I had wanted to expand on my Brave New World thesis in relation to mounting calls from the trendy left and business leaders for a universal basic income. We now see an alliance stretching from social justice warriors, environmentalists and no-borders activists to corporate CEOs all advocating what is in practice a global welfare state. Since Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, joined SpaceX CEO Elon Musk to support UBI (universal basic income), it's become clear to me that tech multinationals are planning for a future where most of their customers will not be workers, who earn money by providing services that big business needs, but citizens whose main responsibility in life will be social conformity and deference to the techno-elite. Just as we thought capitalism had won the great idealogical battle of the 20th century, it has now outlived its purpose as the primary engine of social and technological innovation. Capitalists rely not only on the exploitation of workers, but also on profits from the sales of their goods or services. As workers demand higher pay, shorter working hours and better working conditions, capitalists naturally resort to outsourcing and greater automation. The artificial intelligence (AI) revolution will redefine the relationship between businesses and customers. Previously the market worked by selling goods to workers who in turn earned a living through their productive endeavours. Now big business has dispensed with the need to have so many semi-skilled workers and as AI progresses, so will the minimum IQ required for remunerative work. Most of us could end up either being carers, reliant of state handouts, or being labelled subnormal and thus also dependent on welfare largesse. In the not too distant future the main responsibility of governments may be to redistribute wealth created by tech giants and to supervise their local population to prevent social breakdown. If most people depend on corporate welfare, albeit rebranded as universal basic income, it doesn't really matter where they live. That's why so much of the debate on mass migration misses the point. Naturally if the citizens of a given country wanted greater autonomy, they would need a sustainable population and cohesive community with shared values. In a traditional economy immigration can boost demand and fill skills gaps, but can also lead to unbalanced labour markets and social upheaval. By contrast in a world reliant on corporate welfare only a small minority of working age adults can fill a dwindling number of remunerative high skill jobs. Even most tasks performed by carers can be automated. Human carers can only outperform robots in advanced emotional intelligence and authenticity, both of which require cultural compatibility. If you just need some help dressing and bathing, you may well prefer a smart robot to an underpaid migrant carer with a poor command of your language. If tech multinationals are willing to bankroll universal basic income in Europe or North America, why should they not extend the same privileges to the rest of the world? If your sole role in life is to act as a good global citizen looking after your family and neighbours, then surely you could fulfil that role anywhere, but that would also subordinate all governments to the same worldwide technocratic elite. Nonetheless, my thesis remains incomplete as we see rifts in our ruling elites, some still favouring the illusion of laissez-faire capitalism.
Could Corbyn really win ?
However, events in the UK have kind of overtaken me. Just a couple of weeks ago most political pundits believed a sizeable Tory majority in the coming UK general election was a foregone conclusion. May's local council election results would seem to back this up. Labour did fairly well in trendy cosmopolitan urban areas, while amazingly the Tories gained support among traditional working class voters with LibDems doing best in affluent leafy suburbs. Even in Scotland, which often bucks the English and Welsh trend, we saw the Conservatives pick up votes in some unexpected places as the main opposition to the dominant SNP (Scottish National Party). Then the mainstream broadcasters and social media campaigners began to present Labour's policies in a much more positive light. Corbyn's Labour now promises to renationalise the railways (something New Labour failed to do) and scrap tuition fees while naturally boosting social welfare in many other areas, all presumably funded by raising corporation tax and income tax for the top 5% who earn more than £100,000 a year. Labour has pledged to respect the outcome of EU referendum and prioritise training of British-born youngsters to address perceived skills shortages. More important, Labour has been much more active on the ground than the Tories. While Corbyn may not have the confidence of bellicose Blairite MPs, his leadership has energised an army of young activists, who true to their convictions have attempted to reach out to the working classes, whose confidence Labour have lost.
Islamic Terror rocks the Election Campaign
Last week's bomb attack at Manchester's Ariana Grande concert shocked the nation. What kind of ideology could justify deliberately detonating a nail bomb in a crowded music venue killing 22 innocent revellers including many young girls? Even the IRA tended to target politicians, soldiers and adult protestants. This attack targeted carefree youngsters having a good time. Many have commented on the mainstream media's reluctance to blame radical Islam head on. Britain's growing Muslim community has many difficulties integrating with the country's settled non-Muslim population with radically different cultural attitudes on sexuality, marriage, women's rights, alcohol and gambling. More disturbingly the establishment media has suppressed the scale of mainly Muslim grooming gangs. Yet most people are smart enough not to blame a whole religion for the actions of a tiny minority of its adherents. Islamic terrorism seemed confined to a handful of trouble spots in the Middle East and Central Asia, until our enlightened liberal elite decided to intervene there to overthrow local regimes responsible for abuses of human rights. Rather than stabilise the region, Western intervention has unleashed a hornets nest of Islamic extremism that has spread its tentacles far and wide among the growing Muslim diasporas in the West. So rather than blame their Muslim neighbours, many voters have laid the blame for the murder of 22 innocent youngsters with the government and it doesn't take a genius to work out that on foreign policy and arms sales Theresa May is much closer to Tony Blair than Jeremy Corbyn. Saudi Arabia has long been one of the major funders of Mosques, Islamic schools and madrasas in the West and the cradle of Wahhabism, the most virulent strain of Islam fundamentalism. Yet British governments have been happy to sell arms to Saudi Arabia, which currently spends more on military hardware than Russia, despite the former having a much smaller territory and fewer citizens to defend. Of course, one could also blame rapid mass migration and ethnic cleansing of some inner city districts, but that's not something we can change overnight without triggering even worse social unrest. So when Jeremy Corbyn attributed part of the blame to UK involvement in recent conflicts in Libya and Syria, he had a point. Indeed Mark Curtis, author of Secret Affairs: Britain's Collusion with Radical Islam, has detailed the Manchester suicide bomber, Salman Abedi, and his father were members of a Libyan dissident group, covertly supported by the UK to assassinate Qadafi in 1996 . Of course that does not fully explain why similar attacks have occurred in Sweden, Germany and most notoriously in France, except Islamic terrorists do not really distinguish Western countries they way we do. Theresa May's response was to deploy army reserves onto the streets to supplement armed police, only revealing her earlier cutbacks in policing as home secretary.
The long and short of this whole sorry saga, is that in just two weeks the Tory lead over Labour has shrunk from 15% or higher (some polls showing staggering leads of 46% to the Tories with Labour on just 25%) to as low as 3% (The YouGov poll released on 01/06/2017 for the Times had topline figures of Con 42% and Lab 39). Corbyn's Labour is now polling higher than the party did under Ed Miliband or Gordon Brown. Indeed even Tony Blair, despite enjoying the support the Murdoch press, only gained 35.2% of the popular vote in 2005 and just 43.2% in alleged 1997 landslide. Although I'm no seasoned psephologist, I suspect a marked movement away from the Liberal Democrats and Greens to Labour and only a much smaller trickle away from the Conservatives and UKIP to Labour. Most intriguingly, Labour seem to be doing best among affluent cosmopolitan professional classes, the youth vote (18-24 years) and of course among its special interest groups, the rainbow coalition of ethnic minorities, Muslims, gays, transsexuals and welfare dependents).
As discussed earlier, this heterogenous demographic is only set to grow in coming decades. Corbyn's politics may seem like an anachronistic throwback to the 1970s, but his naive inclusive universalism may serve other long-term agendas brilliantly. The latte-sipping Guardian reading classes now loathe USA's climate change denying President and Vladimir Putin much more Europe's authoritarian politicians or a Labour leader in bed with a bunch of unreconstructed Marxists. Only ten years ago the bien-pensant metropolitan elite still supported Blair's third way. Now they are throwing their electoral weight behind a more radical strand of globalism.
Derailing Brexit
Only a year ago, the outcome of Britain's EU referendum signalled public discontent with enforced rapid globalisation. Ever since the Conservative Government have attempted to use this somewhat unexpected result to drive their own vision of a more globally connected Britain, while placating public concerns about unbalanced mass migration. Brexit, like most neologisms, means all things to all people. As said I have nothing against a community of European nations cooperating on many strategic environmental and economic issues. Indeed I'd prefer a European Community that stood up for the rights and rich cultural heritage of Europeans as a counterbalance to the growing power of China and India and as a bastion of liberal values threatened by authoritarian tendencies within Islam.
Amazingly Theresa May, who wanted to remain in the EU, has capitalised on public distrust of the European superstate, while advocating policies that seem perfectly aligned with those of Angela Merkel and Emanuel Macron. How could she possibly renege on her commitment to take Britain out of the EU with a slender Tory majority reliant on the support of fervent Brexiters such as David Davis, a curious politician with refreshingly honest views on personal freedom and military adventurism (he opposed many recent military interventions and many laws restricting personal privacy). However, with substantial majority, as Peter Hitchens suggested in his Mail On Sunday blog, PM May could safely ignore her nostalgic Little England colleagues and push through a compromise that would in practice differ little from our current arrangement, leaving large corporations as the main mediators between British and EU interests. But that scenario may not happen. Many reluctant Tory supporters (i.e. patriotic working class voters who used to vote Labour) could well stay at home, making the unthinkable, a hung parliament, a real possibility, except unlike in 2010 the LibDems may only muster a handful of MPs.
We may speculate on the growing role of social media. Both Twitter, which I use, and Facebook, which I don't, have become intensely monitored outlets for virtue-signalling social justice campaigns, usually of the kind that the Corbynite Momentum group would wholeheartedly support. While I realise these days we only need a small group of graphic designers, video editors and Web developers to produce a polished media campaign, I sense the omnipresent hand of international big business behind the myriad campaign groups and NGOs that endlessly promote these awareness-raising spectacles. How else can migrant rights groups afford plush offices in expensive cities ? I really started to question the authenticity of today's corporate left when Greenpeace (an organisation I used to support) supported the White Helmets, which as Vanessa Beeley has amply documented are little more than war propagandists bought and paid for by the US and UK governments.
They are clearly working in cahoots with a tangled web of trendy tech entrepreneurs, globalist bankers such as George Soros whose through his Open Society Foundation, countless NGOs bankrolled by big business and a motley crew of old school Marxists who have long dreamed of a borderless utopia.
I still predict Theresa May will win her snap election albeit with a smaller majority than initially hoped, largely because most older voters would rather side with the devil they know than risk an unpredictable Labour-led coalition, who could hasten the rate of cultural change.
I expect no prizes for forecasting the Conservative Party will win Theresa May's Snap General Election on 8th June. That's because none of the opposition parties offer viable alternatives that can convince ordinary pragmatic voters uninterested in foreign policy and who do not have an ideological commitment to socialism, environmentalism or universalism. If, like me, you loathe all power-hungry elites, this election will disappoint you, but is likely to mark the end of an era for the old political theatrics of Workers vs Bosses. In this election many traditional Labour voters, after perhaps toying with UKIP in 2015 will switch to the once-hated Tories, while many affluent professionals and trendy bosses will vote strategically for more openly globalist parties. They can do this safely because they know Left Labour and the Greens do not stand a chance in hell of winning a parliamentary majority. The BBC has gone to great lengths to publicise Gina Miller's anti-Brexit tactical voting campaign. Billionaire Richard Branson, who owns private Caribbean island and has his company headquarters in non-EU Switzerland, has publicly expressed his support for Ms Miller's high-profile campaign. Former Prime Minister, Tony Blair, has urged voters to back the LibDems and pro-EU Tories against Left Labour candidates. If the Liberal Democrats manage to win 50 or more seats, expect a wholesale defection of Blairite Labour MPs to Tim Farron's grouping with Corbyn's Labour reduced to a rump of fifty-odd Labour loyalists and social idealists more akin to Germany's Die Linke (the Left Party) than her majesty's respected opposition. We could even see a few defections from the ranks of Theresa May's Conservatives to the new Neoliberal Elitist Party, which by the next election in 2022 may be a serious contender for government. The likes of Anna Soubry and Kenneth Clarke sing from the same hymn sheet as Nick Clegg and Vince Cable.
Meanwhile the Tory's gaffe-prone Foreign Secretary, Boris Johnson, recycles blatant disinformation about Syria to lend his full support to President Trump's Damascene conversion to Neoconservative military adventurism and destabilisation. We will soon be back to the good old Whigs and Tories, one representing the more worldly business classes and other the more patriotic landed gentry. Of course in those days only the privileged few could vote. Now only the correctly socialised professional classes can be trusted to participate in political debate. Ever since the EU Referendum, the neoliberal media has kept reminding us how Remain voters tended to be better educated and younger than their leave-voting compatriots. The Guardian ever so subtly pushes the narrative that rightwing populism appeals mainly to Sun and Daily Mail reading thickos. George Monbiot, who once admirably exposed the corruption of big business in his 2001 book Captive State: The Corporate Takeover of Britain, now acts as a cheerleader and enforcer of the new left-branded corporate censorship of all views that challenge orthodoxy. His latest campaign targets those of us who refuse to believe the Syrian Government deliberately deployed chemical weapons in the recent attack on rebel-held Khan Sheikhun. Who benefits from the destabilisation of the Middle East and more fake news to justify more military intervention? None other than the same global corporations, Mr Monbiot once condemned.
Who will oppose our Machievellian Bosses?
The real question is who will oppose the devious machinations of our ruling elites and who will stand up for the workers who do not want to end up as welfare dependents? Left Labour have lost all credibility. They champion oversized comprehensive schools that fail bright working class kids, more social workers, non-traditional family units, high levels of immigration, more mental health monitoring and only lend lip-service to nurturing a new generation of software developers, engineers and doctors, all professions dominated by graduates of private schools. That's because the elites behind Corbyn's Left Labour really do not trust plebs at all. They think we're little more than low-IQ simpletons, a lumpenproletariat who fail to realise the benefits of the new socialised utopia they plan to build with a little help from their corporate buddies in the tech industry. So when Labour promise to build a million new homes (to cope with a growing population) or boost spending on our NHS, we're supposed to believe them.
