How the new left merely cheerleads the new globalist establishment
As millions heed the call of the establishment media and celebrity charlatans to protest the inauguration of a new conservative American president, we must ask why the same media outlets barely reported massive grassroots opposition to recent military interventions in the Middle East. These stage-managed anti-Trump protests bare more semblence to similar choreographed uprisings in Ukraine, Venezuela and Egypt, also broadcast live on CNN. Behind the left-branded protests against populism lies the spectre of George Soros' web of fake activist organisations.
Once upon a time left-of-centre social reformers and trade union activists had a bit of a reputation as rebels standing up against the old reactionary establishment intent on preventing social progress to preserve their privileges. If you were a coal miner on 78 shillings a week in 1926 or a toilet cleaner earning little more than pin money, you'd listen to Labour politicians and trade union leaders who promised to redress the balance of power away from capitalists and aristocrats to ordinary workers. The experience of the 1914–18 Great War also taught a generation of young radicals not to support their ruling class's imperialist games and extend their solidarity to workers abroad.
Today the new emerging global superclass of corporate executives, transnational bureaucrats and NGO consultants speak the language of the left. They preach internationalism, environmental protection, equality, diversity, women rights, gay rights, migrant rights and above all social progress. Indeed a potpourri of causes that would not look out of place on the stands of 1980s Students Union conferences. The only difference is the former rebels now occupy boardrooms and enjoy the support of mainstream media outlets such as MTV, CNN, the BBC, Facebook, Buzzfeed and more. Yet the world remains a very unequal place. Real power is demonstrably concentrated in fewer and fewer hands while national elections are often meaningless as elected governments have little choice but to kowtow to the demands of big business and supranational organisations. The old left agenda, in its many flavours, has been repackaged as a model for global social engineering. Meanwhile the traditional working class have lost their strategic role as the engine of industrial creativity. Their jobs have been largely outsourced and/or automated. In their place has come a range of insecure service sector jobs, increasingly divorced from any tangible goods and services we really need. More and more professionals have morphed into service providers, who work for larger organisations as contractors, but whose contracts may be terminated at the drop of a hat. If a fictitious National Union of Graphic Designers ever went on strike, businesses would just outsource these tasks to graphic designers abroad, import more malleable migrant labour or develop artificial intelligence capable of replicating artistic creativity. Only workers with secure jobs and protected employee rights can dream of taking industrial action and such jobs are these days few and far between. In theory teachers and nurses, at the forefront of postmodern social engineering, could withdraw their labour, but would meet massive public opposition. As a result we've created a new underclass who have failed to transition from the old manufacturing economy to the new information and service economy and instead have to compete at the bottom end of the wage scale with growing competition from migrant workers. All too often the underclasses are trapped in a cycle of temporary low-paid non-jobs, such as shelf-stackers or CCTV supervisors, and welfare dependency. Economic insecurity in a consumer society inevitably leads to emotional insecurity. Yet this most vulnerable group feels betrayed both by the corporate left, once represented by Tony Blair, and by the infantile left represented by Labour's new leader, Jeremy Corbyn, and his coterie of trendy virtue signalling celebrities and Guardian journalists. Today's self-styled leftists have abandoned their local working classes, whom they accuse of xenophobia and ignorance, and embraced a smorgasbord of victim groups, many belonging to newfangled categories we barely recognised just 50 years ago. The infantile left bang on about helping migrants, mental health patients, transgender teenagers, single mothers and/or welfare claimants, all categories who owe their conceptualisation to recent rapid socio-cultural changes. It now seems rather odd that many who may theoretically fit one of these categories fail to identify with the new left, who keep failing to distinguish the symptoms of a dysfunctional society (such as emotional stress often described as mental illnesses and expressing itself in myriad forms such as eating disorders or drug abuse or mass migration caused by volatile economic development) from their causes or potential solutions, such as a sustainable economy with full employment that values its participants. Survey after survey have shown that what people really want are secure jobs and stable communities. Amazingly the working classes, or those who still retain some pride in their social and cultural heritage, do not want to depend on state handouts or redefine their personal challenges in terms of mental health, gender dysphoria, sexuality or minority ethnic status. The infantile left keep offering to address symptoms, such as the Middle East quagmire, often in a futile or even counterproductive way, creating new conflicts between rival victim groups, whom they once championed. When Muslim migrants groom teenagers, rape young Western women or beat gay couples, the regressive left censors the reality that many Islamic fundamentalists have a radically different approach to women's or gay rights. Whereas once we may have had the semblance of a rainbow coalition of disadvantaged groups that would unite in their struggle against a common enemy, purportedly capitalism, now we have parallel communities who share only their perceived victimhood and subservience to advocacy groups. The old left may have advocated workers' power. Now the lifestyle left merely advocates submission to a brave new world. While Jeremy Corbyn's small entourage may still claim to defend workers' rights and cherish their movement's ties to the great workers' struggles of the industrial age, the most regressive strand of the new Left are now commonly known as social justice warriors (SJWs). Their stronghold is not the factory floor or trade union branches, but college campuses and their modus operandi is not industrial action but endless awareness raising, protests against traditional beliefs and calls for censorship, safe zones and protection against alleged haters. Unlike student activists in the 1960s who would oppose unjust wars, exploitation and state oppression, social justice warriors work in unison with well-funded NGOs such as George Soros' Open Society Foundation or alongside state institutions. While the government may still pay lip service to liberal concepts such as free speech and open debate largely to keep alive the illusion of democracy, social justice warriors spend much of their time attempting to shut down any debate about their radical redefinition of human reality. Rather than going against the grain, the infantile left act as foot soldiers for elite social engineers, whose main goal is to deny us of any personal or social independence.
Often it can be hard to tell apart a genuine grassroots campaign against real injustice, such as against welfare cuts, from a clever identity awareness raising campaign, e.g. raising awareness of an ill-defined personality disorder few had heard of until recently. They both use similar language and adopt similar techniques to appeal to our compassion. Having been through some relatively hard times myself I can at least empathise with those who campaign against government welfare cuts or want to raise awareness about the very real personal challenges many have in our increasingly atomised society. Some of us have little choice but to beg from the state, but once you begin to depend on remote organisations you have practically relinquished your independence. Our brave new world has consumers and client groups managed by a superclass of technocrats, social engineers and banking cartels.
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.
As we stand on the brink of World War Three over Russian involvement in the Syrian quagmire, our mainstream media feeds us with a steady diet of disinformation about the true causes of death and destruction in the Middle East while entertaining us with juicy stories of sexual misconduct of US presidential candidates. In one of the most controversial elections in recent American history, US voters face a choice between a flamboyant billionaire entrepreneur and a puppet of billionaire bankers and autocratic oil sheiks.
Sometimes in life you have to choose the lesser of two evils, make a pragmatic choice to prevent an outcome that could literally kill tens of millions and enslave billions. As the saying goes: better the devil you know than the devil you don't. The trouble is which candidate is more likely to lead us to unchartered territory? I've probably spent much of my adult life opposing the military adventurism of the world's strongest superpower, the United States of America, as well as the wasteful mass consumerism that its leading big businesses promote worldwide. In other ways, I was glad to see the demise of despotic Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and the temporary triumph of the liberal values of intellectual freedom and personal liberty. It's hard to reconcile the apparent fairness of collectivism with the freedom of individualism, i.e. the right to keep the government out of your private life, a kind of personal or familial right of self-determination. A minimalist state simply ensures free people can conduct business in a peaceful and respectful way, namely it enforces property rights and outlaws obvious evils such as murder and theft. In practice Adam Smith's concept of a laissez-faire free market has never existed. Capitalism, as Marx correctly observed, tends towards oligopolies. Nonetheless, in theory at least during the Cold War years of my youth, Western countries allowed individuals, families and small communities greater freedom to do their own thing, provided they did not infringe the rights and privacy of others. If you want to live in a vegan naturist hippy commune, that's fine as long as you respect your neighbours' wishes not to hear your loud music or see you frolicking around your front garden stark naked. If you want to roam the countryside on your motorbike, that's also fine as long as you respect other people's privacy and lifestyle choices. A prosperous country with plenty of open space and resources can more easily afford to grant its people greater personal freedom and that includes freedom of religious and philosophical expression. My ideal world would maximise social justice, individual freedom and environmental responsibility. But only a fool would pretend that pursuing one goal, such as social justice, does not have trade-offs.
