Universal Basic Income for all (Terms and conditions apply)
On behalf of trendsetting businesses around the world, we'd like to thank all semi-skilled workers for your tireless devotion to the complex industrial system on which we all depend. We are truly grateful to all our past and present colleagues and business partners including production line operatives, meat packers, welders, textile workers, millers, steelworkers, coal miners, mechanics, electricians, plumbers, builders, carpenters, farm labourers, fruit pickers, truckers, bus drivers, cleaners, shop assistants, cooks, waiters, typists, accountants and the thousands of other specialised roles that have served us well over the last 250 years.
Over the decades we have endeavoured to improve working conditions, raise salaries and address emotional issues such as stress, anxiety and interpersonal relations that may arise in the modern workplace. However, we have always had to strike a fine balance between the wellbeing of our staff and our commercial viability.
To this end, our team of robotics engineers and artificial intelligence programmers have now successfully developed a range of smart automatons who will relieve you of your daily drudgery and let you spend more time with your friends and family, unleashing a new world of playful creativity and exploration. As a sign of our lasting appreciation we have lobbied your governments to provide a global basic income, which you may spend online or at any of our authorised retail outlets or leisure centres. In keeping with our commitment to universal human rights and inter-community tolerance, we will extend our universal basic income to all world citizens, irrespective of gender identity, sexual orientation, disability, religious affiliation, ethnic origin or mental health challenges, provided you agree to our terms and conditions* and cooperate fully with our friendly social harmony supervisors.
George Soros, primary supporter of the Open Society Foundation
The above announcement is of course fictitious, but based on current social trends. A populace fully controlled by a technocratic elite and totally subservient to an army of humanoid robots, social workers and psychiatric nurses is no longer science fiction, it's an emerging reality. The main questions relate to its implications for personal freedom and our sense of purpose in life as well as the likelihood of societal breakdown if things do not work out as planned.
In the great debate on the relative merits of Islam, Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism and atheism as dominant ideologies, let me declare my relative agnosticism. Sure, on a purely empirical level I've long been an atheist and have yet to find any credible evidence of the existence of supernatural beings. However, I doubt we will ever gain a complete understanding of nature so we will always have to account for phenomena beyond our control, but I digress. I'm much more concerned with the way ethno-religious and ideological allegiances warp our worldview and more importantly how the elites can manipulate our prejudices to further their own hegemonic ends. Do the ruling elite really care whether we adhere to Islam or postmodern narcissism? Do they really care whether we support Israel or pan-Arabism?
In the globalised era, old national divisions are giving way to new culture clashes among rival sections of an atomised populace. Last year's UK-wide EU referendum, the Trump phenomenon in the USA and the French presidential dual between Macron and Le Pen, all pitted the somewheres against the anywheres, as David Goodhart theorised in the New Statesman (Anywheres vs Somewheres: the split that made Brexit inevitable). The former group are still rooted in their town, region or country. They have over several generations adapted to their locale's dominant culture in terms of language, cuisine, social customs and worldview. As such they are more likely to cherish the quintessential cultural oddities of their neck of the woods. For decades Northern European holiday makers in Spanish seaside resorts would tend to socialise in largely national groups. Language was not the only barrier. By contrast the university-educated professional classes tend to identify more with an amorphous global culture and can thus much more easily socialise with professional elites from other countries than they can with working class people from their own home town. If you want to discuss the subtleties of English Premiership football and real ale with people well-versed in the vernaculars and idioms of the English Midlands, you'll find it much easier with others who share your cultural heritage. By contrast if you want to discuss the relative merits of keyhole surgery, fine wines and Mediterranean holiday villas, you'd probably be quite at ease to converse with affluent medical professionals from any country, who are more likely not only to be proficient in medical English, but to belong to the same social class. The rooted somewheres tend to be sceptical of globalisation, rapid cultural change and mass migration, while the more erudite anywheres welcome these changes as long as they can afford their exclusivity to keep the riffraff at bay. The political landscape mirrors this split too. On the one hand we have openly globalist parties posing on the lifestyle left that champion the rights of welfare dependents, migrants and ethno-religious minorities and on the other we have conservative or nationalist parties who promise to retain nation states with more socially cohesive communities, but with some boundaries and labour market protections. Often big business will support both sides as long as they can successfully lobby government to defend their commercial interests. Globalist parties tend to attract votes from wishful thinking affluent professionals, idealistic students, new migrants and welfare dependents. As I noted in another recent post Realignment in the age of Elitism, more conservative or nationalist parties tend to appeal to the true middle ground of ordinary patriotic working and lower middle class voters. By contrast more openly globalist parties tend to appeal either to the professional and managerial classes who have benefited most from recent techno-economic developments or to the growing underclasses of welfare dependents and special socio-cultural minorities. The latter group is naturally very heterogenous, anybody from Muslims with large families (and thus very keen on welfare provision, schooling and healthcare) and migrant workers (keen to have unrestricted access to the global labour market) to gays, transsexuals, and some categories of mentally ill people who feel estranged from their heteronormative or neurotypical mainstream culture. It hardly matters that these disparate groups privately hate each other. All that matters is that they depend on the kind of welfare largesse that only big business can provide.
