Something’s Gotta Give

“Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way”

(Pink Floyd, Time)

If any line sums up the twelve years of Conservative rule, that is it. The British people have spent that time sucking up a lot; the long-term effects of Austerity, Brexit, the corruption and incompetence of our elites, the filleting of the unwritten rules of our society and the widespread gaslighting of us all. Why did my fellow citizens did all that sucking… well, that’s a discussion for another day. Today it’s an attempt to exorcise the vision of our immediate futures – an attempt I suspect shall fail.

Unlike the title of this very blog, it is not a vision which I alone have. It is one which has been warned of by – amongst others – charities, the Bank of England, politicians, trade unions, media figures, consumer groups and a myriad of industry experts. The warning signs are flashing on all fronts; from cratering consumer spending power to the very real risk of health service collapse this winter.

Yet what do we have? A generally flaccid client media downplaying the issues and declining to join up the dots, a Conservative Party showing the rest of us just how deluded, biased and out of touch they are with the realities of the country while almost without fail Tory politicians either lounge on their ‘holibobs’ or are busy pandering to the prejudices of the previous group – people who despite all the shit, lies, corruption and incompetence still love Bozo and all his works.

Bad Timing?

Part of the problem may simply be down to the time of year; we’re smack-bang in the middle of ‘silly season‘, where many people are either on their holidays or somewhat disinclined to work; as a result, less attention by both actors and audience on the subjects on hand. In fact, several crises have arisen in this time and had a lacklustre reply; the 1998 Russian default, the 2007 subprime mortgage crisis and 2021 Taliban conquest of Afghanistan all examples of this correlation. (I’d actually be interested to see if there was a true link, or just that I’ve got an evidence bias going on). Throw in the fact the country is in the middle of a leadership campaign with a selfish, lazy lame-duck sunning themselves at somebody else’s expense…

But even after taking that into account, I cannot shake the belief that there’s a tacit conspiracy of silence going on here; a combination of those who are too stupid to see the vision, those ordered to not mention the vision and those who believe if they deny the vision it shall go away. And do you blame them? This very strategy worked for selling both Austerity and Brexit to just enough of the electorate to make it happen. And this vision is a nasty one – that Britain is about to tear apart.

Last Straw?

I don’t use this term lightly; I am a Brit and don’t like hyperbole or fear-mongering. In fact, every word I am writing now is fighting my ‘it cannot happen here!’ nagging within my very guts. That like at the end of the Lord Of The Flies, I have some atavistic belief that some ‘grown ups’ will come and sort it all out, perhaps just in the nick of time… despite a firm knowledge from my own childhood that it rarely ever pans out like that. Which is perhaps the point; these delusions are often unconscious and powerful.

When I say ‘tear apart’, I don’t mean as a sovereign nation. Perhaps dissolution of the Union is on the cards, but I don’t think it will happen right now. No, what I mean is that the myriad of problems will reach a tipping point; and when it crosses that point things will get ugly fast. People like Gordon Brown and Martin Lewis are not renowned for their hysterical natures or extremist ideologies, and they are having the same visions as I am.

That vision is of a state running out of road, of a citizenry running out of patience and hope. Of a ‘social contract’ straining to the point of snapping entirely. There have been dire warnings towards people considering ‘energy strikes’ this winter (for example), but my answer is this – threats regarding long-term consequences mean little when you see no future, and pleas that ‘the system’ needs the cash to operate falls on baked concrete when you look at the ballooning profits from said companies. There comes a point where you have nothing left to lose.

The Road Behind?

Now, this isn’t a new thing; Austerity since 2010 has done sterling work in an ultimately futile attempt to balance the nation’s books on the backs of the poor and by starving public services of funds without any regard to the wider results (though some shall argue that this was always a political, not an economic project). Because of the greed and hubris in the banking system, I shall remind you, in case you’d forgotten.

And this, as we shall know has been a decent success in regards to the Tory party and their owners; that while we’ve had a clear ‘Lost Decade’ economically, personally speaking the wealthy and the elderly have won, while the poor and the young have lost. But this didn’t really matter as the latter didn’t have much to lose in the first place and didn’t vote Tory anyway… so who cares?

Sinking Ship…

Perhaps they should. For the situation has declined to the point where swathes of the ‘middle class’ faces proletarianisation – the reduction of their living standards to us working stiffs due to a classic ‘scissors crisis’ (declining income and soaring expenditure).

After countless years of being ‘richsplained’ on budgeting, cooking, employment and lifestyle generally, I shall happily admit – I’m getting a bit of Schadenfreude watching those folks having to use food banks and fearing knocks on the door for the first time (like I did at the start of the pandemic). They’ll get to see the grey, threadbare condition of our welfare net in person – the one they’d always been assuring us ‘wasn’t that bad’. I wonder if they’ll remember their condescending and hectoring advice to ‘work more hours’ and ‘thirty pence meals’ now, eh?

Gloating aside, this situation promises to be politically dangerous – because these are the people who have stuff to lose. Homes, pensions, savings, businesses. A general ‘standard of living’ which allowed enough weekend city-breaks, shopping trips and slap-up feeds in restaurants to allow them to muse ‘well, the Tories do alright generally‘, a view easier to hold after consuming said slap-up feed and you’re comfortably ensconced on a sofa.

Prosperity isn’t like love; the worst bit is to have enjoyed it and then lose it than never experience it at all. And Tennyson never mentioned the possibility that some people shall feel entitled to have love either.

Dumping The Pilot?

For all the myriad of failings of the Johnson government and of the man personally, one positive thing has to be said; at very least the man was not rigidly ideological. That be it on Sunak’s ‘Payday energy loan’ or on the ‘Owen Paterson affair’; he was susceptible to public outcry. A man who has zero concept of shame cannot experience it on doing a climb-down, after all. Speaking as an anti-Tory, this admittedly made him easier to put up with (along with the mass incompetence which meant half of the odious schemes would fall apart and be shelved before completion). It’s unlikely we’ll see this from his successor.