Things look only slightly different on the French side of the English Channel because the conservative vote is divided between the cautious middle classes who do not want to rock the boat and the angry working classes and petite bourgeoisie. Nonetheless the electorate looks set to endorse a globalist warmongering banker because practically the whole mainstream media has tarnished the rival candidate, Marine Le Pen, with her party's past association with historically disgraced Vichy Regime and her protectionist economic policies. I expect mass abstentions in the second round, but Macron will offer his compatriots only half-hearted promises to protect their interests as his cronies open up France to global corporations. Some 47% of French voters opted for candidates openly opposed to corporate globalisation (Marine Le Pen, Jean Luc Melenchon, Nicolas Dupont-Aignan and François Asselineau). Around 20% supported the Conservative Republican candidate who promised to assert France's autonomy within the EU. Only 24% supported the likely winner of the second round. Whatever Theresa May's public posturing on the EU and immigration may be, the British and American elites are banking on a resounding Macron victory. They cannot allow any alternatives to the hegemony of transnational corporations unless it can be carefully managed. In Britain the elites panicked last year because they realised the working classes had rebelled against their plan to phase out viable nation states. However, the EU itself was only one way to achieve their long-term goal. Tory grandees thus agreed to resurrect the concept of British exceptionalism and negotiate a new Mid Atlantic settlement, where Britain is effectively no longer half in the EU, but midway between the EU and a future trading association with the US. Besides Britain had served its role as the EU's strongest advocate of global free trade and thus helped weaken the continent's once proud nation states. The British Foreign Policy elite have long sought to drive their vision of globalisation by destabilising or neutering their main rivals. With Germany firmly under the control of openly globalist politcians (both main contenders for this year's general election, Angela Merkel and Martin Schulz, want even tighter European integration with open borders and both supported the now defunct TTIP agreement too), the EU no longer needs the UK to steer it in a neoliberal direction. Moreover, the US and UK will benefit most as German politcians attempt to impose fiscal rectitude on Southern and Eastern Europe.
If your sole concern were the ecological impact of hydraulic fracturing, you might just vote Green or Left Labour. If your main concern were ridding the UK of expensive nuclear warheads that will fail to protect us against any real world threats Greens and SNP may be options. However, these are not the primary concerns of ordinary working people, who actually want their government to defend their country and to ensure the lights stay on. As bad as fracking may be, power cuts caused by unreliable wind and solar power can kill many more.
At the end of the day people want secure employment, a purpose in life, a sense of belonging, safe neighbourhoods and functioning but unobstrusive services. People do not necessarily want more social workers and more mental health nurses, required mainly because successive governments have subsidised dysfunctional lifestyle choices. Labour and SNP essentially promise higher spending on welfare and public services without explaining how they will raise the additional revenue. If Labour can persuade big business to pay more tax, then so surely can the Tories. Even scrapping Trident would not fund the kind of bleeding hearts altruism that Momentum (Left Labour) and Green activists demand. Their virtue-signalling on hunger in the UK or child refugees denied entry to this country is naive beyond belief. As uninformed as many working class voters may be about the machinations of our ruling elites in the Middle East, most have a reasonably good hunch that more interventionism and more mass migration (a consequence of the former) will only make matters worse. Moreover, the same multibillionaires whom Labour claim they want to tax are also those most in favour of open borders and free trade. Take for example the classic betes noires of Starbucks and Amazon. Not only do they legally dodge billions in taxes, often as advised by high-profile audit firms such as Deloitte or Price Waterhouse Coopers, they also rely on a malleable and hyper-mobile labour force. Meanwhile Amazon is busy developing technology to replace most of their workforce with smart robots. A government could in theory just raise sales taxes on large retailers like Starbucks or Amazon, who would then pass the cost onto consumers to retain their profit margin or find other ways to reduce costs such as outsourcing labour or more automation. Indeed as labour becomes more expendable and the economy depends more and more on complex technological synergy that only large organisations can provide, the only way to raise living standards in your country is to invest in high-tech skills. The trouble is the professional classes closer to levers of power and more likely to be involved in the hiring process have long written off large chunks of their native working classes. We see this trend not just in Britain, but across Europe. While more resourceful youngsters can always migrate to regions with higher salaries and employment levels, the autochthonous or settled underclasses tend to stay put. When will the elites finally admit they don't care about their local underclasses, except as guinea pigs in a Huxleyan social engineering experiment that values compliance more than creativity or independence of mind? The outcome of June's general election will only temporarily restore faith in the British establishment united around a one-nation Conservative Party. Waiting in the wings are the true radicals, the hyper-Blairites, regrouping around the Liberal Democrats, while Left Labour and the Greens serve mainly as vanguard forces for socio-cultural change. Vote strategically to ensure we have a viable opposition, especially adversaries that seek to expose elitist schemes. There are still a few maverick or rather free-thinking MPs left willing to challenge elite agendas, but who have to toe the party line on other issues of the day.
On the Brink of World War Three Over Misappropriated Chemical Attacks.
Call me old-fashioned, but facts do actually matter even if they're inconvenient and do not fit with your preferred narrative. Your enemy may be bad, but your enemy's enemy may be even worse. That said, disinformation and emotive propaganda should concern us most when they come from the world's best funded media operations. Yet many choose not to learn the lessons of verifiable recent history and instead prefer to give our leading state and corporate broadcasters the benefit of the doubt. After all, who would like to be accused of swallowing Putin's propaganda?
However, now Russia Today plays a similar role in the West to the good old BBC World Service behind the Iron Curtain. Millions of citizens of Warsaw Pact countries turned to Western media outlets to learn the truth about their own ruling elites. Now more and more Westerners are turning to alternative news sources when they grow suspicious of a tiresomely predictable diet of agenda promotion and strategically timed media events that serve only to promote more war and greater erosion of national self-determination and democracy.
https://www.youtube.com/embed/pVevIuIRuok
I have long ceased to watch conventional TV news, but I do monitor a wide range of online news. I no longer visit the BBC News site to find out what's going on in the world (though I doubt they'd lie about incontrovertible events such as natural disasters or the weather ), but to analyse how it presents breaking news stories. The BBC is one of a select group of global media organisations who can actually set the agenda. If the BBC reports something, it becomes news. An Italian journalist once explained to me that Italy's state broadcaster, RAI, just recycles BBC and CNN reports, hastily translated and adapted for an Italian audience. BBC reporters can add all the caveats they like to save their proverbial bacon should a claim prove unsubstantiated, but as soon as the BBC highlights an atrocity and attributes it to the enemy of the day, it has already served its propaganda purpose. Truth seekers can easily be dismissed as conspiracy nuts or Putin acolytes, but believe me the truth does matter. If only 1% of BBC news coverage were not just inaccurate or misleading, but mendacious, it would be a scandal. Authoritarian regimes have always used similar tactics. They do not normally have to resort to outright lies, they just embellish cherry-picked snippets of the truth to suit their narrative. Outright mendacity is an act of desperation, especially when alternative and more credible versions of events are available from rival sources.
I don't have either time or resources to go into great detail about the recent chemical discharge in rebel-held Idlib, Syria. That lethal sarin or chlorine gas may have killed as many as 70 civilians in a war zone controlled by fanatical Islamic militias remains the only certainty. It's perfectly possible that the Syrian government could have killed people by bombing rebel ammunition dumps. They US and its allies have long attributed all regretful civilian victims of their bombing missions to the common Islamic militia practice of hiding weapons and fighters in densely populated areas especially near schools and hospitals. As wrong as I believe recent US military interventions may have been, I do not believe they deliberately targeted innocent civilians, but merely considered them a price worth paying for a larger strategic prize, that should be avoided to win the battle over hearts and minds once they've asserted their control. If they wanted just to kill as many people as possible, imposing a complete trade embargo would be much more effective as few Middle East countries are self-sufficient in food. Indeed Syria, which still has thousands of square kilometres of fertile land, may be an exception in this regard. The country has managed to survive despite sanctions and foreign-funded militias. Before Tuesday's attack, the Syrian Army was winning the ground war against Al Nusra and ISIS. US Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, had even suggested that the people of Syria could determine the future role of President Bashar Al Assad, the latest apparent reincarnation of Hitler. The surest way President Assad could guarantee his downfall would be to commit a heinous war crime against innocent civilians before the world's media. He must be surely well aware that the White Helmets will rush to the scene of any atrocity to transmit footage of civilian casualties to global media outlets keen to pounce on any excuse to derail the strategic victory of a Russian / Syrian / Iranian alliance against head-chopping Islamic militias. I this find it extremely hard to believe that a besieged leader of a small country in touch with the global media would authorise his own downfall, unless he were some kind of double agent prepared to commit mad and reckless acts that would end not only his own career, but reduce his country to a set of statelets controlled by illiberal fundamentalists and policed by foreign armies.
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https://www.youtube.com/embed/tymDe83PFMQ
Conformists and Anticonformists
The emerging political landscape is even more confusing. When newly inaugurated President Trump tried to impose a temporary travel ban on globetrotters from seven mainly Muslim countries, the trendy left and Hollywood celebrities protested against this vile act of racism, although travel to the USA is a privilege, not a fundamental human right. When the same President bows to pressure from the Deep State and performs a 180º U-Turn on reconciliation with Russia over their joint efforts to combat ISIS and other Islamic extremists, the liberal media and Hollywood luvvies suddenly applaud the President's courageous actions. The masses of uninformed Americans who get their news from the mainstream media have swallowed their propaganda. Liberals support airstrikes because Assad and Putin are Hitleresque rightwing demagogues. Trump-supporting rednecks support airstrikes because we have to support our armed forces against our enemies. Opponents of more airstrikes are inevitably those of us who instinctively distrust the establishment media. We thus have the spectacle of alt-right former Trump supporters clashing with black block anarchists at a protest against air strikes. Hang on a moment. Both groups believe more military adventurism will only trigger more internecine violence and engender more hatred and religious fundamentalism. Both groups loathe global corporations and superstates. Both groups oppose more surveillance and restrictions of basic civil liberties. So faced with a choice between opposing the world's most powerful military machine and a bunch of European nationalists, the infamous black block decide the latter are the bigger problem despite their demographic demise and the emergence of China and India as the dominant centres of power in the 21st century.
How the Virtue-Signalling Left Cares More About Affluent Jet-Setters Than Defenceless Goat Herders
The faux outrage about Donald Trump's controversial travel ban on citizens of 7 mainly Muslim countries reveals more about the priorities of the affluent infantile left than it does about any shift in US foreign policy. Most people in the world outside of North America, Europe, Japan and a few other wealthy countries cannot afford to fly to the United States. The freedom to travel where you want and to enjoy the benefits of advanced civilisations that took hundreds of years to evolve is a relatively new concept. By contrast food, water and shelter are the most fundamental human necessities. US foreign policy under Bush Senior, Clinton, Bush Junior and Obama has denied millions these basic human rights by bombing neighbourhoods, destroying vital infrastructure for clean water, food distribution and electricity, littering the landscape with depleted uranium, imposing sanctions, arming despotic regimes and covertly supporting Islamic fundamentalist militias in Syria, Egypt, Iraq, Libya and elsewhere. While many protested against the 2003 invasion of Iraq, opposition to subsequent military escapades and arms sales has been muted. The mainstream Western media, most notably the BBC and CNN, have consistently peddled US State Department propaganda by blaming local leaders, Russia or Iran for the region's growing instability. Indeed many left-leaning politicians and opinion leaders supported US intervention in the Middle East. Gordon Brown and the late Jo Cox MP published a report calling for more proactive intervention in Syria to counter aggression from Russia and President Assad. Their narrative leads in only one direction, a borderless one world government controlled by global corporations and policed by a transcontinental expansion of NATO. It's a vision shared not only by Hillary Clinton's campaign team, Tony Blair and George Soros, but also by the EU and China.
Yet the wishful thinking fake Left in all their collective indignation against President Trump seem much more concerned with the rights of affluent Middle Eastern globetrotters than those of Yemeni goat herders whose homes have just been bombed by the Saudi Air Force with the full cooperation of the US and UK or the rights of Christian Syrians murdered by rebel militias that the UK or US armed. They can only relate to people like themselves who value the freedom to travel abroad more than the right to safety, social stability and cultural continuity in your own homeland because they just imagine the world as one large university campus and project impractical idealist student politics onto the rest of humanity.
The latte-sipping soi-disant Left tend to confuse actions with categories of people. Migrate is a verb. Anyone who moves to another region or country is by definition a migrant just as anyone who travels by aeroplane is an air passenger. Migration may be good, bad or indifferent depending on objective environment and social conditions. Likewise anyone who drives a car is a driver. Logically driving may also be good, bad or neutral in different situations. The same human being may be a driver in one situation and a train passenger, cyclist or walker in other circumstances. We should not debate whether migrants or drivers are good or bad people, but whether mass migration or mass motoring make environmental or social sense. Oddly the two phenomena are closely related as people tend to move to more affluent countries with higher car ownership. In today's complex world immigration controls are like traffic regulations. Ideally we would not need any restrictions on movement and if we all lived comfortably in sparsely populated and resource-rich regions we could minimise both traffic and migration controls, but we don't. More freedom in one domain inevitably limits freedoms in other areas. People might value ease of travel, but we also need safe and peaceful neighbourhoods.
