Earth with useless face nappy, a symbol of our Brave New Abnormal
As governments roll out a fresh set of lockdowns in country after country, more and more of us wonder if this is really about a virus. Many people who supported the first lockdown, as a temporary measure to save lives in the midst of a worldwide pandemic, are beginning to doubt the true motives behind these draconian restrictions on basic civil liberties and the complete restructuring of our society and economy. To say that the cure is worse than the disease is a monumental understatement. The adverse effects of lockdowns are highly predictable. They engender greater reliance on remote organisations, lethargy, lack of self-worth, depression, drug addiction, domestic abuse and loneliness. Lockdowns stop children from playing with friends and prevent people from visiting elderly neighbours, friends and relatives with mild dementia. These measures seem tailor-made to wear us down as independent free-thinking human beings. Why would a government spend £500 billion, or over 60% of total public expenditure, on corona-containment measures that not only restrict personal freedoms, but destroy livelihoods and drive small businesses to bankruptcy? In Scotland alone we have seen a 34% increase in home deaths as fewer people access clinics for regular check-ups and life-saving operations. There are no historical precedents for governments around the world inflicting such draconian measures in such a coordinated manner to tackle a nanoscopic virus. Many cite the misnamed Spanish Flu from 1918 to 1920, but governments were too busy dealing with uprisings in the aftermath of the Great War and Russian Revolution to police the private lives of families and regulate social interaction. Any attempt to quarantine the healthy in squalid dwellings without basic sanitation would have almost certainly led to an even higher death toll.
It’s becoming clearer by the day that the covid narrative, as game-planned at Event 201 in October 2019 at John Hopkins University, is not about a virus, but reorganising society around a new post-growth paradigm. While I have long advocated a steady state economic model that focuses on gradually improving our quality of life within natural environmental constraints by adapting to levels of consumption and population that we can sustain in the long term, my goal has always been to save humanity as a whole, not to save the lump of rock we call home. Planet Earth will manage just fine without us. It may take its ecosystem a few thousand years to reconquer the urban landscapes that occupy less than 1% of the world’s landmass, but house over half of the human population, and possibly a million or so years to bury to the last artefacts of the Anthropocene, but the planet has happily shrugged off much more cataclysmic events in its 4.5 billion year history. Demographers and epidemiologists have to clearly distinguish the evidence-based science of the earth’s carrying capacity and the sustainability of our current economic system from the ethical implications of any extreme projections one way or the other. If we underestimate the planet’s long-term human carrying capacity, we run the risk of unnecessarily imposing coercive restrictions on procreation and consumption that could lead not only to untold human suffering and early deaths but could make life a misery for those of us who survive the democide deprived of youthful vitality. On the other hand, if we overestimate the earth’s potential population, we may at some stage encounter technological limits to endless growth with catastrophic repercussions for our species. What goes up, must come down, but what matters most is who guides any changes we may need to make to our lifestyles. If the impetus for more sustainable living comes from local communities via greater resilience and relative self-sufficiency, then ordinary people remain very much in control. By contrast, if most people are fully integrated into the global distribution chain and thus reliant on large corporations, the impetus for lifestyle changes to deal with sustainability will come from the top down and will inevitably reflect the priorities of the world’s richest powerbrokers. The immense wealth accumulated by the likes of Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates may be dwarfed by hidden assets controlled by the world’s leading banks, largely in the form of debt, which they can harness to dictate government policies and crash vast sectors of the economy at a whim.
Technocratic Coup
While large corporations and local administrations have joined forces to promote the new abnormal by flooding the airwaves and cyberspace with mixed messages about fighting viruses, remote working and greener living, they are busy reorganising society around the new mantras of collective responsibility and rule by experts (or as Jason Brennan calls it epistocracy). Alongside persistent fearmongering about a deadly virus, the media began to champion a new tightly regulated puritanical lifestyle. The cultural revolution that for many had begun in the 1960s has in many ways come full circle. Across much of Europe and North America the old left – right dichotomy morphed into a new schism between the socially conservative working classes and the woke professional classes pretending to represent their rainbow coalition of special interest victim groups. The latter category often calls itself, especially in North America and the British Isles, liberal because they lay claim to a tradition that championed greater civil liberties, enlightenment principles and personal freedoms. However, their tolerance does not extend to the sanctity of family life, privacy and traditional cultures. Under the pretexts of upholding children rights, monitoring mental health or tackling prejudice, progressive lawmakers have expanded the role of myriad agencies to encroach on the private lives of commoners. Yet we retained the illusion of choice and expanding horizons with easier travel and instant telecommunication. The authoritarian trend that raised its ugly head among faux-progressives in the twenty-tens as they obsessed with political correctness and identity politics has now in the post-corona era metamorphosed into full-blown hostility to personal freedom, privacy and bodily autonomy. The same people who once chanted “my body, my choice” when it came to sexual relations and abortion now support mandatory vaccination, which will inevitably lead to mandatory psychiatric screening linked to digital health passports. The state could be empowered to regulate our moods as well as our procreation. New aspiring parents may need state approval to visit a fertility clinic to conceive a child whose every move and utterance will be analysed.
The Abolition of the Working Class
One key difference sets the current crisis apart from all previous crises since the advent of the industrial revolution. Our technocratic masters no longer need such a bountiful supply of obedient workers. In the early 21st century growing demand for electric vehicles in Europe and North America may fuel the exploitation of children and adult workers in Congolese cobalt mines, but at least they have jobs and can feed their families. In the near future, smart robots will supplant not just relatively well-paid workers in rich countries, they will displace unreliable human resources in poorer countries too. With the worldwide roll-out of universal basic income, it may soon not matter so much whether you happen to live in Lubumbashi, Lima, Lahore or Liverpool, except for the local weather, if you owe your existence to the benevolence of global corporations coordinated by NGOs. Once you have relinquished your bodily autonomy to get a digital health passport so you can travel and regain access to public venues, there is nothing stopping the authorities from regulating your reproductive freedom and thus determining who may procreate and raise the next generation. Many workless denizens after the Great Reset may not qualify for parenthood at all leading the rest of their lives as overgrown children indulging in supervised recreation. Klaus Schwab and Thierry’s utopian book, Covid-19: The Great Reset, may appeal to many wishful thinking professionals eager for a cleaner, greener and leaner tomorrow, but excludes most of the 7.8 billion people alive today. What’s worse if we are temporarily confined to our homes under medical martial law, we have no way to chronicle the activities of our ruling elites. They can simply write off unexplained deaths as consequences of a viral pandemic and dismiss naysayers as dangerous conspiracy theorists intent on undermining the battle against elusive pathogens. At the heart of techno-elitist thinking is that flesh-and-blood human beings are the disease, while artificial cleanliness via transhumanism and augmented intelligence is the final solution.
Addendum
Don’t believe me? Prof. Graeme Ackland from the University Edinburgh has simulated potential excess deaths with and without lockdowns and concluded rather cautiously that lockdowns may only delay some deaths, while actually causing others and that’s before we factor in the long-term effects of destroyed livelihoods. It’s all very well if you have a spacious house with a secluded home office and can easily network with colleagues and fiends online while continuing to earn a good salary. It’s not so good if you have limited private space at home or your job relies on regular real-life social contact. While technology does indeed allow many professionals to work remotely, we all need some real-life human contact and, most important, a sense of purpose in life. As its name suggests, the whole hospitality industry thrives on our desire to mingle informally with other flesh and blood human beings we would not otherwise meet if confined to our own homes. We don’t eat out just because we’re too lazy to cook as we could just as easily buy a takeaway or have a restaurant meal delivered to our homes. We eat out to soak up the atmosphere, interact with human waiters and casually observe other diners. The same is true of cafés, pubs, theatres and cinemas. Anti-social corona-containment measures dramatically limit capacity and spoil customer experience. They are unworkable for all but the largest and best organised businesses. Most rules introduced since the start of the corona-scare earlier this year have had three effects, to limit natural socialisation, to spread distrust in other human beings (either because we might harbour the elusive virus or flout new rules) and most ominously to isolate dissidents and subdue protests. The mainstream media leads us to believe that technofascism is a price worth paying to prevent the spread of a novel coronavirus. We must accept 24/7 surveillance via track-and-trace apps with regular viral load tests, have our media censored, heed the advice of remote experts whose qualifications and independence we cannot ascertain and obediently follow rules that make our social and professional lives a misery, all because of a nanoscopic virus we cannot detect without a powerful electron microscope. The key to this scam is the infamous PCR test (polymerase chain reaction test). It amplifies DNA strands by adding a reagent in successive cycles to detect a genetic sequence resembling the target pathogen. If you amplify DNA samples beyond 30 cycles, fragments of older related infections can be revealed. Test centres in the UK regularly amplify DNA extracted from swabs as many as 45 times leading to a large number of false positives. While only 1% of the results yield false positives, that’s 10 times more than true positives, meaning fewer than 1 in 10 positive results are genuine. Moreover, the respiratory complications originally associated with sars-cov-2 may have many other causes such as seasonal flu or pneumonia. Dr Mike Yeadon, former CSO at Pfizer Research, has exposed the statistical flaws that underly the government’s covid-19 narrative. Perhaps the best book available in English on the planned overreaction to covid-19 is Corona, False Alarm by Prof. Sucharit Bhakdi, formerly of Mainz University, and Dr Karina Reiss. It details how vested corporate lobbies swayed public opinion to promote an apocalyptic narrative that warranted an unprecedented overreaction.
How affluent liberal progressives think of themselves as a master race
We all tell white lies from time to time, preferring to tell others what they want to hear rather than what we really think. This may seem fine when commenting on your partner’s new hairdo. You may prefer her old style, but you don’t want to hurt her feelings. White lies may be more sinister when someone cheats on you and stabs you behind your back, while claiming to be your friend. You may not want to hear that your business partner is having a salacious affair with your wife while you work overtime to keep your company afloat, but when your marriage breaks down you may wish you had learned earlier.
The same kind of mendacity occurs in public administration, but on a much bigger scale. Progressive influencers have public and private opinions. Publicly they preach greater equality, diversity and tolerance for all, namely they want to be your friend, but only if you behave. Privately, they see themselves as a master race of enlightened professionals entrusted with the task of managing everyone else’s lives, rewarding compliance and penalising the self-determination of sovereign individuals who may threaten social stability.
Back in the 1990s and early 2000s the incipient moral superiority of some overzealous health and safety managers and social workers may have seemed a little condescending at times, but basically benign. Health visitors would advise new parents on how to deal with tantrums without smacking and food standards inspectors would visit fish ‘n chip shops to replace old salt-shakers with new ones with fewer or smaller holes. Both sets of well-meaning professionals believed they served the public good because they knew better than most unsophisticated commoners who might otherwise beat their naughty children senseless or die of salt-laden heart attacks. Many such professionals have attended NLP or neurolinguistic programming courses, so they do not come across as arrogant or condescending when interacting with the great unwashed. One approach is to appeal to collective wisdom rather than suggesting the other person is in any way negligent, e.g. “Did you know some people fail to brush their teeth properly for at least two minutes?”. This technique drops a gentle hint that only fools would fail to heed official advice and forget to brush their teeth methodically. We are thus motivated not so much by a self-determined survival instinct, but by a yearning for social acceptance and thus appealing to a pseudo-intellectual hive mentality, i.e. doing what appears to be for the greater good rather than in our own interests. That doesn’t mean we should not listen to good advice from people we can trust, but we should ask whom we can trust and, more important, who has our best interests at heart?
Could the Covid Scare really be about Population Control?
For decades we have lived under the illusions of liberal democracy with full respect for human rights and growing prosperity. Many of us failed to realise the fragility of the short-lived neoliberal age that seemed to have space for a wide range of people from different walks of life and cultural backgrounds. The apocalyptic forecasts of the 1970s oil crisis never quite materialised. The world’s population continued to grow with rapidly declining infant mortality and lower levels of famine as hundreds of millions moved from small traditional communities to large conurbations. By 2015 most people in the developing world had access to clean water, electricity and telecommunications. At the turn of the fourth industrial revolution, most people on earth are somehow connected and aware of better economic opportunities in far-off lands, but only a tiny minority have the niche intellectual skills that 21st century high-tech businesses needed. We may have over 6 billion consumers, if we exclude off-grid subsistence farmers, and hundreds of millions of potential sales assistants, office clerks, drivers, production line workers or cleaners, but most will be made redundant by rapid smart automation. Over the last twenty years economic migration has mainly allowed employers to keep wages low and make it much easier to hire and fire expendable human resources that will soon be delegated to artificially intelligent robots. In an interconnected world population control has two related meanings, namely controlling our behaviour and potentially controlling our numbers. Once our livelihoods depend almost entirely on corporate welfare, with limited bargaining power, we are at the mercy of the hand that feeds us. The Australian government already operates a “no jab, no pay” policy that withdraws child support and other welfare to parents who refuse to vaccinate their children. As long as most families have at least one breadwinner on a good salary, they can opt out of some state-mandated behaviours. Antivaxxers have become the new unclean outsiders, as powerful lobbies have over recent decades spent billions persuading us of the critical role vaccines play in warding off potentially lethal diseases. Concerns about vaccine safety are often dismissed as scientifically illiterate quackery, despite many widely documented cases of adverse reactions to heavily promoted vaccines such as MMR, HPV and swine flu. However, vaccines may only be a means to an end, another way to bind our survival to the biotechnological industrial complex. If we let natural herd immunity win the day, potentially sacrificing a few vulnerable individuals we cannot protect through common sense precautions, at least we remain in control with stronger immune systems. By contrast once we succumb to the lure of DNA-altering wonder drugs, our survival as species will forever more be intimately bound with biotech giants responsible for micro-managing our immune responses and certifying our health.
