the 2015 General Election, I suspect the Liberal Democrats will be the main beneficiaries of remoaner opposition to Brexit among the affluent classes disaffected with Corbyn's Labour and with an apparently Little Britain Tory Party. Indeed arch remoaners (fervent supporters of the European Union and globalisation in general) see both rightwing Tories and leftwing Labour as anachronisms from the 1980s, yet have little to offer ordinary working people except the opportunity to compete in a global labour market that an elite of robotics engineers are busy automating.
Last but not least we have the idiot fringe, best represented by the Green Party. This group seriously believes all our social and environmental problems are caused by greedy tax-evading multinationals and climate-change-denying xenophobes and non-Muslim homophobes. All we need to do is adopt immature green technologies, litter our countryside with wind turbines and solar panels, build more cycle ways and replace social welfare with the basic income. In short let's turn the whole country into a giant university campus open to all and sundry. Greens tend to think everyone else is just like them, pseudo-intellectual virtue-signalling do-gooders reliant on corporate or state largesse. It all sounds very nice until you dwell on the logistics of powering a modern hospital or importing all the resources we need for our homes, household appliances and transport system. With a fraction of our current population, we might adapt to greater self-sufficiency, but with the Greens' opposition to any meaningful border controls, their policies are bound to end in economic collapse and social unrest. At heart I support green policies, as in favouring great self-sufficiency of regions, lower consumption and stable sustainable population levels. But the Greens clearly support greater dependence on global organisation and less personal and community autonomy.
The Scottish Dimension
Before 2007 for decades Scotland had been a Labour-controlled fiefdom. Not only was corruption rife, but the party let lobby groups use Scotland as a social engineering playground, encountering opposition mainly from entrenched conservative forces within the Churches. Labour policies oversaw a continued brain drain of Scotland's best and brightest to better-paid jobs down south and turned this one proud country into a subsidy junkie, while North Oil profits flowed to multinationals and Central Government. For all their waffle about devolution, Labour and the Conservatives before them made Scotland even more dependent on the United Kingdom. The two biggest employers here in Fife are the council (20% of the workforce) and the Ministry of Defence as well as Rosyth Dockyards (now run by Babcock International) and Raytheon, both reliant on contracts either from the UK's armed forces or its military partners, principally the United States. It should come as little surprise that the SNP could capitalise on decades of arrogant subjugation and hand power back to the people of Scotland. Alas once in office the SNP behaved just like New Labour with a few grandiose infrastructure projects such as the new Queensferry Road Bridge, but even more social engineering. Their biggest failure has been in education, the one area of government intervention that can help bright children from deprived backgrounds aspire to more intellectually demanding and thus usually higher-paid jobs. Scotland's poor have faired worse than their English and Welsh cousins. They continued the previous administration's plans to merge high schools into mega-comprehensives with larger catchment areas, while surreptitiously introducing the Orwellian Named Person Act, treating all parents as potential child abusers.
Current and Future Dangers
The real divide is no longer between left and right or capitalist versus socialist, but simply between elitists vs populists. While populists may often appeal to nostalgia and offer simplistic solutions to complex problems (e.g. leave the EU, stop all Islamic migration or arrest all bankers), they do at least respond to grassroots feelings, however misplaced. Populists are unlikely to advocate lower wages or cuts in essential public services. They are also keen to support the lifestyle aspirations of their core voters, so populists tend to be sceptical of many green policies which may involve lifestyle changes such as cycling to work rather than driving. Elitists, on the other hand, believe they know what's best not just for themselves but for ordinary working and non-working people. Hence elitists will tend to support the often counter-intuitive conclusions of academic studies and reports commissioned by NGOs with a vested interest in promoting rapid cultural and economic change. Populist concerns tend to rely on the lived experiences of ordinary people. If you've just spent 3 hours waiting in a local accident and emergency department with chronic pain surrounded by patients and medical staff from other ethnic backgrounds, you might conclude that mass migration is putting the health service under strain. By contrast an elitist would blame any delays on underfunding or an ageing population, while noting the dedication of migrant medical staff. If a populist then suggests that more local lads and lasses should be trained as doctors and nurses, a typical elitist will merely shrug his shoulders and claim local youngsters simply don't want these jobs and are too busy playing on their game consoles. Elitists are basically alphas and betas, who prefer foreign gammas over native deltas and epsilons because they know the jobs deltas and epsilons used to do will soon be fully automated. Angry natives, especially from lower classes, are a massive people management issue. I suspect the real ruling classes, a small subset of alphas, are divided on this issue. They either plan to turn most of us into little more than docile consumers rewarded for our subservience while only a quarter of working age adults have paid employment, or they have more sinister plans. Either way the hallmark of elitists is their intellectual dishonesty. By pretending to help designated victim groups, whether single parents or refugees, they merely empower their own class of people denying everyone else of any economic or personal autonomy. Their policies inevitably lead to greater surveillance and monitoring of all, but a lucky few who can buy exclusivity and privacy.
