Tag: war

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Computing Power Dynamics

Madonna vs Alex Jones

adonna

How the Virtue-Signalling Left Cares More About Affluent Jet-Setters Than Defenceless Goat Herders

The faux outrage about Donald Trump's controversial travel ban on citizens of 7 mainly Muslim countries reveals more about the priorities of the affluent infantile left than it does about any shift in US foreign policy. Most people in the world outside of North America, Europe, Japan and a few other wealthy countries cannot afford to fly to the United States. The freedom to travel where you want and to enjoy the benefits of advanced civilisations that took hundreds of years to evolve is a relatively new concept. By contrast food, water and shelter are the most fundamental human necessities. US foreign policy under Bush Senior, Clinton, Bush Junior and Obama has denied millions these basic human rights by bombing neighbourhoods, destroying vital infrastructure for clean water, food distribution and electricity, littering the landscape with depleted uranium, imposing sanctions, arming despotic regimes and covertly supporting Islamic fundamentalist militias in Syria, Egypt, Iraq, Libya and elsewhere. While many protested against the 2003 invasion of Iraq, opposition to subsequent military escapades and arms sales has been muted. The mainstream Western media, most notably the BBC and CNN, have consistently peddled US State Department propaganda by blaming local leaders, Russia or Iran for the region's growing instability. Indeed many left-leaning politicians and opinion leaders supported US intervention in the Middle East. Gordon Brown and the late Jo Cox MP published a report calling for more proactive intervention in Syria to counter aggression from Russia and President Assad. Their narrative leads in only one direction, a borderless one world government controlled by global corporations and policed by a transcontinental expansion of NATO. It's a vision shared not only by Hillary Clinton's campaign team, Tony Blair and George Soros, but also by the EU and China.

Yet the wishful thinking fake Left in all their collective indignation against President Trump seem much more concerned with the rights of affluent Middle Eastern globetrotters than those of Yemeni goat herders whose homes have just been bombed by the Saudi Air Force with the full cooperation of the US and UK or the rights of Christian Syrians murdered by rebel militias that the UK or US armed. They can only relate to people like themselves who value the freedom to travel abroad more than the right to safety, social stability and cultural continuity in your own homeland because they just imagine the world as one large university campus and project impractical idealist student politics onto the rest of humanity.

The latte-sipping soi-disant Left tend to confuse actions with categories of people. Migrate is a verb. Anyone who moves to another region or country is by definition a migrant just as anyone who travels by aeroplane is an air passenger. Migration may be good, bad or indifferent depending on objective environment and social conditions. Likewise anyone who drives a car is a driver. Logically driving may also be good, bad or neutral in different situations. The same human being may be a driver in one situation and a train passenger, cyclist or walker in other circumstances. We should not debate whether migrants or drivers are good or bad people, but whether mass migration or mass motoring make environmental or social sense. Oddly the two phenomena are closely related as people tend to move to more affluent countries with higher car ownership. In today's complex world immigration controls are like traffic regulations. Ideally we would not need any restrictions on movement and if we all lived comfortably in sparsely populated and resource-rich regions we could minimise both traffic and migration controls, but we don't. More freedom in one domain inevitably limits freedoms in other areas. People might value ease of travel, but we also need safe and peaceful neighbourhoods.

Until recently only a tiny fraction of humanity could afford long-distance travel. European emigrants to the Americas would save up many years only to endure a long and arduous journey in the lower decks of a ship. It's something people might do once or twice in a lifetime. On arrival they had little choice but to work for a living as there was no welfare to speak of. Not everyone succeeded. Some died through exhaustion while a few returned to their homelands penniless, but the American dream was open only to those who either arrived rich or worked hard and seized every opportunity. Not surprisingly the USA attracted the most highly motivated immigrants. If you were not prepared to adapt to the competitive reality of the new world, you were better off staying in your homeland where at least you knew the score. However, since the mid 1990s we've seen an unprecedented rise in global migratory flows as millions seek a higher standard of living in wealthier countries. People move not so much because they must, but because they can or rather because they are aware of better opportunities elsewhere.

Celebrity Rednecks vs Hollywood Divas

Two media-savvy celebrities vie for the hearts and minds of the American people. One is a pop star and actress whose semi-pornographic exhibitionism has helped promote the kind of consumer fetishism that big business loves and ecologists loathe. The other is a loudmouthed urban redneck from Houston, Texas, who has built his multimedia career on the conspiracy theory that the Feds want to deny law-abiding citizens of their god-given right to drive oversized SUVs and bear arms. At least Alex has ranted and railed against the establishment and stood up for free speech, but Madonna Louise Ciccone has only ever lent her support to Hollywood fundraisers to improve her public image. I can't recall her voicing her opposition to US arms sales to Saudi Arabia. Curiously Alex Jones and Madonna personify only marginally different versions of American exuberance and extreme indulgence. Both drive SUVs and lead jetsetting lifestyles that could sustain 100s, if not 1000s, of African or Indian lives.

Since the inauguration of the accidental president of the United States, property developer and reality TV Star, Donald Trump, the world's most influential economic, military and cultural power has been split into two rival camps, both funded by big business. For decades the White House could rely on the main American and European media outlets to toe their lines on strategic foreign, economic and social policies. The Republicans and Democrats differed mainly in rhetoric, one appealing more to the conservative hinterland and the other more to the trendier metropolitan conurbations. In practice they both vigorously pursued policies that benefited mainly large corporations while attempting to manage the expectations and social conflicts of their diversified citizenry. Behind the scenes the two main dynasties of the last 40 years, the Bush and Clinton families, whose members played key roles in the Reagan and Obama administrations too, got along just fine. Bill Clinton famously vacationed with George HW Bush in Kennebunkport.

Donald J Trump is a loose cannon who dreams of a powerful, self-reliant and prosperous America trading peacefully with the rest of the world. Most notably he has publicly advocated strong nation states, secure borders and bilateral trade deals that protect the interests of local workers, all concepts alien to universalists. However, his presidency is now captive to a splinter group of the infamous neoconservatives who architected the USA's disastrous foreign and military policies over the last 30 years or more. While once united, the business elites in the US and to a lesser extent in the UK are now split into two camps. One remains fully committed to the globalist project and view conservative patriotism as an anachronism that must give way to a new global mindset. Globalists may pay lip service to local or national identity, especially for temporary electoral gain, but their long-term goal is a one-world government. A few years ago many would have dismissed such prophecies as far-fetched, but Western academics have long argued against nation states.

The other group recognises the world is a complex and dangerous place and prefers to build on the relative strengths of advanced countries such as the USA, Japan, Australia or France as a model that the rest of the world might emulate rather than attempt to re-engineer the world in their own image. While globalists always favour policies that undermine national privilege and favour cultural harmonisation, modern patriots favour stable societies that benefit their own people and here I use George Orwell's distinction between patriotism (positive nationalism) and negative nationalism. This marks a paradigm shift that may itself be an adaptation to the USA's relative demise as a superpower. When the Soviet Union fell in 1991, the USA utterly dominated the world's economic, cultural and military domains. No other country could challenge its hegemony. China may have had a much larger population, but lacked the economic and military means to be more than a regional power. Very much aware of the Anglosphere's soft power advantage, China has focussed on building up its economic leverage with Europe and North America as well as expanding its mercantile empire to Africa, South America and the Middle East. The East Asian superpower's economy is set to overtake the USA's in the next 10 to 15 years. A close alliance between China and Russia could challenge the USA's former dominance and prove a much better trading partner for Central European countries who already import much more from China than from the US and rely increasingly on Russian gas. Over the last decade US Foreign policy has attempted to thwart the re-emergence of Russia as a major player in a multipolar world, by preventing a trade alliance with Ukraine under Poroshenko and funding the Maidan movement to bring Ukraine within the EU and NATO umbrella. This strategy has failed. Russia can survive without the US or EU as it has a captive market for its raw materials in China, Iran and India. Russia has little need for territorial expansion and has only acted to defend the rights of Russians in neighbouring countries formerly in the Russian Empire and Soviet Union. Yet Saudi Arabia with a fraction of Russia's size and population now spends more on military hardware than Russia.

For the first time in recent history the CEOs of major American corporations and much of the so-called liberal media are openly hostile to the US Presidency. Sergey Brin, the multibillionaire co-founder of Google, led 2000 employees to protest Trump's travel ban. He has already alluded to a future President Pence, possibly after the successful impeachment of the sitting President. Their main concern is the ease of travel of affluent Silicon Valley workers, not the safety of Yemeni goat herders or Chicago residents.

Categories
Computing Power Dynamics

Is Oceania still at war with Eastasia?

Goldman Sachs

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.

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All in the Mind Power Dynamics

On the Brink of War

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.

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Computing Power Dynamics

Would a sane Commander in Chief ever deploy Nuclear Weapons?

nuclear bomb

The British Parliament is about to vote on the renewal of the country's US-built and US-controlled nuclear missile shield. In case you didn't know, these nuclear warheads are launched from submarines based in Faslane on the Firth of Clyde, just 20 miles from Glasgow, Scotland.