Old rooted identities had a geographic reality, with greater homogeneity within a given region, but more cultural diversity worldwide because each culture could thrive in its own self-contained niche. Large corporations find it easier to rule over transient, volatile, heterogeneous and intersectional communities with competing interests and conflicting demands than over culturally homogenous communities with shared values. The mainstream media may preach universal harmony, but its constant re-categorisation of humanity engenders more distrust and thus justifies more social surveillance. As the native working classes abandon our cities, we see the emergence of transient ghettoes interspersed with gated neighbourhoods for the affluent classes everwhere from Paris to Berlin, from London to Rome or from Madrid to Stockholm. While electronic media can pacify most of the underclasses, police forces are already preparing for street battles on an unprecedented scale in high-density trouble spots. In just ten years the banlieues of Paris have evolved from mixed working class neighbourhoods into ghettoes with few French natives, where women dare not walk the streets alone. Some see these developments as evidence of growing Islamisation, a by-product of former Western colonialism and destabilisation. Yet I see a different scenario emerging, as the technocratic elite take advantage of the conflict between infantilised decadent Westerners and regressive Muslims to impose their new caste system.
Two faces of the same Monster
The globalist left has two rival faces. On the one hand we have mainstream social democratic parties who have thrown their weight behind neoliberal economics, seeking a new partnership between the state and transnational businesses to promote progressive social and cultural change. In the UK we called this strategy Blairism. In Italy the old Communist Party morphed into a bland imitation of the US Democratic Party, implementing policies that penalised small businesses and empowered big businesses to the detriment of blue-collar workers who saw their jobs outsourced. France is a little different. While Macron won the recent French Presidential election by a handsome margin, the mainstream globalist left failed to get much more than 30% of the vote if we combine his votes with those of socialists in the first round. However, France's youthful Blairite, who welcomed the support of former President Obama, is likely to have only a very short honeymoon as his administration proves powerless to tackle the growing disaffection of most ordinary French people with their out-of-touch metropolitan elites. Many on the old radical left opposed this lurch to corporatism, but found it virtually impossible to organise strikes or unite an increasingly fragmented and mobile workforce, whose bargaining power is limited by both extreme labour mobility and by smarter automation. Podemos in Spain and Syriza in Greece have so far failed catastrophically to offer workers an alternative, simply because their countries' economy and institutions are too enmeshed in a globalised system for them to do anything but negotiate with the powers that be. National governments have become little more than parish councils and trade unions act like student councils whose infantile policy suggestions our real rulers can happily ignore.
Useful Social Justice Warriors
Another faction of the radical left proves immensely useful to large corporations, busy planning for a near future when artificially intelligent robots can displace most low-skill jobs transforming the labour market. Some argue greater automation will just create new jobs for people to do, but that's not how the economy works. Big business needs a reliable and malleable workforce and who could be more malleable and more reliable than robots? They will only deploy human resources if we have niche intellectual skills or can act as friendly humanoid operatives in the growing marketing, social care and awareness raising industries. Today more people, ranging from high street charity promoters to call centre marketers, are employed to persuade us to change our lifestyles and/or consumption patterns than to make the goods we need. The old mixed economy worked on the assumption that and better-educated and better-paid workers would boost demand for the products they helped to make. If the labour market is tightly controlled and industries rely on a large number of skilled workers, businesses will have to acquiesce to workers' demands and accommodate their idiosyncratic customs and regional cultural preferences. Now big business is much interested in socially engineering a new kind of culturally homogenised but synthetically diverse team of enthusiastic colleagues. Many of the lifestyle causes once associated with the radical cultural left, such as women's rights, gay rights, disabled peoples' rights, transgender rights, migrant rights, mental health rights, have been embraced by large corporations. Some see this as progress. Should we not welcome the fact that big business has now come on board in our struggle for social justice or should we just cynically dismiss any corporate initiatives? None of these lifestyle issues affect the economic relationship between social classes, they merely address our perception of the relationships and roles of new and old categories of people within the same socio-economic class. Indeed some of these new categories are a product of recent societal changes. Feminism has morphed from a worthy campaign for women's rights to the redefinition of biologically based genders and traditional two-parent families. Some social critics such as Camille Paglia and Germaine Greer, who once called themselves feminists, now question the role of postmodern feminism as no longer being about empowering women as women, but more about the ideologically driven re-engineering of natural variations of humanity. I've previously observed how the roles of men and women respond to underlying societal conditions. Technological advances over the last 150 years have significantly empowered women, arguably more so than men. Not only do women have more time to pursue careers and not only have strenuous manual jobs been first mechanised and then automated, but women excel in modern higher education and in professions requiring advanced emotional intelligence or people skills (marketing, surveillance, social work, recruitment etc.) more than their male peers. Yet these jobs do not produce any concrete results, except to ensure the smooth functioning of an increasingly complex system that values compliance and harmony more than creativity and personal freedom. We now only need a small minority of the workforce to design, develop, test, build and maintain our goods and infrastructure. Our mixed economy rewards everyone else not so much based on their productivity but on their strategic worth as social regulators and persuaders as well as consumers. Many low achievers already work as product testers, mystery shoppers or product reviewers. That's right big business will pay you to act as guinea pigs for their products or services. The aim is not simply to boost sales or short-term profits, but to analyse the long-term psychological impact of their wares. Some lucky souls even get paid to test games or compete in online role playing tournements.