It may come as a surprise to those who have read some of my other recent blog posts, but the party global elitists fear most is probably Corbyn's Labour, not because its policies are viable, which they are not, but because its leader challenges the lies and deception of the American and British foreign policy elites. Once Corbyn is swept away in the aftermath of a near certain slump in Labour's parliamentary presence (with just 25% of the popular vote Labour could lose 50 or more seats), we could witness a realignment of the elitists that brought both Blair and Cameron to office. If they see Labour as a lost cause, expect a few globalist Tories to jump ship and join a new alliance centred around Liberal Democrats, who may gain as many as 30–40 seats. In much of the Scottish Central Belt, Labour are the only party that can deny the SNP of another landslide leading to another fake Independence Referendum, but this time with the full support of the globalist establishment. In an uncertain world, the main losers of a post-UK British Isles would be ordinary working people, the gammas, deltas and epsilons the elitists no longer need. However, if Labour can hold on to a respectable presence by mitigating its losses in England and possibly regaining a few seats in Scotland owing to growing disaffection with the SNP), we may scupper the elitist gamble to silence all viable opposition to its plans.
On the Brink of World War Three Over Misappropriated Chemical Attacks.
Call me old-fashioned, but facts do actually matter even if they're inconvenient and do not fit with your preferred narrative. Your enemy may be bad, but your enemy's enemy may be even worse. That said, disinformation and emotive propaganda should concern us most when they come from the world's best funded media operations. Yet many choose not to learn the lessons of verifiable recent history and instead prefer to give our leading state and corporate broadcasters the benefit of the doubt. After all, who would like to be accused of swallowing Putin's propaganda?
However, now Russia Today plays a similar role in the West to the good old BBC World Service behind the Iron Curtain. Millions of citizens of Warsaw Pact countries turned to Western media outlets to learn the truth about their own ruling elites. Now more and more Westerners are turning to alternative news sources when they grow suspicious of a tiresomely predictable diet of agenda promotion and strategically timed media events that serve only to promote more war and greater erosion of national self-determination and democracy.
https://www.youtube.com/embed/pVevIuIRuok
I have long ceased to watch conventional TV news, but I do monitor a wide range of online news. I no longer visit the BBC News site to find out what's going on in the world (though I doubt they'd lie about incontrovertible events such as natural disasters or the weather ), but to analyse how it presents breaking news stories. The BBC is one of a select group of global media organisations who can actually set the agenda. If the BBC reports something, it becomes news. An Italian journalist once explained to me that Italy's state broadcaster, RAI, just recycles BBC and CNN reports, hastily translated and adapted for an Italian audience. BBC reporters can add all the caveats they like to save their proverbial bacon should a claim prove unsubstantiated, but as soon as the BBC highlights an atrocity and attributes it to the enemy of the day, it has already served its propaganda purpose. Truth seekers can easily be dismissed as conspiracy nuts or Putin acolytes, but believe me the truth does matter. If only 1% of BBC news coverage were not just inaccurate or misleading, but mendacious, it would be a scandal. Authoritarian regimes have always used similar tactics. They do not normally have to resort to outright lies, they just embellish cherry-picked snippets of the truth to suit their narrative. Outright mendacity is an act of desperation, especially when alternative and more credible versions of events are available from rival sources.