I've long realised pacifism, while an ideal we should all aspire to, is not a viable option in a dangerous and grotesquely unequal world. Pacifism makes as much sense as open borders without any police surveillance. It might work once we have overcome the dark sides of human nature and established a truly egalitarian and peace loving society in which not only do we all care for each other, but we all trust each other. If you can justify self-defence and accept the need for public institutions to protect us, you have to recognise we need some form of defence, especially in the wake of recent terrorist attacks and attempted coups d'état.

The biggest threats to the security of the British people do not come rival superpowers intent on destroying our infrastructure and killing millions of people, but from unstable militias and unhinged local despots who retaliate against UK involvement in military operations in their neck of the woods. Britain is a prime target of foreign aggressors not because we have failed to destroy their power bases, but because our government's actions in supporting US and NATO interventions has greatly destabilised much of the Middle East, North Africa and Central Asia. A major military power such as Russia, with vast territory of its own, would have little reason to attack the British Isles, unless we became directly involved in a future conflagration with Russia over Ukraine. In such a scenario, were Russia to deploy nuclear warheads against a densely populated country, without the military and economic might for total world domination, the fallout would permanently shatter its international reputation and almost certainly invite disastrous military and/or economic retaliation. In a globally connected world destroying your customers' countries doesn't make much sense unless it&rrsquo;s the only way to gain control of mission-critical resources only available there in abundance.

A quick look at military spending figures for 2015 reveals a changing world. With the notable exception of the United States, which account for over 40% of the global military spending, the countries with the most successful economies have rather modest defence budgets. Even Russia, with around 145 million, only spends 10 billion more than the UK. Most of its military budget is invested in land forces and a large personnel of 771 thousand. Russia is also surrounded by US bases in Eastern Europe, Turkey, Uzbekistan, Mongolia and Japan. Of greater concern should be Saudi Arabia's massive $88 billion defence budget.

Rank Country $ Billion
1 United States 597.5
2 China 145.8
3 Saudi Arabia 81.8
4 Russia 66.5
5 United Kingdom 56.2
6 India 48.0
7 France 46.8
8 Japan 41.0
9 Germany 36.7
10 South Korea 33.5
11 Brazil 24.3
12 Australia 22.8
13 Italy 21.6
14 Iraq 21.1
15 Israel 18.6

Source: Wikipedia: List of Countries By Military Expenditures

What would happen if some madman launched a nuclear attack against us

While NATO's military planners may be fixated with Russia, the real threat comes from an unstable Middle East, especially in the event of a popular uprising in Saudi Arabia and the ascension to power of an anti-Western regime allied with countries such as Pakistan and possibly Iran. They might, at least until the development of viable alternatives, hold the world to ransom through their control of cheap oil, and fight regional wars of conquest just as Saudi Arabia is currently engaged in bombing campaigns in Yemen. However, any nuclear strikes against European cities would kill hundreds of thousands of Muslims too. Nuclear weapons are useless against strategic military targets, unless such targets are conveniently located in remote sparsely populated regions. Indeed to be effective a nuclear attack would have to annihilate enemy territory. A large superpower, like the USA, could wipe out a geographically constrained enemy, albeit with cataclysmic human consequences, but a small militias linked to an ad-hoc state such as Daesh would only succeed in killing people before inviting immediate retaliation against an ill-defined target. A nuclear strike would be the ultimate act of extreme terrorism that no sane commander in chief of a stable country would contemplate even in the event of nuclear attack on their territory, by which time the damage would have been done. The only logical defence would be an advanced anti-nuclear defence shield that could intercept and destroy nuclear warheads before they reach major population centres. Our priority would be to minimise human deaths and neutralise the enemy. Oddly the huge projected £100 and 200 billion budget for the new Trident system over 30 years would be much better spent on more intelligent satellite reconnaissance and surface to air missiles launched from existing submarines but without nuclear warheads. Mail On Sunday columnist Peter Hitchins supported Trident in the cold war days when most of us on the left opposed it, but he rightly says now "To spend all your money of a nuclear weapon for a war that won't happen is like spending all your money on insurance against alien abduction and then neglecting to insure your self against fire and theft."

Deterrence theory relies on convincing your potential enemy that you'd actually deploy your warheads, which would have no tactical advantage. Nuclear weapons are good at two things: mass destruction and complete humiliation. It's what the US did to the Japanese towards the end of Second World War. They could only get away with it because of their massive technological and economic superiority. That's no longer the case. Nuclear war would lead to mutually assured destruction. Keeping nuclear weapons only encourages rogue states from following suit.

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Power Dynamics

Shifting Alliances

For a long time Britain's political parties have failed to represent the views and aspirations of ordinary people. Politicians have become mere implementors of policies devised elsewhere by a maze of global organisations. Labour, Conservatives, the Liberal Democrats and even the SNP have all converged on a variant of Blairism, broadly speaking a form of managed corporate globalisation with a blurring of traditional national boundaries, a merger between large corporations and public sector services, greater surveillance and above all greater interdependence. They only differ in their presentation to their target audience and can even pretend to disagree on issues over which they have little control or are not mission-critical. The real changes we see in our lives are driven by large corporations and rapid technological innovation with environmental and human consequences few of us can fully comprehend.

The Brexit vote is likely to change the British political landscape in some quite unexpected ways. The EU referendum revealed a divide not so much on traditional party-political allegiances, as on socio-economic classes and tribal identity. In England and Wales people on lower incomes voted overwhelming to leave the EU. Even in Scotland, despite tribal loyalty behind the SNP and its calls for a second Independence Referendum ( #indyref2 ), many working class voters rebelled against their political elites.

In the aftermath of the shock Brexit vote, the British Labour Party is in meltdown. The English and Welsh working classes failed to heed its warnings about the dire economic consequences of leaving its beloved European Union. They sent a clear signal. "Enough is enough. We're fed up of condescending lectures on the benefits of globalisation. We think it's out of control and not in our interests. We want you to put local people first." One thing is clear few leave voters have villas in France or Eastern European nannies. Many live on the breadline, the very people who would once have voted Labour. While some protest votes went to UKIP in the last General Election, many more simply did not vote at all. A few Labour MPs and activists supported the Labour Leave campaign. I donated to help produce #Lexit the movie, presenting the leftwing case against the EU superstate. However, the mainstream media ignored these voices in the wilderness. Only Kate Hoey, Gisela Stuart and Frank Field really took part in the public debate. The party machinery and the bulk of its parliamentarians supported staying in the EU, something which had become an act of faith. Not surprisingly the party's staunchly pro-EU Blairite wing did not blame the handful of mavericks for openly opposing their line, but the new infantile left-leaning leader for failing to present a positive case for staying in the EU. The SNP proudly boasted that they had delivered a pro-EU vote, probably because many of their supporters instinctively distrust remote superstates. Why complain about Westminster being too remote, only to transfer control of your economic and migration policies to Brussels. However, the defining issue was not the finer details of free trade deals or international cooperation, but unsustainable unbalanced mass migration, a phenomenon felt much more in England and Wales than in Scotland. Amazingly on this subject both the Blairite and Corbynite wings are in wholehearted agreement. They may disagree on recent military interventions in the Middle East and Central Asia, on the renewal of Trident or the renationalisation of the railways, but both the infantile universalist left and Blairite corporate globalists adore mass migration, albeit for different reasons. Neither faction really cares about Britain, which they view merely as a social experiment, a kind of extended international university campus. While Corbynites imagine that people from different backgrounds will come together in their struggle against corporate oppressors, Blairites long recognised they had to work with multinational corporations and not against them. They could pretend to care about the environment, community cohesion, international solidarity and human rights just to bring the gullible aspirational left on board. Very often these concerns help drive their longer term agenda for greater corporate control. Human rights provide the ideal pretext for military intervention. Community cohesion can justify greater surveillance and restrictions on free speech. Calls for international solidarity can give grounds for the erosion of national sovereignty and environmental concerns can win public support for a transfer of power to global institutions, often working in cahoots with the same multinationals responsible for much of our industrial pollution. Blairites are pragmatists who usurp progressive rhetoric to empower their corporate masters. By contrast Corbynites can only offer the electorate abstract ideals. In power they could only follow a radical form of Neo-Keynsianism but would soon find themselves constrained by international markets and global institutions just as Greece's Syriza had to bow to the will of the European Central Bank. They may preach universal love for all, including the disadvantaged native English communities, but they have few plans for managing social conflicts when their economic plans go awry. Ironically, outside the European Union, Britain would be freer to pursue independent economic policies, though global banks would be unlikely to let a potential Corbyn government overspend. For all the talk of investing in the re-birth of British manufacturing, I suspect a Corbyn / McDonnell government would be too busy trying to eke taxes out of multibillion dollar tech giants than to stimulate the kind of technological innovation we need to address our environmental challenges.