Until recently only a tiny fraction of humanity could afford long-distance travel. European emigrants to the Americas would save up many years only to endure a long and arduous journey in the lower decks of a ship. It's something people might do once or twice in a lifetime. On arrival they had little choice but to work for a living as there was no welfare to speak of. Not everyone succeeded. Some died through exhaustion while a few returned to their homelands penniless, but the American dream was open only to those who either arrived rich or worked hard and seized every opportunity. Not surprisingly the USA attracted the most highly motivated immigrants. If you were not prepared to adapt to the competitive reality of the new world, you were better off staying in your homeland where at least you knew the score. However, since the mid 1990s we've seen an unprecedented rise in global migratory flows as millions seek a higher standard of living in wealthier countries. People move not so much because they must, but because they can or rather because they are aware of better opportunities elsewhere.
Celebrity Rednecks vs Hollywood Divas
Two media-savvy celebrities vie for the hearts and minds of the American people. One is a pop star and actress whose semi-pornographic exhibitionism has helped promote the kind of consumer fetishism that big business loves and ecologists loathe. The other is a loudmouthed urban redneck from Houston, Texas, who has built his multimedia career on the conspiracy theory that the Feds want to deny law-abiding citizens of their god-given right to drive oversized SUVs and bear arms. At least Alex has ranted and railed against the establishment and stood up for free speech, but Madonna Louise Ciccone has only ever lent her support to Hollywood fundraisers to improve her public image. I can't recall her voicing her opposition to US arms sales to Saudi Arabia. Curiously Alex Jones and Madonna personify only marginally different versions of American exuberance and extreme indulgence. Both drive SUVs and lead jetsetting lifestyles that could sustain 100s, if not 1000s, of African or Indian lives.
Since the inauguration of the accidental president of the United States, property developer and reality TV Star, Donald Trump, the world's most influential economic, military and cultural power has been split into two rival camps, both funded by big business. For decades the White House could rely on the main American and European media outlets to toe their lines on strategic foreign, economic and social policies. The Republicans and Democrats differed mainly in rhetoric, one appealing more to the conservative hinterland and the other more to the trendier metropolitan conurbations. In practice they both vigorously pursued policies that benefited mainly large corporations while attempting to manage the expectations and social conflicts of their diversified citizenry. Behind the scenes the two main dynasties of the last 40 years, the Bush and Clinton families, whose members played key roles in the Reagan and Obama administrations too, got along just fine. Bill Clinton famously vacationed with George HW Bush in Kennebunkport.
Donald J Trump is a loose cannon who dreams of a powerful, self-reliant and prosperous America trading peacefully with the rest of the world. Most notably he has publicly advocated strong nation states, secure borders and bilateral trade deals that protect the interests of local workers, all concepts alien to universalists. However, his presidency is now captive to a splinter group of the infamous neoconservatives who architected the USA's disastrous foreign and military policies over the last 30 years or more. While once united, the business elites in the US and to a lesser extent in the UK are now split into two camps. One remains fully committed to the globalist project and view conservative patriotism as an anachronism that must give way to a new global mindset. Globalists may pay lip service to local or national identity, especially for temporary electoral gain, but their long-term goal is a one-world government. A few years ago many would have dismissed such prophecies as far-fetched, but Western academics have long argued against nation states.
The other group recognises the world is a complex and dangerous place and prefers to build on the relative strengths of advanced countries such as the USA, Japan, Australia or France as a model that the rest of the world might emulate rather than attempt to re-engineer the world in their own image. While globalists always favour policies that undermine national privilege and favour cultural harmonisation, modern patriots favour stable societies that benefit their own people and here I use George Orwell's distinction between patriotism (positive nationalism) and negative nationalism. This marks a paradigm shift that may itself be an adaptation to the USA's relative demise as a superpower. When the Soviet Union fell in 1991, the USA utterly dominated the world's economic, cultural and military domains. No other country could challenge its hegemony. China may have had a much larger population, but lacked the economic and military means to be more than a regional power. Very much aware of the Anglosphere's soft power advantage, China has focussed on building up its economic leverage with Europe and North America as well as expanding its mercantile empire to Africa, South America and the Middle East. The East Asian superpower's economy is set to overtake the USA's in the next 10 to 15 years. A close alliance between China and Russia could challenge the USA's former dominance and prove a much better trading partner for Central European countries who already import much more from China than from the US and rely increasingly on Russian gas. Over the last decade US Foreign policy has attempted to thwart the re-emergence of Russia as a major player in a multipolar world, by preventing a trade alliance with Ukraine under Poroshenko and funding the Maidan movement to bring Ukraine within the EU and NATO umbrella. This strategy has failed. Russia can survive without the US or EU as it has a captive market for its raw materials in China, Iran and India. Russia has little need for territorial expansion and has only acted to defend the rights of Russians in neighbouring countries formerly in the Russian Empire and Soviet Union. Yet Saudi Arabia with a fraction of Russia's size and population now spends more on military hardware than Russia.
For the first time in recent history the CEOs of major American corporations and much of the so-called liberal media are openly hostile to the US Presidency. Sergey Brin, the multibillionaire co-founder of Google, led 2000 employees to protest Trump's travel ban. He has already alluded to a future President Pence, possibly after the successful impeachment of the sitting President. Their main concern is the ease of travel of affluent Silicon Valley workers, not the safety of Yemeni goat herders or Chicago residents.
How President Trump could signal the demise of the USA as a superpower and how the globalist elite may switch allegiance to other centres of power.
In George Orwell's 1984 Oceania appeared to be in a never-ending war against Eastasia. Airstrip One, the new name for Great Britain, belonged to Oceania with North America and Australasia, but Eurasia stretched across continental Europe to Vladivostok. At least since Britain's WW2 alliance with the USA first against Nazi Germany and later against the former Soviet Union, the UK intelligentsia has consistently supported the US in its many deployments oversees. Admittedly the British government remained technically neutral over the Vietnam War, but the mainstream media gave the US State Department an easy time over the sheer scale of its war crimes in Indochina. Critical analysis came mainly from the left, whom we could split into pro-Soviet and anti-Soviet camps. Yet the carefree hedonism that accompanied the protest movements of the 1960s and 70s could not have existed in the same form in any other society. Students could stage colourful musical protests and develop a hippie counterculture precisely because of the affluence that their capitalist society provided. In the USSR you only had freedoms that the state explicitly permitted. While Americans could protest against racial segregation or unjust wars, Soviet citizens could not openly oppose the party line. Many anti-war rebels of the 1960s would become the entrepreneurs and neoconservatives of the 1980s and 90s. With the fall of the USSR, global capitalism was all that remained in most of the world. Even China embraced its own brand of crony capitalism managed by a one-party state. Yet the US did not stop waging wars in multiple conflict zones. It simply redeployed some resources from Western and Central Europe to the Middle East. The State Department's new goal was not the defeat of Soviet communism or the protection of Western Europe against a rival expansionist superpower, but the pursuance of a New World Order dominated by liberal democracy and free enterprise. Alas both stated goals were mere illusions. Personal freedom depended on widespread prosperity and social cohesion, while free enterprise depended on ideal market conditions, economic growth and healthy competition. In short the relatively successful mixed economy model that boosted living standards in North America and Western Europe in the 1960s and 70s relied on a fine balance between private enterprise, state interventionism, managed international trade and protectionism.
By opening up markets to global corporations and transferring powers to supranational organisations, rather than create a new world of commercial opportunities for an increasingly mobile and versatile labour force, the ruling elites have paradoxically expanded the role of governments and a wide range of non-governmental people management organisations. If you let your manufacturing industry relocate to low wage economies and let low-paid migrants do all the manual jobs that local workers used to, you have to offer your disenfranchised working classes alternative employment. For a while many bought the theory that old manufacturing jobs would be replaced by new jobs in retail, marketing, media and information technology. But big businesses first outsourced call centres to places like India or the Philippines and then replaced them with interactive Websites. The manufacturing jobs of the recent past are not coming back, because it will soon be cheaper to automate these tasks. If the US can no longer rely on steady stream of Mexican immigrants to pick fruit for peanuts, it can hire a team of talented robotics engineers to automate the whole process and thus save future generations of the humiliation of such back-breaking drudgery.
Rapid economic and technological developments have disempowered the working classes, or at least those unable to adapt. As a result, contrary to all the rhetoric who may hear about millions of new small businesses (usually contractors), we've seen a massive rise in the welfare-dependent population. As clever-accounting hides the true level of unemployment, it may be better to talk of underemployment, i.e. people employed only part time to do unrewarding jobs that serve no real practical purpose and who could not survive without some form of welfare subsidy. More disturbingly, the boom of this century's first decade was largely fuelled by debt. Big business sold millions of tonnes of consumer goods with a very limited shelf life that would be soon be superseded by further innovations. Clearly the economic numbers do not add up. Nobody on an average wage can conceivably afford the kind of lifestyle we see in American soap operas. Real estate inflation has long been much higher than retail inflation. More and more young Americans, just like their cousins in Western Europe, can no longer afford to get on the housing ladder, as the wealth gap grows. Traditionally the forgotten people of rural and suburban America would have voted Democrat. They did not need a tax cut, but more government help to get back to work. However, the last 8 years have only seen more jobs outsourced abroad, growing levels of unskilled immigration and record levels of welfare dependence. Trump's rhetoric on immigration and unfair trade deals appeals to more conservative Americans from the Rust Belt and Deep South. The Clinton campaign could only offer more of the same, while receiving massive funding from the same global corporations who outsourced manufacturing jobs and supported the US's disastrous wars in the Middle East. More than any other politician Hillary Clinton has advocated pro-active military interventionism combined with greater global convergence and high levels of immigration. If one slogan could resonate more with your average Joe than anything else, it was Trump's rallying cry of Americanism, not Globalism. The country that exported its brand of universalism to the rest of the world, now wishes to shield itself from the world it helped to create.
Deep in the belly of global finance is a man seldom mentioned in the mainstream media, George Soros. He doesn't just move currency markets, but has been active in fomenting protest movements against national governments that fail to cooperate with the global institutions Mr Soros favours. His Open Society Foundation has its tentacles in many organisations which masquerade as left-leaning grassroots movements (See Organizations Funded Directly by George Soros ) . His involvement in world affairs started shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall through various business schools and media outlets in former Warsaw Pact countries. But after a brief foray into the Balkans quagmire, Mr Soros turned his attention further afield funding pro-EU groups, such as the fanatically federalist European Movement. All these organisations share a few key features. They champion the rights of perceived minorities, especially migrants, and offer new international solutions to social injustices. While some campaigns seem innocent or even laudable, the solutions on offer always lead in one direction: greater global convergence. The trendy left has gone from being mildly critical of George Soros in the early 90s when they rightly viewed him a meddlesome billionaire banker, to brothers in arms. Soros-funded campaign groups, most notably those claiming to further migrant rights, have hired many left-leaning journalists and activists, who genuinely believe they are working for the greater good of humanity. Disasters, such as the regional conflict in Syria and Iraq, are presented as opportunities for refugees to enrich Western Europe with their diverse customs and immense talent. While Soros-funded activists are often critical of past Western intervention in the region, they are more focused on facilitating the movement of refugees rather than stopping the wars that purportedly caused the refugees to flee in the first place. In my experience most Soros-funded activists also recycle the orthodox line that the mainstream media endlessly promotes on the causes of such conflicts, i.e. they are inevitably blamed on local despots rather than foreign intervention, except when the intervening foreign power is conflict with globalist interests as in the case of the recent Russian intervention to help Syria defeat ISIS.
Three apparently disparate groups have thus converged in supporting a new universalist agenda. Together they call themselves the international community supported by major governments (such as the US, UK, Australia, France, Germany etc.), major corporations and an international intelligentsia of enlightened experts and human rights campaigners. Sometimes these groups are so intertwined, it's hard to tell them apart. Someone may start their career as a political activist for some noble cause, such as refugee rights, global hunger prevention or climate change awareness, then get a job with an international charity before moving to a global corporate services company like Price Waterhouse Coopers, Ernst and Young, Deloitte or KMPG with a stint in politics or media advocacy.
Consider the strange case of one José Manuel Barroso. As a young man in the mid 1970s he belonged to the Maoist Portuguese Workers' Communist Party (see him speak in a 1976 TV interview ). By 1980 he had joined the mainstream governing PPD (Democratic Popular Party, later PPD/PSD-Social Democratic Party) and rose through the ranks to become Prime Minister of his country in 2002. After supporting the 2003 US invasion of Iraq he became President of European Commission in 2004. Last year, after 11 years of loyal service to European superstate project, Barroso accepted a role as non-executive chairman of Goldman Sachs International. What, you may wonder, has this to do with the recent electoral success of Donald J Trump? Well, his opponent, Hillary Rodham Clinton, clearly was funded not only by Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan, but also by George Soros. Indeed a long list of former EU commissioners and politicians ended up working for Goldman Sachs. The Clinton Foundation has long had close ties with George Soros, so much so, that Hillary's daughter, Chelsea Clinton, married his nephew in the billionaire's mansion.