These lifestyle trends will not only transform the world of work, but traditional family structures and may eventually redefine the purpose of life itself. To enact the kind of far-reaching societal changes required for a Brave New World of intellectually superior creative elites and compliant underclasses of subjugated consumers, today's policy makers have first to suppress traditional social structures. Just as Mao Zedong's cultural revolution paved the way for his country's later conversion to state-managed neoliberalism and extreme wealth disparity, albeit overseen by the Communist Party of China, large corporations are now using social justice idealists to campaign for the kind of social changes that will eventually lead us to an era of hyper-dependence.
Hyper-dependence
So what do transgender teenagers, Muslim migrants, learning disabled adults and other special categories of people have in common? How can we confuse the complex problems that may arise from sexual identity, religion, migration and intellectual impairments? These are mere aspects of humanity that could potentially affect us all. Religion is at heart a belief system that manages human behaviour. Migration is driven largely economic and environmental forces. Sexual identity may be problematic if one is unable to succeed with one's biologically determined gender. Last but not least, intellectual impairment is very relative. But all these categories of people rely not only on state or corporate intervention, but on the blurring of traditional boundaries between countries, close-knit communities and natural categories of people (such as men and women). It hardly matters if many Muslim migrants have regressive views on women's rights or homosexuality, as this provides the perfect pretext for more social intervention. A globalist policy planner does not care so much about a specific self-sustaining community, but how to subjugate the whole of humanity to a handful of corporations. If you're a goat herder in the Yemeni mountains or a Scottish fisherman, you may still retain some degree of independence from the global banking system. If the same Yemeni goat herder becomes a refugee in some godforsaken suburb of a Northern European city and the former Scottish fisherman ends up on incapacity benefit after a spurious psychiatric diagnosis, both owe their continued existence to the illusory generosity of a corporate monster few of us can understand. Yet social justice warriors will fight for migrant/refugee rights and champion the cause of mental illness sufferers, without a moment questioning the system that created these problems or contemplating the long-term consequences of our loss of personal autonomy.
Antifa (antifascist action) have deservedly won their reputation as intolerant agent provocateurs who serve to shut down debate on a wide range of contentious social issues. We now have mounting evidence of collusion between corporate NGOs and far-left political activists, most notably via George Soros's Open Society Foundation, but also via governmental agencies such as Europeans without borders funded by none other than the European Commission. The young idealists who genuinely believe in these causes have the same degree of intellectual autonomy as the cigarette salespeople of yesteryear. They are marketing a dream of a brave new world that can only end in more subjugation with a police state to manage the hyper-dependent masses.
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.
We all yearn for freedom. Instinctively nobody wants to submit to the will of others whom we cannot trust to act in our best interests. However, in today's complex high-tech society we've become so interdependent that we relinquish our personal freedoms and submit to higher authorities in all our daily interactions with the rest of humanity and man-made infrastructure. Failure to conform to societal norms can often result in isolation and impaired emotional wellbeing. So freedom is a very relative concept and can only be truly understood in the context of other desirable goals we may have in our lives and in wider society such as good health, safe neighbourhoods, social cohesion, prosperity or democracy. We often confuse freedom with rights or entitlements. Access to clean water is strictly speaking not a freedom in and of itself. It's a human necessity that keeps us alive and kicking. We may thus have a right to potable water and breathable air, but their availability depends on our ability to exploit nature either by choosing hospitable habitats or by taming erratic natural forces to meet our needs. Primitive human beings did not expect clean potable water to flow freely from taps. Our ancestors had to learn where to find sources of vital elements. We may have been free to move to inhospitable regions, but would have had to pay the ultimate price for our adventurism if we failed to gather life's necessities. Naturally, we cannot enjoy any other freedoms until we have attained the means of survival. Absolute freedom would let us do whatever we want, whether or not it's good for us or harms others. Both biology and culture determine what we want. Our more basic instincts are not just to survive, but to procreate, which in the case of human beings means partaking in a complex game to enhance our social status and mate with the most desirable partner. Absolute tyranny would grant us no freedom of action, speech or thought at all. We might exist, but higher authorities would monitor and control every aspect of our lives, purportedly for our own good. As a social animal, we have seldom enjoyed absolute freedom, and neither have we yet succumbed to absolute tyranny, although some societies have come fairly close. A lone hunter-gatherer in a fertile wilderness may temporarily enjoy absolute personal freedom for no other human being could tell him what to do. Visions of primordial freedom have long featured in our literature, often portrayed as the aftermath of a misadventure as in Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe. The need to survive would constrain all his actions. He would not enjoy the freedom to lie in bed or play video games all day. Indeed they'd be no modern infrastructure at all. The only man-made artefacts would be the creations of our intrepid extreme survivalist. If one day our hero were to meet and fall in love with a woman, his personal freedom would end for cohabitation inevitably constrains your actions. Even the most primitive societies had the concept of social responsibility and rules which governed the behaviour of its members. If you broke these rules and lacked the authority of a lawmaker, you may well be banished and risk becoming yet another biogenetic dead-end. Most of us can thus only conceive of freedom once we have met all our other vital needs and satisfy a set of innate emotional and biological urges that evolved to ensure the procreation of the fittest. More important as a social animal whose young need extended nurturing all our freedoms are subordinate to community needs.