Sweeping controversies under the carpet
The biggest taboos of the late 20th century and well into the first two decades of the current century are the earth’s human carrying capacity and eugenics. Talk of the latter unwelcome dilemma fell into disfavour in the aftermath of the Second World War. Democracy relies on the notion that we should respect everyone’s needs, wishes and opinions, not just those of the anointed classes. As long as governments and big business can keep their people happy with bread and circuses, they can afford a high degree of public consultation and tolerate dissent, although the mainstream media has long channelled public debate into a narrow range of acceptable opinions, manufacturing consent over protracted periods for far-reaching social changes. However, that era may well be coming to an end as Western Democracy morphs into epistocracy, as envisaged by Jason Brennan in his 2016 book Against Democracy, namely rule by experts. In such a world anything that runs counter the experts’ narrative is deemed heretical. In today’s language dissidents are invariably dismissed as either as far-right or conspiracy theorists. In the recent past the establishment press would worry more about the far-left, intent on destroying our thriving free market economy, or about anarchists, intent on destabilising our cherished civil society. The old left versus right divide has now given way to a growing rift between the universalist outlooks of the affluent professional classes and more socially conservative perspectives of commoners. Who would have guessed that many of the same people who last year championed the free movement of workers and sexual liberation everywhere have now become some of the most fervent proponents of social distancing, face-masks, travel bans and mandatory vaccines. This cognitive dissonance is strongest within the green movement. While back in the 1980s ecologists advocated a back-to-nature approach to long-term sustainability supporting greater local self-sufficiency and often critical of high-tech solutions such as pesticides or genetically modified organisms, today’s Green leaders are very much in bed with cybertech and biotech giants. Indeed Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, Bayer- Monsanto, GSK and AstraZeneca are all keen advocates of the much-flaunted Green New Deal.
The End of Endless Growth
The world’s business elites have now ditched the mantra of endless economic growth. Smart automation has dispensed with the need for a large working class. The mega-rich can consolidate their power and privileges without a large army of loyal workers or the need to milk profits from mass consumption. Since the worldwide roll-out of corona-containment measures the accumulated wealth of the planet’s top billionaires has risen exponentially. In the US alone their wealth had risen by a staggering $434 billion by the end of May this year. Jeff Bezos is now worth over $200 billion, more than the whole GDP of many countries. In public Bill and Melinda Gates may talk about empowering the poor through better education and healthcare, which usually means more vaccines and drugs. In private they consider the great unwashed useless eaters. As the United States teeters on the brink of a civil war, the metropolitan elites have struggled to hide their disdain for American rednecks and blue-collar workers, whose love of SUVs, private houses and guns makes them a huge liability. Our new technocratic masters will only tolerate the masses as long as our behaviour and thus our environmental impact on the planet can be micromanaged. The covid-19 narrative provides the perfect pretext to track not only the movements of all 7.8 billion human beings alive today, but to monitor our actions and ultimately our thoughts. Mental health screening will serve not just to identify depression or psychosis, but problematic critical thinking. To the likes of Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg, polar bears, Amazonian rainforests, giraffes and lions are as worthy of protection as the working class tribes of Europe, North America or anywhere else for that matter. They may not yet have immediate plans to cull the global population, as some in the anti-lockdown movement believe, but they certainly want to tame us like wild animals in a zoo.
Notes on the abject dishonesty of the technocratic elites
We are well and truly entering a twilight zone, in which a frighteningly large number of our neighbours see us either as potential traitors or biohazards. Only a year ago refusing to shake someone’s hand because of their skin colour or some other immutable trait would rightly be condemned as intolerant, although it’s only natural to be a little cautious with outsiders. Now the rules have changed. Unprotected social proximity is to be avoided at all costs for fear of an elusive virus that has yet to be isolated. Some may have dreamed of a bright future of well-educated global citizens sharing the planet and working together to put in place the infrastructure we will need to empower us to lead meaningful lives with a sense of purpose and compassion. Alas only a tiny minority of elite policy planners and engineers will shape our destiny. At no time in history has it been harder to know whom we should trust as we depend on technology controlled by a dwindling section of humanity.
Let us delve briefly into the mindset of the conformist chattering classes who dominate academia, schooling, social surveillance and healthcare. Typically, they view themselves as left-of-centre progressives standing up for the rights of the vulnerable and sensitive to the presumed needs of special victim groups. In the heyday of the former British Empire many would have been missionaries. Although most trendy progressives consider themselves agnostics or atheists these days, one can detect a certain religious zeal in their convictions, not least in their relentless urge to educate the masses and engage with local communities, a euphemism for the helpless plebs unable to think for themselves without paternalistic guidance from outreach workers and experts. I can understand their way of thinking because I grew up in a Guardian-reading household of Labour activists. To some extent I can thank them for helping me hone the art of critical thinking in regular family discussions. We could rebel against some perceived wrongs associated with some aspects of the British ruling classes. We could go on Rock against Racism demos together and I would love Reggae bands and subversive counterculture atmosphere. When Labour lost the 1979 general election, many blamed the Murdoch press, i.e. the mass circulation Sun newspaper, for appealing to the worst reactionary instincts of local working class communities. I recall one upper-middle class activist, living in one of the town’s posher neighbourhoods, refer to his nearest council housing scheme as “our council estate”, namely “our block vote” of grateful factory workers and welfare dependents. Over the last 40 years Labour’s focus has moved from the former to the latter group. They now rate someone’s worthiness as a human being in terms of their dependence on the system and more important on their compliance. University lecturers, social workers and the long-term unemployment trapped in dysfunctional households with a history of mental health challenges have one thing in common that sets them apart from artisans, builders, mechanics, farmers, shopkeepers or lorry drivers. They all depend 100% on state and/or corporate welfare, while traditional tradespeople depend largely on their own endeavours.
Merging of Corporate and State Power
The old left clung to the notion that democratically accountable states could somehow rein in the growing power of large corporations or even take them over to protect the interests of the general public and workers alike. By contrast the new left, both in their neoliberal and radical chic garb, sing almost from the same hymn sheet as corporate PR departments. My Web-hosting company proudly supports Black Lives Matter and my bank advertises its support for annual LGBTQ++ Pride events, while the big supermarkets urge customers to donate to local foodbanks. In the mid 20th century many Western governments took natural monopolies and failing industries of strategic importance into public ownership. In the mid 1970s the UK’s largest manufacturers of cars, aircraft, coal and steel were all nationalised concerns as were the national airline, the railways, the post office and telephone network alongside gas, electricity and water supply. The Tory governments of the 1980s and early 90s privatised most of these operations in the hope of stimulating competition, improving services and lowering prices. Privatisation was the hallmark of neoliberalism, promising a new age of enterprise and shareholder accountability. In practice failing industries were allowed to fall by the wayside with the more successful parts getting snapped up by large multinationals, while telecommunications and aviation could adapt more naturally to technological innovations. Minor shareholders either failed to make much money or sold out to the big players to cash in on small returns. However, many former nationalised industries continued to behave very much as an integral part of an emerging global state, especially those involved in public private partnerships. Rather than renationalise key public services, New Labour expanded the reach of state power in lockstep with its corporate partners, by adding new tiers of public sector bureaucracy to manage outsourced services. To confuse matters further, charities evolved from makeshift voluntary organisations campaigning to help people neglected by the system into professionalised operations tightly integrated with their corporate and state partners. The State may well sentence you to a term in jail, but your prison and probation service may be managed by nominally private contractors. Likewise your rehabilitation may be managed by a mental health service that technically qualifies as a charity. Local authorities often outsource operations to private contractors or charities to evade being held accountable for their potentially unpopular activities. Indeed the main purpose of many charities is not so much to help the downtrodden regain control of their lives, as many of us once believed, but to raise awareness of new concepts and thus promote radical social change that empowers the surveillance state and engenders a culture of dependence. If a charity raises awareness of gender identity among primary school children or seeks to normalise risky sexual practices among preadolescent children, local authorities can wash their hands of direct responsibility while still covertly funding the organisation. Today charities rely heavily on corporate donations, either directly or via trusts such as Joseph Rowntree Foundation or the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and from slush funds from supranational organisations that can more easily evade direct democratic scrutiny, again often via proxies and other charities, e.g. Children in Need, in theory an admirable cause, have donated to Mermaids (promoting gender confusion). More disturbing and returning to the corona-virus scare is the massive corporate funding of academia and the mass media, again often working in lockstep to promote hidden agendas. It should come as little surprise that broadly the same kind of organisations that promoted alternatives to traditional two-parent families and mass migration as the new normal have also thrown their weight behind strict lockdown measures.
Carefree Lifestyles or 24/7 Surveillance
Back in the 1960s and 70s most advocates of laid-back lifestyles with laxer dress codes, greater self-expression and sexual exploration among consenting adults considered themselves, at least in the West, on the liberal left. I loathed wearing ties at school so much that I ripped my tie off as I left the school gates and have avoided wearing ties ever since. I’ve always associated uniforms of any variety with authoritarian regimes. Fast forward to 2020 and trendy lefties are among the most vehement advocates of mandatory face-masks in public places, anti-social distancing and mass vaccination. All of a sudden Glaxo-Smith-Kline, the Tony Blair Institute, EU flag-wavers, Stonewall, the Green Party and Momentum are toeing the line that we must fundamentally change our way of life to tackle a hidden threat irrespective of the long-term damage it causes to millions of livelihoods and most of all to personal freedom and basic civil liberties. The common thread is the faux-progressive and semi-intellectual media that captivates the chattering classes and sets the bounds of permissible dissent among the general population. Why did we bother fighting for sexual liberation in the 1960s despite the obvious risks of sexually transmitted diseases if today we can’t share public spaces with people outside our household without keeping safe distances and/or wearing masks, visors or goggles? Why did we bother campaigning against outdated blasphemy laws if now we let the authorities police social media to censor politically incorrect opinions shared by most people until the day before yesterday?
Public Safety and Scientism
Medical martial law provides the perfect pretext to transition away from a belief system that emphasises personal freedom and democratic accountability, though the authorities still pay lip service to these concepts, to one that focuses on public safety and scientism, i.e. deference to the technocrats favoured by vested state and corporate interests. The authorities can now justify almost anything by referring to the science, as if true science emerges from an ideological commitment to find evidence that fits a pre-determined conclusion and to dismiss any inconvenient evidence to the contrary as the dangerous musings of ill-informed wild conspiracy theorists. While our local politicians still try to give us the impression that they are still in charge rather than just following orders from on high, transnational agencies refer increasingly to governance rather than government, while redefining democracy to mean allowing the public to choose between a narrow range of options approved by anointed experts. The Western press would once deride the former Soviet Union for holding elections with only candidates vetted by the ruling Communist Party. Yet we are now heading in the same direction, except instead of the Politburo and myriad subcommittees we have the World Health Organisation, the World Economic Forum, transnational agencies, tech giants and mega-billionaires. Future historians will wonder how so many people could be persuaded in such a short period of time that wearing face-masks in normal public settings could somehow save lives and thus change their lifelong habits and succumb to a form of collective OCD. Little does it matter that the average human body has over 1 trillion nanoscopic viruses, people have been conditioned to sanitise their hands, baskets and/or trollies before entering a supermarket and thus view other shoppers as bio-hazards. Many dutiful wishful thinkers take it unto themselves to confront rule-breakers such as those of us who either refuse to wear masks or, as in my case, only do so temporarily to avoid potential fines or unpleasant confrontations, but prefer to go mask-free wherever possible (I will simply not wear a mask for longer than 10 minutes). No doubt, these wishful thinkers believe their verbal warnings serve the greater good. They’re only doing their bit in a heroic battle against an evil virus by calling out virus deniers addicted to fanciful online conspiracy theory channels. It hardly matters that only 4 months ago leading government advisors in the UK warned that mask-wearing in common social settings could be counterproductive as the masks themselves would soon become vectors of disease. However, face-masks may soon be the least of our worries as the real aim is to control every aspect of people’s lives in the name of public safety.