Some may wonder what the world would be like today if the Soviet Union had won the great battle of ideologies over Western Capitalism, as we called it. In truth it could not have won, because its inflexible command economy and coercive state administration stifled the kind of competitive technological innovation that spearheaded the micro-computer revolution and led to previously unimaginable levels of industrial automation and efficiency. Whatever its comparative advantages, the Soviet Union simply failed to deliver the goods. Mysteriously the Communist Party of China remained firmly in control as it embraced one of the most virulent forms of free market capitalism that has enriched a growing class of billionaire entrepreneurs reliant on a massive oversupply of obedient loyal workers accustomed to very low wages. Since the late 1980s, China has retained its status as one of the USA's most favoured trading partners. Big business positively loves the Chinese model with fewer inconvenient environmental regulations, but a much more compliant workforce. All the big North American and European players from Microsoft, Apple, Monsanto, VW, General Motors to Siemens have a big presence in China.
I've long remained largely agnostic about most US presidential elections. Both Democrat and Republican administrations have pursued the same meddlesome foreign policies. The Clinton Administration continued to enforce a no-fly zone over Iraq and impose sanctions that cost as many as a million lives during the 1990s and pursued disastrous interventions in the Balkans under the pretext of humanitarianism. I seriously doubt if Al Gore had won the 2000 Presidential Election, that hawks in the State Department would not have driven the US to invade and occupy Afghanistan and Iraq. Any disagreements between mainstream Democrats and Republicans were strategic, not substantive. In the event both Tony Blair and Hillary Clinton supported the invasion of Iraq. Then 6 years later when Hillary became Secretary of State, she oversaw the destabilisation of Libya and Syria by arming and funding rebel militias to unseat stable, but admittedly, autocratic regimes, with whom the West used to do business. The 1993–2000 Clinton administration successfully sold the concept of humanitarian bombing as part of a new era of global harmony, in which transnational corporations and supranational organisations would come together to build a better future. We need only look at their marketing campaigns. Barrack Obama simply campaigned on the need for change, without specifying just what such change might involve. Eight years later Hillary Clinton has seemingly recycled a slogan for the EU Referendum “Stronger Togetherâ€. In hindsight I suspect historians will rate Barrack Obama as ineffectual half-hearted president who let lobbyists make all his key policy decisions. He had to placate the strong strand of conservative opinion in his country while promoting a radical agenda of socio-cultural change that clearly suited other lobbies.
The first thing that caught my attention on my first visit to the States in 1994 was the country's unabashed nationalism. Patriot is not a boo word in America. Everyone claims to be a patriot and flies the Stars and Stripes with pride unconcerned about its possible association with a global empire. To an outsider the USA may be a hegemonic commercial and military superpower intent on projecting its influence on all other countries and cultures. To others it may be the ultimate bastion of freedom. Yet ordinary Americans, who often take great pride in their hyphenated heritage from other continents, seem pretty unconcerned about the rest of the world. The further you venture away from cosmopolitan metropolises, the more you become aware of the quaint traditionalism of many rural Americans. Do they want to bomb Syria to the stone age to impose a new regime that will allow multinational businesses unfettered access to new markets and spread the kind of consumer fetishism and narcissism that many religious Americans have learned to despise? The short answer is no, but they can be persuaded to support military action against the enemies of freedom, not least because many Americans are the descendants of those who fled autocratic regimes. These are the Americans who hesitated to support their government's entanglement in the European wars of the first half of the 20th century, but seemed to happy to support a vast expansion of the military industrial complex to defeat the Soviet Union. Most conservative Americans support policies they believe will keep the government out of their lives, except to maintain essential infrastructure such as roads and schools. Yet it saddens me to report that the great American Dream of personal freedom and civic responsibility is dying and fast yielding to a new culture of rampant corporatism that works in tandem with big government to bring the entire global populace under its yoke.
As I watch hardly any mainstream TV, Donald Trump meant very little to me until late 2015. He comes across as an arrogant showman entrepreneur, often appealing to the lowest common denominator. Clearly his rhetoric talks to vast swathes of American public opinion that have lost faith in the mainstream liberal media, but lacks depth and panders to numerous lobbies and entrenched American prejudices. I instinctively distrust anyone who promises miracles without explaining how they intend to bring them about. In American English the adjective liberal denotes what we might call leftwing or even socialist on this side of the big pond. American liberals may theoretically support sexual freedom, especially if it promotes non-traditional family structures, but they also advocate greater government intervention and social regulation to pursue their goal of social justice and build a new society liberated from anachronistic prejudices and social attitudes. Invariably American liberals support higher levels of immigration. The USA is genuinely a country built on migration, but also on ethnic cleansing, partial genocide, slavery and unsustainable levels of consumption. If Making America Great Again means returning to the 1950s heyday of Middle Class prosperity, stable families and gas-guzzling automotive freedom, resembling the innocent hedonism portrayed in Happy Days, then millions of Americans will be very disappointed whoever wins the presidential election. Those times ain't coming back folks, but one of Trump's slogans does strike a chord, “Americanism not Globalismâ€.
In the early noughties alternative media widely reported Donald Rumsfeld's Project for a New American Century. As we progress into the latter half of this century's second decade, the balance of global power has shifted away from the United States to China, India, Russia and a new emerging global world order. The 20th century saw the demise of the British and French empires and the rise of North American commercial and cultural power. Despite fluctuating commodity prices, every year the USA's share of the global GDP has declined. While it accounted 27% of the world economy in 1950, by 2020 the USA will have just 14% of the global GDP despite a fast-growing population. While the top 5 to 10% have grown richer, the great middle class has been squeezed. Tens of millions of US citizens depends either on social welfare or on low pay, as traditional manufacturing jobs have fled abroad. While once America seemed to have an unlimited capacity to share its natural treasures with new waves of immigrants, it now relies on imported resources to sustain growing demand that has to sustain more people. Yet the country's liberal elites do not care about defending the interests of working class Americans. They did not benefit from the three trillion dollars squandered on nation building in Iraq, except by delaying an inevitable transition away from fossil fuels to more renewable sources of energy and greater efficiency. They certainly will not benefit from the destabilisation of the Middle East and the never-ending flow of economic migrants and refugees desperate to experience the American Dream, only to be engulfed in a 21st century welfare ghetto.
Were I a US citizen, my conscience would probably tell me to vote for the Green candidate Jill Stein. While she opposes US military adventurism and overconsumption, like her European partners, she favours relaxed immigration and panders to the vacuous agenda-setting politics of social justice (which basically means more social workers and greater social surveillance). I sincerely hope she takes more votes from idealistic Sanders supporters who might otherwise support Hillary Clinton.
George W Bush did not represent the true American conservative tradition. He may have pandered to this constituency by delaying social engineering milestones such as not allowing embryonic stem cells or gay marriage (both were just a matter of time), but he oversaw record immigration levels while recklessly attempting to impose neoliberalism on the Middle East. Ever since the 2008 banking meltdown the US economy has been powered largely by a mix Keynsian quantitive easing and the creative accounting of its high-tech multinationals, whose operations are now global and thus not affected with the parochial concerns of unemployed blue collar workers.
Meanwhile Hillary Clinton's handlers, such as banking billionaire George Soros, are much more concerned with neutralising strong nation states. The new bogeyman is Russia's Vladimir Putin. The same media that sold us wars in various Central Asian and Middle East countries have found their new Hitler, who some conservative leaders are accused of appeasing. If you believe the CNN, the Guardian or countless books bemoaning a resurgent nationalist Russia, then Putin is set not only march into the Baltic States and Eastern Ukraine, but to conquer the Middle East via an alliance with Iran. Except Russia has no need of privileged access to their resources. It already has vast territory and natural resources as well as a highly educated citizenry and very low population density. Corruption may well be rife in Russia, but it is hardly absent from North America or Western Europe. If you're concerned about grotesque human rights abuses, such as murdering gays or stoning adulterous women, look no further than Middle East or the Islamic parts of Africa and Asia. Why should American workers support their government's obsession with deposing the secular regime in Syria by funding terrorists and potentially triggering a nuclear conflagration with a regional superpower, Russia, that does not threaten the security of American citizens ?