We cannot forget that both candidates were paid-up members of ‘Team Boris’. That despite all the internal squabbling and posturing, they are in almost complete agreement on all the ‘important issues’; that of resumption of Austerity, cutting of taxes on the wealthy and laissez-faire economics. This tallies perfectly with the instincts of the Conservative Party membership; that Johnson was removed not due to mass personal and/or political failings, but due a conspiracy by the ‘deep state’, led by ‘Remoaners’, ‘the media’ and all the other folks which are ‘against us’.

That must be remembered; the Tories may have dumped the pilot, but they’ve kept the course. The analogy to Corbyn has to be drawn; that like him, the cause of Brexit can only be failed, none of the failures are theirs and so on. This iteration of Conservatives are so bankrupt for ideas that all they can think of is more doubling-down on what came before; more ‘anti-Woke’, more deportation flights, more ‘Othering’, more bile and venom. Stuck in a warped vision of the 1980s, they continue to tend ‘the flame of Thatcherism’ while unable to notice that the situation is drastically different; in some cases the problems that were created by Thatcherism.

Yet… while the plumes of smoke continue to move towards us… this ‘caretaker’ government still has done nothing, save a blithe assurance from Johnson that ‘something will be done’… later. Oh, and the visage of the cretins like Iain Duncan Smith, believing in their arrogance that blathering on about ‘Universal Credit’ being the solution and so on. Behold, the answer from the tin-eared lackey to the rich, one who simply does not give a fuck about the situation, who does not believe it is their responsibility to try to sort out.

Road Ahead?

This isn’t a pleasant message. Nor is it one filled with hope. But it is the truth – that the United Kingdom faces a serious crisis; that of a incompetent government, a greed-riddled elite, an utterly callous Conservative party and an enfeebled state apparatus. All combined… well, something’s gotta give, and I suspect it’s going to be the public’s patience. That when you have nothing left to lose, that there is no hope of the ‘grownups’ to sort things out and you’re desperate… well, that’s when things fall apart. And things can spiral away from this very quickly.

The worst thing regarding this crisis is that it was a foreseeable one. The situation with energy, staples and minerals was inevitable when our country decided to resist Putin’s genocidal rampage across Ukraine. This is the cost we Europeans shall have to bear if we desire to wage war on the Russian regime (for we are at war, simply there’s no physical fighting for us… yet). And while the apologists and tempters are very quiet right now, their voices shall grow, and grow quickly as soon as we hit winter.

Which is my take-home point. That the pandemic showed that people are able to put up with considerable privation – if they understand why it has to be done, and that ‘why’ is a reasonable answer. And that the state steps up to take some of the strain – not because (as it’s been accused) of being a ‘big government’ obsessive or whatever, but the simple fact that when a problem is this large and intertwined, only the state has the legal, fiscal and organisational abilities to even attempt to sort it out.

It’s not just a question of ‘it needs to be done to keep public support for Ukraine’, or even ‘it needs to be done to provide the Conservatives with some chance of winning the next election’ – it’s quite literally ‘needs to be done to stop a cascade failure of British society’. And our alleged ‘leaders’ are so fucking arrogant they think they can do what the hell they like, that us plebs will take any amount of kicks and slaps and will never bite them back.

No… it didn’t work. Like Smith’s diary in Nineteen Eighty-Four, my urge to shout expletives at the top of my voice remains as much as before.

As everything on this blog, merely my own thoughts and opinions. Part of my Essays series.

Manipulation By: Weaponised Nostalgia?

So, as part of the wonderful sunlit uplands which is the post-Brexit Britain, the Johnson Government has announced a review on seeing how and where the usage of old ‘Imperial measurements’ could be revived – along with other ‘great things’ like the re-appearance of Crown marks on pint glasses. Both of which, they assure us had been banned by that dastardly EU.

Except that’s a lie. Another Angry Voice covered the Crowns, so I’ll do the measures (though the Crown mark does show it is a ‘legal’ Imperial pint, so it is a confirmation of measure).

Despite the ravings of the Daily Mail and the plethora of lazy right-wing hacks (which now includes our government), Britons were never banned from using Imperial measurements. All though our membership of the European Union (and forebears), it was always fine for you and I to buy a ton of gravel, a gallon of paint, a pound of apples or a yard of carpet. It was also equally legal for folks to sell us these measures too.

The metrication rules only stipulated three things; the items were to be measured out and priced in metric, metric pricing had to be shown by default and if Imperial was also displayed, it had to be smaller text.

In reality, this simply meant that if I bought ‘a pound of apples’ for 90p, my receipt would show it as ‘0.45kg’ (or perhaps ‘454g’) and the pricing label on the shelf would need to show ‘£2/kg’. That’s it. Now, my shop could if they wished also show ’90p/lb’, but it would need to be in smaller text. Similar was for packaged items; the jar of jam I picked at random could have shown it’s weight as ‘13.4oz’ but it chose not to, feeling that the mandated ‘380g’ was enough.

Memory Lane

Thing is, they used to do dual listing – I recall supermarket fresh counters doing so in the 1990s, as well as some packaged items. In fact, I’ve dug out a tin of (British-made) mints dated 2020 which tells me they’re ’40g / 1.4oz’. But a quick check of my flat shows me the mints are the only thing, save the milk (which was a special case, even during EU days). It has, however thrown up a few oddities; a golden syrup tin at ‘454g’, a bag of coffee at ‘227g’ and some laundry liquid at ‘2.27l’. Yes; they are merely pound, half-pound and half-gallon containers sporting metric labels – ie what the EU demanded. Yet… Messrs Tate & Lyle don’t put ’16oz’ on their tins, even when the mints show they could if so desired. Even though the tin design clearly pre-dates metrication.