More disturbing, however, are the close ties between mercenaries and NGOs. The US has long deployed security contractors in conflict zones. These mercenaries are literally guns for hire, who may protect the mining interests of global corporations in African trouble spots such as Sierra Leone or Equatorial Guinea one year and the next be on a mission to train opposition forces in Syria or supplement the Iraqi government's ill-disciplined armed forces. One such group is Blackwater, recently rebranded Academi. Former British army officer and security expert James Le Mesurier, worked for Blackwater in its murderous operations in Iraq. In 2014 he founded the infamous White Helmets in Syria, allegedly to defend civilians in conflict zones and provide critical humanitarian and medical aid. At last we saw a merger of deceptively progressive media activism and the kind of dirty tricks operations many believed the CIA had ceased to undertake in Central America. We now have videographic evidence of Humanitarian aid workers colluding with the same Islamic fundamentalist militias that the US denies supporting. Well-intentioned politicians and former aid workers, such as the late Jo Cox, naively lent their support to this organisation and as a result many worldwise Guardian readers developed a new worldview that pitted the forces of progress represented by the EU, NATO and NGOs against the forces of reactionary nationalism personified by their new bêtes noires of Bashar Al Assad and Vladimir Putin. This simplistic worldview could point to Assad's brutal repression and autocratic rule as well as Putin's alleged corruption and anachronistic views on homosexuality.
https://www.youtube.com/embed/YmjMZbaMsF8
Many analysts, myself included, sought to explain recent military conflicts purely in terms of superpower politics and economic expedience, e.g. privileged access to key resources such as oil. It seemed logical to attribute US interventions in the Middle East to US corporate imperialism Others opted for convoluted explanations that typically implicated Israel. Thirteen years after the US occupied Iraq their Air Force is still bombing insurgents, while its ally Saudi Arabia is busy bombing the Houthi militia and loyalists in Yemen. Let su not forget the US's pivotal role in arming and funding opposition militias in Syria. The Middle East quagmire has led to the emergence of more virulent strands of Islamic fundamentalism whose influence has infected not only the Middle East and South Asia, but growing Muslim communities in Europe and North America. This begs the question to what extent do these wars benefit ordinary Americans? After all many of us fall into the trap of claiming that the Americans invaded Iraq and Afghanistan, the Americans destabilised Libya and Syria or the Americans sold arms to Saudi Arabia and Israel. In reality most Americans did no such thing. Their government did. Worse still even many politicians are woefully unaware of their government's role in destabilising much of the world. The US State Department will never admit to funding head-chopping Islamic extremists. It simply claims to have supported Syrian opposition forces who want to see the replacement of the current Baathist regime with a more democratic system. Traditionally a large cross section of patriotic Americans would have supported whatever the US military and secret services did abroad because they believed, mistakenly in my opinion, that such actions ultimately served to defend and broaden the reach of the liberal, democratic and free market values on which their country was founded or at least the kind of prosperous and socially cohesive society that had evolved by the late 1960s. However, many have begun to question this logic. How did US interventions in the Middle East help ordinary Americans back home? They may just have given the United States a few more years of cheap oil, thus delaying an inevitable transition to more more fuel-efficient vehicles. Yet our ruling elites expect North Americans and Europeans to pay the price of a never-ending series of wars, flows of migrants and refugees and resurgent Islamic fundamentalism, a rival strain of global cultural convergence. All for a few barrels of oil.
Something Bigger Is Afoot: Global Realignment
When the world learned that the US electorate had failed to endorse Hillary Clinton and had let a former reality TV star and property mogul Donald Trump win instead, the neoliberal media erupted in indignation. Throughout the campaign the BBC could only discuss how to prevent the accidental election of a populist demagogue because of wild conspiracy theories about Hillary's email server. As it became clear that Trump had indeed won and may break with over 30 years of military and political interventionism combined with free trade and open borders, the mainstream media began to change their tune. If the world's strongest economic power will no longer spearhead the globalist project because it jeopardises the security of its own citizens, who will? What follows is admittedly conjecture as neoconservatives within the Republican Party, not least those allied with Vice President Mike Pence, may keep the USA firmly within the globalist camp. The linchpin in this realignment is not Theresa May or Angela Merkel, but Vladimir Putin. There are now no major ideological differences between mainstream conservatives opinion in Russia and United States. They all support the same basic values of strong families, limited government, hard work and enterprise. Today only the government account for just 35.8% of the Russian economy and 41.6% of the US economy. By contrast the UK figure is 48.5% (France 56.1%, Germany 45.4%). A bilateral trade agreement between Russia and the US would be of huge mutual benefit. Russia has immense resources and the US still leads the world in structural engineering. In a near future where most mundane jobs can be automated, big business will no longer need a large pool of malleable cheap labour. Why should the US continue to waste vast resources trying to reshape Middle East and build a new world order in its image, if the cost vastly outweighs any benefits to its current citizens. A deal with Russia and continued friendly relations with Canada, Australia and Japan could give US businesses access to vast resources without the high political and military costs associated with interventions in the more densely populated regions of the world.
Yesterday Nick Clegg, the former leader of the British Liberal Democratic Party and passionate supporter of the European Union, voiced his concerns about Trump's alleged friendship with Vladimir Putin. After dismissing the idea of a European Army as a wild conjecture during the recent EU referendum debate, Mr Clegg urged Britain to align militarily the new EU Armed Forces to oppose Russian expansionism. Here Mr Clegg makes a fundamental error of judgement. While the USSR undoubtedly had expansionist aims and Soviet troops were until 1990 stationed as far west as Berlin and Prague, Russia only has a few border disputes with countries that were historically part of the Russian Empire and have large Russian speaking populations. Russia has no immediate strategic need to occupy Ukraine or invade tiny Estonia. Russia has plenty of land and resources and has managed surprisingly well with sanctions imposed by EU and US. However, it would like to maintain its longstanding commercial and cultural ties with these countries. Ukraine and Baltic States could prosper as intermediaries between Central Europe and Russia. Amazing the establishment media here hate Putin so much, they are willing to entertain the possibility of new military alliance, potentially with the USA, to oppose Russia. We must ask whose interests such a conflict would serve.
The worst human rights abuses in today's frenetic world occur, not unsurprisingly, in regions under the greatest environmental stress, i.e. those least able to provide their people with a comfortable standard of living, namely most of the Middle East, North and West Africa, Pakistan, Afghanistan, China, Burma and parts of Central America. Many of these countries are close allies of the US and/or NATO. How can one justify belligerence against Russia because it fails to share the West's values on homosexuality and has purportedly very high levels of corruption (though whether corruption is greater in Russia than in the US or EU is matter for reasonable debate), while selling arms to and collaborating closely with Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Bahrain ? These countries are not just repressive dictatorships with extreme levels of state-sanctioned corruption, they enforce a strict Islamic code on women's rights to education and workplace equality and outlaw homosexuality completely. If we cared about human rights, surely we should impose a trade embargo against these countries and refuse to buy any of their products until they adopt our standards of morality?
Let's forget about all the moral case for disengaging with the Middle East, the business case is much stronger. I disliked Donald Trump's simplistic rhetoric against Islamic extremists and his offensive bad hombre reference to illegal Mexican immigrants who statistically commit a very high percentage of crimes in the US. However, the USA cannot accommodate everyone in the world who would like to take their slice of American prosperity. Just consider Nigeria, with a current population of some 190 million and fertility rate still over 5 children per woman. Its population is projected to rise to some 500 million by 2050. Most Nigerians now live in or around major urban centres and are keen to emulate the consumption patterns of North Americans. Only a naive policy advisor could fail to envisage potential socio-environmental problems as hundreds of millions leave the developing world to seek prosperity in richer countries. One would have to be amazingly naive to believe that most of these new citizens of the affluent world will acquire the kind of high tech skills we will need in 2050. If the destiny of many of current US citizens is a life of welfare dependence under the guise of the basic income, why should we subsidise 100s of millions of new citizens in the US rather than Africa, the Middle East or elsewhere. If the likes of Amazon want a larger pool of keen consumers, do they really need to live in the United States? Moreover, if existing information technology can let us communicate instantly with people all over the world, do we need to move physically to another country to share our cultural experiences? Indeed we could live together more peacefully if each national community had its own cultural space where its own rules apply. Modern telecommunications ensure that we are still aware of other ways of life. If you think all women should conceal their bodies and faces, move to a country where such rules apply. If on the other hand you're quite happy to bare all at the beach on a hot summer's day, you may visit locales where naturism is tolerated. Believe me, over the next 50 years we will have plenty of contentious moral issues to debate. Should we allow euthanasia for mental illness sufferers or human cloning? Both these controversies have huge implications and thus must be held to the strictest standards of open public debate. This cannot be done in a world of poorly educated welfare claimants dependent on corporate benevolence.
Personally, I suspect many will soon be very disappointed with Donald Trump's presidency, but not because he will reintroduce anachronistic discrimination against women, blacks or homosexuals (a mere figment of the infantile left's imagination), but because he will be a prisoner of the same neocon lobbyists who held sway under Clinton, Bush and Obama. However, if his administration seeks peace with Russia and withdraws from Middle East after eliminating ISIS, while renegotiating trade deals in the interests of working class Americans, the globalist cabal may well move to Berlin. If NATO splits, it will not because the USA abandoned Europe, but because globalists want war with Russia.
I just don't know how they can pull this off without involving other key military players such as Saudi Arabia (the world 4th largest military spender), India or even China. If you imagine Europe 20 years from now with a large and politically engaged Muslim population allied with Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan (and what about Iran?), the mind boggles. We'd have a Middle Euroasian Union comprising the Arab World, European Union, South West Asia, North Africa and possibly West Africa as far as Nigeria. We could call this new superbloc, Globalistan. Its official religion would be Political Correctness and its official language Globish, with only partial mutual intelligibility with Oceanic English.
Once again we return to the superseded left vs right spectrum or is it good vs bad, collectivism vs individualism, state control vs private enterprise, equality vs meritocracy or ecological responsibility vs economic growth? Few real world issues can be simplified on a one-dimensional scale.
Some would now describe some of my opinions as embarrassingly rightwing, an epithet often applied to outmoded ideas. What would I have thought 30 to 40 years ago if I had realised that later in life I would ascribe to fiercely reactionary views on topics as diverse as transgender rights or immigration. Back then I supported sexual freedom between consenting adults and recognised the benefits of cultural exchanges and sustainable migration. I always defended immigrants from the irrational prejudices of angry natives who considered themselves superior to their neighbours recently arrived from far-flung former British colonies. I've consistently argued against imperialism, especially that of my own country and its most powerful allies. So what's changed? Have I suddenly become a gay-bashing xenophobe, intolerant of any divergence from the mainstream British culture of some mythical golden era? Not quite. In truth my core values haven't changed at all. Society has. Since my adolescent activism in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, the neo-Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party and my brief flirting with the Revolutionary Communist Party, now regrouped as Spiked Online, I may have lost confidence in the ability of a command economy to deliver a socialist utopia. Nonetheless I have steadfastly opposed all military, economic and social policies that I believe will disempower commoners, destabilise functioning societies or strengthen the power-hungry elites who run the military-industrial complex. In essence I've advocated environmentalism, anti-militarism, decentralisation and mixed economy social democracy, a practical recognition that only private enterprise is versatile enough to develop the kind of technological innovations we will need in the coming century, but left to its own devices capitalism will always tend towards oligopolies. While I've fluctuated from periods of techno-pessimism to cautious techno-optimism, I've only recently grasped the true relationship between rapid advances in informatics and biotechnology on the one hand and an unprecedented rate of societal change on the other. I had mistakenly anticipated that a global economic meltdown would have reversed the seemingly unstoppable process of economic and cultural globalisation and with it the growing dominance of mass consumer fetishism. Alas I have to report global cultural homogenisation shows no signs of abating any time soon, but is fast leading us into unchartered territory.
For the life of me I cannot recall any debates back in the 70s and 80s on gay marriage or using limited public resources to allow single parents or gay couples to procreate without an opposite-sex partner through state-subsidised fertility treatment, initially only available for married couples unable to conceive for medical reasons. Before the turn of the millennium the idea that a child is best raised with a loving mother and father was uncontroversial. For most of us it was just the received wisdom of thousands of years of human civilisation. Of course, it's not always possible for children to grow up with their biological parents. They may not have had a steady relationship at the time of conception, the father may have died at war or at work or the mother may have met an early death through an incurable disease. In some dysfunctional families the children may well have been better off if the abusive parent left, but surely we should investigate the socio-economic circumstances that may engender such troublesome behaviour. However, until recently we always tried through our extended family and local community to recreate as far as possible the ideal of a mother and father team. My mother spent the first three years of her life in an orphanage before my grandmother, working as a chambermaid, married my step grandfather to form a viable family. When things go wrong, as they inevitably do in life, how should society intervene to give everyone the best chance in life? In just 40 years we have moved from debating sexual freedom to redefining not just marriage but the whole concept of families, who when deprived of their biological foundations become little more than temporary guardians monitored by the state. We've transitioned from trying to understand why people may have sexual urges towards others of the same sex to laying the foundations of a brave new world in which procreation is outsourced to fertility clinics.
Do any of these concerns suddenly make me a rabid rightwinger? Certainly not by 1980s standards. I do not want the state interfering unduly with people's private lives, but believe we should respect natural procreation and biological distinctions.
Nothing disgusts me more than the classic ex-pat mentality, the idea that you can live in a country with a different culture to your own, but expect the locals to adapt to your ways rather than making an effort to learn their language and respect their customs. In some countries British ex-pats form parallel communities and see locals as mere servants. To some extent the British are lucky for many are eager to learn or practice their English with native speakers. You can visit some Spanish resorts and barely hear any Spanish or Catalan. Until recently I would have dismissed such cultural arrogance as a byproduct of Anglo-American imperialism and may have felt at least in part guilty. Yet today ordinary citizens of nearly all affluent countries feel increasingly alienated by the fast pace of social and cultural change. It doesn't matter if you're Swedish, English, Spanish, French, German, Italian or North American, your community and cultural landscape are being socially engineered out of all recognition.