Which presidential candidate is most likely to lead the US to an all-out war with Putin? None other than George Soros' s puppet. Whatever his faults, Donald Trump would be more likely to strike a deal with Russia to protect the US from the very real threats of Islamic fundamentalism and China's growing economic dominance. Whoever wins, the era of American exceptionalism is over. The global elites support Clinton, but I doubt they have the best interests of ordinary American people at heart.
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 Labour Party could soon split into a pale imitation of Tony Blair's New Labour and an economically illiterate student protest movement. Jeremy Corbyn's transition from a lifelong backbench rebel to leader of Her Majesty's opposition surprised me. I had admittedly underestimated the popularity of the new wave of leftwing activism. For a short while I rejoiced as at long last we had a Labour leader who would oppose military adventurism and nuclear weapons. Alas Jeremy Corbyn had little choice but to let Labour grandee, Hilary Benn, humiliate him in the debate on bombing ISIS in Syria and Iraq.
First let me lay my cards on the table. My heart clearly lies with the Green Left as, given a choice, I'd favour environmental sustainability and social justice over consumption-led prosperity. I'd rather invest in better public transport and more cycleways than build more motorways or enable more people to buy cars. I'd rather have full employment with most working 10 to 20 hours a week on modest wages than a growing divide between the underclasses on welfare or insecure low-paid jobs and the professional classes. I'd rather cut consumption than rely too much on imported resources. I'd also rather allocate some of my wealth to help people in poorer countries help themselves than live with the consequences of continued economic and environmental instability. Yet my brain recognises that we cannot change our lifestyle overnight for we might well throw away the baby, our cherished liberal society, away with the bathwater and end up in a dystopia with even worse human misery. The problem with the idealist left is its utter failure to recognise that we have to face choices at all, except a fictious battle between the reactionary old guard and our progressive future. They fail to see the contradiction between morbidly obese welfare dependents on mobility scooters in the UK and Zambian children walking 2 miles with a bucket to fetch potable water. To the infantile left, they are both victims with a common enemy, global capitalism, and a common solution, global welfarism.
Britain's vote to leave the European Union revealed the true gulf between public opinion and the predilections of the trendy affluent metropolitan elite. The latter group believe we are on a one way journey to a new brighter tomorrow with more opportunities for all. Their unrelenting optimism is dented only by reactionary conservatives and noncompliant local leaders. Their pet peeves are angry natives, especially those of paler complexion, Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump, Nigel Farage and anyone opposed to their dream of a borderless multicultural utopia managed by benevolent NGOs, global corporations and supranational governments.
Yet although Conservative parliamentarians were split down the middle on the EU referendum, they remain one party, largely because they all support variants of crony capitalism within a mixed economy. While Owen Smith calls for a £200 billion British New Deal, the new Tory Chancellor, Phillip Hammond, is actually pursuing Neo-Keynsian quantitive easing with a vigour not seen since Gordon Brown's short-lived administration in the aftermath of the 2008 debt crisis. Tory MPs only really differ on the minutiae of strategy and international alliances. The so-called Eurosceptic wing of the Tory Party actually reflect a large body of conservative public opinion disenchanted with the rapid pace of social, cultural and economic change that has left behind many of the most disadvantaged communities in this country. Recent opinion polls have miraculously favoured the governing party despite a temporary fall in the British pound and much hype about jobs moving abroad as the UK prepares to leave the EU. Labour's share of the popular vote has now fallen as low as 28%, and if it splits, I fear it could fall much lower leaving a vacuum, which the Liberal Democrats rejected by the electorate in 2015, are unlikely to fill. UKIP may have spearheaded the EU Referendum campaign and given voice to widespread public disapproval with unbalanced mass migration, but it offers no coherent policy platform on economics, ecology and defence that can either meet the challenges of the early 21st century or set the party apart from the Tories. While UKIP wrangles over its leadership, it appears too often just to react to cultural changes rather than propose any new solutions other than a few half-baked ideas from Tory think tanks. If we're not lucky, the UK could well have another ten years of Tory rule, probably with an increased majority with the SNP as the only viable opposition. The European Dream is fast fading too as Southern Europe struggles with high unemployment and unsustainable government debt, France teeters on the brink of civil war, Germany grapples with mass immigration from culturally diverse regions and Turkey looks set to unleash another wave of refugees that native Europeans seem unwilling to accommodate.
On the other side of the Big Pond it's often hard to distinguish the idealistic marketing spiel of large high-profile corporations such as Walmart, Coca Cola, Apple, Facebook, GSK or General Motors from the upbeat universalist rhetoric of mainstream Democrat politicians like Hillary Clinton or Barrack Obama. Just as Coca Cola, responsible for much exploitation and ill-health, can champion multiculturalism through its yearly Christmas ads I'd like to Teach the World to Sing, Hillary Clinton can preach social inclusivity before an audience of Africans and Latino Americans. They all seem to sing from the same hymn sheet. Just as Apple may win favour with its customers by railing against authoritarian cyber-surveillance measures, the establishment left may try to score points with the electorate by promising to clamp down on corporate tax evasion. Yet once the left-branded middle managers are in office, they inevitably collude with their big business friends to entrench the hegemony of a planet-wide corporatocracy. However, many observers make a fundamental mistake in assuming only nominally elected representatives have a vested interest in maintaining social peace. While small business owners may only be concerned with their bottom line and their family's wellbeing, big businesses take an active interest in their customers' wellbeing and social stability. As a result the former tend to dislike regulations and punitive taxes, while the latter often help draft these regulations and fiscal regimes to maintain their market dominance and client base. In short big businesses act and behave just like states with multiple tiers of management, surveillance and security forces and complex systems to handle internal conflicts. New Labour hoped to bring about greater social justice in partnership with big business. Tax credits, Gordon Brown's flagship social justice policy, boosted consumer demand and allowed corporations to keep hourly earnings just above the new minimum wage, while property prices and the real cost of living soared.
The two wings of the Labour Party, if we exclude a few old-timers such as Dennis Skinner or Kelvin Hopkins, share the same basic universalist worldview, tend to read the same newspapers and support the same social media campaigns. They only really differ in their romanticism and willingness to openly support the nastier aspects of the military industrial complex. Under Tony Blair, Labour rebranded Western interventionism as humanitarian peacekeeping. While the Parliamentary Labour Party wants to work alongside big business and support the UK's involvement US/NATO military action in the Middle East, Central Asia and elsewhere, the infantile left imagines it can tax the same global corporations that rely on the US military might to secure privileged access to strategic resources and destabilise uncooperative regimes. They somehow imagine they can bring about a fairer and more peaceful society by taxing and regulating the very corporations that generate the immense wealth on which our high consumption economy depends. The infantile left are always the first to oppose cutbacks in welfare provision and defend the general culture of entitlement that underlies their politics of identity and victimhood. Were someone to suggest the NHS should not give psychologically unstable sufferers of gender dysphoria hormone treatment and invasive gender realignment surgery, social justice warriors would be unable to grasp that the same resources could be better used to ensure everyone has access to clean water or to provide meaningful training and employment opportunities for all. Yet such extravagance can only survive thanks to the proceeds of global capitalism. While sufferers of severe emotional distress may be classed as disabled in Britain and thus entitled to disability benefits, in most of the world such people would have little choice but to work, beg or starve. The naive left may paint the Tory government as heartless for withdrawing benefits from hundreds of thousands of long-term recipients of incapacity benefit deemed fit to work, but in most of the wider world they would have never gotten any state subsidies in the first place and could have only relied on their extended family or community support structures.