The biggest surprise in the wake of the EU referendum is that the Conservative Party is still largely intact, though maybe not for long. I suspect a fair number of MPs, like many voters, were reluctant or rather pragmatic remainers. The establishment know all too well the odds were stacked against the Leave campaign. In the end more people voted with their brain than with their heart. Apart from a hardcore of EU fanatics such as Kenneth Clarke, Michael Heseltine, Nicholas Soames and Anna Soubry, most Conservatives have accepted the result. They merely differ on the finer details of the UK's negotiated exit. For the first time in living memory, the Conservative Party seem more in touch with the aspirations of ordinary working people than Labour or the Liberal Democrats. Tory Brexiteers can now argue that all deals with the EU must exempt us from accepting free movement of people with the full support of a majority of public opinion. Most voters support balanced migration, i.e. where a similar number of workers enter and leave the country every year letting us still attract foreign talent, but reducing competition at the lower end of labour market. Most would also rather pay more for goods and services than see cheap agency staff undercut local workers. However, I would not trust the Tories to stand up for the interests of ordinary working people. If the Eurosceptic wing of the Conservative Party gain the upper hand in the coming leadership election and secure a favourable free trade deal with the EU that gives us full control over migration policy, UKIP will have lost its raison d'être. If they can genuinely bring down net migration to the tens of thousands, it will cease to be a bone of contention. UKIP's other policies such as their hatred of wind farms and support for hydraulic fracturing and cheaper motoring basically just appeal to the Jeremy Clarkson mindset. They may have made a few interesting points on the merits of grammar schools and squandering of foreign aid, but few of their policies stand up to much scrutiny in the real world. Education will have to keep pace with rapidly evolving technology and greater automation. Rather than reintroduce outdated grammar schools, we should be setting up specialised schools to further science, technology, engineering and mathematics and let children develop at different rates. Most important we should aim for smaller class sizes. This will mean training more teachers and limiting population growth. Unlike UKIP, I would spend more, not less, on international aid. I would rather help other countries develop sustainably than poach their best and brightest doctors and engineers. I'd rather see poorer countries give their people a better future than tidal waves of migrants crossing the Mediterranean on makeshift boats. The trouble with international aid has always been corrupt local elites and empire-building NGOs who act as mere fronts for the same global corporations that want to exploit the resources of much of the developing world. We cannot begin to address grotesque global inequalities until we reduce our dependence on resources only available in poor countries. I'm fairly certain the Middle East would be a much more peaceful place were it not for our dependence on plentiful cheap oil and the vast concentration of wealth in a handful of nabobs.

I cannot see any easy way to reconcile the divisions between the Blairite and Corbynite wings of the Labour Party. The Corbynite Momentum movement will retain its strengths among students, trendy cosmopolitan city dwellers and virtue-signalling click activists. If the Parliamentary Labour Party fails to win a likely leadership election with Corbyn on the ballot paper, they will have little choice but to form a new party, which could potentially attract some renegade Tories or even merge with the Liberal Democrats to become effectively the voice of the arrogant upwardly mobile professional classes. A nightmare scenario for British politics would be the growing likelihood of a narrow victory for Andrea Leadsom in the Tory leadership election, not because her team's policies are all that radical or dangerously rightwing, but because her commitment to an immediate invocation of article 50 and to negotiate a deal that would exempt the UK from freedom of movement. If Jeremy Corbyn wins a likely Labour leadership contest, we could see a seismic shift in UK parliamentary politics. It would only take 20 Tory MPs or so to join forces with the mainstream Blairite wing of the Parliamentary Labour Party to rid the government of its majority and trigger a general election with unpredictable results. Faced with a choice between warmongering Blairites and idealist Corbynites, many traditional Labour voters would run a mile.

I suspect neither grouping would carry a majority of the traditional Labour vote. The party has come to rely too much on the volatile support of ethnic minorities who see the organisation as a vehicle to further their ethno-religous interests. I really do not see Britain's growing Muslim community forming an alliance with Blairites committed to more wars in the Middle East or with the infantile left pursing a fanciful rainbow coalition of gays, ecologists, vegans and pacifists. That leaves a huge vacuum for working class labour, the kind of people who believe in a pragmatic mix of social conservatism, patriotism, a non-interventionist foreign policy, international solidarity, environmental sustainability, steady-state economics (i.e. a focus on the quality of life rather than GDP growth) and technological innovation.

Following Nigel Farage's resignation, I'm unsure whether UKIP will ever win over a substantial proportion of the tradition Labour vote. They may just ensure a complete exit from the European Union without any compromise on the globalist left's treasured Freedom of Movement. They may urge tighter immigration controls, but really have little to offer that differentiates them from the Eurosceptic wing of the Tory Party. There has been some talk about Red UKIP, but apart from a few populist commitments on the NHS, the party has little to offer disenfranchised Labour voters in a post-Brexit Britain.

Real Labour Manifesto

  • We want an independent, democratic and federal United Kingdom, defending the interests of our citizens while cooperating with our European neighbours and other countries further afield in an intersecting network of international communities. We support strong nation states and international solidarity. Democracy can only thrive in viable nation states able to respond to the will of their electorates.
  • Balanced migration. Only when we can manage migratory flows in a very unequal world can we safeguard the most vulnerable in our society and ensure community cohesion. Immigration policy should focus on social stability, environmental sustainability and international solidarity first and only then take into account economic factors. We should invest in the future of our young citizens by providing the right training opportunities for tomorrow's world of high skill employment.
  • International aid: In a fast changing world richer countries have a moral duty to help poorer countries develop the infrastructure and skills base they need to take full advantage of modern technology, so we can live in peace together. While we support international exchanges in science and engineering, we should not deprive poorer countries of their best and brightest.
  • Steady-state economics. For too long we have had a narrow focus on economic growth. In practice this just means a greater volume of financial transactions, higher corporate profits and more consumption. Economic growth cannot continue forever. We need to focus instead on improving people's quality of life through greater stability and a more diversified but high-skill economy.
  • Stakeholder economy: Artificial intelligence and robotics will transform the world of work. However, we must ensure everyone is involved in shaping our future rather than consigning a growing proportion of our working age population to a life of welfare dependence. We must invest in lifelong training and education, facilitate remote and part-time working and explore ways to ensure that everyone, except the most severely disabled, can contribute in some way. We would rather have full employment with average working hours of just 10 or 15 hours a week, than a growing divide between a technocratic elite of wealthy professionals on high incomes and millions dependent on corporate benevolence.
  • Self-defence: Britain should become a normal post-imperial country. Our armed forces should exist for the sole purpose of national defence. We will continue to participate in international military alliances to avert potential threats from foreign imperial powers, but we will not intervene unilaterally in disputes that do not affect our national territorial integrity. We will scrap all nuclear warheads and reinvest in essential naval defences.
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Power Dynamics

Meet the new Universalist Establishment

Corporate Logos

Trendy leftwingers are the new ultra-conformists

Many observers still tend to simplify political analysis on a one-dimensional left / right spectrum. We might use many other scales such as state ownership vs private enterprise, libertarian vs authoritarian, individualism vs collectivism, local vs national, national vs international or environmental friendliness vs economic growth, equality vs meritocracy or cultural diversity versus social cohesiveness, but somehow we still try to place each opinion somewhere on the elusive left-right scale. One could be a libertarian capitalist or an authoritarian environmentalist or even a green advocate of private enterprise or, heaven forbid, a libertarian socialist (namely someone who believes people may one day freely choose to share the fruits of their labour with others). I could go on forever, but I find another key differentiator a much better gauge of political leanings, pro-establishment vs anti-establishment or conformist vs anti-conformist. Rebels just love to exhibit their anti-establishment credentials. But the new-age hipsters who rebelled against the old guard back in the 60s and 70s have become the new conformists. On issue after issue, the radical chic elite are at odds with the more conservative traditional working classes practically everywhere. Most people welcome higher living standards and better working conditions, but they do not necessarily want to redefine culturally entrenched concepts of family and ethno-religious identity. Indeed the most successful way of persuading people to abandon cherished social customs is to lure them away from local communitarian values towards global culture of atomised individual consumers, micro-managed and monitored by a new class of marketers, social workers and supervisors. This transition is beautifully described in Adam Curtis's 3 part documentary The Century of the Self Whenever you consider the merits of any policy, just ask what does the establishment want and why?

Of even greater importance is the real composition of today's power brokers. For some reason the wishful-thinking left clings to the outdated belief the UK establishment still comprises a bunch of White Anglo-Saxon Male Tories, Hereditary Peers and Church of England bishops. They imagine the British establishment would love to turn the clock back to some mythical Victorian golden age when women could not vote, the poor starved and much of the world was subject to racialist colonial rule. Based on this logic all reactionary conservative views are pro-establishment, while enlightened universalist policies are by definition anti-establishment or at least break with the ancien régime. If you measure progress by the demise of the Victorian British establishment and their antiquated values, then we have made huge strides towards a new era of ubiquitous consumer culture.

The spectre of a reactionary nationalist status quo may well have reflected reality at the turn of the 20th century, but today power is very much in the hands of a bunch of global corporations, banks, non-governmental organisations and supranational unions. Organisations as diverse as Tesco, Goldman Sachs, the London Stock Exchange, Microsoft, Google, George Soros's Open Society Foundation, the BBC, CNN, News International, HSBC and the WPP Group (world's largest advertising agency) are all infinitely more powerful that the last remaining British aristocrats and are fully committed to the universalist vision of a new multicoloured borderless world order of happy consumers managed by myriad local agencies. They speak the same politically correct, environmentally aware and culturally inclusive language as the aspirational left. Indeed many former leftists have ended up working for the multifaceted tentacles of our new globalist establishment.