Why bother raising the next generation of engineers?
I first became aware of massive investment in special needs education around the turn of the century. Before working in an adult daycare centre, in a hiatus in my career, I just assumed that some children needed extra help and in our more enlightened times we were at last integrating learning disabled children with the mainstream. Over the years not only has special needs education expanded, but the focus of schooling has shifted from traditional academic and scientific subjects to social justice and pastoral care. Richard Lucas of the Scottish Family Party has documented amply the Scottish Government’s obsession with promoting LGBTQ++ concepts in primary schools as well as emphasising children’s rights rather than responsibilities. What kind of society would dedicate most of its education budget to manufacture social compliance rather than raise the next generation of conscientious and industrious workers? Some may believe successive governments have simply listened to the wrong advisors and wasted valuable resources on trendy teaching techniques that have failed many children from the most deprived backgrounds. All this assumes future industries will need millions of tradespeople rather than just a small core of well-remunerated engineers, doctors and surveillance managers assisted by a larger group of enforcers and carers. Teaching unions seem much more concerned about protecting children and themselves from elusive nanoscopic viruses than the damage inflicted on the academic and professional future of working class children from chaotic households. It may be all fine and dandy for the offspring of the professional classes with computer desks in their bedroom growing up in an intellectually stimulating environment. They can do all their schoolwork online and probably learn much more from a wide range of Web-mediated courses and tutorials on every conceivable subject. Today gifted children are often bored at school anyway, fed up with hearing teachers explain simple concepts over and over again to the rest of the class. Life is very different in compact households dominated by loud home entertainment systems and game consoles with little private space for study. Stressed parents are often stuck between a rock and a hard place. They either risk confrontation with their children by getting them to do their homework or they just opt for the easy life and let their children do as they please, e.g. binge on ice-cream while playing video games into the wee hours. The latter option may please the teacher more by taking on board their lesson on children's rights and body acceptance. Yet outside the home children may no longer play freely. It seems teachers care more about whether children masks, socially distance and wash their hands every five minutes than whether they will ever grow into responsible adults with a sense of purpose and some control over their destiny. It's becoming clearer every day that most of our youngsters are being primed for a life of subservience, a kind of extended childhood on universal basic income. If they're lucky they may get a job as social distancing marshals or charity awareness raisers. Otherwise, they may win extra social credits for showing their support for the latest exercise in social engineering.
How our rulers rewrite history to dissociate themselves from their earlier crimes
Ever since the corona scare started earlier this year, the mainstream media has raised the profile of assorted opinion leaders, movers and shakers, closely aligned with what we may call the biotech industrial complex, a curious outgrowth of the better-understood military industrial complex. Some players such as Neil Ferguson, Chris Whitty and Anthony Fauci had stayed away from the limelight outside biomedical circles, but have suddenly risen to prominence in daily televised briefings. Others are seasoned public speakers. Most notably the venerable BBC have given regular prime time slots to the likes of Bill Gates, Tony Blair and Alastair Campbell. Now they’re not selling us proprietary software or regime change wars, but a synchronised global response to an overhyped pandemic, which leading virologists such as Nobel Laureate Michael Levitt of Stanford University believe is no worse than a strong seasonal flu. Every perceived crisis seems to warrant solutions leading us in the same direction: greater surveillance, less personal independence and more global governance. Meanwhile powerful well-funded non-governmental organisations, egged on by the mainstream media, orchestrate campaigns against the symbology and cultural paradigms of what we may best call the Old World Order.
It seems only yesterday when the British establishment draped itself in the Union Jack and took pride in the kingdom’s role in the industrial revolution, the liberal enlightenment and more recently in helping to defeat the Nazis in the Second World War. I’m old enough to remember the long-gone days before 24/7 TV, when the BBC’s daily schedule ended with the national anthem (God Save the Queen), a reminder to turn the telly off. As a critically thinking opponent of imperialism in all its forms I often wondered if the British establishment, as victors in many imperial battles and two world wars, had successfully airbrushed British war crimes out of history books. George Orwell recounted in his 1934 book, a Clergyman’s Daughter, how the history and geography textbooks used in private schools would view the world entirely through the prism of people’s adaptation to superior British civilisation as it emerged in the Victorian era. Books would show missionaries civilising grateful natives. The more people adapted to British values, the worthier they were as human beings. This begs the question, whose relevance will soon become clear, just who belongs to the British establishment? Is the British establishment, as I once naively thought, simply the most influential wheelers and dealers in England, Scotland and Wales who have some sort of connection with the common folk of this island kingdom? Did the East India Company colonise many parts of Southern Asia to help the peasants and labourers back home or to expand their own mercantile empire? One may argue that the immense wealth that large trading companies and banks accrued from their exploitation of the colonies eventually filtered back to the middle and working classes, but these modest rewards did not really bear fruit until the post-war boom of the 1950s just as the ruling classes decommissioned the remainder of their Empire. Certainly the Empire required much larger managerial and engineering classes to support their expansionist endeavours, but let us not confuse the likes of Jeff Bezos, currently one of worlds’ richest influencers, with his relatively well-paid middle managers and software engineers, let alone with low-paid warehouse and delivery workers whose jobs may soon be delegated to smart robots. In times of rapid geopolitical and technological transformation, the ruling elites are quite happy not just to discard their loyal underlings, but to switch their public allegiance to religions or states. It appears the remnants of the core British establishment do not really care either about Britain or its longstanding inhabitants. They may have co-opted a variant of the English language and promoted some English-medium writers and artists, but only when it suits them. Their true goal has always been world domination by any means necessary. In the early 21st century the British establishment has been subsumed into a much larger global network who see nation states and traditional cultures as obstacles in their quest for total control. In many ways the arbiters of political correctness today view the native peoples of the British Isles in the same way as their forebears viewed the hapless indigenes of far-flung colonies. To them the great unwashed masses need to undergo re-education to adapt to our Brave New World.
When Tony Blair won his famous landslide in the 1997 general election, but with only 43.2% of the popular vote, the choreographed celebrations showed crowds waving Union Jacks with Britpop music playing in the background. The same spectacle accompanied a few months later several days of national mourning for the tragic death of Princess Diana. Yet while many ordinary citizens continued to take pride in their British identity, the ruling elites were already rebranding old Blighty as a social engineering playground detached from its roots, but still featuring a few iconic landmarks and historic relics. British values were redefined in terms of pop culture, multiculturalism, LGBTQ++ tolerance and love for the NHS, all at odds with the stoicism and self-reliance of past generations. Yet even Cool Britannia did not last long as Tony Blair trashed the brand’s reputation by joining George Bush’s ill-fated invasion of Iraq. In the 2003 Eurovision Song Contest, the UK notoriously scored null points, despite English being the most popular language and the UK nearly always finishing in the top ten. It was no longer cool to wave the Union Jack with imagery of The Who, the Rolling Stones or the Beatles. The last blast of Britain’s past grandeur was over and now only the English and Welsh working classes and a few aristocrats of the Jacob Rees Mogg breed cared about the British Brand. The Brexit saga may well have been the very last gasp of British patriotism. The forlorn hope that it may restore some control to the peoples of the archipelago lingers on. Boris Johnson’s lockdown represents the ultimate trump card. If Boris truly believed in civil liberties and favoured herd immunity, as he once claimed, then he could have sacked Matt Hancock and called on alternative experts such as Professor Sunetra Gupta from Oxford University, who supports the Swedish model. This begs another question: who is really in control? We may love to channel our anger at politicians for calamitous policies. Some may blame Tony Blair for destabilising the Middle East, but he simply represented a clique within the US/UK foreign policy establishment who saw regime change wars as a means to a greater end, world domination. More or less the same cabal now support medical martial law and once again with humanitarian pretexts. The Tony Blair Institute even proudly announced on social media that their teams are “.... now embedded in governments around the world, helping them to keep their people safe during this pandemic - not just in respect of Covid-19 itself but also the political and economic collateral damage. “ Behind our top politicians are always teams of advisors working alongside corporate lobby groups, think tanks and NGOs. While in January it may have appeared that Boris Johnson was at loggerheads with some sections of the global establishment over the UK’s withdrawal from the EU, this was always a façade. Boris’s advisors knew that by March 2020 the UK’s relationship with the EU would be irrelevant because all Western countries would have to the follow the self-destructive diktats of the World Health Organisation.
The world’s elites have now dissociated themselves not only from the former British, French, Dutch, Japanese, German, Portuguese and Spanish Empires, but amazingly from the American Empire too. They have disowned the very superpower that oversaw the biggest rise in prosperity and living standards in human history. Donald Trump may well be the last nominal President who claims to believe in American exceptionalism. The new breed of US-based super-billionaires do not care about protecting the living standards of their fellow citizens. They grew rich by outsourcing most of their manufacturing to the Far East and relying on cheap-imported labour. Meanwhile US foreign policy has hit a roadblock. They spent trillions of dollars attempting to reshape the Middle East and succeeded mainly in losing the trust both of the local peoples and their rulers. Pakistan and Iran do not need the US anymore. They can trade much more easily with nearby China and India.
Rather than adapt to Asian superpowers with strong regional roots, the world’s elites have embraced a new form of global welfarism that will enslave the workless masses and only reward the much smaller managerial and engineering classes. The deceptive language of identity politics serves to conceal a massive transfer of wealth and power away from the general population, up to their eyeballs in debt, to the chosen few. In our emerging Brave New World we will see two rival belief systems: The official doctrine of equality and diversity, parroted by social workers and the brainwashed masses alike, and the classified reality of a rigid caste system that condemns most of humanity to complete subservience.
Cast your mind back to the recent past when refugee rights activists adopted the powerful slogan “No Human Being is illegal”. Unless you’re a psychopath lacking the most basic compassion for other human beings on the planet, it’s hard to disagree. Of course, the statement in and of itself does not mean endless waves of economic migration are either socially or environmentally sustainable. Migration is not a black and white issue in complex societies, but hold that thought while we consider what it could mean in our post-lockdown world.
Did anyone see this clampdown coming? In little more than a month, jurisdictions spanning much of our planet have placed billions of human beings under virtual house arrest, severely limiting our freedom of social interaction and movement, not so much across national borders, but within our towns, cities and surrounding countryside. Never before have so many people followed the diktat of so few. From Singapore to Saint Tropez and Manhattan to Milan, people have been forced to adapt their lifestyles to comply with new rules that turn us all into potential transgressors if we step out of line. The authorities seem to facilitate only activities controlled either by the state or by big business. The big retailers, and especially the likes of Amazon and Apple, have all done wonderfully well as the only ones geared to meet the new logistical challenges imposed by lockdown restrictions. Tesco rolled out its new human traffic management system with almost military precision. They now employ people not to serve customers, prepare food or stack shelves, but make sure their customers stay 2 metres apart.
The alliances and demographics of the people who toe the establishment line and those who challenge the mainstream narrative have once again shifted. Only last December the UK seemed divided mainly over national and metropolitan identities. All of a sudden the arguments we once had over Brexit, mass migration and Scottish independence have faded into the background. How can any country be independent if we depend on tech giants not only to deliver life’s necessities, but to closely monitor all human movements and interactions and coordinate healthcare policy on a global scale? The coronavirus scare has accelerated the transition from geographic to online communities and from human-operated machines and vehicles to robots. There were plenty of warning signs in the pre-corona world about creeping authoritarianism in the guise of hate speech laws, but few imagined that government ministers would soon talk openly of outlawing any challenges to the new scientific orthodoxy or welcome the corporate censorship of politically incorrect authors. The new divide pits social conformists firmly against critical thinkers. Social conservatives and latter-day hippies are in both camps. We now witness the ugly spectacle of Tony Blair, Alastair Campbell and Boris Johnson agreeing on the need to limit basic civil liberties allegedly to combat an elusive virus. Boris Johnson played the clown by initially suggesting herd immunity as a strategy and stressing the importance of keeping the economy afloat, but in a matter of weeks he changed his tune 180 degrees. Perhaps we have learned who’s really in charge. Some of us may have been hoodwinked by a temporary obsession with the European Union and the false belief that Tory politicians somehow wanted to take back control, only to cave in to the diktat of another global organisation at the earliest opportunity. Some even believed the Tories better represented the desires of the core British working classes or would downgrade the BBC from the Ministry of Truth to a mere public service broadcaster. Yet it pains me to admit that in the pantomime squabble between Boris Johnson and the BBC, the latter won the battle of hearts and minds as millions now parrot the new pseudoscience of flattening curves, contact-tracing, miracle vaccines and saving the NHS by staying at home. The same talking points have been replicated on all the other leading news outlets and echoed by celebrities. Yet at the fringes of society social conservatives and transgressive types have found common cause in their resistance to a new breed of borderless totalitarianism at war with human nature.