Personally I think Owen Smith is little more than an opportunist keen to build on his charisma and Welsh background. His employment history with a pharmaceutical multinational, Pfizer, and the BBC as well as his past support for classic Blairite positions merely confirm that he's just an establishment stooge. Yet sadly Jeremy Corbyn, despite his growing fan base among social justice warriors, is unlikely to win back the traditional working class vote haemorrhaged to apathy, UKIP or the Conservatives over the last decade. Voters in Labour's heartlands were more motivated to vote against the European Union than they were to approve of Labour's Neo-Keynsianism. They may well agree with Jeremy Corbyn on renationalising the railways or keeping the NHS in public hands, but they do not trust his clique to provide the economic stability essential to deliver better public healthcare or transport.
For over seventy years, since the watershed of the post-WW2 settlement, not a single social democratic government has successfully challenged corporate power, while delivering its people greater prosperity. The great social democracies of Northern Europe, most notably Sweden, relied on technologically advanced industries and a highly educated homogeneous working class to engineer probably the best compromise between the highly competitive capitalism of the United States and the inflexible command economies of the former Soviet Union. Globalisation, extreme labour market flexibility and rapid technological innovation have undermined this model. Sweden developed its welfare system to give all citizens equal opportunities and a chance to thrive in a high-skill and low-unemployment economy. That seemed to work while labour market protections remained in place and migratory flows were manageable. However, today Sweden hosts large parallel communities of welfare-dependent immigrants who are neither culturally nor economically integrated into mainstream Swedish society. 41% of residents of the city of Malmö now have a foreign background, 31% born abroad and 11% born in Sweden to non-Swedish parents. This represents a seismic demographic change in little more than 20 years. In 1990 the city was overwhelming ethnically Swedish.
Venezuela marked the final nail in the coffin for socialist reformers. Many leftists placed their hopes in Hugo Chavez and later Nicolás Maduro to exploit the country's immense oil wealth to bring about prosperous social democratic society. Indeed in the early years, with record crude oil prices, Chavez's United Socialist Party scored some major successes in redistributing petroleum profits to the country's workless underclasses and expanding education and welfare provision. However, Chavez failed to address the country's lawlessness, its high murder rate and its dependence on oil exports and automotive culture. Rather than invest in economic diversification and infrastructure while oil prices were high, Chavez chose to lower fuel prices, a populist act if ever there was one. When oil prices crashed and profits plummeted, Maduro's government was powerless to prevent a run on the Venezuelan Bolivar, which made imports prohibitively expensive leading to massive shortages of basic foodstuffs and goods. In truth the Socialist Unity Party has never had a monopoly on power and the fiercely anti-socialist opposition controls the national assembly sabotaging much of the government's efforts to steer the country through the crisis. Venezuela's Opposition: Attacking Its Own People. However, the Venezuelan experience should clearly show us that within the confines of global corporatism, there is no alternative other than to steer a middle course by attempting to milk the system, i.e. capture a greater slice of the corporate profits pie to fund a welfare system that essentially supplements corporate rule. Jeremy Corbyn's does not propose nationalising the commanding heights of the economy, but merely returning to public ownership a few loss making services such as the railway operators and water companies. Most of the wealth required to fund public services and welfare would have to come from taxation. Large corporates will always find loopholes to minimise tax while at the same time ensuring compliant governments can provide a minimum level of public services. As a result governments have little choice but to work with major corporations. Failure to do so will result in disinvestment and job losses. In an era of rapid technological innovation, governments can seldom provide the most efficient solutions, but can at best provide the most reliable tried-and-tested conventional technology and prevent the private sector from abusing their power. We'd have to choose a radically different model of development that would require an enhanced state of human solidarity to break free from our reliance on big business.
Unholy Alliance
Labour represents little more than a brand, built around a set of appealing ideals that others have coopted. The electorate is smart enough to realise that big business really runs the show and is just choosing middle managers to negotiate with big corporations and special interest groups. Today the party is an unholy alliance of 4 to 5 disparate groups:
Traditional Blue Labour, patriotic but committed to representing their own people. Today this faction is best embodied by Frank Field, one of the few Labour MPs to oppose the EU and mass immigration, while campaigning for welfare reform that would empower the underclasses. This small clique sees itself running in the footsteps of Clement Attlee, Hugh Gaitskell, Harold Wilson and Denis Healey. Socially conservative, pragmatic, cautious and pro-NATO, they seek the best deal possible for ordinary working people, but have become a bit of an anachronism.
Traditional Red Labour, best embodied by Kelvin Hopkins, Kate Hoey and Paul Flynn MP, critical of big business, keen on international solidarity but also supporters of economic protectionism and aware migration must be both balanced and sustainable. This group is unlikely to ever leave Labour unless it becomes electorally insignificant. Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell may have once seemed part of this group, but have preferred the politics of idealist posturing over the more classic positions of the Bennite left. The late Robin Cook made a historic compromise with New Labour by supporting NATO intervention in the Balkan Wars, but soon grew critical of their misdemeanours over Iraq. Were he still alive today, he may not just have saved Labour in Scotland, but may have helped Labour steer in a new direction, that is neither trendy left nor neoliberal right.
The Populist Left: A small clique at Westminster, but with wider support among leftwing activists nationally, this group believe government has the power to instruct big business to pay more taxes and subsidise their vision of a welfare utopia, international solidarity and open borders. They somehow see no contradiction in welcoming more migration from Islamic countries and the championing of gay rights or the preservation of greenbelt from either more housebuilding or hydraulic fracturing. Their politics are as impractical as Natalie Bennett's Greens and would sadly hurt some of the most vulnerable communities in the country.
Neoliberal Fabian Wing: We once called this clique, probably a majority of the parliamentary party, Blairites, but their pedigree stretches back to the Fabian Society, focused on social reform within a corporate free market economy. Blairism can trace its origins to Roy Jenkins, founder of the short-lived Social Democratic Party in the 1980s, former Chairman of Fabian Society and Britain's first President of the European Commission. Their adherents basically worship global corporations, the EU, NATO and are broadly supportive with the current US administration's military adventurism. They tend to support high levels of net migration, multiculturalism, rapid socio-cultural change and greater surveillance. In the US this faction would throw their weight behind Hillary Clinton. However, their practical stances are today almost indistinguishable from the Cameronite wing of the Tory Party, who have long abandoned the more socially conservative positions of many former Tory politicians. If their electoral base really understood their true agenda, they would never have won three elections. Tony Blair did not campaign in 1997 to facilitate higher levels of immigration, outsource manufacturing or send British troops to war zones. Rather, New Labour presented itself as a credible centrist compromise between the Thatcherism of the 1980s and the social democracy of 1960s. They could only win under the Labour brand provided they could keep the first two groups, Red and Blue Labour, happy by throwing them the occasional bone, which mainly meant expanding welfare provision. The Growth of Welfare Spending in the UK
The Muslim Faction: Most modern Labour activists would broadly agree on issues such as women's equality, gay rights and cultural diversity, as would most Liberal Democrats and Conservatives these days. Yet Labour depends increasingly on the electoral support of an ethno-religious community that, to put it kindly, has different views on these matters. While affluent Asians have long lost faith in Labour as the sole defenders of their interests and many have pursued careers in other parties of government, Muslims have special needs that require an alliance with the party most likely to provide generous welfare and lighter immigration controls. Wealthy British Indians of the Hindu faith seldom expect special treatment. Indeed their interests fall in line with other settled communities in the UK. While official statistics show just 5% of the UK population is currently Muslim, this proportion is clearly higher among the younger generation due to a much higher fertility rate and continued immigration through family reunions, arranged marriages and other channels. When Labour has failed to cooperate with local Muslim community leaders, we have seen the election of George Galloway of the proto-Corbynite Respect Party, and most disturbingly Lutfur Rahman. The former Mayor of Tower Hamlets not only brought Bangladeshi levels of corruption to the heart of London, butfavoured his own people over other newcomers and the dwindling Cockney community. If Labour continues to lose votes outside metropolitan districts with large immigrant communities, it will either have to acquiesce to the growing Muslim lobby, by allowing Sharia law in Muslim majority areas, or it could lose another significant chunk of its electoral support. A recent Channel 4 survey found 50% of Muslims in the UK want to ban homosexuality. Moreover many Muslims believe in a very strict dress code that prevents women from exposing their natural bodies for fear of being viewed as sluts. Labour-run Luton Borough Council has now authorised segregated male-only and female-only swimming sessions. Until recently this would be condemned as a regressive move, but to win Labour has to bow to pressure from its most loyal supporters.