Of the top ten billionaires in the UK, only one descends from the old British aristocracy, The Duke of Westminster at No. 9. Of the other nine, only one other, George G Weston, descends from a British, albeit Anglo-Canadian, family. The other 8 are foreign nationals, recent immigrants or stem from the wider Anglosphere (e.g. the Reuben brothers, Iraqi Jews born in Bombay and migrated to England). Britain's board rooms, media empires and financial institutions are chock-a-block with non-natives, i.e. people whose grandparents did not live in the country before 1945. Now you may welcome this great internationalisation of British society, but it still stands in contrast with most of the resident population, who identify as English, Scottish, Welsh or Irish and whose surnames dominated phone books in the 1950s and 60s. As late as 1997, 75% of the British population could trace their roots to the first settlers of these Isles after the last ice age (as evidenced by Stephen Oppenheimer in the The Myth of British Ancestry) and most of the rest had assimilated almost totally over several generations. Second or third generation Glaswegian Italians or Mancunian Poles have more or less the same outlook on life as their autochthonous neighbours. Naturally most migration before the 1950s occurred within the British Isles, especially since the advent of the industrial revolution. Our elites have always been much more cosmopolitan than their underlings (the Royal family is largely of continental European extraction), but the rapid pace of global convergence has swept aside even the old elites, descended from the Norman French with an admixture of later arrivals from the Huguenots and East European Jews.

Localism vs Globalism

However hard we may try, it is almost impossible to take an absolutist stance on localisation or globalisation, though the direction of travel has accelerated towards the latter. For instance I may argue that we should source food more locally and cut waste, but in many densely populated areas an absolutist interpretation of this policy could mean starvation or having to adapt to a narrow range of staple foods available locally. By contrast if a city were to depend wholly on imports from afar, people could starve within days in the event of a banking collapse or other natural or man-made calamities that may disrupt trade. Both total interdependence and complete isolation have their prices in terms of personal freedom, living standards and happiness.

Anti-Europeanism

The upcoming EU referendum in the UK exposes the growing divide between globalist elites and nativist working classes. In the UK this may manifest itself as oppsosition to the European Union, but elsewhere it is expressed as left or right-branded opposition to neoliberal mercantilism, whether in the guise of the French Front National or the Italian Movimento Cinque Stelle (5 Star Movement led by Beppe Grillo). Universalists claim to stand for progress and lend lip service to ideals such as democracy, womens' rights, sexual freedom and multiculturism, while overseeing the transfer of power away from local institutions to remote organisations that can override any decisions taken locally. Having sold the illusion of democracy to a sceptical public, the cosmopolitan elite now frown upon any expressions of popular opinions as reactionary, xenophobic, homophobic or just plain ill-informed. This is why elitists are keen to give voice to strategic victim groups, whether ethnic minorities, recent immigrants, disability rights' activists, transexuals or careerist women, as long as their aspirations serve a long-term agenda of global convergence with all power vested in a handful of universal corporations. This doesn't mean these perceived victim groups do not have valid grievances, just that the proposed solutions tend to empower remote entities at the expense of traditional institutions. Thus a globalist is more concerned about the rights of Muslim immigrants in Western Europe than those of Muslims in the Middle East or North Africa. If Muslims had viable, stable and largely self-reliant home countries, then they could seek their own path to social betterment. Their culture would evolve in parallel to Western European societies. They could choose which aspects of our culture they wish to adopt and further develop the aspects of their culture that best suit their needs and aspirations. Over a century of Western interference in the Middle East has destabilised the region, leading paradoxically to the emergence of a new more fundamentalist interpretation of Islam, while Christianity in the West has given way to a new atheistic consumer culture devoid of strong family values. The rising cost of parenting in the affluent world has led to a growing demographic divide between the fertile Islamic world and cautious European and East Asian worlds. Mass migration will almost by design create a culture clash that will further empower surveillance bodies. Some believe the end result will be the Islamisation of Europe and indeed in some European cities Muslim children already outnumber those of other religious affiliations. However, I very much doubt the same globalist elite that helped destabilise the Middle East and incessantly promotes fun culture among the world's youth would like to see the transformation of Europe into a new enlarged Caliphate. Rather they trust the immense emotional and technological power of the world's largest media conglomerates to undermine traditional values everywhere and usher in a brave new borderless world of happy consumers and international commuters. Democracy will be little more than petitions asking Starbucks or Apple to pay a little more tax to other global organisations over which we have no real control.

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Power Dynamics

Destabilisation on the eve of WW3

stop bombing

Opinion leaders in the West seem to take four positions on the fast-moving Middle East quagmire:

  1. Some favour more proactive military intervention against our purported enemies and welcome more refugees and economic migrants from the wartorn region allegedly to boost the economy. This group clearly believes not only in the concept of humanitarian wars, but also favour global governance over nation states. It's the classic Blairite position.
  2. Others seem quite gung-ho about bombing the Middle East to smithereens, but are not so keen on accepting refugees to appease popular opinion at home. This is a classic position of rightwing populists. They oppose para-state terrorism with superstate terrorism under the pretext of national security.
  3. Some are keen to welcome as many refugees and economic migrants as possible, but oppose more imperialist intervention. They are keen to do the right thing and blame any social and economic problems on the Western multinationals and US imperialism. However, this faction only ever seems to get its way on migration and despite years of antiwar demonstrations always loses when it comes to support for more military intervention. They claim to oppose destabilisation abroad, but welcome it at home often preferring outsiders to their own reactionary working classes.
  4. A fourth group, with surprisingly large support from pragmatic public opinion, opposes both more military intervention and more mass immigration. Some may characterise this as isolationist and you're certainly a hypocrite if you want to rely on cheap oil from the Middle East. Mind you, many small-c conservatives would also support protected markets, anathema to the largely globalist elites, whether left or right-branded.

Which position is least likely to harm more people and which position is most likely to prevent more terrroists outrages in European cities? Here's another secret: While political elites favour high-risk strategies, often billed as progressive, ordinary people on the ground tend to favour stability. Any policy that's likely to heighten tension, jeopardise job security or cause large population movements tends to meet with popular disapproval. The masses have to be persuaded to support either war or radical socio-environmental change.

If you believe much mainstream propaganda from CNN, Fox News and the BBC and are prepared to forget the details of recent military interventions in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, you may well believe only the enlightened West can save the Middle East from itself. You may be persuaded that this time our leaders support the good guys and will bring about peace and democracy. I think this would be an extremely naive position at odds with mountains of hard evidence, not least the collusion of US, UK and France in arming and funding rival Islamic fundamentalist groups and their massive arms and oil trade with Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Bahrain, Qatar and UAE.

However, beyond any shred of doubt the infamous Islamic State or Daesh (if you prefer) have committed unspeakable atrocities. We do not know if they are directly linked to the terrorists who killed over 130 innocent people in Paris on 13 November, but we do know large swathes of Europe's Muslim population have lost trust in Western enlightenment and a vast oversupply of cheap labour from migrant communities has exacerbated the deskilling of Europe's native working classes. More important just as the native birth rate has declined in much of Central and Southern Europe, the continent's Muslim population continues to grow both through greater fertility (or rather a greater cultural propensity to go forth and multiply) and through immigration. Whether this phenomenon is good, bad or neutral surely depends on the sustainability of the economic model that has driven such rapid growth worldwide and led so many to move to pastures anew. However, unless we can address the growing sense of helplessness of Europe's disparate parallel communities and keep growing the economy by extracting more resources (by outsourcing production to low wage regions and becoming more reliant on imports), any economic meltdown is bound to see a rise in tensions between rival groups.

In an ideal world we would not need to police borders or even lock our doors at night, but then in such a Shangri-La we would not steal resources from our neighbour's land or fund gang warfare to discredit our rivals. By pursuing a high-risk strategy of more military intervention in a volatile region, our ruling classes have failed in their primary duty to defend their electors. This strategy will only breed more distrust, limit everyone's personal freedom and lead more to escape the inevitable ensuing social mayhem. In a time of so much disinformation and emotive arguments, it takes courage to oppose a double dose of destabilisation.

Winning the War of Minds

Over the last 20 or more or years, one faction has usually won the day, proponents of military interventionism, open borders and global corporatism. Yet some armchair analysts may be forgiven for failing to notice how the media manipulate the traditional left/right divide to win favour with the electorate. Just before the 2003 US/UK occupation of Iraq, two million British people demonstrated against military actions, while public opinion remained steadfastly sceptical of the changing narrative of warmongers. Yet it hardly mattered, once a hardcore of activists had vented their frustration and parliament had staged a token debate with a few cabinet resignations, the then Labour government could rely on the Tory Party to offset any damaged caused by Labour rebels. The US would have gone ahead with or without UK support anyway. Yet within a week of the invasion of Iraq, UK public opinion supported the government again, for evil Saddam Hussein had been toppled. The mainstream left and right often play a game, taking it turn to advocate bold globalising policies and blaming their predecessors for any adverse effects of previous escapades. Thus the Tories blame NewLabour for running an unsustainable deficit and failing to make work pay by offering generous welfare handouts and encourage migrant labourers. Yet in power, the Tories seem just as happy as NewLabour to oversee the transformation of UK Labour market into an international jobs fair. Big business has long considered nation states with protective labour markets obstacles they have to overcome. They also need access to resources to drive economic growth, but are smart enough to appeal to universalism when they want to smash traditional nation state borders and to humanitarianism when they want to topple inconvenient governments in another part of the world.