Communities may allow some activities, such as sexual liaison, only in private or in segregated settings to avoid unwanted resentment and disgust. One person's freedom ends where someone else's fundamental human rights begin. As soon as our actions affect other people, we are no longer free to do as we please and have to modify our behaviour to suit our social environment. In a complex society privilege thus means greater exclusivity via private ownership or temporary hire of private spaces, where one can exert greater personal freedoms without constant social surveillance. Naturally in your private space you could do good or bad things. You may partake in leisure pursuits of which many do not approve or at least do not wish to witness. Often we probably just want to work or relax without fearing social opprobrium. As soon as we leave our private space and enter a social space shared with the wider community, we adapt our behaviour and outward appearance. The range of permissible behaviours depends very much on the social milieu and level of trust. In private we may also discuss personal or business matters that may give us an unfair advantage over others. However, in rare cases where things go nastily wrong, some of us might commit heinous crimes that are obviously easier to conceal in more secluded surroundings. If you happen to own, and have exclusive usage of, a castle in a remote corner of the Scottish Highlands, you might be able to get away with murder much more easily than a typical resident of a high rise flat surrounded by neighbours and CCTV cameras. Many of us like to express our freedom through greater contact with nature, inevitably making us more vulnerable to natural predators and other humans who may take advantage of our nonchalance. Yet we can only confidently exercise such freedoms when we feel safe among others we trust.
One of the most fundamental principles of law is the presumption of innocence, i.e. the assumption that one does not seek privacy in order to commit heinous acts and most people have essentially good intentions unless proven otherwise. The principle of innocent until proven guilty may well have been the bedrock of both Roman and many modern legal systems in what we once considered the enlightened liberal world, but it relies on a strong foundation of shared moral and cultural values and high degree of mutual trust among members of our wider society. Once this reciprocal trust breaks down in an interdependent world, the authorities have to resort to growing levels of surveillance and subtle inculcation to maintain social order.
Complex versus Primitive Societies
Anthropologists often contrast complex with primitive societies. In essence the greater the size, specialisation and interdependency of a society, the more complex it is. More complex societies tend to produce more advanced technology that both expand and restrict personal freedoms. More primitive societies may afford its members greater theoretical freedom of action, but are inevitably constrained by rudimentary technology.
Technocratic Paradox
Undoubtedly most of us in modern European and North American cities enjoy easy access to better technology than our ancestors or the hapless denizens of cultural backwaters still clinging to outmoded ways of life. Our forebears had to survive without the benefits of modern telecommunications and comparatively inexpensive travel. Our day-to-day lives would be a never-ending tale of hard work and thankfulness for our anecdotal daily bread. Freedom never meant entitlement to a life of workless leisure and endless self-obsessed exploration. It meant first and foremost familial independence, i.e. the right of each viable family to manage affairs in their best interests and raise the next generation as they see fit. Under feudalism such freedoms were always constrained by land rights and punitive fees. Early capitalism transformed the nature of exploitation, so workers gained the freedom to compete with each other for breadcrumbs. Only later as technology improved could better educated and more specialised workers demand higher wages and better working conditions that also granted them greater individual freedom. Yet we tend to conceptualise our freedom of action only in relation to the dominant cultural paradigm of our era. Car owners may appreciate greater freedom to drive where they want, but such freedoms ultimately rely on massive infrastructure, advanced technology and regulations that prevent accidents and ease traffic flows. One may well enjoy the illusion of free movement on a desolate highway surrounded by wide open spaces, but when stuck in a traffic jam on a multilane motorway with no easy escape route, one may wish for alternatives. Indeed in many congested metropolises the mega-rich bypass overcrowded trains and gridlocked roads by helicopter. Hyper-consumerism has morphed into an arms race, where the same machines that once seemed to liberate us trap us into a high-tech rat race. Before the era of mass motoring urban children would happily play in the streets. Now their parents dare not let their offspring out not only for well-founded fears of road traffic accidents, but also because of a breakdown in communitarian trust and media reports of rampant child abusers and grooming gangs. Young children may be free to hop in their parents' car to the nearest shopping mall, sports centre or school, but are often no longer free to explore their neighbourhoods unsupervised. My point here is a higher material living standard does not necessarily beget more freedom. Better and more accessible technology may enable us to do things that our forebears could only dream of, but also impose other constraints. We may have the freedom to fly to Tenerife on holiday, but once there our actions are constrained by the thousands of other tourists who have taken advantage of cheap air travel and the facilities needed to support their lifestyle. To gain greater personal freedom you either have to venture off the beaten track and forgo many of the luxuries we now take for granted or buy access to exclusive resorts. Today's mega rich may profit from an increasingly globally integrated economy, but use their immense financial wealth to escape the excesses of mass consumerism and ubiquitous surveillance. We have thus commoditised freedom. If you like the commercialised hubbub of shopping and leisure centres with their incessant promotion of ephemeral products and synthetic experiences, then you have probably relinquished any true sense of self. Had I never visited a shopping mall, I may find the experience of temporary interest. Likewise I don't regret visiting the Great Mosque of Al Quayrawan (Kairouan) in the interests of anthropology, but I would not convert to Islam or agree with many of its practices. All activities organised by higher authorities restrict our freedom of thought, expression and action.