I don't have either time or resources to go into great detail about the recent chemical discharge in rebel-held Idlib, Syria. That lethal sarin or chlorine gas may have killed as many as 70 civilians in a war zone controlled by fanatical Islamic militias remains the only certainty. It's perfectly possible that the Syrian government could have killed people by bombing rebel ammunition dumps. They US and its allies have long attributed all regretful civilian victims of their bombing missions to the common Islamic militia practice of hiding weapons and fighters in densely populated areas especially near schools and hospitals. As wrong as I believe recent US military interventions may have been, I do not believe they deliberately targeted innocent civilians, but merely considered them a price worth paying for a larger strategic prize, that should be avoided to win the battle over hearts and minds once they've asserted their control. If they wanted just to kill as many people as possible, imposing a complete trade embargo would be much more effective as few Middle East countries are self-sufficient in food. Indeed Syria, which still has thousands of square kilometres of fertile land, may be an exception in this regard. The country has managed to survive despite sanctions and foreign-funded militias. Before Tuesday's attack, the Syrian Army was winning the ground war against Al Nusra and ISIS. US Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, had even suggested that the people of Syria could determine the future role of President Bashar Al Assad, the latest apparent reincarnation of Hitler. The surest way President Assad could guarantee his downfall would be to commit a heinous war crime against innocent civilians before the world's media. He must be surely well aware that the White Helmets will rush to the scene of any atrocity to transmit footage of civilian casualties to global media outlets keen to pounce on any excuse to derail the strategic victory of a Russian / Syrian / Iranian alliance against head-chopping Islamic militias. I this find it extremely hard to believe that a besieged leader of a small country in touch with the global media would authorise his own downfall, unless he were some kind of double agent prepared to commit mad and reckless acts that would end not only his own career, but reduce his country to a set of statelets controlled by illiberal fundamentalists and policed by foreign armies.
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https://www.youtube.com/embed/tymDe83PFMQ
Conformists and Anticonformists
The emerging political landscape is even more confusing. When newly inaugurated President Trump tried to impose a temporary travel ban on globetrotters from seven mainly Muslim countries, the trendy left and Hollywood celebrities protested against this vile act of racism, although travel to the USA is a privilege, not a fundamental human right. When the same President bows to pressure from the Deep State and performs a 180º U-Turn on reconciliation with Russia over their joint efforts to combat ISIS and other Islamic extremists, the liberal media and Hollywood luvvies suddenly applaud the President's courageous actions. The masses of uninformed Americans who get their news from the mainstream media have swallowed their propaganda. Liberals support airstrikes because Assad and Putin are Hitleresque rightwing demagogues. Trump-supporting rednecks support airstrikes because we have to support our armed forces against our enemies. Opponents of more airstrikes are inevitably those of us who instinctively distrust the establishment media. We thus have the spectacle of alt-right former Trump supporters clashing with black block anarchists at a protest against air strikes. Hang on a moment. Both groups believe more military adventurism will only trigger more internecine violence and engender more hatred and religious fundamentalism. Both groups loathe global corporations and superstates. Both groups oppose more surveillance and restrictions of basic civil liberties. So faced with a choice between opposing the world's most powerful military machine and a bunch of European nationalists, the infamous black block decide the latter are the bigger problem despite their demographic demise and the emergence of China and India as the dominant centres of power in the 21st century.
Let's agree that the left-branded neoliberal dream best associated with the Clinton Dynasty in the US and with Tony Blair and David Cameron in the UK has failed their core working class electoral bases. Ordinary working people are fed up with know-it-all talking heads on TV lecturing them on what they should think and belittling their concerns about globalisation and social engineering. How could the working classes turn to political causes such as Trump in the US, Brexit in the UK or Le Pen in France?