Shortly after the Soviet Union collapsed, Francis Fukuyama wrote the End of History and the Last Man. Western Liberal Democracy had triumphed and the American Dream of personal freedom, entrepreneurialism and civic pride would gradually spread around a peaceful global community of free and independent nations. Yet history has not stood still. The core conservative values of most North Americans and Europeans now appear rather outdated as the liberal elites promote an increasingly illiberal agenda under the false pretexts of multiculturalism, social justice and economic growth. The more they talk about equality, the greater the educational and monetary divide between the new upper classes and the dumbed down masses. The more they talk about diversity, the more cultural homogenisation and migratory flows suppress centuries of gradual cultural evolution, diversification and exchange. The more they talk about social justice, the more they create new categories of people unable to fend for themselves and completely dependent on state handouts. Indeed Professor Fukuyama's historical stasis lasted little more than a decade. Back in the 1990s it seemed the European Union and North America would gradually converge on the kind of liberal social democracy I could live with and we only had to contend with environmental challenges and regional conflicts that we viewed as hangovers from an intolerant past. However, the emerging transnational elites did not seem content just to make our existing nation states work better in the interests of their citizens, they wanted to replace nation states, the very bedrock of liberal democracy, with regional superstates that would eventually merge into a one world government. This is not some wild conspiracy theory either, mainstream social scientists now openly advocate a borderless world (See the Nation State is an Outdated Concept ). Their only concern is how to sell their postmodern vision of a homogenised world run by enlightened technocrats to the underclasses, still inconveniently attached to their traditional ways.
Parallel Visions of the Future
In the back of my mind I've long had three dystopian visions of our future. One is an Orwellian future of absolute state control. Orwell certainly learned much from his experiences in the poverty-stricken European cities of the 1930s, the Spanish Civil War and working in the BBC's war propaganda department during the 4 short years of the Anglo-Soviet Agreement. Orwell saw how the Soviet system merely empowered a new ruling class and perhaps by 1948 had concluded that the Western World would soon emulate the Soviet model. Yet his dystopia lacked sophistication and relied on rather conspicuous means of social surveillance. Aldous Huxley's 1931 Brave New World seemed for many years little more than a far-fetched sci-fi dystopia that the forces of democracy and liberalism would avert long before the necessary technology became available. Aldous Huxley's techno-optimism would be blunted by another world war, the 1970s oil crisis and apparent limits to technological progress. My third dystopian scenario would involve no hidden agendas or conspiracies, merely systemic breakdown as technology fails to meet growing demand. James Howard Kunstler is probably one of the most outspoken technopessimists on the planet. He's written extensively on the myopic idiocy of suburbia (Geography of Nowhere) and the coming energy crisis (The Long Emergency). Others such as Richard Heinberg, author of the Party's Over and exponent of the peak oil theory, are a little more upbeat as long as we transition to renewable energy, cut consumption and stabilise our population. However, their dire predictions of economic collapse have yet to materialise. The global economy may be built on debt, but the Chinese, Indian, Brazilian and Nigerian economies have continued to grow as have the number of cars, refrigerators and mobile phones. Our enlightened elites may talk about the dangers of climate change, but they are going literally full steam ahead with their global economic growth plans. We may not see it quite that way in the formerly affluent West, but Nigeria's largest city Lagos is now a sprawling metropolis with over ten million inhabitants and multilane superhighways while India now has nearly as many smartphones as it has inhabitants.
Infantile Left and Paranoid Right
Before the Internet age had begun in earnest, environmental depredation and techno-totalitarianism presented only challenges that transcended traditional political divides. Environmentalism, to me, meant a concern for the long-term sustainability and wellbeing of our society, rather than short-term economic growth. Likewise concern about techno-totalitarianism appealed to traditional liberal values of free speech and individual freedom. I first became aware of political correctness in the early 1990s. Honestly, it just seemed a joke. I really could not see anything wrong with saying chairperson rather than chairman, and never approved of disparaging ethnic markers. Little did I know that hackneyed politically correct speech would soon usher in an age of Orwellian language police and a new concept of hate speech that could suppress viewpoints that would have been mainstream only a couple of decades ago. Today feminists such as Germaine Greer are silenced for expressing honest opinions about transsexuals.
The 1990s may have been a relatively tranquil era for Western Europeans and North Americans, but peace was a short-lived illusion. Civil wars continued to rage in the former Yugoslavia and more catastrophically in the Congo, Rwanda, Somalia and much of Central Asia. Under Boris Yeltsin former KGB apparatchiks made billions by taking over former state enterprises, while millions of ordinary Russians starved or froze to death. As bad as the Soviet Union may have been, since the famines of the 1930s and the devastating death toll of the Second World War, the state had tried to provide all citizens with food, shelter and heating. Only the allure of mass consumerism and greater trade with the outside world prevented Russians from voting their former communist masters back into power. Vladimir Putin seemed the natural successor to an increasingly unpopular and alcoholic Boris Yeltsin. As Russia regained confidence and Putin cracked down on the worst abuses of the country's gangster oligarchs, many of whom left Russia for the US, UK or Israel, Western leaders would wine and dine him for Russia remained a mere shadow of its former self, while NATO had expanded as far as the Baltic States with US military bases in neighbouring Uzbekistan and Mongolia. However, Russia today has turned its back on top-down state control and ironically is more closely aligned with the kind of conservative mentality of strong families, patriotism and minimalistic government common in 1950s USA, while the United States is moving in the opposite direction towards more state and/or corporate control. In 2014 the Russian State account for just 35% of its GDP compared to 48% in the UK, 56% in France and 41% in the US.
Many on the left, or notional left to be more precise, failed to understand the true purpose of New Labour. We criticised it for being too neoliberal and not radical enough. Neoliberal had come to refer to a strand of free market capitalism that wanted to dismantle the welfare state and empower global corporations. At least that was how it seemed in the Thatcher years. To the left, neoliberalism was rightwing and only liberal in terms of the freedom it afforded big business. However, the role of government never really shrank, not even under Margaret Thatcher's premiership. Welfare and social services continued to grow throughout the 1980s. Inefficient nationalised industries such as steel, coal and car manufacturing were privatised as were later telecoms, railways, electricity and water suppliers, but this masked the growth of transnational organisations responsible for managing every aspect of our lives. Contractors such as Serco, G4S, Capita and Veolia began to run public services as diverse as prisons, refuse collection and accounting. A growing proportion of workers did not make anything or provide any essential services, they just micromanaged a hypercomplex system. More startling has been the growth of the third sector and a vast maze of awareness raising pressure groups and charities who fill a void left by the demise of traditional family and community support structures to cope with permanent social insecurity. Neoliberalism has not led to a new era of individual freedom and small-scale private enterprise, but rather to a steady transfer of power away from traditional nation states, who may intervene to defend local small businesses, to global corporations. Today most small businesses are effectively freelance service providers or skilled workers whose contracts with big business can be terminated at short notice.
However, on lifestyle issues the neoliberal intelligentsia seem perfectly aligned with the trendy left. I only became active on Twitter in 2014, but one of my earliest followers was one Andy Woodfield, who heads up the diversity team of Price Waterhouse Cooper. His tweets are uncomprimisingly positive about all aspects of globalisation and social engineering. I think the PwC language police are in the process of phasing out the adjective ungood as it might trigger the occasional critical thought. Why would an audit firm such as PwC, founded to help large corporations avoid tax, be so concerned with promoting the misnamed Equality and Diversity agenda? Shouldn't PwC just focus on its core business of accounting? Besides how can they afford such plush and spacious offices in some of the world's most expensive cities? I used to walk past their shiny office building sandwiched between the Houses of Parliament, City Hall and Ernst and Young's London HQ. The truth is tax consultancy is only a small part of their operations. Their true role is the creation of a new world order that serves the long-term interests of their corporate clients. They're in the change management business, overseeing the suppression of traditional cultures and their replacement with a global culture of socially engineered psychoanalysed individuals. Big business has now coopted the language of the old anti-establishment left. They claim to want a fairer, greener, more egalitarian, more inclusive and simply nicer world. Monsanto wants to tackle hunger through biotechnology. Starbucks wants to help African coffee growers through its fairtrade brands. Facebook wants to combat racism, misogyny and homophobia by monitoring social network posts, while HSBC helps young people set up small businesses. Happy consumers can help by choosing brands that reflect ethical responsibility and positive change. Indeed in the mindset of the metropolitan elite, the only bad guys are those who want to limit the freedom of our benevolent global corporations, such as Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump or Bashar Al-Assad. These are the Orwellian Emmanuel Goldsteins of our era, people every progressive person should hate.
Most on the left have long ceased to oppose global corporatocracy. They still rant and rave against greedy energy companies and CEOs, but their main gripe these days is that corporations do not pay enough tax. Translated into English this means the do-gooder left worries that some branches of the global mafia do not sufficiently subsidise local branches of the global mafia. As it happens it's not in the interests of global retailers such as Amazon for Europeans or North Americans to be so poor that we can't afford to buy their goods online any more. They are perfectly cognisant of the fact that the next wave of automation will render most jobs in manufacturing, transportation, agriculture, food processing and even catering obsolete. Big business needs big government not only to subsidise its customers, but also regulate their behaviour through education, social services, psychiatry and policing. The tamed masses need do be given the illusion of democratic control. Whenever a local government reaches a new social engineering milestone, the progressive classes give themselves a pat on the back as if a grassroots movement has just achieved a breakthrough. Likewise whenever a new technology enables a new service or consumer experience, big business can present itself as a force for social progress. Manufacturers no longer need us as workers, only as loyal consumers and marketers. We should have seen it coming. Right through the first decade of the millennium I marvelled as manufacturers continued to outsource production and lay off workers, while retailers expanded. How can we have an economy in which people only sell products and services, but don't make anything? I wondered. In a traditional capitalist economy my observation would be perfectly correct. The retail economy relies on wealth ultimately generated by the productive economy, which is increasingly in the hands of global corporations. So why should the likes of Amazon pay more taxes to subsidise consumption in the UK if its real wealth comes from all over the world? Why should it not subsidise Kenyans or Peruvians? Why should it not support social engineering to encourage more people to flock to regions where consumer culture already reigns supreme?
The real political divide is no longer between left and right. It's between conformists and anti-conformists, globalists and nativists, establishment cheerleaders and anti-authoritarians. If you trust the new coalition between statists and corporatists, your rhetoric may sound progressive but you are unmistakably conformist. I, on the other hand, remain a free thinker and support whatever policies seem to redress the balance of power away from unaccountable elites to people like you and me and more important lead to the kind of sustainable society that can best safeguard the future of our descendants.
Would global corporations bankroll a universal welfare system without seeking to control our lives?
Imagine a society that not only provided all your existential needs, but also gave you wide-ranging lifestyle freedoms and did not compel you to hold down a mundane job just to afford the necessities of life. This usually means clean water, food and shelter, but nowadays we could probably add a few more goods and services to our list of bare essentials. In Western Europe a minimum viable standard of living would include a cooker, fridge, washing machine, a shower with hot and cold running water, heating and last but not least telecommunications devices to enable everyone to stay in touch and enjoy 24/7 access to the world's media. In the not too distant past many ordinary Western Europeans had to make do without all the latest mod cons just so we could afford the basics, like food. If you couldn't afford a washing machine, you could always take your dirty clothes to a laundrette. If you couldn't afford a television set, you could always listen to an inexpensive radio or read a book borrowed from the library. If you could not afford to buy or rent a place of your own, your employer might provide temporary digs. Indeed the whole concept of a universal right to a minimum standard of living via state welfare is relatively recent. Until the early 20th century the church would have provided emergency accommodation for the respectful needy, but by and large the destitute only had two escape routes. They could find casual work at the going rate or, in the case of attractive young women, seek an affable husband. In either case the underlings had to show deference to the hand that would feed them. The only way to free oneself from the tyranny of bosses or financially dominant spouses was, and I suggest still is, to have the means to feed oneself. A smallholder may own just a few fields, work long hours to raise livestock and tend crops, but at least he's his own boss and, in a country that respects personal freedom, may lead his life as he chooses provided he respect the privacy and freedom of his neighbours and adheres to common etiquette of decency and courtesy when engaging with the wider community. I use the third person male pronoun here because historically women from humble backgrounds would aspire to motherhood rather than self-sufficiency without a husband. Nonetheless, most smallholdings were family concerns. Husbands and wives worked as a team and although men tended to work longer hours outdoors and do more of the heavy lifting, few could doubt the pivotal role that women played in raising the next generation.
For most of human history, unless you inherited considerable wealth, your only route to greater personal freedom was through hard work and dedication. All most people expected of their state was to safeguard their acquired rights and protect them against raiders who may seize the fruits of their labour. Before the industrial revolution the greatest liberation for most peasants was to unshackle themselves from the burdens of slavery or sharecropping and to cease being in debt to a feudal master. However, with the advent of capitalism and the growth of a working class wholly dependent on their employers, the downtrodden embraced the appeal of collectivism. If technological progress demanded extreme specialisation, growing interdependence and massive infrastructure that only large organisations could conceivably provide, then our future freedom logically depends on our ability to control the levers of power for our collective good. Most early workers' struggles focussed on bread and butter issues of survival, primarily working conditions and wages. Workers demanded the right to withdraw their labour and called on their governments to enforce minimum health and safety standards. Nobody denied that everyone had a duty to pull their weight and contribute to wider society by working to the best of their ability. Few anticipated that the underclasses of the future would not be 8 year old boys sent down coal mines or 13 year old girls working as chambermaids, but workless welfare claimants trapped in a cycle of psychological dependence on external authorities who may regulate every aspect their lives. While workers may always withdraw their labour to reassert their rights, welfare dependents are at the mercy of their benefactors.