Labour activists clearly back Jeremy Corbyn. Social media has undoubtedly played a major role in the surge of support Corbyn's brand of right-on virtue-signalling politics, at least judging from my Twitter feed. Influential Guardian columnist Owen Jones may have expressed heartfelt doubts about Corbyn's ability to beat the Tories, but Owen Smith is likely to gain support only from the PLP, longstanding moderate members and some Trade Union affiliates. In all likelihood Owen Smith's team only hopes to win among the remnant core of Labour loyalists, enough to justify a later declaration of independence from the Corbynite Momentum movement, possibly with the support of a major Trade Union and the Daily Mirror. Labour's membership has grown from a low of 170,000 in 2008 in the late Brown years to around 600,000 today,a by-product of the kind of online activism that helped the Scottish independence movement win the support of nearly 45% of Scots voters. I think Labour's newly enlarged membership represents the bulk of trendy Guardian-readers, who have probably switched their news-gathering preferences to the openly globalist Huffington Post. However, I seriously doubt they could win the general election. Recent polls suggest a breakaway Fabian Labour party might attract around 13 to 14% of the vote with a Momentum-led party gaining little more than 20%. Left Labour may well join forces with the Greens to gain a maximum of 23 to “24% of the vote. With a First Past the Post voting system that would spell electoral disaster. It then remains to be seen, which way the growing Islamic lobby will side. Why would they urge their followers to back a party that stands little chance of forming a government? Would they not be better off forming their own party and winning a few seats in areas with large Muslim populations? The latter move would deprive the successor Labour parties of at least a fifth of their vote share. Left Labour would probably win in trendy urban areas like Bristol and Brighton, Right Labour may still do well in parts of Wales and Northern England, but face stiff competition from UKIP and Conservatives for the hearts and minds of traditional working class voters and welfare dependents.
Until the aspirational green left can unite around a viable political platform with proposals that will improve people's quality of life, I think the best we can do is to campaign for electoral reform.
Is another Labour Party possible?
While I may rant and rave against the policies and institutions that Labour politicians have supported, many Labour activists still have their hearts in the right place. I blame Tony Blair's clique for making the party unelectable by alienating first Labour activists and then traditional Labour voters. The former often defected to the Greens, while the latter group either abstained or voted UKIP at the last general election. How could New Labour, often accused of being too rightwing, have pushed some Labour voters towards a party that is allegedly even more rightwing? It all depends on your definition of rightwing, but the answer clearly lies in New Labour's relaxation of immigration controls and its failure to address the skills gap among its core electorate. The voters of Sunderland did not want Labour to tackle unemployment in Poland or provide job opportunities for Indian nurses, they wanted their government to provide their sons and daughters with the skills they will need in the 21st century. Instead they got temporary jobs in call centres before they too were outsourced. I don't pretend Real Politik is easy but here are just some ideas for a true 21st century alternative Labour Party:
Skills for the future: Invest heavily STEM education and training. Reorganise further education around the real needs of future workers. Reintroduce full grants for students from low income families on STEM courses, while urging others to opt for vocational training rather than university. Plan for a high skill / high wage economy rather than short-term growth based on high retail consumption and low wages.
Balanced migration: Reassert Britain's sovereignty over migration in the best interests of the current population. Migration policy should aim to stabilise the population, enable professional and cultural exchanges and family reunions and allow newcomers time to integrate into mainstream British society.
International solidarity: Target international aid at sustainable development to enable people in poorer countries to prosper in their native communities and prevent a damaging brain drain. We should target aid at countries or regions that lack basic infrastructure such as clean water supplies or reliable electric power and such aid should be conditional on progress towards sustainable birth rates and womens' rights.
Strong Nation states: Campaign for a looser community of independent European nations that cooperate over key environmental and security issues, but retain susbstantial autonomy over economic and social policy. Should the European Union prove beyond reform, Labour should support Britain's negotiated exit from the European Union. Since the Treaty of Lisbon it's become clear the EU is indeed beyond reform. Had Labour led the Leave campaign in the 2016 EU referendum, not only would this referendum been won by a much larger margin giving the UK a stronger bargaining position, but it may well be in power to negotiate a settlement in the best interests of ordinary workers in this country. We want Europe to remain free trade zone, but support the rights of national governments to support their native industries against unfair competition.
Fair foreign policy putting our interests first: Consider first and foremost the interests of British citizens at home and pursue an independent foreign policy in cooperation with our European neighbours. Britain should only intervene militarily in self-defence or when a foreign militia directly threatens the security of our citizens and only then with the clear agreement of the United Nations and only against military targets. Britain should not use miltary force to depose foreign governments or occupy foreign territory. All territorial disputes must be resolved through diplomacy and respect of the democratic wishes of the inhabitants.
Invest in public transport: We will renationalise the railways and increase subsidies for public transport and cycleways in urban areas by raising fuel duty and vehicle excise duty. We will also promote car sharing to give town dwellers greater flexibility. People in rural areas where public transport is not feasible will pay lower vehicle excise duty and be entitled to special fuel discounts.
Invest in sustainable housing for a stable population: Once we can stabilise our population, we will build affordable high density housing for younger people in major cities to prevent urban sprawl.
Invest in sustainable energy: While we recognise the first generation of renewable energy may be more expensive, we want Britain to be at the cutting edge of innovative clean renewable energy solutions, especially offshore wind farms and tidal power.
Phase out nuclear weapons: Britain's Trident nuclear defence system was built for another age when the biggest threat seemed interballistic missiles launched by the former Soviet Union or China. That threat is negligible today, except in an apocalyptic scenario of mutually assured destruction. We oppose renewing Trident submarines and will only retain nuclear warheads until we can negotiate multilateral disarmament with other major nuclear powers. We should prioritise conventional defence and advanced reconnaissance systems. Our duty is to protect our citizens, not to act as a superpower.
Corporatism vs Capitalism
On a side note it would be tempting to replace the adjective corporate with the much maligned descriptor, capitalist. Unlike small businesses, corporations are much more concerned with expanding their empires of influence than short-term profits. Corporations work alongside banks, venture capitalists, marketing agencies, law firms, lobby groups and governments to conquer markets and suppress competition from small players by setting standards and regulations.
If you just want to sell a coffee-drinking experience, you can set up a family-run café, work hard, refine your services to appeal to your customers and find the right price point to cover your expenses and earn a small profit. If you employ bar staff, cleaners, maintenance workers or decorators, you may in theory be an exploitative capitalist, but you do not behave like a corporation or a crony capitalist. The latter would employ a market research outfit to identify demand for a customised coffee drinking experience and analyse the competition, open themed cafés in half-a-dozen prime locations of a major city replete with affluent and socially connected young adults and launch a clever social media campaign to spread the word before expanding rapidly to other cities. However, to accomplish such a feat they'd need to run at a loss for at least a year and would thus require a massive injection of startup capital. That how the big corporations such as Starbucks and Tesco behave. They do not set out simply to pursue a creative passion and make a living, but to conquer a large chunk of a market segment with global ambitions and in the process destroy local competition.