You may well have been one of the trendy lefties who welcomed refugees at the height of the Syrian conflict, unaware they were mere pawns in a grand chess game over global control. I have no doubt that many so-called activists genuinely believed they were helping desperate human beings fleeing unspeakable horrors, oblivious to the role of the global Deep State (centred around the US, UK, France and Israel, but now merging with the EU, India and China) in arming rival factions of foreign mercenaries on Syrian soil, and turning a blind eye to large numbers of economic migrants who had learned via social media about generous welfare in far-off lands. Remember the iconic picture of a Syrian boy drowning as his father failed to board a boat from Turkey to a nearby Greek island? No human being is illegal became a rallying cry for metropolitan elitists and revolutionary communists alike in their common desire to destroy anachronistic nation states and transform the whole world into a giant theme park. Do you really think our ruling classes promoted global governance because they cared about starving Africans or the hapless victims of civil wars rather than exploit their desperation to build an empire that treats all jurisdictions as mere colonies? It should hardly surprise us that the prime advocates of global policing in the form of endless military interventions with humanitarian pretexts, mass migration and superstates have crept out of the woodwork to champion a global response to the current pandemic. Tony Blair, Hillary Clinton, Henry Kissinger and Bill Gates have all lent their support to a synchronised global lockdown. Now their enemies are no longer local despots like Saddam Hussein or Slobodan Milosevic, angry nativists or terrorists, but flesh and blood human beings who in one way or another refuse to cooperate with their new medical martial law. Those who flout social distancing or face mask rules stand accused of endangering other people’s lives. Simple everyday activities that would until recently have been quite innocent with no ill-intent have suddenly been criminalised.
In the not too distant past, people would regularly break loosely enforced rules. Back in the 1970s and 80s, it was technically illegal to tape records for friends, yet everyone did it. When the Italian government first made it mandatory to wear front seat belts in 1989, most Italians ignored it and after a few half-hearted fines, the police failed to enforce the law. People would complain that seat belts were uncomfortable or prevented a quick escape if your vehicle careered off the road into deep water. Way into the late 1990s Italians regularly flouted crash helmet laws, especially in summer. Now they are expected to wear face masks for fear of catching an elusive virus and transgressors are routinely accused of wanting to kill others for the crime of being flesh and blood living organisms capable of transmitting pathogens to bystanders. This begs the question: Who owns your body? Yourself, your parents, your spouse or the state? Who has the right to decide what you do with your body? The usual caveat is that you may do anything that doesn’t infringe on someone else’s freedom or safety without their consent. However, such notions are subjective. In a dynamically integrated society, many of our actions may potentially harm others, but the risks to others are relative and usually outweighed by their benefits to our emotional wellbeing. Over recent decades the state has taken a greater and greater interest in our personal habits such as smoking, drinking and junk food. It treats us as children unable to look after ourselves without their constant guidance. On the one hand, the state undermines personal independence by subsidising dysfunctional lifestyle options often leaving us with little choice but to depend on welfare handouts, while on the other it seeks ever more invasive ways to regulate our behaviour and make key medical decisions on our behalf for the common good. If you take personal responsibility for your actions, then a healthy diet may help you live longer, but you are free to ignore advice and prioritise ephemeral pleasure over theoretical longevity. The world’s longest living woman, Jeanne Calmert, died at the ripe old age of 122 in 1997, but smoked and drank red wine with her meals for most of her life. Besides, there has never been a consensus about the healthiest diets. State agencies seem obsessed with recommended daily intakes for cholesterol, sugar and fat, often favouring sugar-free or low-fat alternatives that nearly always contain artificial flavourings that may also harm our health. However, if you can’t source your food from local farmers whom you trust or even better grow your own, you can only rely on the honesty of supermarket chains. It should hardly surprise us to learn that the same IT billionaire who has invested billions in worldwide immunisation programmes, now has plans to corner the market for synthetic meat to satisfy the demands of billions of new consumers.
Conscientious workers or useless eaters?
Let us briefly dwell on this confusing epithet for person, citizen or worker. We may well all consume to meet basic human needs and desires, but consumption has not until recently defined us. We could just as well call everyone eaters, breathers or defecators, all essential activities. While we may view a worker, mother or father as someone who contributes to the betterment of their family and wider community, a consumer is little more than a user of products or services that another entity else has created or in crude terms a useless eater.
In a complex society such as our own with a high degree of interdependence, workers retain bargaining power only as long as the ruling classes depend on the fruits of our labour. The lockdown has only accelerated the trend towards greater smart automation with a shrinking proportion of the nominal workforce responsible for mission-critical tasks. Well-paid jobs such as train drivers could have been automated years ago were it not for public distrust of malfunctioning technology, but now media-driven fear about covid-19 have led to louder calls for driverless vehicles. Smart remote-controlled robots could soon replace plumbers, hairdressers and dentists too this avoiding the need for close proximity to other human beings. Yet the mainstream media focuses mainly on teachers and carers employed to mould the next generation and micromanage the private lives of vulnerable consumers. All of sudden, we have all become vulnerable, unable to go about our daily lives without succumbing to a deadly virus. The disability industry has successfully labelled every mild medical condition or psychological challenge as a handicap that redefines our lives. Early 21st century corporatism has simultaneously deprived us of independent means of subsistence and then humiliated us if our intellectual or practical skills fail to find a niche in a rigged marketplace. Some of us feel trapped between successful professionals with substantial independent financial wealth and a growing army of state-dependants, whose livelihood depends more on social conformity than diligence or talent. We strive for greater personal independence, but have to sell our souls to large corporations to pay off mounting debts. No wonder, so many have welcomed the extended furlough that the covid-19 scare has provided kissing goodbye to any dreams of financial independence.
Social Credit Nightmare
We may soon have a new breed of unpeople, whose worthiness is diminished not by their skin colour, birthplace or parental wealth, but by their failure to fully cooperate with the authorities. The scariest aspect of mandatory vaccination, as promoted by health agencies and media organisations around the world, is not the vaccine itself, but digital certification. As any vaccine against an RNA virus is only ever likely to provide temporary immunity, we would need regular top-ups. Once a precedent has been set to only let those certified to be up-to-date with their vaccine schedule access public venues, the authorities may make such access conditional on other aspects of our social conformity. Have we had a recent mental health checkup? Have we taken meds prescribed for any mental illnesses we may have? Have we ever expressed politically incorrect opinions on social media? It’s not hard to imagine the rationale behind such invasions of privacy. It only takes a few tragic cases of random murders by mentally unstable individuals to justify the screening and forced medication of the general law-abiding population. You may be denied access to many public places not because you have committed a heinous crime, but because you have not submitted to psychiatric screening, whose purpose is not only to detect potential murderers, but to identify nonconformists who may challenge the dominant social order. Today opinion leaders may target antivaxers, as some sort of mad army of flat-earthers whose ideas endanger public health, but tomorrow they may target critics of psychiatry for the same reasons. More worryingly, once people have been trained to only trust official fact-checkers and to distrust outcasts, a totalitarian state can literally get away with murder. The covid-19 scare has already empowered governments to meddle with death certificates by allowing medical professionals, as opposed to doctors, to attribute deaths to covid-19 even if someone has other serious life-threatening conditions or is only suspected of carrying the virus without testing positive. The provisions of the 2020 Coronavirus Act now provide the state with the ultimate pretext for judicial murder of undesirables by forcing them to undergo unwanted medical treatment, potentially by being sectioned under 2005 Mental Health act if they refuse treatment, and then ascribing their death to a new contagion. This makes anyone who resists medical martial law an illegal human being.
Have you noticed how the same managerial classes who had until yesterday been extolling the virtues of open borders and mass migration have switched gear in response to the COVID-19 pandemic? All of a sudden the same experts and pundits who claim to favour a melting pot of all peoples with an integrated world economy expect all responsible governments to restrict our freedom of movement around our neighbourhoods. This means following the Chinese and Italian examples by closing schools, sports centres, offices and other public venues and only allowing authorised workers to cross cordons sanitaires with heavy penalties for transgressors. Such draconian measures can only be effective with a compliant populace and a militarised police force.
Don’t get me wrong. All early deaths from preventable illnesses are a tragedy. Every day over 3000 human beings die of tuberculosis, over 2400 of hepatitis B, over 2200 of pneumonia, over 2100 of HIV/AIDs, over 2000 of malaria, over 1600 of shigellosis, over 1200 of rotovirus, over 1000 of seasonal flu, over 500 of novovirus, over 400 of whooping cough, nearly 400 of typhoid and a similar number of cholera. So far this year 5547 people have died of a mutant strand of coronavirus out of a world population of around 7.8 billion. Coronavirus is an umbrella term for any of a group of RNA viruses that cause upper respiratory tract disease. Previous outbreaks were known as SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) and MERS (Middle East Respiratory Syndrome), but most types of influenza and the common cold are caused by rhinoviruses.
What’s so scary about COVID-19 with a death rate estimated varying from a low 0.7%, based on the projected infection rate, to a high of 5%, based on the initial outbreak? As of 14 March 2020, in the UK only 26 thousand have been tested and even in Italy with the highest coronavirus mortality rate in the world, only 60 thousand have been tested out of a population of over 60 million. In all likelihood the authorities have seriously underestimated the total number of infected persons with suppressed or mild symptoms, but able to nonetheless to transmit the contagion, while highlighting the number of fatalities, which even in the worst-hit regions are a tiny fraction of all deaths. In Italy, now with over 1800 coronavirus-related fatalities, the average age of death is just over 80 with the vast majority of deaths affecting people over 70. Italy has one of the world’s most advanced health services and highest life expectancies.
Let’s get things into perspective. The three biggest factors that contribute to a longer life span are sanitation, diet and lifestyle. If you keep clean, but not obsessively so you develop natural resistance to pathogens, eat a healthy diet and get plenty of exercise, again without overdoing it, you may now easily live into your 80s, only resorting occasionally to medications such as painkillers and antibiotics. Vaccines work in theory by giving you a small dose of a potentially lethal disease in the hope your body will develop long-term immunity. Likewise before the introduction of measles, mumps and rubella vaccines, children were encouraged to catch these diseases before puberty to gain lifelong immunity. By the late 1960s the measles-related mortality rate had already fallen dramatically. It’s worth remembering that until the slum clearances of the early 1960s millions of people across the British Isles had to make do with outside toilets and only a washbasin instead of a bath and/or shower. Many would visit their local public baths, not to swim, but to wash their bodies. Being confined to a squalid dwelling is not good for your health. Believe it or not, exploring the great outdoors and swimming in unpolluted lakes and rivers is much better for your health. Anecdotally I recall my father claiming he was not allowed more than 4” (10cm) of water in his bath as a child in the 1940s to stop me using more than my fair share of our limited hot water supply during the 1974 energy crisis and coal miners’ strike. Now we no longer have weekly baths, but daily showers. Of course, we still catch the common cold and seasonal flu. However, vaccines have proven a blunt tool against these pervasive contagions, as they can only provide temporary immunity against specific strains. Vaccines adhere to the law of diminishing returns. A few well-targeted vaccines can boost your immune system and save lives. Herd immunity works by ensuring most healthy people have antibodies to fight viruses and bad bacteria (good bacteria are key to our digestive and immune systems) and thus not pass on these diseases to the frail with weak immune systems who would not respond well either to vaccines or the live pathogen. We have become so terrified of germs that we do not want to risk letting our immune systems adapt to constantly evolving infections as we have done rather successfully. Laboratories in China, Germany, Israel and Scotland are working on a vaccine. However, as Aaron Colen uncovered in the Blaze, the most frightening aspect of COVID-19 is its high reinfection rate among those who have recovered, meaning our immune systems may not respond to the virus and a potential vaccine may not protect against subsequent infections or may have severe adverse effects in otherwise healthy individuals.