Right now, Jeremy Corbyn's Labour party doesn't stand a chance in hell of winning the next general election. The Tories rub their hands in glee as the Labour Leader espouses a combination of international welfarism, shortsighted neo-Keynsianism, naive open-borderism and conscientious objection to incessant warmongering. Traditional labour supporters may well support Corbyn on the latter point, but actually care about defending their nation and livelihoods. Cameron has the Tory press and decades of subtle BBC propaganda on his side. He can pose as a responsible defender of Western values, forced to take action against foreign terrorists and despotic regimes. Yet both the Labour Left and the Tory Right have failed to address the primary concerns of most ordinary people, security at home. Your average working class person doesn't care about the details of the Syrian conflcit or whether ISIS/Daesh are a bigger threat to us than Bashar Al-Assad. They care about their neighbourhoods and jobs. If you want to bring terrorism onto the streets of Britain, then a combination of more airstrikes and more open-door immigration could usher in a police state much more authoritarian than anything Augusto Pinochet or Erich Honnecker could have envisaged.

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All in the Mind Power Dynamics

Left vs Right: The Yin and Yang of political analysis

Left vs Right: The Yin and Yang of political analysis

As an idealist teenager I always wanted to side with the notional left on everything. The left represented progress towards a better tomorrow freed of human suffering, prejudice, inequality and exploitation, a panacea in which all human beings could enjoy life to the full in a giant communal garden of Eden. The right, on the other hand, represented the forces of reactionary conservatism emotionally tied to the establishment and traditions that prevented progress to a fairer world. I could summarise my naive adolescent appraisal of the left versus right dichotomy as a simple battle between altruistic good and selfish evil. If only life were so simple? However, this simplification of the left - right spectrum still holds true for many youthful political pundits. If you want to discredit a political stance, it often suffices to call it rightwing, end of debate.

The real distinction between left and right transcends broader political questions such as the balance between state control and private enterprise or the relative merits of equality and healthy competition. A left-winger, at heart, is just a wishful thinking idealist who believes social and technological progress will enable us all to enjoy a very high standard of living if only the greedy rich could share more of their wealth. Right-wingers on the other hand are simply pragmatists. They do not necessarily mean to harm anyone else, just they believe we can only really take care of ourselves and our family and should owe greater allegiance to our national community than our species as a whole. While left-wingers view humanity as an organic network that will converge on a new progressive agenda, right-wingers view people as a complex web of competing individuals and in-groups with different interests, strengths and weaknesses.

Fifty years ago in the midst of the Cold War, it may well have seemed that the notional left, at least in Western Europe and North America, challenged a notionally right-wing establishment. Conservative parties would tend to favour private enterprise, family values and civic pride, while the left called for greater state control, more social welfare and international solidarity. In reality most Western governments, whether nominally left or right of centre, pursued business-friendly social interventionism, often confusingly called social democracy, to engineer high living standards, a growing consumer economy and relative social cohesion. National debates would be framed in terms of progress versus traditionalism, personal freedom versus social intervention or democracy versus tyranny. However, both the left and right had plenty of skeletons in their proverbial cupboards. While the libertarian right could point to godless dictatorships behind the Iron Curtain, the radical left could expose national capitalism's complicity in supporting not only Mussolini and Hitler, but also dictatorships in Spain (1937-75), Portugal (1933 to 1974), Greece (1967 to 1974) or Chile (1973 to 1990). Whichever way, authoritarian regimes of the notional left and right, had the blood of tens of millions on their hands. Moreover, these regimes often enjoyed the full support and collaboration of governments in supposedly democratic countries. Meanwhile much of the European radical left sought either to distance themselves from the Stalinist Soviet Union and Maoist China or downplay their authoritarian excesses. Yet repressive regimes of all hues tended to favour collectivist rights and responsibilities over personal freedoms.

For much of the 19th and 20th centuries, the notional left would champion the self-determination of subjugated peoples, whether in Ireland, India or the African colonies. Imperialism remained largely associated with the right, except when dealing with regions and peoples attempting to free themselves from a rival imperialist power. As the Spanish and Portuguese empires waned, the British, French and later American empires could spread their more technologically advanced liberal mercantilist culture, often supporting local forces of national liberation. As the Ottoman Empire declined, the French, British and Italians filled the vacuum as progressive purveyors of Western civilisation, a concept which would later morph into freedom and democracy. The left's view on self-determination began to change with the birth of the Soviet Union. While previously the left had always favoured the self-determination of all peoples in the age of expansionist empires, socialists became more interested in international solidarity and in defending what many saw as a workers' state, whether deformed or not. Yet many of the struggles, from which quasi-socialist regimes emerged, started as wars of national liberation from foreign oppressors.

Nothing epitomises the modern left more than its oxymoronic obsession with equality and diversity. Surely, the more diverse we are, the less equal we are too, except in the loose sense of equality of opportunities, rights and responsibilities. A hunter-gatherer community will never be equal to a globally integrated complex society reliant on advanced technology and an extreme division of labour. That doesn't mean hunter-gatherers are in any way intellectually inferior, just they use their intelligence in a different way. Hunter-gatherers conceive wealth in terms of their ability to enjoy the bounties of nature, not as their ability to use abstract finances to allocate strategic resources for their personal benefit. Yet traditional ways of life that evolved over thousands of years are rapidly giving way to a globally integrated high-tech mono-culture. The more we talk of diversity, the less we have. As fewer and fewer people survive as subsistence farmers or hunter-gatherers (the latter being an endangered way of life), most of humanity now depends on the financial economy. Globalisation has unmasked a massive, and indeed growing, disparity between the financially rich and poor, concealed only by generous welfare in wealthier countries and lower costs of living in some low-wage regions. Equality and diversity initiatives really have little to do with either equality or diversity, but merely managing global convergence as people from different social and cultural backgrounds come into contact with each other.

The heirs to the great European and American working classes, who in large part made today's world possible through skill and dedication, have either had to adapt to a volatile service economy or have been made redundant through automation and/or outsourcing. By keeping large swathes of the population dependent on welfare, the social democratic left has mainly succeeded in keeping the consumer economy alive while slowly but surely thwarting the willpower and self-motivation of millions in the growing underclass trapped on benefits. How could the heirs of the once-proud labour movement defend a system that not only demotivates the lower classes, but wrecks family life and requires a massive social surveillance apparatus to maintain some degree of social order. Fatherlessness alone costs taxpayers hundreds of millions through additional welfare support needs and lack of ambition in teenage boys. Yet the trendy left sees the demise of the traditional two-parent family as a sign of progress, because it allegedly empowers women and homosexuals to break free from heterosexual patriarchy. Yet in promoting this brave new world, the lifestyle left have broken with thousands of years of cultural evolution across many diverse societies. Rather than adapting the traditional roles of men and women in line with technological and social change, the doctrinaire left seeks to eradicate all functional differences. As a result in many Western countries, young men have become great demotivated underachievers, while women have an advantage in a plethora of non-productive people-oriented roles, such as social workers, project managers or recruiters. While female emancipation has been enabled by technology developed mainly by men, it has effectively turned most women into wage slaves and undervalued their traditional role as mothers.

All too often many of the forces that pose on the left advocate policies that suit the needs of power-hungry transnational corporations much more than those of ordinary women or men. Meanwhile the globalist left pretends to oppose the excesses of global capitalism, such as environmental depredation, grotesque overindulgence or mind-bending hyper-consumerism. Yet these are mere side effects of a system that creates insatiable demand for elusive opulence.

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Power Dynamics

Managing the Opposition

Jeremy Corbyn looks set to become Labour Leader and may soon trigger a realignment of the variety show called British parliamentary politics. Don't get me wrong, Jeremy Corbyn was one of the few Labour MPs to take a consistent stand against recent military interventions and oppose the government's love affair with global corporations. I'd certainly agree with him on some other other issues such as the re-nationalisation of railways and energy companies, which are natural monopolies. Yet on other issues such as his steadfast opposition to welfare reform and immigration controls, he may tick all the politically correct boxes and win much kudos among the rhetorical left, but fails to present a coherent alternative that can stand a moment's scrutiny. Corbyn's campaign appeals mainly to emotions and widespread rejection of the kind of corporate politics we've seen from all governments since, well err. 1976 when the then Labour government went cap in hand to the IMF to negotiate a bailout.