Extended Childhood
Traditionally two main groups of commoners were exempted from the onus of work: the very young and the very old. While children have to mature physically and mentally and learn some core skills before their induction into the adult world, the elderly have earned their keep through a life of dedication to their family and community. Even in primitive societies young children play and the old relax and share their wisdom. As the industrial age progressed, businesses began to rely more on technical and intellectual skills and a less on sheer muscle power. Capitalist countries expanded mandatory schooling not just to appease demands for greater social justice, but to equip industry with a literate workforce better able to meet the challenges of greater technical complexity, which even in relatively low-skill jobs involved reading and understanding detailed instructions. Not until 1921 did the UK implement the Fisher Act raising the compulsory school age to 14. It took another 52 years for the school leaving age to rise to 16. Today over 90% of British teenagers remain in education or training at least until the age of 18, while those advancing to further education, has risen from around 10% in 1970 to 45% today. While the needs of business have changed, the UK has a massive undersupply of engineers and technicians and an oversupply of graduates in people management, marketing, psychology, law and humanities in general. Yet employers still complain about graduates with poor writing or number-crunching skills. Not surprisingly we've seen a fair amount of grade inflation and degrees from all but the best universities have been greatly devalued. As a result most graduates do not pursue their desired career. Not everyone can be a sports journalist or an equality and diversity training officer. Long gone are the days of secure permanent jobs where one could progress from an apprenticeship and work one's way through the ranks to attain well-remunerated senior role. Now many university graduates find themselves in a similar position to that of schools leavers only 30 years ago. They have to try their hands at a series of uninspiring low-paid jobs before they find an opening in a role vaguely related to their degree. Many may have to retrain in something more practical, such as nursing or plumbing, once they become aware of the limited commercial value of their sociology degree. Only a small minority of graduates, and it's hard to quantify just how few, have acquired the kind of scientific excellence we will need in the coming artificial intelligence revolution. We now employ more people to manage other people or to create ephemeral media campaigns than to develop and produce the technology we will need to survive and overcome environmental constraints on human development in the coming century. Today we have more persuaders than doers or more talkers than walkers.
The future of work
Much of Britain's manufacturing base has migrated abroad since the 1970s. Today's factories are more automated and mainly assemble or just repackage components made elsewhere. Owing to rapid technological innovation, product lines tend to have short lifespans and production facilities are regularly retooled along with their workforce, who are now viewed as expendable free agents. This helps explain the rise of agency workers and employers' preference for itinerant workers without local roots. As soon as advances in robotics can automate operations in a cost-effective manner, management can lay off most human workers. Driverless vehicles are already a reality. We merely need to perfect artificial intelligence to ensure their reliability in challenging and unpredictable traffic conditions. The writing is on the wall for long distance truck drivers and for millions of other skilled workers, whose monotonous occupations follow a programmable set of routines and respond to a predictable range of environmental stimuli. I suspect in the not too distant future smart vacuum cleaners will be versatile enough to climb stairs and automatically adapt to different floor types, reach into nooks and crannies and potentially call another robot to move furniture. In all likelihood most robots will not resemble human beings at all, but will be polymorphic with a multitude of attachments and tools for different tasks. Unlike human beings they will be easily serviceable and reprogrammable. Even the world's oldest freelance profession, often not so euphemistically categorised as sex work, now faces competition from lifelike erotic dolls.
However, the main stumbling block to the adoption of robotics is not the theoretical feasibility of artificial intelligence and nanotechnology, but the collapse of our underlying industrial infrastructure due to our gross mismanagement of finite resources and our inability to develop safe renewable energy able to meet our growing demands. We have probably already passed peak oil and over the coming 50 years we're likely to hit a peak human population of 10 billion. If we factor in the threats of climate change, clean water shortages in the areas of fastest population growth and insatiable demand for cars and other consumer goods in the developing world, we clearly face unprecedented environmental challenges that can only be addressed by taming human behaviour or significantly boosting industrial efficiency. Short of colonising other planets, the alternative may well be a world war over control of mission-critical resources.
Work and Society
Many think of work as drudgery we endure to earn a living. We would rather relax or pursue hobbies that inspire us. Few of us would enjoy getting down on our hands and knees to scrub the kitchen floor or crawling through narrow underground tunnels to mine coal. Yet during the early industrial revolutions millions of working class women and men had to endure these conditions just to fend for themselves and their children. When millions lost their jobs in the great depression of 1930s, the fledgling welfare state offered little consolation. Without work millions felt completely unfulfilled and would go to extraordinary lengths to relieve themselves of the shame and stigma associated with joblessness. The Jarrow March of 1936, ironically as the economy was picking up again in Britain, exemplified social attitudes of the era. Workers did not expect luxuries or endless charity, they just demanded a chance to earn a living to restore their dignity. The post-war boom of the 1950s and 1960s was built largely on a skilled working class whose earnings and leisure time rose as technological advances began to favour intellect and proficiency and over muscle-power and perseverance. It was a short-lived age of full employment, stable families and a narrowing social divide, unfortunately reliant on state subsidies and trade barriers to protect workers from unfair competition and unregulated market forces. Big business soon realised it could no longer boost its profits and expand markets in such a protectionist environment, holding it often at the mercy of militant trade unions. By the early 1970s UK industry had become both outdated and notoriously inefficient compared to their German, Japanese or Korean competitors. As the pendulum swung from protected markets and state-subsidised industries to free market economics, much of British manufacturing moved abroad. While some former manufacturing workers moved to the growing service sector, many were left behind. While material living standards have continued to grow, since the 1980s we've seen a widening gap not just in terms of wealth, but in education and personal attainment. The emergence of the trendy professional classes as the mainstay of our economic and cultural activity may well be but a harbinger of things to come. By 2012 over 60% of workers were tax-negative, i.e. received more benefits and direct services than they paid in tax. If we take into account indirect services consumed, the situation is even more unequal and this disparity is growing. By 2014 the top 25% of earners paid 75% of income tax and the 1% alone paid over a quarter. The only way of closing the income gap is to close the education gap, not in terms of nominal qualifications or years of formal schooling, but in terms of ensuring a much larger proportion of the population acquire the kind of intellectual and social skills we will need in the cybernetic age.
Today the descendants of the old Labour movement not only champion welfare rights, but assume a great many working age adults will never be gainfully employed owing to mental or physical disabilities, concepts which are now much more loosely and widely understood than in the recent past. In the future most work will be either intellectual or social, requiring us to focus our creative and emotional skills and effort on endeavours that serve the wider social good rather just satisfy personal desires. An ideal job is one that you both enjoy and can help others. Your material or financial reward for your effort is a direct measure of its utility to the current socio-economic system. If you possess a rare talent the reward for your creative endeavours may be substantial. Thus an elite of sportspeople and entertainers can earn a fortune simply due to the inertia of market forces. While Premier League footballers may have to train regularly and exert themselves for 90 minutes on the pitch before chanting fans, a hospital cleaner will typically exert much more effort for a fraction of the income. Yet people's lives may depend on clean hospitals, but not on the outcome of a soccer match. Your salary is mainly of a function of your expendability. To what extent is your role mission-critical to your employer? If your employer is a major football club earning tens of millions of pounds in advertising revenue, broadcasting rights and ticket sales, their main concern is your ability to help win games and keep their investors and customers happy. While millions can play football, only a few hundred in the whole wide world possess the kind of rare talent that can make or break a sports entertainment business and a handful can command eye-watering sums, such as the record £89 million Manchester United paid for French international, Paul Pogba. That figure could employ around 4700 hospital cleaners on the national living wage and is a staggering 280 thousand times greater than the mean GDP per capita of Paul Pogba's parental homeland of Guinea. A hospital cleaner can be replaced literally at the drop of a hat, while a world-leading football striker cannot. Gone are the days when hospital cleaners could go on strike for more pay. These services are now predominantly outsourced to agencies. Back in the 1960s and 70s public institutions saw it as their duty not only to provide public services, but also to employ local workers who might get a much worse deal in the private sector. These days a hospital does not employ cleaners, it has a contract with an agency, which in turn procures the best human or technical resources for the job at hand. I recall working in the BBC's plush open plan offices in London's White City. At 7pm every weekday evening when most staff had left, a team of mainly Portuguese speaking cleaners would mop up the mess left by higher-paid BBC staffers. I know this because on one occasion their supervisor had to impart bilingual instructions to accommodate an agency worker from Ghana, who didn't speak Portuguese, but this was in the heart of English speaking world. Yet the same BBC struggles to admit the impact of globalisation on lower-skilled native workers (most of whom deserted the capital decades ago and could not afford to return). Currently machine-assisted human cleaners are still more cost-effective than robots, but as robots become smarter and more versatile human workers will focus more on supervisory and engineering roles. That leaves very little for those of us who do not possess exceptional analytical, creative or people management skills.
Most of us are what social researchers might call semi-skilled, i.e. we've acquired many practical skills through hands-on experience, but lack outstanding talents that set us apart from the crowd. In the recent past some semi-skilled labourers, without formal qualifications in their line of expertise, honed their skills to such an extent as to become invaluable to their employers or clientele, but with outsourcing and automation we've lost much of that traditional skills base for good. Many semi-skilled workers may well have much more experience than a someone who has been formerly trained, but their skills can be easily learned not just by millions of other workers, but by machines. Millions of us enjoy cooking from fresh ingredients, but it's often much more cost-effective just to buy a ready-made meal. Once we rely supermarkets to supply food, it makes little difference if a machine prepares an elaborate recipe from fresh ingredients or we do it ourselves from separately purchased ingredients. In many practical instances ready-made meals are both cheaper and healthier as otherwise you'd have to buy much larger quantities of the source ingredients, which may well go off before you have a chance to eat them. Fast food outlets have already automated most aspects of food preparation. In the near future human chefs will be a luxury available only to the affluent professional classes, but with more leisure time many will still prefer to engage in a little culinary therapy.
More disturbingly the two dominant narratives of public debate on economics and employment could both prove wrong. Global optimists keep reminding us how our growing economies, reliant on extreme labour mobility, can provide new opportunities for all, while identitarian populists from Donald Trump in the USA to Marine Le Pen in France pretend manufacturing jobs can somehow be repatriated. In reality outsourcing menial tasks to low-wage workers is just a stop-gap solution until robotics becomes more competitive. However, if big business no longer needs semi-skilled labour and only requires a select group of engineers, creatives, managers and entertainers, who is going to buy their products?
Universal Welfare
The answer, so the wishful thinking trendy left tell us, is a universal basic income. I fully appreciate its appeal and take on board the argument that by guaranteeing everyone a basic income we remove not just the stigma associated with joblessness and the humiliation of holding down low-paid non-jobs (burger flippers, shelf stackers or call centre operatives), but we also greatly reduce the immense administrative costs of our current welfare system. Essentially the government would just give everyone a basic income that guarantees a minimum standard of living. If you want more you can undertake paid employment or may be inspired to volunteer in the ever-expanding third sector (charities, campaign groups, NGOs etc.), a great CV-booster when you do decide to get a real job. If you just want to take it easy, you can still survive on your basic income with no questions asked. It would also prevent people from claiming disability status due to some perceived relative handicap, which is really just a natural variation in the human condition or the result of acquired behaviour. However, short of a global revolution bringing all multinationals into public ownership and guaranteeing full transparency and accountability of all organisations responsible for our wellbeing, I think we need to take into account human nature. The strongest basic income evangelists insist it would allow people to unleash their creative minds without fear of losing their salary. Such idealists imagine the world as an extended high-tech hippie commune cum university campus. Were we all sandal-wearing bicycling vegans taking time off to write a book on the history of Mesopotamian basket weaving the basic income would be a great idea. Alas deprived of any motivation to focus one's creative efforts on something useful, most adults will succumb to a blend of junk culture and social gaming, no longer competing on skills, but on personality and worthiness. Our aim in life will no longer be to provide for our family through hard work, but merely to ensure we can gain the same emotional privileges. This helps explain the rise of social justice warriors with a bloated sense of entitlement. The great struggles against real injustice of the past (against slavery, imperialism, starvation wages, misogyny, racism etc.) will descend into a farce as most citizens will become mere beneficiaries of corporate welfare enjoying an extended childhood and just like children, their freedom will be at the mercy of their guardians, the technocratic and managerial elites. If the masses remain blissfully unaware of the activities of the regulating classes, they will be lulled into a false sense of security and treated like children, i.e. rewarded for good compliant behaviour and penalised for antisocial behaviour. Until the late 20th century most societies relied on the labour of the underclasses. Without ordinary workers, crops would not be harvested, houses would not be built, machinery would not be maintained, food would not be processed and distributed, infrastructure would crumble and people would starve. If the underclasses cannot produce a surplus of food, housing and tools, the ruling classes cannot accumulate the wealth they need to maintain their power and privilege through a network of administrators and security forces. In theory the working classes could hold their rulers to ransom. If their rulers failed to allocate enough resources, the underclasses could either rise up and overthrow their masters or switch allegiance to a rival faction or neighbouring fiefdom, especially if they possessed superior technology. Parents care for their children not only through strong emotional bonds, but also because of their future role as purveyors of the family's wealth for they would soon become workers and parents themselves. By contrast in the age of robotics, the workless underclasses will be mere consumers whose only duty will be to conform to social norms. We may well retain the illusion of democratic control via online elections for the most affable middle managers, but effectively we will be beholden to a technocratic upper caste responsible for programming and administering our cyberservants. Over recent decades we've seen a steady transfer of responsibilities from viable two-parent families to a maze of service providers. If something goes wrong, we tend to blame external agencies whether they are suppliers, manufacturers, safety regulators, doctors, nurses, social workers or teachers, because we have learned to accept that many aspects of our lives are out of our direct control. We have internalised the notion that one has to have special training to perform any task not deemed safe for laypeople. We have lost touch with mother nature to such an extent we are unable to accept its limitations. As robots evolve to undertake forever more complex tasks, we can expect the range of safe jobs to narrow to all but a few closely monitored human activities performed in controlled environments, such as eating, drinking, exercising, relaxing, playing or making love. For years officialdom has tended to discourage the old do-it-yourself attitude, while encouraging people to seek specialists. This may be preparing us psychologically for a future when robots replace technicians, decorators, builders, cleaners, nurses, police officers and other social surveillance officers. However, if only the gifted intelligentsia have any understanding of the inner workings of our high-tech world, how will the rest of us hold them to account? The people of the future could well split into distinctive castes along the lines the dumbed-down Eloi and Morlocks in H.G. Well's Time Machine. Slowly but surely we seem to be sleepwalking towards a Huxleyan future of human beings genetically engineered to assume different roles in a chain of command that only members of alpha caste understand.