The Medical Managerial Classes
Two schools of thought dominate the public discourse. One, supported by many leading virologists such as Prof. Karol Sikora and Dr Ranjeet Brar, favours pragmatic steps to improve personal hygiene and protect the vulnerable, but not to panic unduly. If the virus has a long incubation period and many healthy people experience few symptoms that could not easily be attributed to other common transient ailments, then COVID-19 is probably already spreading through the general population. Our focus should thus be on protecting those most at risk. The other approach, favoured by international health agencies, many opinion leaders and healthcare managers, calls for an Italian-style lockdown with schools, colleges, pubs, bars, restaurants and sports centres closed, controlled access to shops to avoid panic buying and limit social contact. While such drastic measures may slow the spread among the general population, they cannot disinfect those who have already caught it, or help the frail and elderly who do not need to work and can more easily stay at home. Moreover, young people crave social contact and will inevitably find ways to meet up with their friends. The health effects of sitting at home glued to computer screens for weeks on end may be much worse than the ill-effects of the virus itself. Obesity, diabetes and, narcotic abuse, associated with sedentary lifestyles in small rooms, are much bigger killers than coronavirus in Wuhan or Lombardy. And who is going to look after school-age children in an era where either both parents work or children only have one parent or carer at home? Many key service workers such as nurses, doctors, plumbers, electricians and cleaners to name but a few, are also parents who may have to choose between staying at home to look after their children or providing services critical for public health. If self-employed plumbers cannot enter premises without special permits or additional health and safety checks, leaks will go unfixed. Without clean water and reliable electricity, we could see a rapid spike in other infectious diseases.
The managerial classes, often posing on the radical left, believe we cannot cope without their endless busy-body intervention. Should we really forgo hard-earned civil liberties in the name of public safety? It is with great sadness that much of the left has thrown its rhetorical weight behind the usual suspects, such as Hillary Clinton and Gordon Brown, calling for a complete lockdown with the police empowered to arrest transgressors. Only a few months ago the same technocrats wanted us to welcome open borders. Now they want us to stay indoors. The same actors support clamping down on free speech, while scaring us into accepting mandatory surveillance, probably under the guise of remote medical supervision via smart watches or RFID chips.
Do our global policy makers welcome Scottish Separatism?
As the first exit polls came in after polls closed on Thursday 12 December, one key trend caught my attention. While the working classes in the Midlands and North of England had swung to the Conservatives, many voting Tory for the first time in their lives, Scottish voters had bucked the trend and shifted their support to the misnamed Scottish National Party, who in government have prioritised radical social engineering even more than Labour before them. As the Conservatives look set to win a comfortable majority, I monitored BBC coverage only to notice they displayed vote share for mainland Great Britain alone. Their reporters struggled to hide their glee that for the first time in history a majority of parliamentary seats in Ulster had been won by parties that support unification with the Republic of Ireland, with the moderate SDLP gaining two seats and the Alliance Party one seat. This clearly marks a move towards a secular Ireland detached from both the sectarian divisions in the North and from its cultural heritage. When Boris Johnson agreed a compromise with the European Union on the Irish backstop, did he know that sooner or later the province would merge back into Ireland anyway? It now seems the only distinctive features of Ireland's two jurisdictions, except for strong regional accents, are road signs in miles and prices in pounds Sterling in the North East, but in kilometres and Euros in the rest of the Emerald Isle. So Ireland may regain political unity just as it becomes a lot less Irish.
The SNP only really disagree with Corbyn's Labour on the constitutional issue and look set to emulate the transformative mass migration policies of Leo Varadka's Irish government (known as Project Ireland 2040). If the SNP had their way, Scotland may sever its ties with England but will become a lot less Scottish as is already evident in many parts of Edinburgh and Glasgow. However, unlike Labour, they ran a very sleek campaign that would meet the full approval of Guardian columnists and Blairites alike. Blair's advisors only really supported the Union to maintain social peace and keep alive the British wing of the Anglo-American military industrial complex. Traditional Scottish nationalists are correct in observing that the British Foreign office sees Scotland as a convenient location for their military toys. Now the European Defence Union is a done deal, international NeoCons like Henry Kissenger, Emanuel Macron, Guy Verhofstadt may turn to the Franco-German alliance for their global policing operations rather than the UK. Other big businesses really do not care about the Scottish constitutional settlement.
For the time being, England's new Prime Minister, Boris Johnson (and yes I know he's technically the PM of the whole of the UK), has turned down Nicola Sturgeon's request for a second referendum on Scottish Independence, but it may well only be a matter of time before he announces a policy shift. With growing support for Scottish separatism coming not just from international academics and economists, but from former Scottish Labour politicians such as Kezia Dugdale, the outcome may depend on the unpredictable stability of the British and European banking systems. If Boris Johnson not only passes the Withdrawal Agreement, but successfully agrees on a full divorce settlement with the EU in the form of a Free Trade Agreement by the end of 2020 that would keep Great Britain out of the Single Market and Customs Union, we may just see a run on the pound which may increase the price of imports and cause the markets to panic leading to temporary disruption and hardship. The SNP could capitalise on such a scenario to win a narrow majority in a referendum. However, in the same time frame, we may see the collapse of the Italian banking system prompting a continent-wide recession and widespread civil unrest as governments raise taxes to keep alive the Euro and bail out banks. Other European countries cannot expect German taxpayers to keep subsidising economic mismanagement in Southern and Eastern Europe when they are struggling with their own social problems. In a Europe-wide crisis, Britain may seem a safe haven and support for Scottish separatism may well dwindle. Some recent polls have suggested figures as high as 51%. However, if the central government can manage an orderly departure from the European Union and the UK as a whole outperforms most other European economies despite Brexit, then the case for Scottish Independence falls. The question remains whether our business elites really want to keep the Union or do they think they can play a nominally independent Scotland off against a future Kingdom of England & Wales, e.g. by demanding lower corporation taxes or de-regulations of biotech experiments (something like human cloning may be unpopular UK-wide, but may just win the SNP's approval if meant higher investment from biotech giants)?
I think most people on the ground crave economic stability and cultural continuity, i.e. do not want radical economic upheaval, top-down social engineering or rapid migratory flows. The SNP is building its entire case for Scottish independence on continued EU membership and a wishful assessment of Scotland's potential revenues from oil and other natural resources. That would only work if Scotland retained full control of both its territorial waters and banking system. As a separate member state within the EU Scotland would have neither. Norway prospered because it could invest the immense proceeds of its short-lived oil bonanza in education, infrastructure and training for just 5 million citizens.
And how powerful forces commandeer youthful idealism to further totalitarian aims
Labour's new army of social justice warriors have learned a bitter lesson. While they may appeal to some special interest groups and social service professionals, they have lost touch with their base outside a few culturally diverse inner-city areas. As the results of the snap December 2019 election poured in, it turned out Labour's vote share of around 32% was not quite as low as many of its supporters may have feared. Let's get things into perspective, in 1983 under Michael Foot Labour's vote plunged below 28% and in 2005 under Tony Blair Labour managed to win a comfortable majority on just 35% of the vote. In both 2010 and 2015 under fairly orthodox centrist leaders Labour polled just 29% and 30.4% of the vote respectively. However, with a radically changed demographic the quirky arithmetic of the First Past the Post electoral system now works against them and favours the Tories and SNP.
Two cheeks of the same Backside
It's hardly a coincidence that both Blairism and Corbynism hail from the trendy inner London borough of Islington with sky high property prices and extremes of wealth. Tony Blair and Peter Mandelson lived there in the 1990s as they planned to take over the Labour Party, as do Jeremy Corbyn, Emily Thornberry and Jon Lansman, the architect of the Momentum cult. Many Blairites had been Trotskyists, Maoists or Stalinists in their youth. They just recognised the need to embrace big business and strategically support the projection of US-led cultural and military hegemony. However, their goal has long been a technocratic one-world government that suppresses true cultural diversity and undermines the last vestiges of self-determination. Their apparent differences centred on short-term strategy, mainly support for destabilising global policing operations and endless debate about the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. Broadly speaking both Blairites and Corbynites come from the same privileged social class with an entourage of token working class acolytes. The sycophantic Blair babes of the early 2000s seemed to have now been replaced by a new breed of wishful thinkers such as Rebecca Long Bailey and Jess Phillips. It may be hard to understand the common purpose of Jeremy Corbyn, who rebelled against all of Blair's military escapades, and Tony Blair, who joined forces with George W Bush to invade Iraq. To the architects of a borderless new world order, these military conflicts serve mainly to destabilise nation states. Indeed they may welcome the destabilisation of Europe and North America in the 2020s as much as they relished the dismemberment of the Middle East and Central Asia in the first two decades of this century. Periodically they will engineer a changing of the guard, so the new management team can dissociate itself from the mistakes of the previous leadership. You can't get more pro-establishment than Nick Clegg, former Deputy Prime Minister and leader of the Liberal Democrats, now working for Facebook. Yet in public he claimed to have opposed UK involvement in the invasion of Iraq to earn street credibility among disillusioned Labour voters. Admittedly I almost voted LibDem myself before I fully grasped the consequences of the cultural revolution that started under Blair and has continued ever since under the fake Conservatives.
How Millennials who grew up under Blair embraced Cultural Marxism
Back in the mid 1990s I wrongly saw Tony Blair as the heir to Thatcher. Indeed, New Labour embraced Thatcher-era privatisation, expanded private sector involvement in the National Health Service via controversial Private Finance Initiatives and continued to outsource more and more public services to commercial service providers. It steadfastly refused to nationalise the railways, but committed to the renewal of Britain's ageing nuclear deterrent and eagerly assisted the US military industrial complex in its global policing operations in the Balkans, Africa and in the Middle East. Tony Blair enjoyed being a loyal sidekick of Presidents Bill Clinton and George W Bush alike. Many traditional Labour supporters opposed these policies from the left. The late 1990s were in the context of the impending cultural revolution a historical hiatus. Seven years after the Soviet Union had disbanded and 4 years after South Africa inaugurated Nelson Mandela as its first black President, representatives of Northern Ireland's warring factions, including Sinn Fein and the Ulster Defence Association, agreed to a ceasefire in the much heralded 1998 Good Friday Agreement, brokered by Labour's new Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, Mo Mowlam, but building on negotiations that had begun under the previous Conservative government. As devolved parliaments opened in Scotland and Wales, we seemed to be on the verge of a new era of greater social peace and prosperity, while retaining our cherished personal freedoms and cultural heritage. Alas few observers fully appreciated the scale of the impending cultural revolution as fewer and fewer young adults could get on the housing ladder and all too often succumbed to culture of hyper-dependence.
While Thatcher appealed to traditional family values and championed small businesses, Blair appealed to pop culture and embraced the entertainment business. In reality Thatcher-era reforms had not just destroyed millions of stable manufacturing jobs, they had prevented many young men from marrying and starting families as the primary breadwinner. Attitudes to traditional marriage had begun to change in the swinging 1960s, but the demise of secure jobs for working class young men without good academic qualifications meant many young women turned to the state rather than marriage to help them fulfil their natural desire for motherhood.
Despite the hype the all-powerful state has never really receded, it's merely handed over some of its operations to unaccountable large corporations with labyrinthine management structures, while expanding in other areas, most notably in social surveillance and welfare provision. Contrary to popular perceptions, public spending rose in the first years of the Thatcher government and only declined as a percentage of GDP in the more prosperous late 1980s as the economy grew and unemployment fell. In no year since 1946 has public spending fallen in absolute terms, even accounting for inflation. What really matters more than the proportion of the economy under direct state control is personal independence or the extent to which we are masters of our own destiny or beholden to external agencies. Over the last four decades a growing proportion of our income goes not to life's essentials but to rent, mortgage payments, loan repayments, insurance, commuting and various communication and entertainment services we never used to need. It's often much easier to divorce your spouse than to end legally binding contracts that limit your personal budget to a mere fraction of your theoretical net earnings. We spend much of our remaining disposable income in a handful of supermarket chains and other retail outlets, restaurants, pubs, gyms, leisure centres and clubs controlled by big business. In the early 2000s I had to reassess my earlier analysis that our ruling classes wanted to roll back the state leaving only bare bones public services for the poor. Instead it dawned on me that a growing underclass was trapped in a vicious cycle of welfare dependency, substance abuse, family breakdowns and myriad emotional challenges interpreted as mental illnesses. To escape this trap, you'd expect government agencies to help young adults gain the kind of skills that today's high-tech job market needs. Yet they only ever made half-hearted attempts at workfare and seemed quite happy for an influx of Eastern European migrants to fill vacancies that local youngsters could have snapped up with the right incentives, thereby denying hundreds of thousands of young adults of an opportunity not just to gain critical work experience, but greater personal independence.