I still recall the last time the gullible loony left temporarily held sway in Britain's main opposition party after a decisive defeat in the June 1979 General Election that saw Margaret Thatcher's Tories sweep to power. Unlike real alternatives such as ecologism or communitarianism, the loony or trendy left merely offers a wish list of virtuous policies with little consideration to their holistic viability. With massive job losses and a rising cost of living, in early 1982 Michael Foot's Labour Party, committed to the re-nationalisation of privatised industries, unilateral nuclear disarmament and withdrawal from the EEC, held a healthy lead over the governing Conservatives. Had there been a general election in March 1982, Labour might well have won. I suspect a combination of vested corporate and military interests would have tamed the government's radical agenda. Then in April 1982 Argentina's General Galtieri kindly invaded the Falklands (aka Malvinas) to give the Iron Lady a decisive lead. Michael Foot joined the chorus of engineered public opinion calling a Naval Task Force to liberate 1600 British citizens in windswept islands, some 250 miles from the Argentine coastline (but 10,000 miles from England). The Tory government's monetarist economic policies, far from promoting British workers' interests, furthered those of global corporations who deemed British workers too expensive, too lazy and above all unreliable. It was cheaper for industry to subsidise welfare handouts in the UK than it was to maintain inefficient manufacturing plants. Overnight the public mood changed from one of disaffection with Thatcherite policies to one of nationalistic support for the heroic liberation of some remote Islands, many had never heard of. Four ministers of the former 1974-79 Labour administration left to form the Social Democratic Party in alliance with the Liberal Party. In the end Labour did not do quite as badly as many feared. Michael Foot tried his best to keep Labour grandees such as Dennis Healey and Roy Hattersley (both very much in favour of the EEC, NATO and a nuclear deterrent) on board and tame the more radical elements of the loony left, personified by Tony Benn. Yet with just 27.6% of the popular vote (with a turnout of 72%, so effectively just over 20% of the electorate), Labour sank to its lowest level of popular support since 1918, despite over 3 million unemployed and growing social unrest.

The new Consumer Classes

Labour could not persuade working class voters that their policies were either viable or desirable. Skilled workers no longer wanted to travel by bus from council houses to manual factory jobs with an annual holiday in Blackpool or Clacton, they aspired to enjoy faster cars, home ownership, better-paid office jobs and Mediterranean holidays. Progress for the working classes did not mean lower train fares or more council houses, but the new era of inexpensive consumer gadgets marketed by Maggie's business friends. Under Thatcher, the service sector, especially the toxic financial services industry, blossomed as factories shut and moved abroad. The British working class seemed happy to watch Japanese tellies, drive German cars, buy Italian washing machines and holiday in Spain. Many were left behind, especially a growing underclass of NEETs (Not in Education or Employment) and single mothers. Despite all Thatcher's rhetoric about living within our means and back to basics morality, her premiership saw the further decline of traditional families and the emergence of a hot-air economy where real jobs were increasingly outsourced. Oddly far from downsizing Labour's beloved welfare state, the social security system continued to expand in large part to manage the growing underclasses unable to adapt to the new dynamic but perennially unstable service economy. National governments became powerless to change the fundamental logic of the global market economy. Governments could merely regulate businesses, adjust tax rates, provide infrastructure, incentivise inward investors and ensure some degree of social stability.

The New Left

The political debate no longer focussed on the nature of the global economic system, but how to tame or harness it to our best advantage. Within just a few years the Labour leadership under Neil Kinnock embraced the European Union and gradually dumped commitments for the re-nationalisation of privatised industries or nuclear disarmament. The left turned its focus to social issues. Rather than champion the majority of working class people, the left began to promote the identity politics of various victim groups, whether they were ethnic minorities, single mothers, homosexuals, disability groups and the growing array of disadvantaged individuals who claimed some sort of victim status. Rather than advocate a different model of development, the new left embraced globalisation and planned to regulate corporations to be more environmentally friendly, respect workers' rights and promote their various victim groups in the name of equality and diversity. As the global economy became more tightly interdependent, big business started to co-opt the language of the trendy left. International corporations began to embrace and promote multiculturalism, feminism, LGBT rights and mental health advocacy. All these issues were honed to meet business needs. Multiculturism tended to mean multi-coloured cultural homogenisation. Feminism no longer supported women's rights as women, but coopted women into wage slavery. LGBT rights served not to remove prejudice against sexual minorities, but to change the family as it had emerged in diverse cultures around the world. Mental health advocacy far from making society more tolerant of natural human diversity, imposed a new concept of social normality. Capitalists had not suddenly had an epiphany, with a burning urge to undo all the evils of 500 years of European colonialism and 250 years of industrialisation. Rather their marketing departments had instructed them to embrace the new ethnically diverse and culturally metamorphosing demographics of their expanding consumer markets. Global capitalists genuinely believed their economic model would emancipate not only women, but also the poor of the third world. To do this they needed a new alliance of transnational businesses, governments and non-governmental organisations. Big business now marketed itself as a force for progress and no longer needed to pay lip service to the cultural whims of the old aristocratic and ecclesiastic elites. Indeed, big business much preferred to deal global institutions and bypass national and local governments altogether. They also preferred atomised consumers with new and forever morphing cultural identities to rival national and religious communities with more stable identities, and thus less malleable to the kind of cultural change required in a dynamic consumer society.

Britain's most Radical Government

Just as Thatcher's government was way more radical than Callaghan's more conservative 1970s administration, John Major's cautious stewardship of UK PLC gave way to one of the most disruptive management teams the country may ever see. Rather than undo the Thatcherite revolution, New Labour rebranded it and attracted the support of large swathes of the corporate media. Many Labour supporters welcomed Scottish and Welsh devolution, the minimum wage, working family tax credits and Good Friday Agreement that saw the apparent end to an anachronistic feud between protestants and catholics in Northern Ireland. Though sceptical of Blair from the very outset (I couldn't vote Labour in 1997 because I was still in Italy, but probably would have), I welcomed these developments too. What too few realised was just how fast the world outside was changing and how even these modest reforms in part enabled a much greater transfer of power away from national governments to supranational organisations. Within the context of Federal British Isles, Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish devolution make perfect sense, but soon the UK itself would be a mere region of a wider European and eventually Global superstate. The minimum wage seemed long overdue, but soon became the maximum wage of an overheating service economy that generated hundreds of thousands of low-paid jobs. Working family / child tax credits merely incentivised low wages and, paradoxically, family breakups (as families were redefined). Retail inflation remained deceptively low as property prices began to rise much faster than salaries. By 2006 a typical 3 bedroom house in the outskirts of London cost the equivalent of 10 times the average salary and mortgages, not included in retail inflation, became the largest item in most households' budget. Unsurprisingly the Blair era saw a shift towards the private rent sector as millions of young adults could no longer afford to step on the property ladder, while other mischievous homeowners became landlords using convenient buy-to-let schemes.

Yet it was on the international stage that New Labour showed its true colours. Not content with the rebranding of big business as a vehicle of enlightened social change, Blairite spin doctors sought to rebrand military interventionism, which had gotten itself a bit of a bad name during the Vietnam war and post-colonial escapades such as 1956 Franco-British occupation of the Suez Canal. Blair became one of the world's most vocal advocates of a new form of global colonialism, in which an international alliance of progressive countries would intervene against repressive regimes to spread freedom, democracy and free trade. In 1998 a vast majority of Labour MPs, with the support of a large body of public opinion, supported NATO's airstrikes over Kosovo and Serbia. Despite protests from the rebellious fringes (including Jeremy Corbyn and George Galloway), the concept of humanitarian wars had been successfully sold, especially as the intervention aimed to save Muslim Kosovars against orthodox Christian Serbs.

While Blair appealed to Britain's lingering patriotism, his entourage didn't really believe in nation-states or self-determination at all. Labour had long championed the rights of racial minorities, especially with the influx of immigrants from the British Commonwealth during the 50s, 60s and 70s. However, the indigenous working classes remained sceptical and as most Commonwealth countries gained independence and Britain remodelled itself as a modern West European social democracy, the political consensus shifted towards integration and managed limited migration. Indeed by the early 1980s Britain had negative net migration, which returned to modest migratory surpluses by the late 1980s. By the mid 1990s migratory flows had risen everywhere. The world was on the move, but some destinations were much more appealing than others. Many talented British physicians and engineers preferred better pay in Australia, Saudi Arabia or the United States. State education had also failed to train millions of disadvantaged youngsters for the world of work. While manufacturing had mainly moved abroad, we still needed plumbers, bricklayers, electricians, chefs, nurses, mechanics, carpenters and care assistants. These jobs had failed to capture the imagination of the growing underclass who failed in academic subjects. Indeed employers began to complain about UK school leavers and graduates who lacked even basic literacy and numeracy skills or simply failed to turn up for work. Without any public consultation, New Labour decided first to relax immigration controls (something largely welcomed on the left) and then in 2003 opted not impose transitional work restrictions on the new Eastern members of the European Union. As a result net migration grew from 20-30,000 a year in 1970s, 80s and early 90s to 320,000 a year in 2005. Even this masked the true picture of ethno-cultural transformation, as 650 thousand entered the UK and 330 thousand left with very different groups of people moving either direction. Little has changed since the fall of Gordon Brown's Labour administration in 2010. Under the Conservative and Liberal Democrat coalition, net migration reflected wider global economic imbalances. The UK population has grown from 58.5 million in 1997 to 65 million now, while in the previous 20 years the population had hardly changed (56 million in 1981). Unsurprisingly, we now have a dire housing shortage and need to import an even greater proportion of raw materials and food. Despite growing concern about the scale and sustainability of these rapid population movements among ordinary British workers, the political classes have continued to argue that migration is good for the economy. The Labour Left may rightly oppose gangmasters and low wages, but they still think mass migration is always a good idea or the best way to tackle global inequality. Jeremy Corbyn may be sceptical of the corporate grip on the European Union, but he embraces the free movement of labour. Yet too few on the left admit the chief beneficiaries of the current waves of mass migration is a global corporate elite who really do not like self-determination in any form. Indeed the current Conservative Government would rather cut workers' rights and downscale the welfare state for all, than protect British jobs.