Oddly this referendum has restored my faith in humanity
Just over a week ago the global establishment and their cheerleaders in the liberal intelligentsia got the fright of their lives. They had failed to persuade the British electorate to vote remain in the referendum on the United Kingdom's membership of the European Union. When Labour lost in 2010 and again in 2015, the metropolitan elite did not seem all that bothered as the resulting coalition led by David Cameron and Nick Clegg offered more or less the same neoliberal politics, albeit with a little window dressing and hype about tackling the country's deficit through minor cutbacks in welfare and public services, which the left insisted on calling slash and burn austerity. Yet when the British public voted against their beloved European Union, hell had truly descended on earth. It hardly mattered that this supranational organisation had imposed real austerity on Southern Europeans, brought about mass youth unemployment through a one-size-fits-all currency and led millions to migrate across the continent in search of work destroying close-knit communities and widening the gap between rich and poor. Rapid globalisation may have benefited the upwardly mobile professional classes, keen to exploit new business opportunities and enjoy a wider selection of restaurants and more malleable foreign workers, but it has left behind vast swathes of the traditional working classes unable to adapt to our post-industrial present. Their voice has been largely ignored. Mainstream parties have merely pitied the remnants of the British working classes, talking glibly about new business investments in industrial wastelands, while defending welfare dependence and social interventionism. Whenever the topic of unlimited immigration of unskilled and semi-skilled labour from Eastern and Southern Europe cropped up, the pseudo-liberal elites would downplay its extent, misrepresent its economic benefits and, ever so subtly, suggest the native underclasses were too lazy and inept to fill vacancies in the country's booming service sector. To add insult to injury, over the last 6 years of Tory-led government, the phoney left has not only championed welfarism, but via myriad charities, has condescendingly treated growing sections of our communities as sufferers of mental illness. Rather than viewing the working classes as the true creators of the nation's wealth, the postmodern left now regards the underclasses as just another victim group alongside other underprivileged groups such as low-paid migrant workers, single mothers and ethnic minorities. In the new world of virtue-signalling, victimhood status matters more than hard work. If you're mentally ill, obese, gay, Muslim or a recent Bulgarian migrant, the bien-pensant left will pretend to champion your rights, but if you're just a low-paid or jobless native worker concerned about unfair labour market competition they will write you off as ignorant and potentially racist. Indeed many actually regard angry nativism as a form of mental illness, i.e. a phenomenon that must be managed and tackled, but not expressed in the ballot box. If working class white British males could rebrand themselves as a victim group, the trendy left may just listen. Indeed in many urban areas this ethnosocial category is already a disadvantaged minority.
The big Surprise
As the polling stations closed and the last opinion polls indicated a marginal lead for the remain side. I was braced for a big anticlimax. If the leave side could muster 45%, then maybe in five or ten years time, when the whole EU project goes pear-shaped, we might get another chance. In all comparable referenda, the public voted for the status quo, better the devil you know. I'm sure many remain voters were concerned about the EU's lack of democracy and unsustainable migratory flows. They just believed that the consequences of leaving the EU were much worse than any potential gains of greater national self-determination just as many proud Scots voted to stay in the UK just under 2 years earlier. The Remain side appealed to emotions, international solidarity, our love for our European neighbours and, above all, economic expediency. Indeed a common theme in the closing stages of the referendum, and one repeated endlessly by the bad losers now, is that simply leaving the EU will have little effect on migration. If the British economy continues to prosper, it will, according to free marketeers, attract more migrants than it exports. I think all this talk about trade deals and regulations bored most voters, partly because it's so hard to gauge how economic growth translates into a better quality of life for ordinary people, e.g. property speculation may drive GDP growth, but it also makes houses unaffordable for workers on typical salaries.
As the results piled in, we saw two clear patterns emerge. The United Kingdom was divided primarily along class lines, but also by ethnocultural identity. Outside a handful of cosmopolitan urban areas, in England and Wales the more affluent tended to vote remain. Much of Oxfordshire, Buckinghamshire and the posher parts of Hampshire and Hertfordshire had remain majorities, while less affluent areas, especially those with more elderly demographic profiles, voted more heavily to leave the EU. The biggest leave majorities came not from the Tory-voting Southeast of England, but from Labour's traditional working class heartlands in the Midlands and North of England as well as Wales. In Northern Ireland the protestant community followed their English and Welsh cousins, while the Republican catholic community voted overwhelmingly for Remain, following orders from the Sinn Fein and SDLP leaderships. In Scotland the result was more mixed. If the UK had had a referendum on EU membership 15 years ago, I would have expected a healthy, but not crushing, majority for staying in the EU across the UK. That was before the Lisbon Treaty and before the EU's eastward expansion. Two factors swayed the vote for remain in Scotland. First all main parties, especially the ruling SNP, favour continued EU membership. Second, Scotland has seen much lower net immigration and only very limited population increase. For most Scots unfair Labour market competition is a side issue, but Scots compete with new migrants in the UK-wide labour market and are thus not immune from wage compression. Even in the areas with relatively homogenous populations like Fife, migrant labour is common in many sectors. The leave campaign here was very low key. I've seen more Stronger for Scotland stickers and posters, with their distinctive SNP branding, than VoteLeave signs. UKIP enjoy only limited support, but some cracks in the united front did appear when veteran Scottish independence campaigner, Jim Sillars, supported Brexit. After all if little Iceland, with a population of just 300,000, can manage outside the EU with its own currency, then so surely can Scotland. 62% of Scots supported the status quo, but a fair number not out of any love for Byzantine EU institutions, but simply to spite the English and trigger another referendum on Scottish independence. Alas 38% rebelled against their political elite and opted to protest against globalisation and gain greater control over fishing and agriculture.
People did not vote along party lines. Polls suggest only majority of conservative and UKIP voters supported leave, while most Labour, Liberal Democrat, Green and SNP voters supported remain (Nonetheless 25% of Green voters and 30% of LibDem voters rebelled against their staunchly EU-phile party leaderships). A closer look reveals a different picture. Turnout was highest in many deprived areas that often see lower turnouts in general elections, the kind of backwaters where Labour or Conservatives take their voters for granted. Just consider Scunthorpe in North Lincolnshire. In the 2015 general election only 57.7% could be bothered to vote, but in the 2016 EU Referendum a whopping 72% turned out. In London and Scotland we saw almost the opposite scenario with lower turnouts than in general elections. Remain supporters clearly lacked enthusiasm despite all the scare stories about a post-Brexit abyss of economic stagnation and rampant xenophobia. The brutal murder of pro-EU campaigner and Labour MP, Jo Cox, just a week before polling day had enabled the globalist media to appeal to the public's emotions, especially by associating the mentally ill murderer with far-right grouplets. #VoteRemain thus became the ultimate virtue signal akin to the #refugeeswelcome hashtag just a year earlier.
Back in 1975, it was mainly the left who opposed membership of the then EEC (European Economic Community). Leading Labour politicians such as Tony Benn, Barbara Castle and Peter Shaw as well as the bulk of the era's trade union movement all opposed the EEC just two years after Britain joined in the midst of an economic downturn. The key arguments were over democracy and trade. Immigration hardly figured in the debate because most viewed it as an issue only with people from Commonwealth countries. Apart from a few language students the UK did not see a massive influx of migrants from France, Germany, the Low Countries or Italy. There were few overriding economic advantages and citizens of other EEC countries did not enjoy the same acquired citizenship and welfare rights as British citizens until the 1992 Maastricht Treaty. Indeed in the early years more Britons may have taken advantage of work opportunities in the rest of Europe than vice-versa. EU migration only really became a bone of contention with the superstate's eastward expansion.
The result has sent shockwaves across the world as ruling elites become aware of the strength of opposition to global governance. In hindsight we may view such a reversal as a necessary adjustment to technological developments, which will soon allow a much smarter and more humane form of international cooperation to supplement viable compact nation states. Outsourcing production made sense when markets could take advantage of cheap and more malleable labour in other parts of the world. It makes little sense with the emergence of artificial intelligence, robotics and 3D-printing, which do away with the need for cheap semi-skilled labour or gargantuan manufacturing facilities. We will need more highly skilled software developers, engineers, designers and scientific researchers and fewer machine operatives, cleaners and hauliers. More important we can share expertise and cooperate closely without having to physically move to another country. Mass migration is driven primarily by economic insecurity and environmental instability, not by demand for low-skilled labour or a need to boost retail sales.