Why? That answer is simple; they don’t see the need to. The UK (generally) metrified between 1965 and 1980; that by the time the new century rolled around, only the most dense or stubborn of Britons would have failed to realise an inch was about 2.5cm, or that a pint was a bit more than a half-litre. Sure, I suspect there was a bit of pressure applied to them to ditch from the Powers That Be, but like the mints, there was no legal force to make them do it.

Even more importantly, British schoolkids generally quit being taught Imperial around 1985. Now, most of us would have picked up some knowledge of it from everyday life – I know from cooking that an ounce is ‘about 30g’, from my piecemeal weight plate collection that a pound is ‘about 0.45kg’ (meaning the ratio for conversion is 2.2) and so on. But the knowledge is patchy; I’m hazy over how long a yard is, I keep on forgetting whether there’s 14 or 16 pounds in a stone and please don’t ask me what the unit below ounces is. Simply put; I think in metric, because the National Curriculum decided it was the the way to go (it was decided much earlier than that; 1974 in fact).

Me, and the majority of Britons under fifty, that is.

Nostalgia…

So, why the hell is there a push for a revival for a system of measures only those approaching – or beyond – pensionable age are able to use intuitively? That answer is simple; it’s a lump of ‘red meat’ to throw to a key ToryKip demographic – the elderly – in a desperate attempt to save Johnson and by extension, this shower of malign, corrupt, reactionary cretins which passes for a government in the hope it’ll be enough to placate the backbench blockheads to not move against Bozo and his clown-show.

Though that isn’t the whole story (it usually isn’t). The other half is the long-running tragicomedy which is Brexit. That in short – to quote James O’Brien – it’s falling apart like a cheap suit. The Northern Irish status quo shaking apart, product shortages, increased red tape and costs, no ‘great trade deals’ with the Americans… it would appear that ‘oven ready deal’ which Johnson got his electoral victory in 2019 turns out to have given us all bad case of food poisoning instead. Couple this with Covid and Ukranian-related issues… there’s a mass thunderstorm on those hallowed sunlit uplands.

But Brexit needs to be seen to have ‘worked’. It’s got almost nil ‘benefits’ anywhere else to boast of, so let’s clutch at straws, like when that pompous twat Rees-Mogg asked readers in the Sun and Express to write in to his office listing ‘Brexit benefits’. If generous, a sneaky way of subcontracting your own work out onto volunteers – I prefer the more obvious option; that his office really can’t think of any.

Thus the Crowns and inches. Nostalgia was a major component of winning Brexit in the first place; why not simply trot out some more as a ‘benefit’?

…Weaponised

But it’s more than that. Even a simpleton can see that ‘bringing back’ Imperial measures shall figure very low on anybody’s priority list. Hell, even some old people think it’s a rather daft move. Yet that’s not the point – this is a policy cooked up in the ‘feels, not facts’ pot, which Johnson has borrowed from Trump (along with many other things).

This is simply another generic swipe at ‘modernity’, to help encourage the view that the way to deal with the problems of the present is to escape into a mythologised photograph of the past. To work the nostalgic, romantic riffs of a previous era where everything seemed simpler, better. Even when they actually weren’t. Specially when they weren’t.

You can almost hear the riff of the music for the old Hovis advert here; ‘Remember when men were men and women women? That we all went out t’work, not sitting about at home? That the coloureds knew their place, most of which was to not try to live here? Ah, the days that we all knew Britain was great and no lefties saying it was because we did bad things in the past. When the police did their jobs and we didn’t pander to silly ideas like ‘human rights’…’

Now, I’m not saying everyone who wants the Imperial measures revived is a political and social reactionary… just that there appears to be a very heavy overlap on the old Venn diagram between the two groups. Technological, too; find a person who delights in using furlongs and hogsheads and I bet they’ve also uttered paeans for vinyl records and incandescent lightbulbs, refuses to use self-service checkouts and holds that nothing on the internet is ‘real’. Similar can be said for other pointless baubles, like the hallowed ‘blue passports’.

However, it has to be told; this kind of trick is done because it works. Even if they’re not reactionaries, older people have a unconscious hankering for the past. This was noted in people who even grew up in times of privation, such as the Great Depression. Even if there wasn’t much else going on in your life in your mid-late teens, all the chances were was that you were at the peak of fuckability, you ‘got’ most of the new technology and trends, your body had not yet started to turn on you and so on. And thus, wheeling out such a familiar touchstone well… touches you.

Terminal Rot?

The value of such a ‘proto-policy’ is so thin it’s laughable. Companies have already signalled that almost without exception, they won’t ‘change back’ unless made to by law. Shops have complained that it would add confusion and extra costs at a time inflation is letting rip. Teachers shall need to be taught how to teach Imperial (as almost all shall be too young) so it can be re-introduced to the curriculum, which is already over-stuffed with ‘must cover’ topics. Metric shall continue to be the measures used in science, technology and industry because Britain has to interact with the rest of the metric globe (including the USA). When this idea was first mooted, a weights inspector explained why such an idea was patently foolish, simply on the logistical front from their occupation.

Yet Johnson and co know all this. Normally, this could be simply discounted as a ‘playing to the gallery’ example; to assure the elderly cranks their God-given right to go into a grocer’s and buy a pound of dripping and two pound of cornflakes. This ‘right’ being mainly theoretical, as the last time I saw such a shop it was about 1994. But unfortunately, this government has a tendency to actually try to attempt to deliver on it’s more demented policies, like the simply malign and stupid Rwanda deportations.

But hey, look on the bright side. This is such a heady mix of the stupid, the nuts and and the pointless it would in fact be rather amusing trying to watch this government try to apply ‘demetrification’ in any serious manner. And if they simply plan to end up announcing that folks have the right to do what they did anyway, it proves this government really has run out of ideas on ways to keep this shitty clown-show on the road.

As everything on this blog, merely my own thoughts and opinions. Part of my Essays series.