Having your cake and eating it

In life you sometimes have to make choices. You could stay in bed all day watching Youtube videos or get up and go to work. Both choices have their appeals, especially if the state subsidises your worklessness and you can justify your idleness as a consequence of depression or eating disorders. However, most rational observers agree that despite technological advances, effort and diligence should be rewarded. Likewise, we could choose to cut air traffic and save our countryside from the blight of a new airport or we could continue to fly abroad more regularly, but be prepared to allocate more arable land to new airports. If you want more people to enjoy motoring, then we'll need to build more roads.

If you listen to some on the wishful thinking left, you'd seriously think only rabid right-wingers want us to face these dilemmas. Do we reduce carbon emissions or do we let our population rise to boost our economy? The trendy left does not want to face this dilemma. They believe some magic bullet technology will enable us to have the best of both worlds. We can keep growing our economy, welcoming more newcomers, building more houses, improving transport infrastructure, while leaving plenty of countryside, arable land and only trading fairly with the rest of the world. In the minds of the loony left, pollution and limits to growth are right-wing inventions.

So just for a short summary of Jeremy Corbyn's policies.

  1. Boost the money supply to avoid any cuts in welfare.
  2. Oppose immigration controls.
  3. Grow the economy to pay off debt and accommodate a growing population.
  4. Stop hydraulic fracturing.
  5. Reduce nasty pollution.
  6. Re-open closed coal mines.
  7. Stop resource wars.
  8. Tax global corporations
  9. Develop a high skill economy

Few politicians would disagree openly with the last point, though a global labour market place reduces the need to train local workers and corporate moguls would rather keep the masses relatively unskilled. Moreover, our current comprehensive education system and generous welfare state fail to motivate excellence in our underclasses, while middle and upper classes opt for cushy careers or prefer to migrate to sunnier climes. However, the remaining policies are inconsistent. Unless you are prepared to cut total consumption by stabilising the population and cutting per capita consumption you cannot reduce our dependence on resources imported from war-torn countries. Even much green technology increases our dependence on finite resources. Electric cars require lithium batteries and the world most abundant reserves just happen to lie in Central Asia and especially in Afghanistan. You might think trendy lefties want you cycle to work instead and grow vegetables in your back garden, but not if you can claim to have a special medical condition such as obesity or have to drop off your kids on the way to work in an out-of-town business park. A global labour market requires an increasingly mobile and versatile labour force, which in many practical situation necessitates some form of personalised rapid transport. Last but not least, it defies logic that the loony left expects global corporations to subsidise welfare largesse in the UK. Any attempt to impose higher taxes on multinationals will simply prompt them to migrate for tax purposes or pass on the local tax to local consumers as an additional cost of operating in the UK. If we introduced some form of European corporation tax, then multinationals would move their HQ outside the EU and local governments would have even less control over fiscal policy. Indeed the only way to tax multinationals fairly would be to enforce a global fiscal regime backed up by a global military. However, an independent country could ban multinationals with bad records on environmental protection or workers' rights. However, that would fall foul of the WTO,

If these policies do not seem wacky enough, just consider Jeremy's brother, Piers Corbyn, who has been running a 15-year long crusade against the religion of Global Warming. I have little faith in our corporate elites, but the one consistent strand in all mainstream economic thinking is the need for perpetual growth. The issue at stake is not whether the climate is cooling or warming or whether Sunspots play a role in weather cycles (Scotland has just had its coldest summer for over 50 years), but whether massive human activity on an unprecedented scale can destabilise our delicate ecosystem. Yet another dilemma, the loony left refuses to consider. Amazingly Piers seems very supportive of Jeremy's campaign. However, there is one small influential political cult that would entirely endorse a combined Jeremy + Piers Corbyn manifesto, the Spiked-Online brigade of media-savvy intellectuals. At least they are consistent, they are outspoken techno-optimists and climate change deniers.

Whose interests does Corbynmania really serve?

It doesn't take a genius to realise Jeremy Corbyn's policy platform could never be implemented in its entirety. Most policies would be vetoed by supranational bodies like the EU. In some ways I wish Corbyn's dream of plenty for all could be true. I too would like cheap food and well-paid farmworkers, clean cities, abundant wildlife, clean rivers and efficient inexpensive rapid transportation. However, I also detect a centralising and potentially authoritarian statist streak in Corbyn's agenda, not least his talk about mental health and support for more social workers.

Like or not, big business only agrees with two of Corbyn's policies, more migration and economic growth at all costs. If the main opposition party, albeit a rump Labour Party deprived of Blairites, could oppose even the most feeble attempts to regulate unsustainable people trafficking, the government can pose on the middle ground of public opinion while covertly pursuing an unashamedly globalist agenda. That leaves the settled working classes only with another bunch of climate change deniers in UKIP while the greens back a rebranded Labour party.

The other 3 candidates behave like overgrown school students trying hard to impress their politically correct social studies teacher and gain favour with their classmates. I guess Andy Burnham tries to appeal more to his classmates, while Liz Kendall and Yvette Cooper want to get full marks for their Labour leadership project. Only Andy Burnham, in a sop to working class voters, has dared to criticize Labour record on mass migration, but this is probably as credible as similar musings from Tory politicians. All support the EU and free movement of Labour. Yvette Cooper even suggested David Miliband's charity, Rescue International, help with the refugee crisis in Calais. Now, why would a staunch Blairite and supporter of Iraq war (which together with other interventions in Aghanistan, Libya and Syria helped create a much bigger refugee crisis in North Africa and Turkey), be so keen to help refugees? It's like selling double-glazing services to someone whose windows you have just smashed. What matters most to global corporations is to keep the range of acceptable public debate on message, which is simply there is no alternative to the curent globalist model of development and any attempt to regain control over the levers of economic power will be ridiculed and sidelined.

If something sounds too good be true, in my experience it probably is. The loony left cannot change the laws of thermodynamics, but it's up to us on the rational left to suggest coherent alternatives to our current economic system.

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Power Dynamics

Does Scottish Independence really matter?

As a half-Scot and half-Englishman, I never really identified as either. I grew up to believe in Britain as my father owed his career in the army and later British Aerospace to the archipelago's imperial legacy. Whenever my English mother would inadvertently confuse England with Britain, my brother would correct her. I'd support Scotland in football and in the Commonwealth Games, but Great Britain at the Olympics. Scotland remained the land of clan battles, legends, inventors, Hogmanay, Highland Games, Whisky, Billy Connolly and Sean Connery, a quaint region of post-imperial Britain. There had long been two Scotlands. Here I mean not so much the age-old Highlands / Lowlands feud, but the contrast between scientific enlightenment, embodied by David Hume, Thomas Carlyle and James Watt and later industrial decline, portrayed so brilliantly in Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting and fictional TV character Rab Nesbit. Scotland's best and brightest tended to emigrate, while the social ills of alcohol abuse, bad diet and some of the worst poverty levels in Europe blighted those who remained. Until this very day the UK armed forces draw a disproportionate number of recruits from Scotland. The country's strategic military importance greatly outweighs its relative proportion of the UK population. Then came the first oil shock of the early 70s and the prospect of black gold in Scottish coastal waters. Although by that time 300 miles south of the border in Southern England, my Scottish friends and relatives seemed determined to get their fair share of the coming oil bonanza to bring new life to the old country. Yet after the 1979 referendum on devolution failed to attract enough votes (a simple majority voted yes, but many more failed to vote), Scotland, alongside Northern England and South Wales, faired very badly as manufacturing industries moved abroad. Ironically, the Thatcherite revolution was not so much about Great Britishness, that was just rhetoric reinforced by her role in the recapture of the Falkland Islands, but about opening up markets and transitioning to a new service-based economy. A large strand of Scottish public opinion has until recently been conservative with a small c upholding national traditions, but also adhering to a strong Calvinist belief in prudence, self-discipline and restraint. Sadly, junk culture with its beguiling forms of multimedia entertainment has taken the country's most underprivileged classes by storm. Not surprisingly Scotland would later become the electronic gaming hub of Europe, while other industries, including the short-lived Silicon Glen, outsourced production elsewhere. Despite a brief industrial revival in the early 1990s, under New Labour, Scotland transitioned, like its southern neighbour, to a post-industrial economy. IBM, Lexmark, Hoover and many others moved away for good, as global retail outlets spread mushroom-like across the urban landscape.