One of New Labour's flagship policies, besides the national minimum wage, was the introduction of working family tax credits. On paper this sounded like a great idea making low-paid jobs pay and helping young families make ends meet. In practice it subsidised penny-pinching employers and naturally redefined families as any combination of adults and children who live together. More significantly, these new benefits were available to all EU citizens no matter how long they had lived in the UK or paid into the system. One of the main reasons many youngsters from deprived neighbourhoods in the North of England do not move to London to take advantage of a buoyant labour market and higher wages in the bustling service sector are sky-high rents and the hurdles you have to cross to gain access to housing benefit. I know from talking with many Eastern European bar staff that recruitment agencies and their extended ex-pat community would often help with shared accommodation for new migrant workers.
I still think New Labour missed a golden opportunity. From day one they should have fulfilled their promises by investing heavily in technical skills in the most deprived communities of their former industrial heartlands and weaned the welfare-dependent underclasses off benefits not through uninspiring temporary jobs, but through re-training and a culture of creative innovation. They could have expressed their love of continental Europe not through slavish devotion to a federal superstate, but by emulating German and Dutch vocational colleges and subsidised apprenticeships. If we lack good plumbers, mechanics, electricians, nurses and doctors, surely we can train our own. That doesn't mean we can't have exchanges with other countries, it just means employers don't have to keep recruiting from abroad because of a dearth of qualified candidates locally. However, it should now be abundantly clear the government's senior policy advisors had no intention of empowering the local working classes. As Andrew Nether revealed, they wanted to rub the right's nose in diversity, but their definition of right-wing did not mean a small band of wealthy stockbrokers and aristocrats, but rather the socially conservative native working classes. If you did not embrace our new multicultural reality and were not involved in our growing media, marketing and social engineering sectors, our globally minded managerial classes considered you an ignorant country bumpkin at best or a racist thug in urgent need of psychiatric treatment. By multiculturalism, they did not mean respecting the many cultures that have evolved gradually over many generations in different parts of the world, but rather a post-modern reality of parallel ethnoreligious communities struggling to intermingle and cope with cultural convergence in their new neighbourhoods alongside other groups of newcomers. Their idea of diversity is a wide range of ethnically themed restaurants, boutiques, dress codes and skin colours, more chicken tikka masala than smörgåsbord, but a convergence of lifestyles submerged by mass-marketed universalism. To the cheerleaders of fake diversity what matters most is helplessness, namely complete dependence on external authorities. They see identity groups as constituents thankful for more social surveillance to keep the peace. It hardly matters if Christian Afro-Caribbeans value traditional two-parent families or young English gay party revellers distrust Islamic fundamentalists in their neighbourhood, everyone is supposed to unite in their superficial diversity.
Who's behind Cultural Marxism?
Just as Blair built on many Thatcher-era policies favouring big business interests, Cameron and May continued New Labour's cultural revolution, with key public policies emanating not from nominally Conservative politicians, but from corporate thinktanks and NGOs. Increasingly over recent decades large corporations, nominally in the private sector, have promoted dysfunctional lifestyle choices and fake diversity.
You need only watch advertisements for leading retail outlets. They would once portray typical families broadly representative of their customer base, but today they clearly go out of their way to overemphasise diversity, often showing happy households with mixed race gay parents enjoying a meal with their Muslim neighbours. Rather than simply reflecting reality on the ground, advertisers seek to drive cultural change by presenting a rose-tinted glimpse of our projected future.
Take for example the controversy over self-identification of one's perceived gender, which featured in both the Labour and Liberal Democrat manifestos. This is still a fringe issue that concerns only a few confused individuals who have been persuaded to attribute their psychological challenges to a redefinition of gender roles. It turns out the Liberal Democratic Party had accepted a large donation from a pharmaceutical multinational that produces puberty-blocker drugs. Yet we are somehow led to believe by the virtue-signalling echo chamber of social justice warriors that the campaign for transgender rights comes from grassroots activism and not from corporate lobbyists. This begs the question as to why businesses that theoretically want to make profits and expand their clientele should invest so much money promoting lifestyle choices that greatly limit personal independence? It's because they need captive consumers more than conscientious workers who actually provide the products and services we need.
Cultural Marxism has only taken root in the millennial generation because both academia and big business actively promote it. You're hardly rebelling against the system if you're faithfully recycling talking points coined by advertising agencies. When I worked as a contractor in the offices of Saatchi and Saatchi (the advertising agencies behind the election of both Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair), marketing staff would religiously read the Huffington Post and embrace the key tenets of identity politics. Social conservatism is much more prevalent in working class communities. Indeed the coming years may see the emergence of new and unexpected alliances to resist top-down social engineering. I think most parents across the British Isles disagree with gender theory lessons in primary schools. At least they would do, if they understood what their sons and daughters were learning in deceptively childish language. When mainly Muslim parents protested the No Outsiders programme in Birmingham schools, the mainstream media tried to dismiss these protests as the bigoted views of religious fundamentalists. If you watch Channel 4, you may have welcomed a break from the usual derision of the xenophobic white Anglo-Saxon working classes to focus instead on transphobic and homophobic Muslims. Sooner or later the parallel ethno-religious communities of our big cities may actually find common cause to resist wokeness and stand up for common sense. Finally people on the ground may realise how disparate groups are being played against each other.
What will happen to Momentum?
I suspect the masterminds of the Corbyn Cult knew full well they could never really win over the working classes outside their metropolitan bubbles. That's why they cheer on the proliferation of new welfare-dependent communities in large cities and the ethnic cleansing of many towns. If only we could extend the vote to 16 year olds or let new migrants vote before they've gained full citizenship? If only we could encourage more apolitical misfits to opt for postal votes in the hope they will opt for the nice party promising them more free stuff. While Blair's spin doctors knew how to appeal to the core Labour vote with platitudes about better education and job creation, Corbyn's handlers offered only patronising charity and public spending commitments they clearly could not honour. However, Momentum will not disappear, it will merely morph into a permanent vanguard movement driving dysfunctional lifestyle changes that ultimately serve the interests of the same big businesses, who for now, are happy with Boris Johnson's fake Conservatives. The only consolation prize is we may have at least exposed the true agenda of global totalitarians.
How the quest for greater independence is being usurped by power-hungry control freaks
I make no bets on the outcome of the snap General Election scheduled for 12th December. Last time a healthy Tory majority seemed almost certain until a couple of weeks before polling and after a disastrous Conservative election campaign. For the first time in recent history Labour did much better than expected. My hunch is Boris Johnson's party will win a comfortable majority of seats because the core working class electorate have lost all faith in Labour, but I doubt the resulting managerial team will do much to protect British workers from the excesses of globalism. I hope the government's ineptitude may oddly strengthen the resilience of ambitious youngsters as they realise the state will not help them fulfil their dreams and thus avoid succumbing to a prevailing culture of victimhood and entitlement.
We may well see another shift among the affluent managerial and business classes from the Tories to the misnamed Liberal Democrats (or the illiberal unDemocrats as I call them), while many traditional Labour voters either sit at home, strategically vote Conservative or flirt with the Brexit Party to keep out Labour, whom they now see as the party of unlimited mass migration, toxic identity politics and undeliverable spending commitments. However, in Scotland Labour will lose out not only to the Conservatives, but to a resurgent SNP capitalising on fashionable anti-English sentiment. They see Brexit as the brainchild of English Tories eager to resurrect the British Empire. If we assume current polling is correct, the political map of mainland Britain will be split into four. The Tories will dominate English shires and towns, the Liberal Democrats will do well in the most affluent neighbourhoods, while Labour will keep most of its metropolitan strongholds among its special victim groups, welfare-dependents, social engineers and trendy students. By contrast, owing to the vagaries of the First Past the Post system, Nicola Sturgeon's cult movement look set to snap up most Scottish seats, as the anti-SNP vote is too evenly split. The Brexit Party will be lucky to gain 1 or 2 seats in former UKIP strongholds, but they may succeed only in letting Labour hold on to a few more marginals.
The ongoing Brexit saga amid yet another General Election with very uninspiring choices has revealed two unwelcome realities. First most nation states have limited independence from global banks and corporations, supranational institutions and a well-funded network of nominally independent non-governmental organisations (NGOs) posing as humanitarian charities. Second, and perhaps more important, it has exposed what our ruling classes really think about democracy. If they cannot persuade the great unwashed masses to endorse their social engineering plans by electing a bunch of middle managers who will cooperate with the agents of change, they will destabilise your country and have you begging for their intervention.
Whatever the relative merits of the European Union may be, the outcome represented a huge kick in the backside for the metropolitan elite, who for decades have presided over the steady transfer of power from time-honoured local institutions to more remote international entities in the name of progress. Let us be under no illusions the EU is only a means to an end, not the end itself. There are many good reasons to welcome close cooperation among Europe's disparate peoples to protect our cultural heritage and defend us against the worst excesses of what we once viewed as neoliberal globalism, especially as a counterbalance to the North American and Chinese models with their extreme forms of plutocracy. Just 15 years ago in the aftermath of the joint US and UK occupation of Iraq, many of us wanted to distance ourselves from the British and American foreign policy establishment. Many of us hoped a Europe Community of independent peace-loving and democratic nation states with strong protections both for personal freedom and social justice could offer an alternative to Anglo-American capitalism.
While many other countries appeared insecure and in imminent danger of fragmentation, civil war and greater subjugation to imperial forces, Britain seemed impervious. Only the Northern Irish conflict ever posed a security threat, although behind the scenes the British Civil Service has long viewed the province as more of a burden than a strategic asset. Scottish and Welsh nationalism remained relatively tame disputes, quibbling mainly about the extent of autonomy within the United Kingdom. Few thought any major part of the UK would join another major superstate. The Republic of Ireland has since its inception remained steadfastly neutral, so even if Northern Ireland voted to join the Republic, there would be no fundamental shift in the balance of power. Leaving aside widespread opposition to the deployment of the Trident nuclear missiles in Faslane just northwest of Glasgow, Scotland has long been way too reliant on tight integration with the British military industrial complex for mainstream politicians to advocate military independence from the rest of the UK and from NATO, although this was the official SNP position until 2012.
Sea Change
Before around 2012 the European issue seemed very much off the radar. Transnational bodies like the EU, NATO and the UN were just facts of our increasingly internationalised lives, but not things we felt affected our everyday lives. Broadly speaking most Europeans opposed further centralisation preferring to keep control of economic, social and military policy at a more accountable national level, but many still believed our politicians somehow represented our interests at various international gatherings. We saw this in referendums in Ireland, France, the Netherlands and Denmark where voters rejected new treaties (respectively of Nice and Lisbon) only to see their votes either ignored or to be forced to vote again after cosmetic changes. However, we could also argue that the public have grown so disillusioned with the sorry state of national politics that they'd rather place their trust in shiny new progressive institutions that transcend traditional boundaries. For decades the establishment media has tried to persuade Europeans that they can trust the EU and NATO more than their local regimes with their chequered history of corruption and despotism. In the early 1970s not only was most of Eastern Europe behind the Iron Curtain, but Greece, Spain and Portugal still had military dictatorships appealing to traditional Christian values to ward off the dual dangers of Eastern communism and Western decadence. Not surprisingly millions of younger Europeans welcomed the fall of these paternalistic regimes and embraced a new era of mass consumerism combined with a comfortable social safety net. While millions of Greeks, Spaniards and Portuguese may be critical of the budgetary constraints imposed on their governments to keep alive the Euro, they still tend to associate the EU with the greater prosperity they've enjoyed since the 1980s. The situation in Britain is very different. The golden era of the British working classes was the 1950s and 60s. Sure we lacked many of the modern conveniences made more affordable by recent technological progress, e.g. many had outside toilets, coal fires instead of central heating and cars were still a luxury for many, but what mattered most is that the relative quality of life was steadily improving with a high level of upwards social mobility. A typical school leaver could aspire to getting a decent skilled job as an apprentice and earn enough to be able to marry, buy a house and start a family by his or her mid to late twenties, all without welfare handouts. We hoped progress would empower families to lead more independent lives while still enjoying the fruits of a civil society with a high degree of social trust and mutual respect. Little did we know that many of our mission-critical jobs would be first outsourced and then automated as big business had to rein in the collective bargaining power of trade unions. The long-drawn-out demise of British industry, kept on life support during the 1970s, weakened the resolve and resilience of the working classes, blamed for demanding unmerited pay rises, being too lazy and lacking the industriousness of their European and Japanese colleagues. Yet to this day, many observers simply blame Thatcher for turning off the life support machine that squandered countless billions on trying to save outdated industries that could not survive the challenge of global competition able not only to tap into a seemingly limitless supply of cheap labour, but to quickly close or retool outdated manufacturing facilities with little regard to job security.