Lifeboat Politics

So, the Home Secretary Ms Patel has gotten her wish, even when her underling the Immigration Minister explicitly denied last week otherwise; the plan to dump asylum seekers in Rwanda so basically, we don’t have to have them. This is different from say the ‘Australian model’; this isn’t a ‘go to Central Africa while we process your application’ (which would be bad enough), this is a ‘here’s a one way ticket, please fuck off, beggars can’t be choosers’ model which has been attacked not just from the predictable ‘bleeding hearts’ but even the rather hard-nosed types who are objecting on grounds of ‘value for money’ (it appears we’re going to be paying more for Rwanda to take them than actually doing it ourselves), legality and the fact Rwanda is not even granting asylum for them either – in fact, the seekers are merely allowed to request it.

Now, much of this is fag-packet territory (as it normally is with the Johnson Government) but the reason for doing this policy is obvious; it’s to cater to the xenophobic Brexiteer demographic; particularly those living in the old ‘Red Wall’ seats in the British Rustbelt. The areas of the country which, completely coincidently were the ones which got Johnson over the electoral line in the 2019 election. A bit of ‘red meat’, so to speak. Unless it’s all simply yet another distraction from the level of stink coming off this incompetent, corrupt, lying, degenerate ToryKip government. Which is possible.

No… wait. It’s a shitty little attempt to influence both the coming local elections and the Wakefield byelection! Which as Caroline Lucas, MP points out, may actually be illegal. But rules are for the ordinaries, not them.

Storm In A Teacup?

This is in fact a good question to start with – just how serious is the issue? Well, as of 2021 it was around thirty thousand. Well, three quarters of the applications for asylum are accepted, which means last year the UK had to accommodate around twenty-two thousand. Which depending which measuring-stick you’d prefer, is 0.03% of the total UK population, a town the size of Potters Bar, equal to the amount of people who died in just over two weeks in the country in 2019 or accepting a couple of busloads of new people every day.

Now, folks can say (with some good reason) that this is just the numbers of folks ‘caught’; though more accurately the folks who are attempting to claim asylum (illegal ‘economic’ migration is a different issue entirely). And remembering (which many don’t) is the simple fact there is no fucking way to claim asylum in the UK without actually getting here (Patel lied! Who would have thought it!).

So… why do folks care so much about something so statistically small? Part of it is the graphics of it; crappy little barely-seaworthy dinghies braving trying to cross one of the busiest sea-lanes in the world. But the main aspect of it has to be the simple over-coverage of the issue vs the reality; if you went on Hate Mail, Scum etc coverage alone, you’d think the numbers were hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions. And the vast majority of them bogus asylum seekers.

Well, that answer is simple; right-wing media stokes up a controversy which then suits right-wing politics. Farage built a whole political career off the back of xenophobia (which until late managed to deftly avoid falling into obvious racism) and like a vampire, UKIP managed to bite and turn the Conservative Party into a clone of itself. Thus ToryKip shall scare you with visions of boats to vote for them, and the only way to be ‘tough’ on it is to be maliciously, stupidly evil.

The real question is why the hell people fall for this. And that answer, is frankly depressing.

Conditioning?

I’m obviously not talking about the racists, closeted or not. Or the simple xenophobes. Just the ‘normal folks’ who in other respects seem sane and reasonable. Why are they so worked up about a few thou of people of which it is unlikely they’ll even meet one of, and even if they did meet one, wouldn’t realise it?

The answer is simple; despair, fatalism and apathy.

These are the people who are the net losers from the ‘neoliberal era’. They’ve had perhaps forty years of having the myth of ‘trickle down economics‘ rammed down their throat; even now we have that haunted mannequin called Rees-Mogg plugging his ‘cheap shoes for peasants’ line, hoping that that shall appeal to said peasants who haven’t had a real pay increase for decades and trick them into supporting policies to make him richer.

However, Austerity helped really grind in that despair. Cut cut cut. Take from those who already have little. Trim your sails, make do with less, lower your standards. Watch the standard of life – never really that high in the first place – slip downwards. However hard you work, despite every effort to ‘get on’, you’ll count yourself lucky if you simply manage to tread water. See services in a never-ending circle of decline; as social housing stock decays, waiting lists balloon and staff become ever-more overstretched.

It was this mentality Jarvis Cocker tried to show in Pulp’s Common People; a land where you ‘watch your life slide out of view’. That of the belief that things cannot improve, there’s nothing you do about it and at best you can hope that you can avoid things getting shittier than they are already. A land of low ambition and even lower success, where high hopes are nearly always ‘delusional’ in nature. The land of the zero-sum game, in fact.

Lifeboat Mentality?

A zero-sum game is simple; it’s one where a ‘gain’ has to balanced by a equal ‘loss’ somewhere else. A game of poker is a good example; no person can win a sum larger than the pot of cash put in by the group.

Now, replace ‘pot of cash’ for ‘a nation’s resources’. Hospital beds, council houses, school places, jobs and so on. If you’ve been so conditioned by a lifetime’s failure and kick-downs to believe that that pot is unable to be increased – a belief reinforced by the British ‘Lost Decade’ – you have a zero-sum game. Or as I call it, ‘lifeboat politics’.

In the lifeboat, one can only gain at the expense of another. And when a migrant gets in the boat, it means a bit less of everything for everyone already in it. Now, that wouldn’t be so bad if the boat had ample supplies and space. But the UK lifeboat doesn’t. It’s already on short rations, and our Brexit-loving working class are in the worst seats, getting covered in spray every rock in the sea, feeling hungry and cold.

That’s what a migrant is. Less for me, to accommodate you. So you’re hurting? Look at me, mate. I’m not living the life of fucking Riley. Any change is bad, all developments mean less for you and your family and friends, without fail. Immigration. Climate change. Globalisation. Affirmative action. A black person getting a slot means a ‘normal’ person is denied and so on.

Dare To Dream?