UK as an anachronism

As Glaswegian comedian, Frankie Boyle, points out, rather than invest the proceeds of North Oil in education, infrastructure and next generation engineering, the Westminster government chose to subsidise mass unemployment and later disguise it through the redefinition of disablement . All of a sudden you could be disabled not because you were crippled, blind or deaf (though modern technology can empower even the severest cases of physical disability), but because you had succumbed to drugs, booze and all the psychological traumas so common in people deprived of a true purpose in life and forced to while away their days as mere welfare dependents. While many blame Thatcher for single-handedly destroying the Scottish soul, its policies were dictated solely by the needs of multinational corporations who owed little allegiance to ordinary British people of any national persuasion, except as consumers. Indeed rather than balance the books, Thatcher's government squandered oil proceeds on short-term priorities such as expanding welfare by letting industry move abroad and cutting taxes for the rich. Yet after 18 years of Tory rule, New Labour continued in the same vein, but rebranded as a progressive internationally minded venture. The boundaries between public and private institutions continued to blur, as bureaucracy expanded, but also outsourced services to private bidders. Former public sector organisations, like British Rail and British Steel, had been sold off and were now run by unaccountable multinationals. Power was slowly but surely slipping away from the Westminster Parliament to boardrooms and remote transnational institutions. Many on the left had initially opposed the EU, but now the new left saw it as a force for social progress, despite enforcing privatisation and fiscal restraint on all European countries. Successive treaties agreed under Conservative and Labour governments handed powers to the EU Commission. Most disturbingly New Labour supported corporate globalisation in the guise of free trade and open borders at all costs. Rather than negotiate to protect the interests of British workers, British-born lobbyists campaigned for opening up European markets to cheap goods from the Far East, thus destroying small manufacturers in much of Southern Europe, unable to compete with heightened competition. Protectionism, once supported by the labour movement, became a bad word. Only global institutions could bring about change, but the multi-billion dollar lobbying industry, with its various branches in PR, mass media and charities, can easily subvert any grassroots movements.

Rebranding Scotland as a Euroregion

However, in one important area the Scottish experience of recent social changes differs greatly from the Southern English experience. Scotland remains largely peopled by Scots. Indeed, outside a few districts of Glasgow and Edinburgh, the largest ethnic minority are the English. While the Scottish population has risen from just a wee bit over 5 million in 2001 to around 5.3 million in 2011, it has plenty of empty houses and unused land. By contrast England alone has gained over 4 million new residents in the same period with vast swathes of inner cities and market towns transformed out of all recognition. Migration has increased rapidly worldwide, more people move in all directions than ever before. As recently as the 1970s annual migration flows would see 30–50,000 people move either way, since 2001 we've seen more than a ten fold increase in migration numbers, e,g 650,000 moving to the UK (mainly England) and 450,000 moving away). Most of us on the left saw Commonwealth immigration as part of a post-colonial settlement and welcomed our new neighbours. However, in the age of cheap air travel and growing migratory pressures from the rest of the world, mass immigration can lead to social upheaval uprooting formerly cohesive communities and replacing national identities with vague and volatile regional identities. I know from my own line of work in software development, labour market instability and regular relocation has become the new norm. When young English people complain about competition from the new wave of industrious Eastern European immigrants, some politicians suggest they take advantage of open borders and migrate themselves (It seems odd to hear nothing but Polish, Portuguese, Bengali and Arabic in London, only to feel swamped by British ex-pats in Spain). Of course, many Brits do, but usually either wealthy pensioners or highly skilled professionals and business-people. If you need a plumber in Warsaw, do not expect to meet a keen Essex lad filling a gap in the handyman market, though you might meet one on an extended pub crawl. The Scottish social fabric has simply changed much less dramatically than in England. Scotland is much more Scottish than England is English in much the same way as Austria has always seemed to me much more German than Germany, which these days is surprisingly cosmopolitan.. Indeed English is spoken more widely and more eloquently in Glasgow and Edinburgh than in London, Birmingham or Manchester. In many ways Scotland reminds me much more of the Britain I once knew than modern metropolitan England.

All five main Scottish parties (SNP, Labour, Liberal Democrats, Greens and Conservatives) support open borders with the rest of the EU, although Scottish public opinion seems just as sceptical of the EU and the purported benefits of mass immigration as down south. More intriguingly, at least four of the main parties pander Scotland's recent conversion to the culture of welfare entitlement rather than self-reliance and social solidarity. The SNP would have us believe unshackled from Westminster's chains, optimistic oil revenues will reverse the current government's alleged cutbacks (in fact they have continued to increase public spending and made only modest changes to welfare provision, at least compared with EU countries like Greece, Portugal or Ireland). Labour, by contrast, reassure their electorate that the UK will continue to subsidise Scotland, presumably with funny money earned at the city of the London. Few Scottish people seem aware of the sheer duplicity of the career left. Ken Livingston has long claimed that London subsidises the rest of the UK, especially outlying regions such as Scotland. While Ken hopes City profits will fund more growth in London (whose population and economy eclipse Scotland's), the SNP places its hopes on massive oil profits.

Countries as disparate as Greece, Portugal, Finland and Estonia are powerless to go against the global flow, an unstoppable juggernaut of rapid technological change and social progress albeit with plenty of teething problems. Their economic policies are dictated largely outside their borders. Their local management teams can lower corporation taxes or pioneer new retraining programmes, but only within tight budgetary constraints. They spend much of their legislative time harmonising local laws and customs with new global or European standards. Would Scotland be any different ?

Aye, but with no illusions

Let me just set the record straight, I'm voting yes for two reasons. First because unlike globalists, I actually believe in self-determination. Ideally, I'd like to see some sort of loose federation of the British Isles. Let us not forget that over 90% of imports into Scotland travel via England. If the global economy implodes, we will need to be on very good terms with our immediate neighbours. Second, I'm curious to see how things will pan out. I'd love to see Trident nuclear submarines sail back to the USA. A rump UK would have diminished status on the world stage less able to help the US in its global policing operations.

However, I vote yes so with no illusions. Of course, a currency union would make Scotland subservient to the Bank of England, and without a large increase in oil revenues the SNP's grandiose public spending plans remain uncosted. Raising income tax will just encourage the rich to emigrate, while lowering corporation tax to attract inward investment will prompt other countries to do the same thus boosting corporate profits. Scottish education has a long way to go before it can compete with Eastern Europe and Eastern Asia. To revive manufacturing, the government would not only have to invest billions in new infrastructure and training, it would have to impose trade restrictions or drastically boost competitiveness and productivity.

The only way a nominally independent Scotland could succeed would be for global crude oil prices to rise enough to make new North Atlantic oil fields more profitable, but in such a scenario global demand may also shrink. To tap wind and wave energy to any meaningful degree, someone would have to invest billions and wait decades before reaping the benefits of such monumental endeavours.

However, I suspect life after the breakup of the UK will not be plain sailing. Global events will eclipse the rebranding of Scotland. The Euro-zone may well collapse and the EU may disintegrate into looser regional trading partnerships along the lines of EFTA, while the Chinese economic bubble may well burst, unable to access cheap resources to fuel further growth. How would a Scottish government behave without economic growth? Would it relocalise the Scottish economy and choose the post–1991 Cuban model of self-sufficiency? Would it seek closer ties with its Scandinavian and British Isles neighbours? Would it be forced to abandon welfarism in favour of the Calvinist tradition of hard work? How would Scottish voters react if a future bankrupt Scotland had to impose austerity on a Greek scale just to accept another loan from the EU? Greece too has enormous resources as does Sweden and Denmark. But none are able to stop the global steamroller.

Do the establishment really care?

40 years ago an independent Scotland seemed almost unthinkable. If the SNP could muster 20-30% of the vote, pundits would just write it off as a protest vote. Back then the Scottish intelligentsia, alongside the Unionist movement and Glasgow Rangers fans, were passionately pro-British. But the British ruling class has long joined the borderless global elite, more concerned with property prices in the south of France than the Scottish fishing industry. The only English politicians who can claim any genuine commitment to an ongoing social union with Scotland would also oppose handing more power to big business and transnational organisations. Yet I suspect they are merely shedding crocodile tears. Where will they station Trident ? Will they still help the US bomb the enemy du jour in the Middle East ? Who cares. Rupert Murdoch has already decided that his neoliberal globalist project can work fine in the SNP's Euro-region. Most disturbingly, the SNP have already agreed in principle to the new TTIP ( Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership), claiming only they will exempt the NHS from free-trade rules. If the likes of Rupert Murdoch have their way and lobby a future Scottish government as successfully as they have in other countries, Scotland could well end up as an outpost of corporate America, with as much independence as North Carolina. The Scottish Sun, which supported the 2003 US/UK occupation of Iraq, seems set to support Scottish independence or a good location for Rupert's new private golf course. If some of the latest polls are right and a majority now support the Yes campaign,the Scottish Sun may well have played key role. Tommy Sheridan's dream of socialist beacon of enlightenment may well give way to a puppet government at the mercy of big business.