I noticed even as long ago as the 1979 General Election that saw Margaret Thatcher's Tories win a healthy majority of seats, Labour had begun to shift its focus from standing up for workers' rights to championing welfare and public services. Thatcher managed to appeal to the aspirational working classes, the kind of people who wanted to own a house, drive a car, holiday in Spain and earn a decent living through a career in the growing service sector. While some workers adapted and some new light manufacturing outfits took the place of heavy industry, many youngsters in Labour's working class heartlands outside the more prosperous South East of England inherited the helplessness of their parents who had failed to adapt and thus became trapped on welfare or short-term jobs in call centres leading inevitably to dysfunctional households and social dislocation. Nonetheless a major rebranding effort saved the Labour Party as it embraced Thatcherite reforms, the information revolution and pop culture while promising not to raise taxes. I was an early sceptic of Blairite Magic. Somehow his soundbites lacked substance or analytical integrity, but one slogan stuck in my mind "Education, Education, Education". If you believed the hype, we were on the verge of a quantum leap in scientific excellence. The next generation would become talented doctors, inventors, bioscientists, software developers and robotics engineers. Alas very few did, but many more became recruiters, public relations officers, graphic designers, creative directors or worked on the peripheries of emerging high-tech industries in new-fangled specialisations such as forensic science or environmental science, learning how to engage with technologies that someone else developed to monitor other people's behaviour, market goods or ensure minimum health and safety standards. With such a dearth of tech-savvy innovators and entrepreneurs, British professionals have focused mainly on people management and persuasion, a sector encompassing not only advertising, public relations and entertainment, but behaviour and attitude modification through charities and education. For every engineer developing new technology to help us solve practical environmental challenges, there are many more climate change awareness officers or busy bodies lecturing parents on how to deal with tantrums without smacking. The net result is a dual culture of dependence, either on state handouts or on corporate largesse, and greatly reduced personal resilience. The first Blair government famously rebranded Britain as Cool Britannia, more about rock stars than scientific pioneers. Now the last gasp of British cultural innovation has been co-opted by the multibillion dollar entertainment industry and blended into a global culture disconnected from the specific locales of post-imperial suburban Britain. In the same period Global English has begun its shift from a high-status international language modelled on standard British or American English to a rapidly mutating form of NewSpeak inspired by a worldwide intelligentsia with little reference to the speech patterns of the transient residents of London or New York City. Native speakers have thus lost the relative advantage they once had over those who acquired the language later in life.
As a historical paradox the country that has given the world its dominant lingua franca now suffers from an acute identity crisis as progressive opinion leaders attempt to deny there is such a thing as a native English person. This mirrors trends in other European countries with almost identical claims going mainstream in Germany and Sweden too. National identity for many in cosmopolitan areas has been reduced to mere temporary allegiance to your country of residence in occasional sporting events.
What's left of Britishness anyway?
Many Ulster unionists are none too happy about Boris Johnson's deal to keep their province in regulatory alignment with the EU's Customs Union and Single Market with customs checks in the Irish Sea rather than along the meandering border with the Republic of Ireland. Increasingly only the Democratic Unionist Party defend traditional values, while Sinn Fein, claiming to represent the Catholic community, has recently endorsed positions on gay marriage, LGBTQ-friendly sex education and abortion perfectly aligned with the cultural left, but at variance with Catholic teachings. However, a growing proportion of the younger generation identify neither with Protestantism nor Catholicism and are very open to unification with what has become a secular Ireland. The British Deep State seems more concerned about the perceived Russian threat than subsidising Northern Ireland.
The begs the question whether the CEOs of UK PLC really care that much about the constitutional status of Scotland, now they know a nominally independent Scotland would both stay in NATO and join the new European Defence Union. Universalist media outlets treat Nicola Sturgeon's SNP much more favourably than the Brexit Party or even the Tory Party.
However, I sense a split between the Atlanticist and Europhile wings of British intelligentsia. Recent statements from Emanuel Macron, Guy Verhofstadt and the EU's new President Ursula von der Leyen have revealed a gradual shift from a unified European military command working within NATO alongside the USA to a European Army taking over from the USA in global policing operations in the Middle East, Africa and Central Asia. More disturbing is the growing hostility among the Western European elites towards Russia. In just a few years neo-conservative war hawks have shifted their lobbying operations from Washington DC to Brussels. To match US military spending, the Europe Union would have to double spending, something that would be very unpopular at a national level, but could only be justified by the spectre of a Russian and/or Chinese threat. Even if Trump is re-elected in 2020, US military adventurism has peaked. The federal government can no longer justify such a massive defence budget when they have bigger challenges at home with rapidly changing demographics. It's only a matter of time before someone like Tulsi Gabbard or Alexandria Ocasio Cortez becomes the president of a debt-ridden federation in a post-dollar world order, dominated by the Chinese and Indian economies.
Without Scotland and Ulster, England and Wales would be a very disunited place with London behaving more and more like a city state divorced from its geographic hinterland and parallel communities in many other towns and cities.
In all likelihood Boris Johnson's BRINO or Brexit In Name Only will avert Scottish Independence for a few years before other events overshadow it, Ulster quietly merges with a post-Christian Eire and the Scots turn against the SNP. Meanwhile continental Europe will struggle to cope with the fast pace of cultural and demographic metamorphosis, a looming banking crisis and an escalation of the civil unrest that has spread across France over the last year. We may just be able to salvage a federation of the British Isles, but with waning faith in traditional British institutions such as Monarchy (and far be it from me to comment on Prince Andrew's close friendship with American sex predator Jeffrey Epstein) this island seems ripe for Balkan-style destabilisation with the people's splat over Brexit serving as a trial run for a much deeper conflict over culture, identity and power.
Before sometime around 1990, while I lived abroad in Italy, most large institutions and the establishment media in the North West of Europe liked to refer a place called Britain and proudly used adjectives like British to include England, Wales, Scotland and, by loose extension, Northern Ireland too. Outside the UK confusion reigns supreme as England, Great Britain and United Kingdom are often used interchangeably. Indeed, many English people often struggle to recall the correct name for their country. This may sometimes lead to false positives with regular references to British Law, when as a result to the 1707 Act of the Union, Scotland has always retained a separate legal system and Northern Ireland's juridical framework has its roots in Irish common law.
If you want to be pedantic, then the island that comprises England, Wales and Scotland is Great Britain, while Britain alone may refer to just England and Wales and the United Kingdom includes Northern Ireland too.
Scotland and Wales have never lost their distinctive identities, but over the generations, and especially since the industrial revolution, there had been so much intermarriage and movement among the peoples of the home nations, that Scottish and Welsh separatism seldom gained more 25% of the vote. Welsh nationalism focused mainly on protecting the Welsh language after centuries of suppression, while Scottish nationalism only really gained momentum after the discovery of vast oil reserves in the North Sea in the 1960s. If anything Scotland has long been overrepresented within the Union, relative to its population, which has declined from around 1/9 of the UK total circa 1900 to less than 1/11 today (although still rising in absolute terms) with more than its fair share of prime ministers, entrepreneurs and inventors.
British identity grew in the Victorian era on the back of the industrial revolution and expansion of the British empire over a quarter of the Earth's landmass. Without Scotland and Ireland's plentiful natural resources and critical mass of engineers, Great Britain may never have gained such a large competitive edge over its main rivals, France and Spain, in its quest to colonise North America and dominate world trade. Although Britain's relative importance declined with the emergence of Germany as the main European powerhouse and the United States as the world's dominant economic superpower at the turn of the 20th century, British identity remained strong through two calamitous world wars and the Great Depression. Britain emerged from the Second World War very much as a junior partner of the United States with an oversized empire it could no longer afford to maintain, but it had at least escaped the worst ravages of Nazi occupation and widespread ethnic cleansing. The peoples of England, Wales and Scotland were still proud to identify with Britishness as the country transitioned to a new role as a medium-sized Western European power on a par with France, West Germany and Japan and subservient only to the USA. The old empire had become a motley collection of new nation states. Some, like Canada and Australia, retained very strong cultural affiliation, but soon integrated much more with the booming North American or East Asian economies. Others, like India and most of British Africa, retained the English language as a commercial and scientific lingua franca, but sought new alliances. The continuing importance of global English bears little relation to the current status of the UK. It is a legacy of Britain's Mercantile hegemony in the 19th century and the USA's economic and cultural dominance of the 20th century.
An irony of history is that despite losing two world wars and much of its eastern territories, West Germany regained its role as the motor of the European economy. Having your main industrial areas carpet-bombed may lead to temporary loss of human life and manufacturing capacity, but it certainly facilitates productivity-boosting modernisation. By the 1970s Britain was the sick man of Europe, plagued by industrial strife and inefficient infrastructure. Much of British industry either outsourced production overseas or gave up entirely, refocusing instead on the growing service sector. To add insult to injury, in the mid 1980s the Italian economy briefly overtook the UK's. Indeed despite recent economic decline, Northern Italy remains much more affluent than most of the UK with larger houses and higher car ownership. More recently India, Russia and Brazil have overtaken the UK's GDP once adjusted for purchasing power parity and it's only a matter of time before they do so in absolute terms too.
When did the new generation of UK citizens stop identifying as British?
It all depends what you mean by British? As a loose synonym of English, then most people in provincial England are probably happy to call themselves either. But only English is a true ethnic marker close to people's heart. Naturalised UK citizens, especially from Commonwealth countries, often prefer hyphenated British identities as being more inclusive. The more integrated someone with an immigrant background is, the more likely they are to identify as English, Scottish or Welsh. I used to think that the millions of Britons with mixed English, Scottish and Welsh heritage would more readily identify as British, but outside the London area, this no longer appears to be the case. Your childhood friends, especially in your core school years, tend to instil ethnic identity in you more than anything else. Just as the Scots are reasserting their rebranded Scottish identity, even if their parents come from England, Italy or Poland, so too are the working classes in provincial England once again identifying first and foremost as English.
In the late 1990s I noticed a shift in the mainstream media, especially in one of the last institutions to incorporate British in its name (the BBC). All of a sudden presenters and politicians started to avoid references to Britain and Britishness in favour of the Yookay, the United Kingdom, just "this country" or weird concoctions like England and Wales or England, Wales and Scotland if one or more parts of the UK were excluded. Tony Blair's New Labour government seemed happy to acquiesce to demands for greater devolution in Scotland and Wales, although support for the Welsh Assembly only won by the narrowest of majorities in the 1997 referendums on the matter. As Scotland and Wales had suffered much from the industrial decline of the 1970s and 80s, devolution seemed like a long overdue constitutional reform. In the early years Labour dominated both the Welsh Assembly and the Scottish parliament but had to seek an alliance with the Liberal Democrats due to the new mixed proportional representation voting system. For a while the Scottish National Party's failed to make any significant headway. As recently as 2005 the SNP gained just 17.7% of Scottish votes in the UK general election after polling a disappointing 20.9% in the 2003 Scottish Parliamentary Elections, despite the unpopularity of Blair's Iraqi misadventure. Four years later the SNP under Alex Salmond managed to pip Labour at the post winning 31% against 29.2% and just 1 more seat. The SNP formed its first minority government. Yet in the 2010 general election the Scots bucked the national trend with Labour gaining 42% of the vote, possibly because Gordon Brown remained popular north of the border, and the SNP just 19.9%. A year later the vote shares of Scotland's two main parties were almost reversed in the 2011 elections for the Scottish Parliament, giving the SNP a working majority and paving the way to the 2014 referendum on Scottish Independence. Few observers would have predicted that in just 10 short years support for Scottish separatism could rise from a rump of 20% to just shy of 45%. The big question is why David Cameron's coalition government so willingly acquiesced to the SNP's demands
Mood Change
Traditionally the main institutions of successful nation states tend to resist separatism. We may be accustomed to the acrimonious breakup of unstable federations like the former Yugoslavia or the more amicable divorce of Czechoslovakia, but many have long suspected foreign intervention in their demise. When the levers of political and economic power move from compact nation states to supranational bodies like the European Union or NATO, the business classes shift their allegiance from their current national entity to the remote organisations best able to protect their commercial interests. In the era of international commuting, outsourcing and globalised supply chains, nation states appear to growing sections of the professional classes as anachronisms of the 19th century, discredited by the excesses of fascism and national socialism. If a country the size of Italy has limited operational autonomy, constrained militarily by NATO and economically by the IMF and the EU, what chance does a country the size of Slovakia, Croatia, Latvia or indeed Scotland have? Despite the much-maligned project fear during the Scottish independence referendum, the main arguments hinged on social security, oil revenues, currency, Trident nuclear warheads based in Faslane and Scottish jobs dependent on UK military contracts. Big businesses, while preferring easy access to the nearby English market, seemed almost indifferent. Tesco does not really care whether Scotland is nominally in some abstract entity called the UK as long as it can continue to bribe local councils to expand its retail empire, which now stretches as far as Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Thailand. The main reason the British Civil Service wanted to avert Scottish independence was the country's tight integration into the British armed forces and, more importantly, NATO, but the SNP ditched its earlier opposition to NATO in 2012. Until recently the United States relied on the UK as its most loyal ally in its various military endeavours around the globe, but with shifting global alliances Uncle Sam is suffering from battle fatigue. The failure to overthrow the Syrian government and the rapid rise in China's military budget and soft power have led military lobbyists to seek new vehicles for their nation-building operations. Recent US-led wars have done little to project American power, something much better accomplished by US-based tech giants. If anything, the USA's military adventurism has weakened the country's soft power, while the main hubs of technical innovation are moving away from California and elsewhere in the United States to the Far East, China, Russia and Europe. We should watch not so much the sales revenues of tech behemoths, but the concentration of talented engineers able to drive future innovation. Gone are the days when the best Chinese, Russian, Korean or Japanese engineers would be snapped up by American multinationals. Today, they often have better opportunities in their home countries and thanks to the wonders of modern telecommunications can collaborate with others around the world without having to emigrate. When the CEOs of American IT enterprises like Amazon, Facebook, Google, Apple and Microsoft are happy to lambast the current resident of the White House and seem more concerned with adhering to the edicts of the Chinese government than training young American software engineers, it must be crystal clear that they owe no special allegiance to their fellow Americans.