Visions of the Future
The current rapid pace of technological and economic progress could lead in two apparently divergent but equally dystopian directions. One the one hand technology fails to meet the insatiable demands of a growing number of consumers either through limits to growth, such as peak oil or climate change, or through cataclysmic technical failures such as nuclear power plant explosions, or indeed a combination of both. Such a scenario may kill hundreds of millions of people, but may also forestall a cybergenetic dystopia of complete submission to technology out of the control of ordinary global denizens. On the one hand technology may evolve so fast to control the excesses of human behaviour and thus render both itself and humanity compatible with our planetary life support system. In other words technology will determine our living standards and, indeed, our procreative potential. Arguably it already does. Only last week the London Telegraph reported that Motherless babies are now possible as scientists create live offspring without a female egg. As always the neoliberal press presents the next step in human genetic engineering as a great advance enabling more couples, such as gay dads, to conceive. The next logical step is an artificial womb, whose development is no longer mere science fiction (See Men redundant? Now we don't need women either ). No doubt artificial uteruses will liberate women from the pain and responsibility of pregnancy, but soon biological genders may become obsolete binary categories that belong to a past age of primitive dependence on messy and inconvenient organic procreation. The affluent cyber-managerial classes will inevitably be able to afford better fertility treatment leading all too predictably to the emergence of a super-race, meaning the underclasses will simply lack the intellect to outsmart their rulers, whether humanoid or not.
The Alternative to Basic Income
If you thought the basic income sounds too good to be true, you're probably right. That's what a majority of shrewd Swiss voters concluded earlier this year. They understood that unless you contribute to the functioning of society, you cannot expect to have any meaningful say in the way it's run. You may well have the illusion of democratic control, but it will more like children choosing which flavour of ice-cream they want or which games they want to play during their birthday party. If they misbehave their true masters will drug them or confine them to their bedrooms. If their life support system fails, all they can do is follow instructions to wait for cybernetic technicians to repair the faults. However, a Huxleyan dystopia is not an inevitability if we wake up to its very real likelihood early enough and ensure all working age adults are directly involved in developing and regulating human-friendly technology. In other words robots should serve us and not vice versa and bioengineering should only ever assist natural human beings as we've evolved over eons. This means preparing the next generation for a high skill future where everyone will have a part to play in the development of our engineered environment. We must be fully aware of the consequences of new technology as the toys of today may become the prison wardens of our near future.
The British Parliament is about to vote on the renewal of the country's US-built and US-controlled nuclear missile shield. In case you didn't know, these nuclear warheads are launched from submarines based in Faslane on the Firth of Clyde, just 20 miles from Glasgow, Scotland.
I've long realised pacifism, while an ideal we should all aspire to, is not a viable option in a dangerous and grotesquely unequal world. Pacifism makes as much sense as open borders without any police surveillance. It might work once we have overcome the dark sides of human nature and established a truly egalitarian and peace loving society in which not only do we all care for each other, but we all trust each other. If you can justify self-defence and accept the need for public institutions to protect us, you have to recognise we need some form of defence, especially in the wake of recent terrorist attacks and attempted coups d'état.
The biggest threats to the security of the British people do not come rival superpowers intent on destroying our infrastructure and killing millions of people, but from unstable militias and unhinged local despots who retaliate against UK involvement in military operations in their neck of the woods. Britain is a prime target of foreign aggressors not because we have failed to destroy their power bases, but because our government's actions in supporting US and NATO interventions has greatly destabilised much of the Middle East, North Africa and Central Asia. A major military power such as Russia, with vast territory of its own, would have little reason to attack the British Isles, unless we became directly involved in a future conflagration with Russia over Ukraine. In such a scenario, were Russia to deploy nuclear warheads against a densely populated country, without the military and economic might for total world domination, the fallout would permanently shatter its international reputation and almost certainly invite disastrous military and/or economic retaliation. In a globally connected world destroying your customers' countries doesn't make much sense unless it&rrsquo;s the only way to gain control of mission-critical resources only available there in abundance.
A quick look at military spending figures for 2015 reveals a changing world. With the notable exception of the United States, which account for over 40% of the global military spending, the countries with the most successful economies have rather modest defence budgets. Even Russia, with around 145 million, only spends 10 billion more than the UK. Most of its military budget is invested in land forces and a large personnel of 771 thousand. Russia is also surrounded by US bases in Eastern Europe, Turkey, Uzbekistan, Mongolia and Japan. Of greater concern should be Saudi Arabia's massive $88 billion defence budget.
What would happen if some madman launched a nuclear attack against us
While NATO's military planners may be fixated with Russia, the real threat comes from an unstable Middle East, especially in the event of a popular uprising in Saudi Arabia and the ascension to power of an anti-Western regime allied with countries such as Pakistan and possibly Iran. They might, at least until the development of viable alternatives, hold the world to ransom through their control of cheap oil, and fight regional wars of conquest just as Saudi Arabia is currently engaged in bombing campaigns in Yemen. However, any nuclear strikes against European cities would kill hundreds of thousands of Muslims too. Nuclear weapons are useless against strategic military targets, unless such targets are conveniently located in remote sparsely populated regions. Indeed to be effective a nuclear attack would have to annihilate enemy territory. A large superpower, like the USA, could wipe out a geographically constrained enemy, albeit with cataclysmic human consequences, but a small militias linked to an ad-hoc state such as Daesh would only succeed in killing people before inviting immediate retaliation against an ill-defined target. A nuclear strike would be the ultimate act of extreme terrorism that no sane commander in chief of a stable country would contemplate even in the event of nuclear attack on their territory, by which time the damage would have been done. The only logical defence would be an advanced anti-nuclear defence shield that could intercept and destroy nuclear warheads before they reach major population centres. Our priority would be to minimise human deaths and neutralise the enemy. Oddly the huge projected £100 and 200 billion budget for the new Trident system over 30 years would be much better spent on more intelligent satellite reconnaissance and surface to air missiles launched from existing submarines but without nuclear warheads. Mail On Sunday columnist Peter Hitchins supported Trident in the cold war days when most of us on the left opposed it, but he rightly says now "To spend all your money of a nuclear weapon for a war that won't happen is like spending all your money on insurance against alien abduction and then neglecting to insure your self against fire and theft."
Deterrence theory relies on convincing your potential enemy that you'd actually deploy your warheads, which would have no tactical advantage. Nuclear weapons are good at two things: mass destruction and complete humiliation. It's what the US did to the Japanese towards the end of Second World War. They could only get away with it because of their massive technological and economic superiority. That's no longer the case. Nuclear war would lead to mutually assured destruction. Keeping nuclear weapons only encourages rogue states from following suit.
Free trade has now become an untouchable sacred cow, which alongside economic growth and free movement of labour forms a sort of mercantile holy trinity. Without free trade, we are told, we would have a smaller variety of more expensive products and, worst of all, economic stagnation. However, all this assumes an idealised world of free markets and a level playing field in terms of environmental regulations, workers' rights, welfare provision and taxation. Such a world of laissez-faire entreprise is pure fantasy as the technologies on which our hypercomplex societies rely require a degree of organisation and material resources only available to the largest corporate players. While small players may often innovate, they need a little help from venture capitalists to win the financial resources required to take their ideas to the next level. If our government doesn't regulate our way of life, other organisations fill the void and regulate human behaviour to suit their quest for greater power. Capitalism, if left unregulated, ultimately destroys itself through its natural tendency to let more successful companies dominate the market, either as oligopoly as in the case of cars and many electronic goods, or as a quasi-monopoly, and as may appear in the case in the productivity software industry. No elected government decided that Adobe Photoshop â„¢ should be the standard image editing application or that Microsoft Wordâ„¢ should be the only word processor acceptable in business, education and government administration. Two large software companies first established a market lead in their respective fields and then through an army of sales agents and lobbyists locked key organisations into their ecosystem, largely by enforcing cryptic file formats that other applications had to deconstruct. They can thus charge government and small businesses whatever they can get away with because key decision makers are unaware of alternatives. It's often hard to work out if one is dealing with public or private organisation and they both behave in similar ways. The prison service has clients rather than inmates and the NHS has customers rather than patients. Both outsource many of their activities to private service companies like Serco, Capgemini, G4S, Virgin Health etc.
The British Isles produces around half of its food and imports most manufactured good and strategic raw materials. We're no longer self-sufficient in oil or gas and even import coal as it works out cheaper than exploiting our last remaining deep-vein coal pits. To add insult to injury we import thousands of tonnes of Chinese steel while letting the British steel industry, once a pioneering world leader, shed most of its workforce. However, for some spurious reason in the current debate on EU membership, both sides seem to agree on one thing: Free trade is good or is it? On the one hand the Remain crowd keep reminding us how 3 million jobs depend on trade with the EU, while the Leave side have just produced Brexit the Movie which advocates an even more globally integrated future than possible within Fortress Europe, a myth that spread in the late 1990s just before the WTO negotiations had completed under the New Labour-appointed EU Commissioner for Trade Peter Mandelson. I'm not alone in having viewed the European Union as the lesser of two evils back in the heady 1990s. It seemed for a while that it could protect workers' rights and environmental standards while nurturing a competitive internal market. Southern Europeans, especially entrepreneurial Northern Italians, prospered as their small and versatile businesses adapted to meet demand for niche products in Northern Europe. However, their competitive advantage would not last long as the EU expanded eastwards and forced governments to remove protectionist tariffs and subsidies. Combined with greater automation and the fast pace of technological change and obsolescence, globalisation led to the failure of thousands of small businesses and rapid rise in youth unemployment and that was before the 2008 credit crunch and Euro crisis.
Economic students learn the old mantra that protectionism always fails. One need not look to extreme examples such as Cuba during its special period in the early 1990s or the former Soviet Bloc, most advanced mixed economies, including the United States, had tightly controlled national or supranational markets until the mid 1990s. Governments understood the advantages of competition, but also the need to retain a skills base in strategic industries and more important maintain full employment and social stability. If the local economy depends on hundreds of small textile businesses, it's no good telling voters they have to adapt to new market conditions with dirt cheap imports from the Far East.
Tariffs are effectively a tax on low pay, poor working conditions and minimal environmental standards. If a competitor from another jurisdiction can undercut local producers because they pay their workers peanuts, dump waste in the sea rather than invest in an expensive effluent treatment plant or pay hardly any taxes in their home country, this is unfair competition. You may get cheaper consumer products in the short term, but unless the workers laid off in your high-wage country can retrain or upskill to fill new vacancies in the service sector, you'll end up paying more in welfare handouts. Thus over the last 20 years of unshackled global trade, the welfare bill has skyrocketed in much of the advanced Western world. While some former manufacturing workers have transitioned to the service sectors, tens of millions have been left behind. Not everyone is cut out for sales, marketing, research, graphic design or informatics. Some can find new niches as personal trainers or dog walkers. Others try their luck with online retail businesses, while others tap into the insatiable demand for instant gratification via sexual services or narcotics. As a result fewer and fewer of us have a direct stake in the real economy responsible for putting food on our tables or a roof over our heads. We simply trade favours and compete for a bigger slice of corporate profits, while in other parts of the world resources are depleted, workers are exploited in slave-labour conditions and natural habitats are destroyed in the name of economic growth.
We could only have free and fair trade if we had a level playing field, i.e. a global minimum wage, global corporation tax, global environmental regulations and workers' rights. Why should Malaysians make kettles for the British market? Why should Indians process English council forms? The two main reasons are for temporary economic expediency and to prevent workers from holding their employers to ransom. Today few groups of organised workers can trump the power of global corporations to move their operations from one part of the world to another or in the longer term to invest in greater automation.
Infantile globalist leftwingers dream of a world with Norwegian workers' rights and welfare provision, Tanzanian consumption levels and cutting edge green technology that will enable everyone to enjoy an Australian lifestyle. I recently exchanged tweets with one deluded leftist who believes in free energy, i.e. a conspiracy by oil companies to deny us free and clean water-powered vehicles. With current levels of youth unemployment and ecological destruction, believers in a such utopian vision live in cloud cuckoo land. Each viable community needs to find its own way to reach the ideal equilibrium of technological progress, environmental protection and social justice. More important everyone needs to feel that are stakeholders in the social and economic life of their country, which requires a strong sense of social cohesion, trust and shared values. Free markets empower unaccountable corporations, while fair trade lets each community decide what is in the best interests of its workers.
What is Fair Trade?
Like many other good things Fair Trade has been hijacked by big business as a sort of ethical kitemark (stamp of approval) to mean some external agency has vouched for minimum workers' rights, earnings and environmental standards. We are supposed to place our blind trust in international bodies supported by big business to monitor their compliance with various well-intentioned regulations. This inevitably empowers larger businesses with sophisticated marketing and PR operations who can afford the additional overheads to the detriment of unscrupulous small businesses. Next-generation automation technology will soon displace banana pickers or coffee plantation workers anyway.