The referendum also shows growing conformism among the affluent chattering classes, all too willing to recycle orthodoxy. However, truly intelligent people do not blindly accept official advice from powerful institutions who may not have their best interests at heart. Everyday we are deluged with messages from advertisers and lobbyists, often masquerading as charities. Our high streets are teaming with professional awareness raisers, subtly pushing various hidden agendas that may not seem immediately obvious. This referendum has shown that ordinary people have lost their trust in condescending experts and pundits. There cannot be a soul in the whole wide land who has not heard the neoliberal elite's view on the benefits of the European Union and mass migration. Love of global institutions and multiculturalism are mandatory parts of today's school curriculum. The main TV channels have long subtly injected their universalist themes into popular sitcoms and soaps. Eastenders, the UK's most popular soap opera, portrays a fictional community where people from the most diverse backgrounds all get along fabulously in stark contrast to the reality of parallel communities that barely talk and transient agency workers replacing the previous bunch of underpaid labourers.
As a result opposition to the European Union was until recently a fringe concern. Affordable holidays in Southern Europe have given millions of working class Britons a taste of Europe's delights, although most tend to gravitate to tourist resorts and mingle more with their countryfolk than with the locals. I always make a point of venturing away from the madding crowd of British holiday makers. True diversity can only thrive when native cultures retain their homelands. Otherwise they become a mere flavour that blends into an indistinct melting pot.
Gradual change may be good, but rapid change is nearly always disruptive
Currently popular discontent with rapid globalisation and cultural change is filtered through a handful of tabloid newspapers with their sensationalist stories about benefits-cheating migrants and fake refugees. However much the wishful-thinking left may find these stories distasteful, they do seem to reflect the everyday experiences of ordinary Britons struggling to cope with rapid change more accurately than the sop stories one reads in the Guardian or sees in BBC documentaries. I have personally visited London housing estates where most residents are not only recent immigrants, but are also clearly in receipt of substantial welfare handouts. Otherwise they could not pay their rent and most do not pay enough taxes to compensate for the true cost of additional public services. Reassuring official reports attempt to contradict such anecdotal evidence, but often do so through selective data sets. However, midway through the referendum campaign not only did official statistics show another rise in net migration, but evidence also emerged of massive undercounting of temporary EU migrants owing to a large discrepancy between official immigration figures and new national insurance numbers. We thus have two contrasting narratives. One presents a progressive community of gradually converging European regions and view migratory imbalances as mere temporary and easily manageable phenomena that can only create minor inconveniences for local inhabitants. The other presents a failed superstate project that drives millions to seek work in high wage regions displacing local workers. The elites see these people movements as way of forging a new pan-European identity. While this international camaraderie may work in university campuses and affluent neighbourhoods, it has created new conflicts between natives and newcomers elsewhere.
The challenge ahead
In any case mass migration is a much more complex issue and certainly not confined to the European Union. Indeed the biggest challenge over the next decade will be to deal with growing migratory pressures from Africa and Middle East, two regions with high birth rates. I have long argued the best way to address these challenges is through sustainable development. That means helping these countries acquire the skills and technology they need to feed their people while transitioning to a more sustainable birth rate. China has already transitioned and India is well on its way to an ideal fertility rate of 2 children per woman (currently 2.45, but just 2.0 in Kerala). Greater migration to Europe or North America will do little to alleviate the environmental impacts of rapid population growth. Besides the real challenge will be to develop smarter and greener technology to reduce massive waste and inefficiencies.
Could the Native English have halted Cultural Convergence?
The Brexit saga reveals another irony. Today's globalisation is largely built on British and later North American imperialism. The English language has become one of the primary vehicles of cultural convergence. As a rule the more globally connected a place is, the more its people are likely to be fluent in English. Ironically as the European Union has morphed from a Western European free trade area to a pan-European superstate, the dominance of international English has grown. While paying lip service to French and other major European languages, Eurocrats have an unnerving habit of speaking a kind of Euro-English that alienates not only millions of continental Europeans who still prefer their mother tongues, but native English speakers too. Their diction, replete with neologisms, bears an an uncanny semblance to George Orwell's NewSpeak, namely it serves more to preclude unwanted thoughts than to expand mutual understanding. If the UK leaves the European Union, Ireland may be the only country where English spoken as the primary vernacular. (see English language could be dropped from European Union after Brexit) I'm beginning to feel the tide is turning on globalisation as people become more aware of what they are losing. We can actually harness modern technology to break language barriers without jettisoning our traditions and cultural identity. Will machine translation kill English as Lingua Franca?
If you listen to the debate on Britain's membership of the European Union you could be forgiven for believing that it's a clash between progressive philanthropists and selfish Little Englanders determined to restore Britain to Victorian values. To the likes of Caroline Lucas the EU represents green fields with solar panels and wind turbines interspersed with cycle lanes, eco-friendly houses and intelligent talented European citizens sharing ideas on how to make the world a better place. This idyllic vision of a new Europe might resemble a cross between a university campus and the Teletubbies, where EU bureaucrats act as benevolent teachers and playground assistants moulding a new generation to break with their forebears' old divisive ways. For all the talk of multiculturalism, pan-Europeanism has always been about suppressing national identities that emerged over centuries of gradual cultural evolution in favour of an artificial social construct.
Just as primary school teachers fear their children will revert to bullying and infighting without their progressive oversight, left-branded EU fanatics would have you believe Britain would revert to a pre-1973 squalor controlled by rightwing Tories intent on undoing all the good things the EU has purportedly done. In reality most environmentally friendly EU legislation just helps big business deal with the adverse affects of higher consumer demand. We may have more energy-efficient fridges and hair-dryers, but not only are these goods imported from afar, they are replaced more frequently offsetting any marginal gains in yield.
Yet it's when the debate turns to the UK's unbalanced net migration statistics that the faux left reveal their true colours. Free movement of labour has become a core value. It's doesn't seem to matter how unbalanced migratory flows are or how many social problems are caused by our inability to accommodate so many new residents, the infantile globalist left has only two answers:
Shout racism at native workers
Blame greedy capitalists for not building enough affordable houses, schools, hospitals and roads to accommodate newcomers.
By this logic 19th century Bengali textile workers should have welcomed cheap imports from Manchester in solidarity with their English counterparts toiling away in mechanised sweatshops. Surely any attempt to defend your community and way of life must be motivated by either insular nationalism or Luddism.
Yet the same arrogance that Victorian imperialists showed towards the native peoples of their colonies has now re-emerged as a the globalist revulsion against autochthonous working class opposition to their plans. Just as Victorian industrialists used child labour in English, Welsh and Scottish textile mills, factories and coal mines to displace local cottage industries in the colonies, they use migrant labour today to displace native working classes everywhere.
More disturbing is the pseudo left's emotional propaganda for perceived victims groups. They will have us believe that our health service would crumble without the hard work of immigrants from the rest of the EU. Besides the obvious point that a higher population boosts demand, a disproportionate percentage of NHS staff are indeed not UK-born. This is because the NHS has failed to invest sufficiently in training medical staff and relies increasingly on agency workers, who can be hired and fired at the drop of a hat. NHS managers seek to cut costs by importing ready-trained personnel, thereby reducing training costs and gaining more malleable staff.
No doubt, longer life spans, higher survival rates of disabled people and greater awareness of medical conditions and treatments have increased demand for healthcare in most technologically advanced countries. The NHS employs a staggering 1.7 million people, of whom around 140,000 are medical doctors. However, other European countries have similar needs and need staff too. Why should we pilfer the best and brightest from low-wage regions whether they happen to be in the EU or not? Why are young Britons not pursing medical careers in sufficient numbers or being given chances to train? These are naturally complex questions, but even those British nurses who try to do the right thing find themselves sidelined by agencies NHS spends huge sums on foreign nurses, yet two thirds of local applicants are rejected. The NHS is clearly run by people who do not have the beat interests of their local communities at heart. The locals are seen as customers or, as we used to call them, patients.