The Brexit Delusion seen from postmodern Scotland
Some believe the outcome of the 2016 referendum on the UK membership of EU marked a protest against the excesses of globalism and the disenfranchisement of the native working classes. Yet for all the bluster about taking back control and national self-determination, the United Kingdom appears less united than at any time since World War Two in the terms of social class, national identity and outlook on life. There are many good democratic reasons to advocate the transfer of power from remote superstates to viable nation states, but while a clear majority in the English provinces and in most of Wales voted to leave the EU, Scotland, Northern Ireland and inner city areas of England voted to remain. Two groups in particular opposed any attempts to restore national sovereignty, the affluent professional classes, especially in academia, and Britons with a recent immigrant background. The results in Scotland would have been very different if the SNP had opposed continued EU membership as they did the 1975 referendum. Many Scots voted to stay in the EU because they believed it made Scottish independence easier if the whole of the Former United Kingdom (FUK?) remained deeply embedded in the EU facilitating seamless trade and movement of people.
Let me suggest they were wrong for two simple reasons. First the Brexit saga has provided Nicola Sturgeon with a pretext to call another referendum on Scottish separatism. Second joining the EU as a separate member state would make Scotland a net contributor but without any subsidies from the UK government. So unless crude oil prices return to the heady heights of $120 a barrel, the SNP will be forced to drastically slash public services and welfare spending, especially as all new member states have to join the ERM and prepare to adopt the Euro. No pragmatic Scot could contemplate such socially divisive policies that could turn Scotland into a wetter and windier version of Greece under the now disgraced Syriza government (who promised to reverse EU-enforced austerity before agreeing to another loan requiring even greater cutbacks than anticipated). While many English workers have bought into the illusion of a strong and independent UK outside the EU, the Scottish working class have been sold a European pipedream that reflects the widespread middle-class affluence of 1990s Germany much more than the grim reality of Macron's regime unable to contain open revolt from his country's yellow vests movement.
The SNP's love for identity politics and mass migration have set the party's leadership on a collision course with their supporters who overwhelmingly want Scotland to be more Scottish in the traditional sense and less like the multicultural chaos they see in England's metropolises. It appears the SNP leadership would be quite happy for Glasgow and Edinburgh to emulate London and Birmingham, while many of their supporters would much prefer the Norwegian model. Scottish nationalists and Northern Irish Republicans have been co-opted into the virtue-signalling no-borders movement. Their leaders not only oppose traditional family values, they want to redefine Scottishness or Irishness to mean temporary loyalty to your current jurisdiction rather than longstanding family ties or full cultural assimilation.
Over the last decade Scotland's main cities have belatedly succumbed to the lure of global harmonisation, with segregated transient communities, gentrification of inner city neighbourhoods and sky-rocketing property prices in the wee nation's capital. The SNP's priorities have at best addressed short-term populist concerns, e.g. removing bridge tolls and offering free prescriptions, and at worst transferred more power to a centralised police force and invasive social services, especially the notorious named person act.
Most disturbingly the SNP's education policies have significantly lowered standards, widening the gulf between the offspring of Scotland's professional classes who can either provide an intellectually stimulating home environment or afford private tuition and the rest whose stressed parents struggle to deal with precarious employment and unstable relationships. The SNP may champion Scotland's integration with the rest of Europe, but it's made foreign languages optional guiding underperforming students to easier subjects. You might imagine that Scotland's love affair with the games industry might have inspired a new generation of budding programmers. Alas tech companies struggle to find local whiz kids for mission-critical software development roles. The main advantage of moving an IT business from London to Scotland is not the availability of local talent, but lower property prices and smaller social extremes. If you have to import your best developers from Poland, Ukraine or India, then London, once a magnet for the best and brightest professionals, has no inherent advantage. A small country dependent not only on international trade, but also on imported human resources only has limited leeway to fine-tune its fiscal regime and employment laws to attract greater inward investment. The Irish government may have tempted Google and Twitter to set up their European HQs in its capital city, but the multinationals hired mainly non-Irish staff driving up property prices while a growing number of born and bred Dubliners are homeless. Under its new Taoiseach, Eire (more commonly known as Republic of Ireland) is currently undergoing its fastest rate of cultural transformation since it gained independence in 1920. Irish journalist, Gemma O'Doherty, has gone as far as to describe the government's Project Ireland 2040 initiative as state-sanctioned ethnic cleansing, aiming to add 25% to the existing population while the country's best and brightest continue to emigrate. The leaderships of Sinn Fein and the SNP may appeal to anti-British nationalist sentiment, but advocate socially engineered post-national identities for their respective fiefdoms.
The post-national Alliance
One photograph captures more succinctly than any others the duplicity of politicians we once believed had some principles, the spectre of Nicola Sturgeon hugging Alastair Campbell. I remember seeing Nicola speak at a small demonstration in Glasgow against the UK's enthusiastic participation in the bombing of Serbia and Kosovo back in 1999, a courageous stance that involved challenging the bias and disinformation of much of the mainstream media. The SNP also opposed the 2003 invasion of Iraq, but fast forward to the current year and the same SNP has shifted its focus from opposing military adventurism and making the case for full fiscal autonomy to supporting full integration with the European superstate with its own plans for a unified military command and fiscal harmonisation. Rather than being deployed in conflict zones as British soldiers under the auspices of NATO, Scotland's future military personnel could well serve in places as diverse as Ukraine, Mali or France as part of the new European Defence Force. Over the decades many high profile politicians as diverse as Bill Clinton and François Hollande have built their political reputations on opposition to imperialist wars, only to fall into line once in power. So what do the likes of Tony Blair's former spin doctor, Alastair Campbell, and Nicola Sturgeon really care about? Their appeals to Britishness, Scottishness or working class solidarity have only ever been ploys to win electoral support. Both have failed their core electorates dismally, much preferring global grandstanding over local solutions. Alastair Campbell may have strategically supported US-led military interventions and nominally opposed Scottish independence, but that's mere water under the bridge when faced with the prospect of the dismemberment of the wonderful European Union and the potential unravelling of a greater project to bring all countries within the purview of a one world government. Both appear diametrically opposed to the likes of Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage, but are they? As Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson fell into line with the foreign policy priorities of successive US and UK administrations to push for regime change in Syria and seek confrontation with Russia. While previously critical of the Iraq war and disastrous interventions in Libya and Syria, Nigel Farage has remained loyal to Donald Trump's presidency.
Could Brexit be a mere charade to engineer the break-up of the United Kingdom?
Reading between the Lines
The Withdrawal Agreement negotiated by British civil servants and EU Bureaucrats under Theresa May's premiership did little to restore sovereignty to the British electorate. The UK would nominally be outside the EU, but still bound by the rules and regulations of the Customs Union and Single Market, all for a little extra control over labour mobility from EU countries, e.g. not allowing workers to claim in-work benefit until they have paid into the system for at least 5 years. Given the much greater challenge of smart automation displacing millions of monotonous manual and clerical jobs, the native workforce would compete over fewer and fewer entry level jobs. The only way to make a success out of greater economic autonomy would be to invest heavily in STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics), all areas where British students lag behind their Russian, Chinese, Japanese and Indian counterparts. Yet while the public debated the dreaded Northern Irish backstop, that would stop the UK from striking new trade deals independent of the EU until it had definitely resolved the Irish border issue to the EU's full satisfaction, the UK government was busy agreeing to military unification with the armed forces of other EU members with hardly a murmur of dissent from any of the parties represented in Westminster. The DUP were too obsessed with the constitutional status of Ulster, while the Liberal Democrats and Labour probably welcomed the move. While the military budgets of most continental European countries, with the notable exception of France, have remained subdued over the last 20 years, they have begun to creep up as European military integration became a reality. Germany's former Minister of Defence and now President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, had the blessing of US-based military strategist, Henry Kissinger for Europe's remilitarisation. Global strategists owe no special allegiance to their nation states. In the mid to late 20th century it made sense for the superpowers to contain the military ambitions of the main European countries, but with monetary union and only nominal national sovereignty, in the eyes of world chess players, a unified European military command can assume the role of global cop in conflict zones in Africa, the Middle East and most disturbingly of all seek direct confrontation with Russia. One thread that unites most European federalists is their visceral hatred of Vladimir Putin's Russia, whom they accuse of meddling in European politics, while simultaneously letting American and Chinese tech giants run vast swathes of the continent's telecommunications infrastructure. In the dying days of her administration Theresa May agreed to let Chinese multinational, Huawei, manage the roll-out of the UK's controversial 5G network, only a couple of years after the same government let China's General Power Corporation build new nuclear plants in the UK despite obvious security risks. With the current pace of globalisation it may not matter if the British Isles are whole or only partly in the EU, our lives will be managed by the same corporations.
The Ultimate Con Trick
Many EU-flag-wavers have suggested the true aim of Tory Brexiteers is to hand over British public services to North American big business, which could potentially lead to the privatisation of the revered NHS. There's only one flaw in this analysis, the neoliberal dream of dynamic private enterprises competing in a regulated free market is on life support. Neoliberalism has outlived its purpose as the main driver of economic growth and technological innovation, as big business no longer needs the services of most working age adults and relies instead on welfare largesse to subsidise its customers. As private healthcare can only serve those able to pay, the global trend is towards public healthcare, not least because local authorities prefer one-size-fits-all social medicine with mandatory vaccinations, mental health screening and regular check-ups for common medical conditions such as diabetes or asthma. In early capitalism, successful enterprises remained largely indifferent to the plight of the great unwashed masses. Today the largest commercial ventures do not want only to satisfy their consumers, but to actively shape their lifestyle and thus to regulate their behaviour. Gay Pride Parades are no longer fringe events of a marginalised minority, they're sponsored by banks, supermarkets and mobile phone networks with the full blessing of local authorities and the police. New shopping centres bear little semblance to their geographic surroundings with variants of the same ubiquitous brand names and chain stores. Slowly but surely our urban landscape is beginning to resemble a maze of playgrounds with different sets of prefects monitoring puerile plebeians. At the same time countries with proud histories, strong traditions and distinctive cultures have become mere social engineering pilot projects.
UK PLC (the British version of USA Inc.) is so enmeshed with the world economy, that it no longer needs the loyalty of its hapless inhabitants, known affectionately in Germany as Inselaffen (island apes) partly due to their drunken antics in Mediterranean resorts. The business elites only supported the UK's continued existence to placate remnant patriotism and maintain a tightly integrated military industrial complex.
I seriously doubt whether Boris Johnson, whose family can trace their roots to Germany, Russia and Turkey and who was born in New York city and partly schooled in Brussels, cares more about British self-determination than his pro-EU siblings or the likes of Richard Branson for that matter. They probably care even less about Ulster, the ramifications of Scottish separatism or even the future of the Conservative Party. A no-deal Brexit may not be such a big deal after all for Boris's corporate friends, but the mainstream media could easily blame Brexit for the looming European financial meltdown as Germany fails to bail out insolvent Italian banks and the London Stock Market crashes. With rising unemployment and a devalued currency, Scotland and Northern Ireland may well vote to leave the UK, conveniently blaming the hated Tories for inevitable cutbacks to public services. That may well be one of the better outcomes. The worst case scenario may be a Yugoslav-style civil war.