What Fair Trade should mean is trading only when it makes good long-term social and environmental sense. It may be temporarily cheaper to import to apples and tomatoes from Spain, Chile or South Africa, but these fruits grow in the British Isles too and people used to adapt to seasonal fruits and vegetables. As people have grown accustomed to a plentiful supply of seemingly fresh fruit shipped from halfway around the world, we waste much more, offsetting improvements in agricultural yields and preventing the development of feasible alternatives such as the greater use of greenhouses. That doesn't mean we should not import at all, but should aim to be as self-sufficient in staple foods and essential goods as reasonably possible. Certainly it makes little sense to outsource manufacturing of goods mainly consumed here. If kettle production can be fully automated, why should that take place in China rather than in the UK? More important, by insourcing more manufacturing we become more aware of the true environmental consequences of our shopping habits. Why should we keep throwing away cheap imported products just because it's more cost-effective than replacing inexpensive spare parts that are mysteriously unavailable locally? Many recent technological advances such as 3D-printing could actually enable greater localisation. Rather than ship goods thousands of miles, we could simply send a design to a local 3D-printer to produce a customised component. To sum up free trade focuses on short-term corporate profits and their need to maximise retail sales and minimise labour costs without having to invest in new technology or training. Fair trade focuses on identifying products and services that regions can exchange to their mutual long-term benefit without displacing workers overnight or creating unsustainable social and environmental imbalances.
If you believe vocal lobbies, we can never devote enough resources to tackle our ongoing mental health crisis. Politicians of all hues like to champion the rights of mental health patients to better care. They try to score points on the perceived lack of funding for mental health services. The subtext is that we should treat mental health just like physical health and it is thus the business of healthcare providers not only to check your blood pressure and heart rate, but to analyse your state of mind.
Unlike physical health, mental health is highly subjective. What kinds of moods and behavioural patterns are so dysfunctional or antisocial that they merit the proactive intervention of third-party supervisors whether in the guise of counsellors, social workers, psychiatric nurses or psychologists. This paternalistic approach raises many questions about personal independence and freedom. Until recently we just assumed that happiness is a mere expression of satisfaction with life. Yet it is hard to detect any correlation between prosperity and happiness, except in a looser relative sense. Above all people need security, a sense of belonging and some love and affection. We often substitute ephemeral pleasures of temporary stupefaction or indulgence for true contentment gradually won through hard work. The abundance of consumer goods and a generous welfare state have jointly undermined the great art of delayed gratification and replaced it with a sense of entitlement that can often create an emotional void and an insatiable demand for more and better.
It seems only fair to care for vulnerable members of our community. If we were talking about paraplegics, everyone would understand why their disability, paralysis of the lower body, merits some help from the rest of us. Indeed with assistive technology most paraplegics can lead fruitful lives. However, few would choose to be cripples and most would welcome medical breakthroughs to help them walk again. If the incidence of paraplegia were to double every twenty years, we would seriously have to address the root causes for society relies on the able-bodied to assist the physically disabled. If we are unable to look after ourselves unassisted, we inevitably depend on the goodwill of others to act in our best interests. Our personal freedom is ultimately limited by our dependence on others for our basic needs. These days few of us could be truly self-sufficient, unless we adapted to a humble existence as subsistence farmers, so a paraplegic is only relatively more at the mercy of external agencies than your average able-bodied citizen. Arguably a talented cripple able to work remotely as a writer, designer or programmer may contribute more to society than an able-bodied drug-addict who cannot hold down a menial job. However, by promoting the concept of mental ill-health we greatly widen the range of people unable to fend for themselves without intrusive help.
Subjective criteria
Who exactly decides who is and who is not mentally fit? What criteria do we apply? If you can only run a hundred metres before running out of breath, are you physically disabled? Of course not, though you may be relatively unfit and should probably get some more exercise. Your doctor would probably advise you not to overdo it and set simple attainable goals and slowly adapt your lifestyle. However, if you fractured your spine in a horrific workplace accident, you may well lose control of your legs and suddenly countless everyday tasks like getting dressed or going to the bathroom become almost impossible to accomplish without some help. You are not simply unfit, but genuinely disabled. A disability, by its customary definition, prevents you from accomplishing essential life-sustaining tasks. It is not a relative handicap. If you're tone-deaf, but able to speak and understand a human language, you are not disabled, but just have a relative weakness in one facet of human creativity. Musical aptitude is certainly a nice to have and arguably gives you an advantage in natural selection, but many tone-deaf people have led fruitful lives without requiring any special help. Tone-deafness is also a rather relative concept as are relative intellectual deficits in mathematics, literacy or dexterity. While we may debate the causes of our relative strengths and weaknesses, modern society relies on functional and intellectual diversity. We cannot all be playwrights, musicians or comedians, but society would be dull without artistic creativity. However, it would cease to function without farmers, builders, engineers, plumbers, toilet cleaners or nurses. We can only relax and have fun once we have provided all infrastructure, food, clean water, shelter and other amenities essential to comfortable human existence. Technological progress and societal pressures have redefined our concept of comfort. Recent technological and economic trends have revealed two paradoxes. First automation and globalisation have displaced millions of manual workers, increasing competitiveness and lowering wages at the bottom end of the labour market. Second as material living standards have risen our emotional well-being has not. Greater labour mobility may have boosted the economy but it has led to greater job insecurity at a time when most women and men are expected to participate in the financial economy. Our personal worth is no longer measured by the roles we play in our family and community, but by our utility as a player in a dynamic consumption-driven market economy. Since the 1970s in much of Western Europe we've seen a gradual shift from practical trades to abstract tertiary sector roles involved in endless lifestyle and product promotion as well as the micromanagement of every aspect of human interaction. The UK now has more social workers than farmers, more accountants than carpenters and more IT recruiters than software developers. Yet we all need food, furniture and mobile communication. As we lose touch with the fruits of our endeavours, we begin to lose our sense of purpose in life other than the mere acquisition of money as a means of ersatz self-validation.
Not only is employment less secure, but human relationships are more volatile and communities more fluid and transient than ever before. By most measures material living standards have never been so high, but people are not only more indebted, but in the absence of paid employment or welfare payments only a few pay cheques away from financial ruin with little means to survive in the wild.
Extreme interdependence
Our current obsession with mental health is the result of extreme interdependence. A quick glance at the commonest professions in the UK reveals a rather disquieting picture. Fewer and fewer workers have any direct relationship to the production and maintenance of essential goods and services, excepts as managers, sales personnel or hauliers. In the UK over six million are employed in mainly administrative roles, some requiring some limited technical expertise or prior hands-on experience, over 3 million are employed in sales, marketing and business presentation, with only 300,000 employed in farming and fishing and around one million in manufacturing, but the biggest growth sectors are personal care and surveillance. The last-named sector encompasses not just policing, but social work and psychiatric services. An ageing population and technological innovation can partly explain this phenomenon, but not entirely, especially as older people are now fitter and many can live independently well into their 80s. A growing proportion of working age adults require assistance as a result of a learning disability, mood or personality disorder.
The Human Spectrum
Until the mid 1980s psychiatric disorders only referred to extreme cases of dysfunctional behaviour. Much of the literature on the relative merits of psychotherapy or pharmacological treatment relates to individuals who posed a direct threat to themselves and/or to wider society. They accounted for under 1% of the general population and as therapeutic care improved most could rejoin the community as normal citizens. Psychiatry had been tarnished by its association with authoritarian regimes, not least in Nazi Germany where schizophrenics were euthanised alongside the mentally handicapped, but also extensively in the Soviet Union where dissidents were routinely treated in psychiatric institutions. Freedom meant above all the freedom to be yourself, to be the master of your feelings and to act an autonomous player in a wider social reality. Of course personal behaviour is regulated by social mores and a fine balance between rights and responsibilities that we learn from our family and community. However, as we gained more free time, we could unleash our individuality and creativity in more expressive ways. Not surprisingly many of the mental ailments now falling under the broad umbrella of mental illness were first observed among the professional classes. The working classes were until recently too busy working to indulge in the kind of fantasies that would preoccupy early psychotherapists. Alcohol remained the main release valve for emotional insecurity and deviant behaviour was either managed within the community or treated as criminality.
To gain greater public acceptance, psychiatry needed a complete rebrand. As the age of self-centred narcissism deepened its roots in North American society, people became more preoccupied with their moods and feelings. New Selective Serotonin Re-uptake Inhibitors such as fluoxetine, also known as Prozac, proved a huge marketing success. By the late 1990s taking mood-enhancing medication had not just become socially acceptable, they had helped blur the boundaries between a normal range of human emotions and psychopathy. Meanwhile concerned parents and teachers began to refer boisterous children unable to pay attention in class to be diagnosed with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder with a seemingly tailor-made drug, methylphenidate better known as Ritalin. In the same period we saw a rapid rise in the diagnosis of hitherto rare neurological disorders on the autistic spectrum. This craze for psychiatric labelling spread to Europe, usually accompanied by awareness-raising campaigns. Psychiatry had now donned the clothes of the progressive left championing the cause of sufferers of these new labels and thus creating new victim groups demanding special treatment. More and more young people began to contextualise their problems in terms of a psychiatric diagnosis.
Marketing Personality Disorders
The more troublesome behavioural disorders that would have merited a psychiatric diagnosis did not lend themselves to marketing, but only to occasional awareness raising initiatives. Nobody could claim pride in psychopathic madness or subnormal idiocy. However, people can be persuaded to claim pride in geekishness, hyperactivity, obsession, sudden mood swings or certain learning challenges if celebrities share some of these traits. Indeed many high-profile media personalities have publicised their diagnosis with OCD, bipolar disorder, ADHD, Aspergers' Syndrome and even learning disabilities. These traits may have their challenges, but also their advantages especially in creative professions. Other past and present luminaries have been posthumously diagnosed. Albert Einstein is claimed to have suffered or benefited from Asperger's Syndrome. It's even been claimed that multibillionaire IT entrepreneur, Bill Gates, has this syndrome too. As the mental health industry widens the diagnostic criteria for personality disorders, we begin to uncover traits common in almost all of us. Excellence in any endeavour is impossible without focussing on the task at hand. It's thus absurd to claim that a special interest in a circumscribed subject is any way pathological. It may be relatively dysfunctional if it prevents us from doing more important things essential to our wellbeing, but we would have made little technological or social progress if some people had not dedicated their professional lives to specialist subjects that few others understand. Our complex high-tech society depends on hyper-specialisation, but as noted elsewhere, most specialists are involved in various aspects of communication, administration and supervision rather than in the hard science that makes our modern lives possible. By promoting the concept of neurological diversity, the authorities can now treat different groups of people in different ways.
Inevitably, some readers will feel a little confused. Most of us have friends or family members who face significant personal challenges. You may have had episodes of emotional distress yourself. Indeed one may argue if you have never experienced sorrow, rejection or isolation, you have led a very sheltered life and will probably struggle to understand the real-life experiences of most members of our society. Should we help an anorexic girl starving herself to death for fear of becoming morbidly obese, a severely depressed teenager confined to his bedroom or a troubled young man plotting to save humanity from a contagious virus by killing his next door neighbour because he works in a pharmaceutical testing laboratory? Of course, but we need to understand the true causes of such seemingly illogical behaviour, e.g. is the rise in eating disorders related to our obsession with perfect bodies, advertising, size-zero models and media obsession with obsesity?
Alphas, Betas, Gammas, Deltas and Epsilons
In Aldous Huxley's prescient vision of a distant technocratic future, humanity had ceased to procreate naturally and was socially and biologically organised in 5 distinctive castes, ranging from high-IQ but potentially moody Alphas to low-IQ but happy Epsilons. However, everyone took pride in their own cast identity rather than fret about their relative social or intellectual status. In Huxley's Brave New World every aspect of life from conception to death was micromanaged and any psycho-social tensions were managed by the wonder potion, Soma (Sanskrit for he body as distinct from the soul, mind, or psyche) and recreational sex. Today's Soma takes various forms. Besides obvious analogies with anti-depressants and other psychoactive drugs, the mass entertainment business and recreational stimulants play an important role in managing the general population, turning us into compliant consumers and loyal team players rather than awkward free agents. Increasingly political opinions at variance with the neoliberal globalist orthodoxy are associated with maverick personal types, i.e. rather than tackle a philosophical viewpoint head-on, the new establishment will parody it and insinuate that proponents of such views suffer from some form of paranoid delusion. Democracy thus serves no longer to reflect the true will of citizens, but to manage different groups of people in order to manufacture consent with political agendas promoted by powerful lobbies.
Joining the Dots
We should view the neuological categorisation of human beings alongside other trends for cosmetic surgery, assisted fertilisation, gender reassigment and the potential for artificial intelligence to empower the technocratic elite. Now under the pretext of combatting childhood depression and/or bullying, the authorities feel empowered to subject all children to mandatory mental health screening, while simultaneously encouraging non-traditional family structures, facilitating fertility treatment, now available on the NHS irrespective of relationship status and heavily subsidising mothers going to work, even if their earnings are less than equivalent cost of childcare. All these phenomena remove children from traditional biological families and transfer responsibility for their socialisation away from parents to corporate institutions. Natural variations in human behaviour are analysed in detail to identify individuals that fail to respond to mainstream socialisation and psychological conditioning techniques and may thus become, in the authorities' eyes, troublemakers.
Concern about mental health, while often well-intentioned, provides the ultimate pretext to expand the surveillance state. As the saying goes, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