The fact that this is a mentality mainly seen in whites is not down to racism. Well it is, but not due to the racism from the white working class themselves. It’s merely that traditionally they’ve been treated better than this. They in fact, did decently well in the previous era but their prosperity juddered to a halt in the 1980s and never picked up again.

This is important because people perform comparisons not from national statistics, but their own personal ones. The older white remembers the higher ‘base rate’ they enjoyed thirty, forty years ago – even I can remember ‘the Cheapskates’ managed to raise five kids on one, not huge salary in the 1990s (though our SoL was kinda shit, thus the name). Part of the lack of belief in the future is the one which doubts that their kids will ‘get it better than I did’. Hell, I think many don’t even think the kids will get it as good as they did, let alone better.

Minorities don’t have this nostalgia because in most ways, their lives were shittier. Many are perhaps at best three generations removed from a subsistence farm, urban slum or a mediaeval village. Overt discrimination has almost vanished, covert has drastically declined. In comparison terms, they have more ‘opportunity’ to rise than they did in say, the 1960s. In fact, for many groups, the much-maligned ‘affirmative action’ programmes help overcome some of the historical imbalance which is the lack of ‘accumulated capital’ which keeps you stuck to the bottom floor.

Which is the remedy for ‘lifeboat politics’. That we on the left cannot simply talk in generalities, or promise more cake in the future. We won’t be believed, and I don’t blame this disbelief one second. Nor should we deride or attack such feelings as racism, xenophobia etc. In fact, much of the their disbelief is perfectly justified due to the fact the pale-pink ‘New Labour’ types have generally failed to live up to almost all their promises. And are unlikely to buy the same old things again.

What we have to do is talk less about the redistribution of the current supplies and more about how we can increase supplies. Without resorting to pushing people off the boat. Even if there are a tiny group on the boat sitting on the supply-chests with a shit-eating smirk telling us ‘there’s no money left’ and doing all they can to get us to turn on each other.

As everything on this blog, merely my own thoughts and opinions. Part of my Essays series.

An End Of An Era

‘The Post Cold War’

[August 21^st 1991 – 24^th February 2022]

A clunky name, yes; but I’m not sure what future historians shall call that era yet – that slither of thirty and half years between the collapse of the attempted coup in the Soviet Union which heralded the effective end of the ‘Second Russian Empire’ and the invasion of Ukraine which makes it plain to all that the current Russian leadership desires to build the third one.

Like such things, we can dicker over the dates; on one end you could push it further back, to October ’89 when Gorbachev told Honecker that Soviet troops wouldn’t be available to put down the anti-Communist protests in East Germany, and on the other shunt it to February ’14 when disguised Russian forces invaded the Crimea. Perhaps future historians shall use the outbreak of Covid as the bookend. But said dickering does not deflect from two simple facts; that this was a particular ‘era’ in global history… and it has now ended.

Zeitgeist?

All you need is a half-decent memory to take issue with my premise; the Europe of 2018 was very different to the one of say, 1993, and that’s even before the rest of the world, no? For folks of my vintage, that includes the entirety of our personal memories – you telling me that things are the same? Of course not. Yet… we do speak of ‘eras’ in history, even when a moment’s consideration tells us that it’s kinda stupid – like ‘Victorian Era’. A period of 63 years, two ‘generations’. How can 1845 be the same as 1890?

Part of this is simply down to shoddy history teaching and popular culture; much easier to portray as a series of millponds than a flowing of a river. But even historians do this, but in their case it’s to accept the common threads which run through the age; be it people (‘Victorian’), events (‘Age of Nationalism’) or a space between events (‘Interwar’).

So, what are the threads of this ‘Post Cold War’ era?

Fukuyama’s Folly?

If only one example shall be our era’s thread, it’s his 1992 ‘End Of History’ text. The triumphalism of ‘the West’, dancing on the grave of ‘the East’, which had rusted away and fallen apart, it’s bankruptcy clear to all. The arrogant belief that ‘liberal democracy’ was the final and highest stage of human development, that it shall in time defeat all the remaining ‘isms’ which shall continue to wither away due to their own patent obsoleteness, leading us to the promised land of a capitalist paradise.

Okay, he was a bit more nuanced than this, but sometimes an individual either manages to capture the ‘spirit of the age’ or even manages to score adherents who then shape the world in their master’s (imagined) image. And of this, I shall put Fukuyama in the first category.

But what did he mean by ‘liberal democracy’? In a nutshell; individualism, multiculturalism, neoliberalism and legalism. That ‘individualism’ would grant social freedoms to, well individuals to do and be what they desired, without being pressured to fall into what ‘the group’ says, working seamless with the multicultural ‘melting pot’ where everyone’s able to be whatever without pissing off others. Neoliberalism was to be economic route to the projected capitalist paradise, while legalism – the protection / enforcement of the global and national laws and norms – was to be the framework which made it all possible.

So… he told us about this ‘Good News’ (literally, his term for it) – but where’s this delicious cake he promised us all? Surely, literally thirty years later, we should at least have smelt some alluring wafts from the kitchen, no? Why the hell can I smell burning flesh, concrete dust and burning propellent coming from Ukrainian cities instead?

We know the answer to this, really. There is no tasty cake for all because his whole theory was shit – at least as any sane road-map.

Now, he would complain at this; that he didn’t mean cake was immediately around the corner, or that the ‘path to cake’ was going to be the direct one. Only that ultimately, all roads shall lead to cake. That we shall suffer diversions from cake, some of which could last centuries. Ironically, here his tone is almost identical to the likes of Lenin; in that ‘historical forces’ meant that worldwide Communism was the ultimate destination for the world – whether it liked it or not.