Free Will
In theory at least we are all mere carbon life-forms. Human emotions and culture would be inconceivable without our evolved intelligence that helps us learn new skills and concepts. To an animal behaviourist, a herd of cattle act in highly predictable ways responding largely biological impulses and environmental variables that may affect the availability of edible grass and potable water. They can easily explain aberrant behaviour in terms of disease or bad ecology. Most zoologists do not expect one cow to seclude itself in the corner of a field to write a philosophical treatise, compose a symphony or invent a new kind of manger. Neither do they expect groups of cows to gather to discuss how to free themselves from their human overlords. Yet our bovine cousins still have independent brains and some limited sense of self, albeit as part of a larger collective. We know this because most animals, except under extreme stress, act in the best interests of self-preservation. Without a sense of self, life and breeding serve little purpose other than to propagate one's species to the detriment of other life forms. Here we note two competing procreative strategies, known to ecologists as r/K selection theory. Lower animals with less evolved brains tend to maximise their procreative potential through r-selection and are limited only by their habitat's natural restraints. Such animals tend to rely more on collective intelligence than individual insights. Higher or more intelligent animals tend more towards K-selection with much higher investment in raising their young and much more selective mating strategies. However, a given species may adapt its procreation strategy to match environmental or cultural changes. Although human beings tend to more to K-selection, when compared to more prolific species, our rapid cultural and technological evolution has changed our procreation strategies and consequently the relative importance of individuals versus the collective. Our modern high-tech society would not be possible without hyper-specialisation and the creativity of a relatively small number of pioneering scientists, engineers, mathematicians, philosophers, entrepreneurs and philanthropists. Without a highly evolved sense of self our ancestors could never have innovated or challenged the old status quo. Critical thinking means understanding that the real world has many inconvenient dilemmas and paradoxes, e.g. should I satisfy my temporary desires by eating more ice cream or keep to a strict diet to maintain a healthy body shape and avoid unpleasant illnesses? Such a choice is an act of free will, a battle between biological instincts that evolved in Palaeolithic times and rational evidence-based behaviour. Prehistoric hunter-gatherers may well have feasted on nuts and berries to give themselves a much-needed sugar and fibre boost while stocks lasted. We evolved to crave things that were good for us or our longer-terms survival in most circumstances. But as we modified our environment through the invention of tools, farming and machines and we colonised habitats to which naked humans would be ill-suited, our instincts gave way to reason and culture, ways of life that evolved through trial and error. Ultimately everything we do or say can be reduced to biological instincts, but describing as human beings as mere carbon life-forms makes about as much sense as defining books as wood pulp products. Paper is a mere medium for advanced concepts expressed in complex human language. Free will is thus the intersection between physical reality and our intelligence. It is the act of conscious thinking when we consider conflicting options. We can exercise our free will to help ourselves, our loved ones or wider society. We are also free to make mistakes or follow the wrong advice. Without free will, independence is a mere figment of our imagination.
Identity Politics and Personal Freedom
A free person does not need a label to define or justify his or her behaviour. As long as our behaviour does not unduly limit someone else's freedom, without their express consent, then our predilections are a matter for us alone or other people with whom we choose to share such experiences. We have devised two dominant ways to deal with the complexity of an increasingly interconnected and transient society. The free market, in theory, allows competing cultural paradigms to coexist and find their own niche in a rapidly evolving world. By contrast a socialist utopia would replace competing cultures with a universal super-culture that would seek to eradicate practical inequalities between individuals. Equality and diversity may sound virtuous, but in practice cannot coexist, unless we redefine diversity in terms of ethnic background, gender identity, sexual orientation or non-conformist personality traits. Indeed we would never have progressed beyond the Stone Age if we had all conformed to societal norms. Some of us needed to think out of the box to devise new ways of overcoming natural constraints, while others had to nurture our prehistoric inventors. Natural diversity, especially of the intellectual and vocational kinds, spearheaded human development. Sadly such natural differences are also grotesquely unfair. A maladapted person without an opportunity to flourish is an evolutionary dead-end. Hence we descend mainly from the survivors of past civilisations with high infant mortality rates. Anyone with extremely dysfunctional behaviour would either not have survived to adulthood or would have been shunned by the wider community. As a result only more advanced, mainly post-agrarian, societies could afford a degree of specialisation that would take full advantage of the rare intellectual skills that saw the development of writing, mathematics and applied sciences, without which our modern world would be unthinkable. We have seen neither the triumph of Smithsonian laissez-faire economics nor a transition to a command economy with full public ownership. Instead we have the growing dominance of large transnational corporations closely tied to global banking cartels who work symbiotically with millions of smaller service providers and suppliers. These conglomerates not only bankroll the world's most influential media outlets, they fund myriad third sector organisations to lobby governments and promote the kind of lifestyles that suit their long-term business interests best. Many of today's leading businesses invest more in marketing, advertising, lobbying and law than they do in research and development. Any large hierarchical organisation, however classified, is much more concerned with bending the will of its subjects, whether citizens or consumers, than empowering others. That's much easier task if you can split your subjects into a plethora of interdependent identity groups. Your freedom to consume has to be balanced by other freedoms, such as financial independence or privacy.