The faux left loves to complain about government cutbacks in welfare provision and mental healthcare. Yet has it occurred to them that alternative to both might be better training and job security. Why do so many native Britons need mental healthcare? Why do so many lack any sense of purpose in their lives? Traditionally one lived to provide one's family with comfortable standard of living and a future for the next generation. The kind of neoliberal policies we have seen since the Thatcher era have both destroyed communities and split families. Just as the information revolution enabled greater automation, Western elites decided mothers should organise their lives around wage slavery rather than seeking new ways to enable both women and men to work less and have more time to raise their children. So rather than reorganising our economy so people only have to work 20 hours a week, can retire early and take off a few years for sabbaticals, we opted to condemn millions to joblessness and welfare dependence while others were forced to hand over their young children to third-party carers so they could earn a living in boring office jobs. No wonder so many children lack any clear sense of identity or purpose life. Their parents either depend on welfare handouts or they're away most of the day serving someone else's needs. As men are no longer needed as breadwinners during a child's early years, many women have effectively married the state. However, these developments have not affected the chattering professional classes anywhere near as much. The highly skilled can usually negotiate much better work conditions. An affluent professional couple can easily team up to provide both themselves and their offspring with the right work/life balance. If you earn £100,000 a year each working 40 hours a week you can easily agree to halve your salaries while you take it turns to look after your children, though mothers naturally have a stronger biological bond with their babies in their tender first few months. By contrast if you're on the breadline struggling to pay exorbitant rents or mortgages, you have no such choice. A couple earning 30,000 a year each would both have to work full-time in most of the UK to maintain a vaguely normal standard of living without being a drain on the welfare system. Indeed as discussed elsewhere, anyone earning less than 32K per annum receives more in services than they pay in tax once we take into account childcare, schooling, healthcare, transport infrastructure, policing and other essential public services.
A new reality is dawning on the affluent world. Big business no longer needs most workers, except as marketing, surveillance and support staff whose job it is to control the behaviour of social deviants. The only mission-critical workers of the future will be those essential to the development of new technologies and new ways to manage the great unwashed masses, basically between 1 and 5% of the current workforce, a privileged intellectual elite able to grasp complex organisational concepts. Everyone else's job will be expendable.
The trendy left's simplistic rhetoric may reassure some that they care about the underprivileged, but increasingly it seems they have become extreme advocates of interdependence. Every faux-left cause célèbre seems to lead in the same direction, greater dependence on external agencies and greater reliance on high-tech solutions to cope with the demands of increasingly interconnected lives. If we grow our economies and fill skills gaps by allowing our population to rise, we'll have to import more resources, build more houses and find innovative ways to boost energy efficiency. If we expand mental healthcare, we are effectively policing people's minds rather than enabling them to fend for themselves. If we ban hydraulic fracturing, something I'd certainly welcome, we either cut consumption or need alternatives means of energy generation to cope with demand.
The last people the faux left trust to run their lives are ordinary workers, because sooner or later workers start to think for themselves and may not agree with the universalist vision of infantile globalists. Hence social media has to be proactively monitored for nationalist opinions. Social workers can pry into the lives of every parent or carer. Surveillance has moved way beyond the primitive CCTV of the 1990s. Labour-controlled Glasgow City Council partnered with an Israeli Intelligence firm to introduce a state-of-the-art surveillance system with advanced facial recognition (Big Brother is watching: Glasgow City Council partners with Israeli surveillance company to monitor ‘unusual behaviour' among citizens). If you think the Scottish National Party are any better, just consider their infamous Named Person bill that assigns an inspector to every child empowered to intervene in family matters.
The pro-EU left do not trust common folk to run their lives. They see us as mere voting fodder. If you think they care more about new immigrants or refugees, just consider the plight of Britons of Caribbean descent who arrived here in 1950s and 60s. Labour seemed quite happy to let agencies overlook hundreds of thousands of unemployed Londoners of Afro-Caribbean heritage, and hire directly from Eastern Europe. If the left really cared about immigrants, it would make sure we can assimilate the last wave of newcomers before we import another. If it really cared about sustainable development in Africa or India, it would also make sure they can keep their most talented sons and daughters rather than rely on aid and remittances.
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.
As net migration to the UK hits record levels, many opinion leaders, especially in the Labour and Green parties, claim this is no bad thing. Don't worry about the numbers. They are just a sign of our interconnected times. We get to go on holiday or retire in Southern Europe and they come here to do all the jobs we used to do, add a little spice to our life and, of course, boost our wonderful economy. Naturally more people lead to greater retails sales, but any net benefit can only measured on a per capita basis.
However, one of the most cherished claims we hear from mass migration lobbyists is that EU migrant workers pay more in tax than they receive in welfare. Both Caroline Lucas of the Greens and Alex Salmond of the SNP have parroted the statistic from 2007 that EU migrants contribute net 2.5 billion to the exchequer. I should sincerely hope so as otherwise they would not contribute at all to the services they consume, such as transport infrastructure, street cleaning, health, schooling or policing. Unless you live in a tent in a sparsely populated region without access to electricity or running water, you inevitably consume public services. This then raises the question if that 2.5 billion in tax covers the services consumed by over 3 million EU citizens working in the UK, do they pay enough tax?
Currently if you earn less than around £32,000 a year, you are on average tax-negative, i.e. you consume more in services and welfare than you pay in tax (read Are you a contributor to or a burden on the nation's finances?). Of course, besides income tax we also pay sales tax (VAT and other duties), council tax and vehicle excise duty, however, these are just levies on consumption. Like most governments the UK runs a budget deficit. It needs more than half the population to be tax-positive to subsidise the other half who cannot afford to pay more, but still need services. Initially clever-dick economists told us Eastern European migrants would not burden our public services because they are young, childless and will return to their home countries after a few years in the UK. Now schools and hospitals are overwhelmed by increased demand from the same newcomers, who have miraculously had children, aged and succumbed to ill health. Indeed the fertility rate among Eastern Europeans in the UK is higher than it is in Eastern Europe because our relatively generous child benefits. Polish women in the UK have on average 2.4 children compared to just 1.4 in Poland (see Poland's baby boom in UK! and End of 2.4 children, as Britain has biggest families in Europe).
Despite a massive rise in inward migration, the UK still has a substantial skills shortage in Science, Technology Engineering and Maths (STEM), because a higher population raises demand. As advances in artificial intelligence enable far greater levels of automation than we dreamed possible only ten years ago, the demand for a select number of high skilled jobs will increase while many other jobs can be fully automated. Indeed the only low-paid occupation that is likely to see increased demand is personal care where empathy and cultural affiinity are distinct assets. Does it make any sense to import care workers from poorer countries just to undercut local workers? We have a huge oversupply of unskilled and semi-skilled workers. The overwhelming majority of new international commuters do jobs that native born Britons could easily do with appropriate training and, more important, sufficient motivation. Only a small proportion of 630,000 new immigrants (the 333,000 figure is the net amount after discounting emigration) are talented engineers, doctors, architects or academics. We do not have a shortage of sandwich makers or bar staff, but a growing divide between low-paid workers competing with other low-skill workers on little more than the minimum wage on one hand and professional elites on the other. The latter group do not see their jobs threatened by newcomers from other countries. They enjoy cheaper childminders and more attractive bartenders and will probably retire to a holiday home in Southern France, Spain, Greece or Bulgaria. Indeed the arrogant liberal elite do not like native Britons at all, too uncouth, lazy and borderline racist, unless they learn to repeat the same old line about the wonders of multiculturalism and diversity.
If you listen to globalising evangelists, you might believe immigrants only ever come to the UK to work in our health service, help us build houses and pay more taxes. Sadly this is just a fantasy. Most people come out of shrewd self-interest to earn more than they would do back home. Southern Europe has over 50% youth unemployment as a by-product of enforced free markets and an unsustainable currency union. Some may well have some rare skills, but most will just be fairly average and have little to offer other than enthusiasm and perseverance. Meanwhile, any chances of economic revival in much of Southern Europe are scuppered as their best and brightest have left.
While globalisation seems unstoppable, unbalanced migratory flows always harm the poorest most. Neoliberal pundits should stop calling the native working class racist and start listening. They may actually learn economic growth as in bigger profits for leading supermarkets does not translate into a happier more egalitarian society. Most people just want more affordable housing, greater job security, more accessible healthcare, less congested transport network and more social cohesion around common values and experiences. By all accounts quite the opposite is happening. The economy may be growing, but people's real lives are under greater stress.