That last line is the important bit. For the whole ethos for this era has been a ‘it’ll be alright in the end’ baseless optimism regarding all problems. It was held as faith that neoliberalism would cause autocratic regimes to democratise and prosperity to miraculously increase for all; it has not. It proved unable to promote individualism without elevating and excusing callous selfishness. There was no reply to the charge that ‘liberal multiculturalism’ was not much more than a figleaf for lack of societal cohesion and ghettoisation. And it never dealt with the obvious problem that you cannot have true ‘rule of law’ when you have societal stratification in which the elites used said law as a weapon.

The failure to answer these has led to the bankruptcy of both political proponents – both on the Right and Left. In this, Fukuyama’s ‘crime’ was to merely voice the massive hubris and lack of ability to view the future as something different, not really create it.

Nothing New Under The Sun?

Though truth be told, it was increasingly clear our drive to cake has been faltering for some time; and I don’t think it’s controversial to say the main ‘diversion’ came from after the Great Recession. Democratic backsliding, surging economic inequalities, increasing corruption and societal stresses; all topped off with a deteriorating global situation.

With hindsight, there’s a good historical parallel here; with the ‘Interwar Era’. Our first half was our ‘roaring 20s’; exuberant, naïve and shallowly optimistic. Then we had our ‘Wall Street Crash’, and entered our 1930s; austere, suspicious, cynical. Then, as now, we got to learn that the new ‘glues’ didn’t really hold up much when put under real strain, but the old, derided ones still seemed to work. That several events cut across traditional loyalties, shaking up the political scene – which unlike before, was becoming increasingly ‘interesting’. The certainties shook and buckled, while both the mainstream ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ were devoid of answers.

I am sure that future teenagers shall sit in history lessons a century hence and pronounce judgement on us; calling us stupid, naïve, cowardly – ‘why didn’t they see this coming, why didn’t they do something earlier when it would have been cheap to do so?’ – in the very same terms that we derided both the leaders and led of the 1930s in failing to deal with Hitler.

And the answer is – as far as I could tell – about the same. We didn’t see the coming threat because we didn’t want to. We deliberately deluded ourselves that the threat was being way exaggerated, cherished the idea that ‘they wouldn’t dare’ or ‘that sort of thing doesn’t happen anymore’ (here’s Prime Minister Johnson, 2021 telling us that ‘tank battles are a thing of the past’). The best way to deal with an issue is to deny it’s existence; and without the issue, we saw nothing wrong with allowing our muscles to weaken, our organs to become tainted while our eyes were fixed on our navels and with hands busy with our genitals.

It was not ‘Western power’ which was deterring Putin from misbehaving; it was the memory of it. And like Hitler in the 1930s, Putin has slowly pushed his luck further and further with us and each step of the way the opposition presented was between ‘laughable’ and ‘non-existent’. And even now while Russian ordnance rains down on Kiev, the response has now been upgraded to ‘lacklustre’ – while Putin himself boasts to his cronies that any sanctions will only be temporary because we cannot do without Russian cash and resources.

1939, Redux?

Two things can be deduced from the above. One, that Putin thinks we are too lazy, timid, self-absorbed and fearful to actually stand up to him. And the second is that his goals shall never be satisfied. If his desire to make a puppet Ukraine is achieved he shall simply move onto his next target. The Baltic States? Poland? Finland, perhaps? And the price and costs of resistance shall cost more each step of the way. And the Ukrainians are already paying the price for our long history of appeasement.

Now, I am not blind to the fact this situation is not all of Russian making, that we – as in, ‘the West’ – made a series of both strategic and tactical mistakes, some dating back to the 1990s. But the whos and whys of how we ended up at this juncture is irrelevant now. We are at the juncture, and it’s decision time. And it’s ultimately quite simple, really; do we resist the Third Russian Empire, or do we surrender to it? It’s that simple, really. There is no third option here.

Shape Of Things To Come?

Nor is the path of resistance going to be either easy, painless or quick. There are many people – some of them in positions in power and influence – who due to reasons fair or foul will do their best to bamboozle us into thinking the acres of shit have been cleaned and/or never really existed in the first place. They are going to have to either sniff that shit or be scraped out along with it.

Then there will be the quislings, hirelings and plain old idiots who will do their best to convince us that my above analysis is wrong in the principles. Those on the Right, like Trump and Farage, who shall do their best to lull us back to sleep, to tell us Putin is a decent man who’s good word has never been tested, that all this is a one-off.

On the other end of the horseshoe come our left-wing Tankies. Their disagreements with Fukuyama’s cake is so strong, they cannot help but to at least play the ‘bad as each other’ line, which if nothing else hides the simple fact that at least our societies, as debased as they are, still allow considerable freedom of thought, expression and independence.

Lastly, the folks of no real political hue; the ones motivated by cash, telling us that it’s ‘wrong’ to sized oligarch assets and to put in trade embargoes. Those wishing to preach the gospels of isolationism taken to stupid conclusions; that we can ignore the flames unless directly within our own front room. Lastly, the plain old folks preaching selfish individualism; that any sacrifice is wrong.

Though sacrifice is never a popular sell, and shall be even less so after three decades of being told ‘you’re worth it’ and ‘you can have it all’. But it has to be done. We shall have to say no to those trillions of pillaged wealth from Putin’s oligarch cronies, which is sloshing around our banks and institutions. Even more importantly, we shall have to say no to Russian oil, gas, wheat, coal, nickel and so on – there is precious little point in banking bans when Europe alone is giving some 650 million dollars daily in trading. And we will have to drastically beef up our defences; troops, weapons, spies, police and hackers – this shall cost us money and effort.

Lastly, this is going to be a generational battle. Putin isn’t going to ‘go away’. In fact, it’s quite possible that the totalitarian system he’s constructed will outlive him. Nor is he going to ‘change’; in fact, all change seen in him over the last two decades has been for the worse. That like the ‘last’ Cold War, we are going to have to construct defences strong enough to deter and to never for a second stop watching him like a hawk, to never let anything slide.

Despair Event Horizon?