Traditional ethnic, religious, professional and biological identities have recently given way to new identities based on lifestyle choices, personality profiles, erotic preferences or ancestral traits such as skin colour. It may matter little whether you are Portuguese or Polish, but it seems to matter more whether you chose to stay in your home region or migrate to a wealthier country, identify as an avid gamer, suffer from OCD, are allergic to nuts or enjoy erotic exchanges with members of the same sex. An almost endless array of circumstantial and behavioural traits can divide people into thousands of subcategories that justify special treatment and new regulations that affect the rights and freedoms of others. Corporate globalisation is commodifying thousands of years of gradual cultural evolution into a set of marketable flavours and identities that mainly serve to subjugate us to their domination. In this bizarre brave new world we are no longer free to criticise a religion that considers homosexuality evil or to challenge the fashionable view that sexual orientation is an immutable inherited trait. We are no longer free to challenge the theory that human activity has caused climate change or to challenge the logic of mass migration. Now I don't dispute that mass consumption has environmental consequences or sustainable migration can be of mutual benefit. I just want the freedom to investigate and discuss the evidence for these propositions.
Freedom to Breathe Fresh Air
I value the freedom to walk in the countryside undisturbed by vehicular traffic, noisy machinery or rowdy behaviour. Yet such freedoms can only be guaranteed by limiting the freedoms of others. You may believe the freedom to cross national boundaries untrammelled trumps all other freedoms such as the freedom to walk your dog in the park without getting mugged or raped. In a complex and unequal world we cannot grant everyone universal freedoms that do not inevitably counteract each other.
How the Virtue-Signalling Left Cares More About Affluent Jet-Setters Than Defenceless Goat Herders
The faux outrage about Donald Trump's controversial travel ban on citizens of 7 mainly Muslim countries reveals more about the priorities of the affluent infantile left than it does about any shift in US foreign policy. Most people in the world outside of North America, Europe, Japan and a few other wealthy countries cannot afford to fly to the United States. The freedom to travel where you want and to enjoy the benefits of advanced civilisations that took hundreds of years to evolve is a relatively new concept. By contrast food, water and shelter are the most fundamental human necessities. US foreign policy under Bush Senior, Clinton, Bush Junior and Obama has denied millions these basic human rights by bombing neighbourhoods, destroying vital infrastructure for clean water, food distribution and electricity, littering the landscape with depleted uranium, imposing sanctions, arming despotic regimes and covertly supporting Islamic fundamentalist militias in Syria, Egypt, Iraq, Libya and elsewhere. While many protested against the 2003 invasion of Iraq, opposition to subsequent military escapades and arms sales has been muted. The mainstream Western media, most notably the BBC and CNN, have consistently peddled US State Department propaganda by blaming local leaders, Russia or Iran for the region's growing instability. Indeed many left-leaning politicians and opinion leaders supported US intervention in the Middle East. Gordon Brown and the late Jo Cox MP published a report calling for more proactive intervention in Syria to counter aggression from Russia and President Assad. Their narrative leads in only one direction, a borderless one world government controlled by global corporations and policed by a transcontinental expansion of NATO. It's a vision shared not only by Hillary Clinton's campaign team, Tony Blair and George Soros, but also by the EU and China.
Yet the wishful thinking fake Left in all their collective indignation against President Trump seem much more concerned with the rights of affluent Middle Eastern globetrotters than those of Yemeni goat herders whose homes have just been bombed by the Saudi Air Force with the full cooperation of the US and UK or the rights of Christian Syrians murdered by rebel militias that the UK or US armed. They can only relate to people like themselves who value the freedom to travel abroad more than the right to safety, social stability and cultural continuity in your own homeland because they just imagine the world as one large university campus and project impractical idealist student politics onto the rest of humanity.
The latte-sipping soi-disant Left tend to confuse actions with categories of people. Migrate is a verb. Anyone who moves to another region or country is by definition a migrant just as anyone who travels by aeroplane is an air passenger. Migration may be good, bad or indifferent depending on objective environment and social conditions. Likewise anyone who drives a car is a driver. Logically driving may also be good, bad or neutral in different situations. The same human being may be a driver in one situation and a train passenger, cyclist or walker in other circumstances. We should not debate whether migrants or drivers are good or bad people, but whether mass migration or mass motoring make environmental or social sense. Oddly the two phenomena are closely related as people tend to move to more affluent countries with higher car ownership. In today's complex world immigration controls are like traffic regulations. Ideally we would not need any restrictions on movement and if we all lived comfortably in sparsely populated and resource-rich regions we could minimise both traffic and migration controls, but we don't. More freedom in one domain inevitably limits freedoms in other areas. People might value ease of travel, but we also need safe and peaceful neighbourhoods.
Until recently only a tiny fraction of humanity could afford long-distance travel. European emigrants to the Americas would save up many years only to endure a long and arduous journey in the lower decks of a ship. It's something people might do once or twice in a lifetime. On arrival they had little choice but to work for a living as there was no welfare to speak of. Not everyone succeeded. Some died through exhaustion while a few returned to their homelands penniless, but the American dream was open only to those who either arrived rich or worked hard and seized every opportunity. Not surprisingly the USA attracted the most highly motivated immigrants. If you were not prepared to adapt to the competitive reality of the new world, you were better off staying in your homeland where at least you knew the score. However, since the mid 1990s we've seen an unprecedented rise in global migratory flows as millions seek a higher standard of living in wealthier countries. People move not so much because they must, but because they can or rather because they are aware of better opportunities elsewhere.