At the end of the day most people just want stable communities, job security, safe neighbourhoods and some degree of personal independence. So what's the alternative to third way corporate globalisation ? Do we really have to re-learn the fallacy of the old adage that my enemy's enemy is my friend all over again? No, often your enemy's enemy is even worse than your local enemy. If you hate US imperialism, would Chinese imperialism be any better? However, the game has changed in the early 21st century. We no longer have the spectre of rival national imperialisms, as in the 19th and early 20th centuries, but rival visions of globalisation, which is not so much an inevitability as a fait accompli, a fact of life. Our high-tech lives depend on infrastructure that can only be provided by global organisations. Nobody is going to uninvent the Internet or mobile phone. Moreover, without efficient industrial systems our increasingly urbanised population would starve. If a national government attempts to break free from international banking cartels, it can soon be reduced to misery as imported products it used to take for granted suddenly become unaffordable in local currency. Venezuela, once hailed by many on the left as a viable alternative to neoliberalism, is probably one of the most depressing failures in recent history. While crude oil prices remained high, the radical social democratic government could tax energy companies to fund its welfare state. When they plummeted, the country faced the twin scourges of hyperinflation and rampant crime. Although very fertile and technically able to feed itself, Venezuela never developed an industrial base sophisticated and diverse enough to meet the needs and desires of its citizens. Hugo Chavez and Nicolás Maduro failed to raise the educational standards of the country's underclasses quickly enough to build an indigenous industrial base independent of global corporations. Meanwhile the social democratic experiments of Northern Europe have failed to cope with the growing demands of mass migration and job insecurity. Trade unions have become a mere shadow of their former selves, wedded to concepts of international workers' solidarity that made sense 50 years ago when governments could easily intervene to protect local workers from unfair competition.
Globalisation and automation have not only displaced millions of manual workers, they have made it almost impossible to organise strikes. Parties posing on the left have failed miserably to address any of the concerns of the remnants of the once great European and North American working classes. The best they can do is offer retraining for the new dynamic information economy but usually for ephemeral occupations. Many former factory workers ended up in call centres in much of Northern England, Wales and Scotland. For a few short years Scotland's Central Belt was the call centre capital of the world. I should know, I worked in one. We'd handle calls for the European and North American markets. That was before these jobs were outsourced first to India and then largely replaced by Web portals or advanced voice recognition software. Any boring and monotonous job is a prime candidate for smart automation. So after retraining as call centre operatives, our undaunted postmodern workers have to retrain as software engineers or care workers, both professions much in demand. Except programming requires a high level of abstract thinking and usually several years of thorough study and experimentation, while care workers are usually trapped on low pay with stressful and unrewarding jobs. Just imagine you're a newly unemployed call centre worker and former shipbuilder and you're contemplating retraining as a plumber or taxi driver, only to discover the market is saturated with competition from newcomers, apparently more diligent and enthusiastic than you are. Would you persevere and adapt? Would you accept a job in a meat packing factory as the only native worker? It's hardly surprising that many former workers end up trapped on benefits. Most employers will just ignore you if your CV provides no proof of recent employment. You can always embellish your CV, but in today's easy-come easy-go hire-and-fire culture if you cannot get up to speed within a few days your inexperience will soon become apparent. The globalist left do not have any answers for these questions, except vain promises to spend more on welfare, mental health, invest more in training and make sure large corporations pay more tax. Once in power former social democratic parties offer more of the same. The last great hope of the European left was Francois Hollande, whose French Socialist party now polls between 15 and 20% of the vote while the electorate will in all likelihood face unpalatable choice between a global extremist Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen, despised by most of the global establishment. I suspect a Le Pen presidency, especially if she wins by a narrow margin because the old left fail to support Macron's Neo-Thatcherism, would disappoint as international investors flee France.
Americanism vs Globalism
While I lost no sleep over Hillary Clinton's loss, Trump has thus far only delivered feeble promises of bringing back jobs to the US and stemming the tide of illegal immigration. The Trump administration has remained consistent on only one area of US foreign policy, its unflinching support for the State of Israel. While some hoped a Trump Presidency would stop supporting Islamic militias and meddling unduly in the domestic affairs of sovereign states, nothing has changed. The US is still bombing Iraq and Syria and Trump has actually boosted US Defence spending, which will inevitably only lead China, whose economy will overtake the USA's in the next two decades, will follow suit triggering a new and dangerous arms race. While Trump may personally have the best of intentions, his policy advisors will guide him into the neocon camp, whose sole mission is to ensure their cabal lead the New World Order rather than rival gangs in China, India or Saudi Arabia.