Despite all the above, I am cautiously optimistic that we’ll prevail eventually. Putin has been ‘such a great game player’ partly because we did not realise (or more correctly, didn’t want to admit) he was playing for keeps. This isn’t wishful thinking either; Putin’s Russia is not the USSR in terms of power, influence or even attractiveness. And while we have quite a few serious internal issues to deal with, generally speaking he’s got those too. What’s more, the unveiling of Putin’s ‘true nature’ is bound to cause a rupture in the Anglo Right; hailing him as a ‘great leader’ after all this shit shall appear to be much more like treason. And lastly, while our system of government has many flaws and weakness, it at every least allows us to reform and develop to meet the challenge – something that dictatorships find generally much more difficult to do.

But it relies on us accepting the truth of the situation and then doing what needs to be done to combat it as quickly as possible. For I do not think he can openly defeat us, but he sure as hell may be able to trick, bore and/or corrupt us into surrender, in a manner we only realise we’d signed everything away afterwards.

The first signs are, in fact a long-neglected backbone is being discovered. Ukrainians are generally speaking, firmly telling Russian forces to ‘go fuck themselves’. European states are moving closer by the day towards overt, meaningful opposition – and dragging a rather reluctant America and Japan in their wake. We can do it again; those folks who beat Hitler seventy-five years ago were made of flesh, blood and nerves, just like us.

Not that we have a choice. It must be done again.

As everything on this blog, merely my own thoughts and opinions. Part of my Essays series.

The Arrogance Of Power

If the myriad of ‘Partygate’ scandals which have repeatedly hit Mr Johnson and Downing Street in the last couple of months have taught us plebs only one thing, it’s this: our views do not matter one jot. Unfortunately, they’re – generally speaking – correct.

There’s no way for us Big Public to remove them until the next ‘permitted event’ due in a couple of years time. The ‘independent report’ will be landing on Johnson’s desk and then he shall decide what is done about his own wrongdoing. The police have – rightly or wrongly – decided not to intervene. We are unable to force him – or his minions – to tell us the actual truth of the affair. To paraphrase Scooby Doo; ‘I got away with it despite you meddling public’.

Well, what other reason do you think he was smirking in that interview?

However, as with these types of post, I’m not actually that interested in the whole ‘Downing Street parties’ thing as a topic of discussion – more about what led to first the parties and then the response to it – the ‘culture’, so to speak. For I feel that it’s this which is the true, embedded problem in British society and thus worth talking about.

I shall call it ‘the arrogance of power’.

Lords & Masters

To say Mr Johnson is a ‘deeply flawed character’ is the truth – however, it is not the whole truth. The seeds of Mr Johnson – and the whole system which would allow him to thrive to the point of becoming Prime Minister – lay not down to quirks of fate or accident, but the very socio-economic system which dominates this country. I speak, naturally that of the class system – a beast who’s death is constantly predicted but never confirmed.

The most interesting aspect of the British ruling class – as noted by the likes of Orwell some eighty years ago – is it’s ability to change just enough with the times to avoid becoming a fossil and to co-opt just enough of the successful upstarts per generation to avoid being deposed. In recent decades this primarily took the form of absorbing the top rungs of our ‘nomenklatura’; those professional and managerial elites which increasingly ran the country on their behalf and were predicted by some to become their usurpers.

The key meeting-point of the two groups was ideological; they both have what I shall call ‘the master ethos’. That they believe – for good reasons or not – that they are inherently superior to us oiks; in intellect, learning, culture, drive and discipline. They possess a kind of warped meritocratic justification; they are on top because they’re the best, for if they weren’t some folks from the Lower Orders would have supplanted them long ago, right?

Worse, a large segment of the British public buys into this bollocks too. Deference – to a plummy voice, verbose glibness and patrician arrogance – has been bred into our very bones which causes our knees to bend and heads to jerk downwards when in their presence. How else can you explain the popularity of such period drama escapees such as Rees-Mogg?

I can. That we British have been groomed over centuries to equate said ‘master ethos’, or more correctly it’s outward signs as ‘leadership’. And that this view has become so ingrained that some of us actively recoil when we see one of our masters not conforming to this – as seen as all the hate shown for Reyner for her working-class accent, or Corbyn’s refusal to be impeccably groomed and suited at all times.

Consider that, for a moment. That even now, in the third decade of the twenty-first century, many Britons still apparently buying into ideas that are in reality a load of crap.

A Second Look?

Now I’ve planted ‘the master ethos’ in your head, let’s go back to ‘Partygate’. Johnson had his ‘drinks meetings’, because he was working ever so hard and he deserved it. It was okay that he broke the rules because he was intelligent enough to make sure it was done safely. In fact, the rules were wrong here so it was fine to break them. And he apologised for our inability to understand the ‘special circumstances’ which involved him, because we are too thick to get it otherwise.

I actually think Johnson was telling ‘his truth’ when complaining to Tory MPs that he’d ‘done nothing wrong’. And I also believe that the majority of MPs would have agreed with him too.

That’s part of the problem.

Acton’s Maxim

I could have called this post ‘the arrogance of privilege’ but I didn’t for one reason; the problem is wider than that. This has already been vaguely alluded to with Johnson; a ‘toxic culture’ within Downing Street.

The reason for this is simple; that even after you take into account the sorts of people who could hack working for a man like Johnson, their very proximity to him had a malign effect on their judgement. Despite not being ‘of’ the ruling class (as a rule), they grew to act according to their mentalities; that they too were special, that they also deserved exemptions. It’s not like Johnson was ever a ‘details man’, and even if he was I strongly suspect he wouldn’t have enquired too deeply into the doings of his servants.

I shall argue that the smug superiority, the entitlement writ large from of our masters rubbed off on the underlings; ‘taking their tone’ from them, with others falling into line ‘because everyone else was doing it’. The arrogance rubs off; nay, the arrogance is seen as part of having power in this country, the way to act, ‘leadership qualities’. It’s the true strength of the British ruling class; it takes hirelings and moulds them with elements of the master ethos unawares, which not only makes them better servants but is good ground-work in case they rise far enough that ‘absorption’ is worthwhile.