Celebrity Rednecks vs Hollywood Divas
Two media-savvy celebrities vie for the hearts and minds of the American people. One is a pop star and actress whose semi-pornographic exhibitionism has helped promote the kind of consumer fetishism that big business loves and ecologists loathe. The other is a loudmouthed urban redneck from Houston, Texas, who has built his multimedia career on the conspiracy theory that the Feds want to deny law-abiding citizens of their god-given right to drive oversized SUVs and bear arms. At least Alex has ranted and railed against the establishment and stood up for free speech, but Madonna Louise Ciccone has only ever lent her support to Hollywood fundraisers to improve her public image. I can't recall her voicing her opposition to US arms sales to Saudi Arabia. Curiously Alex Jones and Madonna personify only marginally different versions of American exuberance and extreme indulgence. Both drive SUVs and lead jetsetting lifestyles that could sustain 100s, if not 1000s, of African or Indian lives.
Since the inauguration of the accidental president of the United States, property developer and reality TV Star, Donald Trump, the world's most influential economic, military and cultural power has been split into two rival camps, both funded by big business. For decades the White House could rely on the main American and European media outlets to toe their lines on strategic foreign, economic and social policies. The Republicans and Democrats differed mainly in rhetoric, one appealing more to the conservative hinterland and the other more to the trendier metropolitan conurbations. In practice they both vigorously pursued policies that benefited mainly large corporations while attempting to manage the expectations and social conflicts of their diversified citizenry. Behind the scenes the two main dynasties of the last 40 years, the Bush and Clinton families, whose members played key roles in the Reagan and Obama administrations too, got along just fine. Bill Clinton famously vacationed with George HW Bush in Kennebunkport.
Donald J Trump is a loose cannon who dreams of a powerful, self-reliant and prosperous America trading peacefully with the rest of the world. Most notably he has publicly advocated strong nation states, secure borders and bilateral trade deals that protect the interests of local workers, all concepts alien to universalists. However, his presidency is now captive to a splinter group of the infamous neoconservatives who architected the USA's disastrous foreign and military policies over the last 30 years or more. While once united, the business elites in the US and to a lesser extent in the UK are now split into two camps. One remains fully committed to the globalist project and view conservative patriotism as an anachronism that must give way to a new global mindset. Globalists may pay lip service to local or national identity, especially for temporary electoral gain, but their long-term goal is a one-world government. A few years ago many would have dismissed such prophecies as far-fetched, but Western academics have long argued against nation states.
The other group recognises the world is a complex and dangerous place and prefers to build on the relative strengths of advanced countries such as the USA, Japan, Australia or France as a model that the rest of the world might emulate rather than attempt to re-engineer the world in their own image. While globalists always favour policies that undermine national privilege and favour cultural harmonisation, modern patriots favour stable societies that benefit their own people and here I use George Orwell's distinction between patriotism (positive nationalism) and negative nationalism. This marks a paradigm shift that may itself be an adaptation to the USA's relative demise as a superpower. When the Soviet Union fell in 1991, the USA utterly dominated the world's economic, cultural and military domains. No other country could challenge its hegemony. China may have had a much larger population, but lacked the economic and military means to be more than a regional power. Very much aware of the Anglosphere's soft power advantage, China has focussed on building up its economic leverage with Europe and North America as well as expanding its mercantile empire to Africa, South America and the Middle East. The East Asian superpower's economy is set to overtake the USA's in the next 10 to 15 years. A close alliance between China and Russia could challenge the USA's former dominance and prove a much better trading partner for Central European countries who already import much more from China than from the US and rely increasingly on Russian gas. Over the last decade US Foreign policy has attempted to thwart the re-emergence of Russia as a major player in a multipolar world, by preventing a trade alliance with Ukraine under Poroshenko and funding the Maidan movement to bring Ukraine within the EU and NATO umbrella. This strategy has failed. Russia can survive without the US or EU as it has a captive market for its raw materials in China, Iran and India. Russia has little need for territorial expansion and has only acted to defend the rights of Russians in neighbouring countries formerly in the Russian Empire and Soviet Union. Yet Saudi Arabia with a fraction of Russia's size and population now spends more on military hardware than Russia.
For the first time in recent history the CEOs of major American corporations and much of the so-called liberal media are openly hostile to the US Presidency. Sergey Brin, the multibillionaire co-founder of Google, led 2000 employees to protest Trump's travel ban. He has already alluded to a future President Pence, possibly after the successful impeachment of the sitting President. Their main concern is the ease of travel of affluent Silicon Valley workers, not the safety of Yemeni goat herders or Chicago residents.
How the new left merely cheerleads the new globalist establishment
As millions heed the call of the establishment media and celebrity charlatans to protest the inauguration of a new conservative American president, we must ask why the same media outlets barely reported massive grassroots opposition to recent military interventions in the Middle East. These stage-managed anti-Trump protests bare more semblence to similar choreographed uprisings in Ukraine, Venezuela and Egypt, also broadcast live on CNN. Behind the left-branded protests against populism lies the spectre of George Soros' web of fake activist organisations.
Once upon a time left-of-centre social reformers and trade union activists had a bit of a reputation as rebels standing up against the old reactionary establishment intent on preventing social progress to preserve their privileges. If you were a coal miner on 78 shillings a week in 1926 or a toilet cleaner earning little more than pin money, you'd listen to Labour politicians and trade union leaders who promised to redress the balance of power away from capitalists and aristocrats to ordinary workers. The experience of the 1914–18 Great War also taught a generation of young radicals not to support their ruling class's imperialist games and extend their solidarity to workers abroad.