Yet dark forces are at work to destabilise not only the Middle East, but Europe and North America too. Before Trump's election any talk of a US State leaving the federation would have been dismissed as a joke. Sure, Texans love their Lone Star flag and Californians like to set themselves apart from their East Coast compatriots, but the dominant loyalty most Americans had, until now, was to the USA. The last election cycle revealed a massive gulf between metropolitan areas and America's redneck heartland. Trump won the support of some of the most disadvantaged people in the US, while the affluent urban elite voted overwhelmingly for Clinton. One section of American society welcomes recent social changes and growing interconnectedness, while the other clings to more traditional values of strong families and self-reliance. Now many Californians feel ashamed to be US Americans. The carefully choreographed protests following Trump's inauguration could be a sign of things to come if the US economy continues its in relative decline. In the not-too-distant future trade with the Asia Pacific region might be of greater importance to California than the rest of the US. Cultural convergence and extreme labour mobility have already reduced the USA's earlier cultural uniqueness. Tech firms can now easily relocate to India and attract high-calibre software engineers from across the globe. Miniature Californian bubbles can be recreated almost anywhere big business can set up shop with an almost unlimited supply of cheap labour to clean offices and serve coffee (until these jobs are fully automated). That's the point of globalisation, the whole world becomes one country with a maze of parallel communities, gated neighbourhoods, ghettos and hinterlands with displaced natives.
Likewise until recently any talk of Scotland leaving the United Kingdom would have equally been dismissed as wild conjecture. Then between 2010 and 2014 support for Scottish Independence rose from 23% to just under 45% in the last referendum. While the 2016 EU referendum exposed a growing divide between the interests of ordinary working natives and metropolitan elite in England and Wales, in Scotland most new SNP supporters voted to remain in the EU (although 37% voted to leave). This apparent divide has allowed Nicola Sturgeon to claim Scotland is being dragged out of the EU against the will of Scottish voters, though to be honest the EU has never been the foremost issue in Scottish voters' minds. Many social attitudes surveys would suggest if anything Scots are even more conservative than their southern neighbours on issues such as mass migration or social engineering. Differential voting patterns are swayed by deep identitarian emotions. Working class English northerners blame Brussels for their lack of job security, while working class Scots are keen to blame Westminster. In truth the real culprit for the disempowerment of the underclasses is neither the EU or UK administrations, but the rapid pace of corporate globalisation and technological change. But who would benefit most from the break-up of previously viable nation states such as the United Kingdom or United States? One would think the Anglo-Saxon world would lose out. When the former Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia splintered in the 1990s, few Western observers seemed surprised. After all these were young federations without a strong sense of shared identity. But now global corporations treat all countries as mere regions with historical quirks and quaint traditions. However, they distrust strong nation states for another more profound reason. Nation states are the only known viable unit for the kind of relatively free, democratic and prosperous societies that emerged in Western Europe and North America in the last century. I really have to stress the significance of the adjective relative before abstract concepts such freedom and democracy as no society can claim absolute freedom or pure democracy, but some societies can respond to their citizens' needs and desires better than others. As a result the citizens of prosperous nation states tend to expect their governments to defend their best interests in matters such as employment opportunities, education, training, workers' rights, welfare provision, policing, surveillance, free speech and migration. However, the corporate and state media have long managed public debate and expectations. Some subjects, such as military and political alliances, are taboo in countries that either lost the Second World War or were occupied by Nazi Germany or the former Soviet Union. To a large extent German national identity has been redefined in terms of loyalty to the EU project. The UK and USA have always differed from continental Europe in one important respect. Their citizens have not until recently been ashamed to show off their patriotic fervour. I can recall how Margaret Thatcher's popularity ratings changed almost overnight after Argentina invaded a windswept and sparsely populated archipelago in South Atlantic. Despite record post-war unemployment levels, the country rallied behind Thatcher's infamous Naval task Force to recapture the Falklands and liberate 1600 islanders. Such a reaction would be unthinkable in Italy or Germany, whose territorial assets had already been stripped down to little more than their core ethnolinguistic regions.