Today the new emerging global superclass of corporate executives, transnational bureaucrats and NGO consultants speak the language of the left. They preach internationalism, environmental protection, equality, diversity, women rights, gay rights, migrant rights and above all social progress. Indeed a potpourri of causes that would not look out of place on the stands of 1980s Students Union conferences. The only difference is the former rebels now occupy boardrooms and enjoy the support of mainstream media outlets such as MTV, CNN, the BBC, Facebook, Buzzfeed and more. Yet the world remains a very unequal place. Real power is demonstrably concentrated in fewer and fewer hands while national elections are often meaningless as elected governments have little choice but to kowtow to the demands of big business and supranational organisations. The old left agenda, in its many flavours, has been repackaged as a model for global social engineering. Meanwhile the traditional working class have lost their strategic role as the engine of industrial creativity. Their jobs have been largely outsourced and/or automated. In their place has come a range of insecure service sector jobs, increasingly divorced from any tangible goods and services we really need. More and more professionals have morphed into service providers, who work for larger organisations as contractors, but whose contracts may be terminated at the drop of a hat. If a fictitious National Union of Graphic Designers ever went on strike, businesses would just outsource these tasks to graphic designers abroad, import more malleable migrant labour or develop artificial intelligence capable of replicating artistic creativity. Only workers with secure jobs and protected employee rights can dream of taking industrial action and such jobs are these days few and far between. In theory teachers and nurses, at the forefront of postmodern social engineering, could withdraw their labour, but would meet massive public opposition. As a result we've created a new underclass who have failed to transition from the old manufacturing economy to the new information and service economy and instead have to compete at the bottom end of the wage scale with growing competition from migrant workers. All too often the underclasses are trapped in a cycle of temporary low-paid non-jobs, such as shelf-stackers or CCTV supervisors, and welfare dependency. Economic insecurity in a consumer society inevitably leads to emotional insecurity. Yet this most vulnerable group feels betrayed both by the corporate left, once represented by Tony Blair, and by the infantile left represented by Labour's new leader, Jeremy Corbyn, and his coterie of trendy virtue signalling celebrities and Guardian journalists. Today's self-styled leftists have abandoned their local working classes, whom they accuse of xenophobia and ignorance, and embraced a smorgasbord of victim groups, many belonging to newfangled categories we barely recognised just 50 years ago. The infantile left bang on about helping migrants, mental health patients, transgender teenagers, single mothers and/or welfare claimants, all categories who owe their conceptualisation to recent rapid socio-cultural changes. It now seems rather odd that many who may theoretically fit one of these categories fail to identify with the new left, who keep failing to distinguish the symptoms of a dysfunctional society (such as emotional stress often described as mental illnesses and expressing itself in myriad forms such as eating disorders or drug abuse or mass migration caused by volatile economic development) from their causes or potential solutions, such as a sustainable economy with full employment that values its participants. Survey after survey have shown that what people really want are secure jobs and stable communities. Amazingly the working classes, or those who still retain some pride in their social and cultural heritage, do not want to depend on state handouts or redefine their personal challenges in terms of mental health, gender dysphoria, sexuality or minority ethnic status. The infantile left keep offering to address symptoms, such as the Middle East quagmire, often in a futile or even counterproductive way, creating new conflicts between rival victim groups, whom they once championed. When Muslim migrants groom teenagers, rape young Western women or beat gay couples, the regressive left censors the reality that many Islamic fundamentalists have a radically different approach to women's or gay rights. Whereas once we may have had the semblance of a rainbow coalition of disadvantaged groups that would unite in their struggle against a common enemy, purportedly capitalism, now we have parallel communities who share only their perceived victimhood and subservience to advocacy groups. The old left may have advocated workers' power. Now the lifestyle left merely advocates submission to a brave new world. While Jeremy Corbyn's small entourage may still claim to defend workers' rights and cherish their movement's ties to the great workers' struggles of the industrial age, the most regressive strand of the new Left are now commonly known as social justice warriors (SJWs). Their stronghold is not the factory floor or trade union branches, but college campuses and their modus operandi is not industrial action but endless awareness raising, protests against traditional beliefs and calls for censorship, safe zones and protection against alleged haters. Unlike student activists in the 1960s who would oppose unjust wars, exploitation and state oppression, social justice warriors work in unison with well-funded NGOs such as George Soros' Open Society Foundation or alongside state institutions. While the government may still pay lip service to liberal concepts such as free speech and open debate largely to keep alive the illusion of democracy, social justice warriors spend much of their time attempting to shut down any debate about their radical redefinition of human reality. Rather than going against the grain, the infantile left act as foot soldiers for elite social engineers, whose main goal is to deny us of any personal or social independence.
Often it can be hard to tell apart a genuine grassroots campaign against real injustice, such as against welfare cuts, from a clever identity awareness raising campaign, e.g. raising awareness of an ill-defined personality disorder few had heard of until recently. They both use similar language and adopt similar techniques to appeal to our compassion. Having been through some relatively hard times myself I can at least empathise with those who campaign against government welfare cuts or want to raise awareness about the very real personal challenges many have in our increasingly atomised society. Some of us have little choice but to beg from the state, but once you begin to depend on remote organisations you have practically relinquished your independence. Our brave new world has consumers and client groups managed by a superclass of technocrats, social engineers and banking cartels.