The New Labour years taught me a perspective-changing lesson. Initially I considered Tony Blair just to be a trendy Tory masquerading as a moderate Labour leader. As imperfect and compromised as previous Labour governments may have been, I have little doubt that its leading politicians actually believed they were acting in the best interests of their working class voters. Certainly even in the 60s and 70s corporate lobbies would find ways to promote their transformative socio-economic agendas. The cultural revolution of the swinging 60s turned out to be a big boon for big business. As long as national governments could protect local industries and retain job security with low levels of unemployment and gradually improving living standards, the welfare state had a largely benign influence providing a social safety net. However, by the 1970s big business no longer wanted to subsidise inefficient industries to maintain full employment and the great social democratic experiment began to unravel. In the beginning of the Thatcher era the left supported workers' rights first and foremost, however as the workless underclasses expanded and job security weakened, the left began to champion welfare dependency over workers' empowerment. It soon became clear the Blair government had little interest in helping ordinary working class kids escape the real poverty trap, which was not a lack of food or bad sanitation, but intellectual poverty and a lack of opportunity amidst a decadent culture of instant gratification. Meanwhile their foreign policy no longer followed the national interest, but reflected the demands of a globalist cabal deeply entrenched in the US, EU and UK administrations. I once believed the BBC had an institutional bias in favour of British imperialism allied with American imperialism. But British imperialism died shortly after World War Two. The US merely allowed Britain and France to retain a semblance of post-imperial grandeur with a few token overseas territories and special interests. Today the global elite does not seem to care if the United Kingdom loses Northern Ireland or Scotland. That's how far we've travelled in just 20 years. The unthinkable has become thinkable. While nostalgics of the British Empire fret over the status of Gibraltar (basically a money laundering centre with a special tax and legal regime) and the Falkland Islands, many English towns and cities have been ethno-culturally transformed out of all recognition. When I went to high school in Luton in the late 70s, fewer than 5% of the population came from visible ethnic minorities (many more were of Irish descent). Now the town's ethnic white British and Irish population has fallen below 50%, and the proportion is even lower among the younger generation owing to differential birth rates. Many will claim this is either not a problem or is just the price we pay for past British imperialism. The affluent cosmopolitan elite now regard the home-bred lower classes as ill-informed xenophobic scum unable to adapt to our Brave New World, despite the fact that in-group loyalty is much stronger among non-European migrant communities. The North American liberal elite show a similar attitude to their blue collar workers and rednecks, mainly of white European descent. Their wealth no longer depends on the hard work of their native working classes, who are now viewed as little more than an inconvenience or people management problem.
Facile Rhetoric
A basic rule of thumb is “If it sounds to good to be true, it probably isâ€. Tony Blair mainly spoke in facile soundbites. On Iraq he would say “I did it because I believed it was the right thing to doâ€. How low does your critical thinking IQ have to be to believe such an explanation? The same goes for Trump. He just makes sweeping claims about how fantastic his job-creating and healthcare policies are. His vanity knows no bounds. Meanwhile he has outsourced his entire foreign policy to a bunch of neocon lobbyists such as Jared Kushner with close ties to Israel and US Deep State. He merely acts a mouthpiece for their hidden agendas.
Meanwhile the true ruling elites are busy preparing for a post-American world, where the USA is little more than a loose confederation of states. If Trump triggers a showdown with Russia, Iran and China, he will lose, but the globalist project will stay intact. Its epicentre will move on, but a China-led world will rely even more on high-tech surveillance and censorship to manage the underclasses. Together these superpowers can now hold the US to ransom. Its military might is built on debt. Its wars in the Middle East have failed and will soon backfire in hideously dangerous and unpredictable ways.