The whole ‘Owen Paterson affair’ makes more sense when you look at it this way. For truth be told, not many of the Conservative MPs are actually of the ruling class – partly due to the simple fact Parliament is too ‘low-status’ an occupation and only a limited number of safe seats come open each election. This means it’s mainly the ‘hirelings’ and the socially ambitious which try this route; which if done ‘right’ can lead to the end of the rainbow – pots of gold, ermine and sinecures.

Anyway, these MPs took their cue from their masters, which in this case was ‘there is nothing wrong with using your position to further oneself’. To this light, Paterson did nothing wrong. His ‘crime’ was not to be caught, or even to complain about the slap-on-wrist he got as punishment either. It was merely that he caught the public’s eye on it. This meant he was promptly thrown overboard.

Wicked Or Stupid?

Was the question Orwell asked of his own ruling class eighty years before, and I’ve generally come to the same conclusion as he – it’s mainly the latter.

That they do not understand the point that leadership comes from example, that we’re not so dim we don’t remember you said the opposite thing last year, last month, last week. Or that your words and deeds are on different planets, that your promises to us never come true. That your rule is mainly through gaslighting, fear and nonsense, mainly done as your group continues to run the county into the ground, while you treat it like it’s your own piece of personal property.

That the truth of the matter is more alarming; your class has decayed so far that you’ve lost your brains, your morals, your patriotism and even your sense of duty. That all it is now left is the entitlement, superficiality, greed and immaturity.

I wouldn’t mind so much if they simply honest about it all; to baldly state ‘we are in charge, and by jove we’ll do anything and everything to remain so’. But Orwell also tells us why this cannot be so; because not only does such an action make it obvious to us plebs that weaponry may be required to throw them overboard but it also requires them to be honest with themselves regarding their position. And this would require a clear view of the true state of the country, as well as an objective look on their classes’ actual abilities and ethos.

Then everything becomes so much harder to justify. Wilful ignorance is a warm, fuzzy blanket to wrap yourself in, which is a vital attribute for the ‘master ethos’ – it only works if you genuinely believe yourself to be superior.

‘Save Big Dog’

As I sit here, I hear about the Conservatives’ ‘fightback’; mainly based around pandering to some of the hobby-horses of the base. This, I predict shall be successful; for it’s being tailored to the only people who matter – backbench MPs. Keep them sweet, keep this shit clown-show on the road a little bit longer so they don’t vote him out today.

Bound by ties of corruption and lacking any ‘better offer’, I predict most shall remain… for now. But they’ll throw him into the mincer the second they do get said offer. For in the degraded sense of their master ethos, ‘loyalty’ is something you speak of so to lure into a false sense of security the folks who are about to be thrown under the train to save your skin.

I wonder if Johnson shall weep bitterly when they finally do this to him?

As everything on this blog, merely my own thoughts and opinions. Part of my Essays series.

The Right To Offend?

I am about to do something… naughty. An action that until perhaps a week or two ago, would have led me open to getting police attention of an unfriendly nature. In fact, might still lead to it. But I’m going to go ahead and do it anyway, for it is vital to illustrate the issue.

*Clears Throat*

I disagree with the acronym ‘LGBT’ and all it’s variants. In fact, if I had my own way, it would be abolished. Forever.

(Me, right now).

*Pause*

I have just committed a ‘non-crime hate incident’, of which many English police forces – including my own – record. Now, as I am pseudo-anonymous, it is unlikely any police force would go to the lengths to try to ID me, but for all I know there may be a special list for such nasty, hurtful cowards such as I who hide behind pseudonyms.

I have grounds – quite good ones, I feel – for saying the above. Perhaps I’ll one day do a post laying out my argument. But not today. Firstly, the argument is not relevant to this post and secondly, at 119 characters my ‘offense’ is easily imaginable as a post on Twitter, Facebook or whatever. That’s important, because this post was inspired by the antics of a Mr Miller on Twitter around three years ago, and the long, drawn-out aftermath.

The Non-Crime?

The full story is here, but I’ll quickly recap now – it’s one which got lost in the combination of Christmas and Omicron, but feel it’s worth covering even this far ‘after the fact’.

In late 2018, Mr Miller was on Twitter discussing transgender issues and he did a variant of the clichéd ‘I self-identify as an attack helicopter’. Someone took offense to this, enough to the point he was reported to the police. It seems he had made several other comments which were judged to be transphobic, which led to a visit by members of Humberside’s finest. There he was interrogated, and threatened with – amongst other things – possible future difficulties with employers due to it being a stain on his DBS (‘police check’) record.

The problem was, he had not committed any offence, either criminal or civil. What’s more, the police knew this at the time. Unfortunately for the police, so did Mr Miller. For he was an ex-policeman himself. And they’d picked a fight with the wrong person, which led all the way up to the Court of Appeal, where Mr Miller finally won the right to be offensive (somewhat). Now and then the Grumpy Old Man stubbornly digging in his heels to prove a point benefits us all, and I’ll argue this is one such event.

What Issue?

Now, before anything else, I’ll make this clear – I think on the main Mr Miller was mainly wrong on the transgender issue(s) being discussed (in fact, I think we’d have a bit of a bust-up on it). Yet I won’t say for sure because I’ve not been able to read all his comments and/or had the chance to actually question him on them, so I’m giving him the benefit of the doubt there.

But my opinion on the correctness of his comments is irrelevant here. Or even the issue his comments were ‘the most part, opaque, profane or unsophisticated’ – for I do not believe being rude and/or crass are crimes in themselves. No, my beef is with the whole manner ‘non-crime hate incidents’ were handled. And we need to focus on that bit, and that bit alone. Which is why I didn’t explain why I don’t like the acronym ‘LGBT’.

The Premise

…is simple. That there’s a myriad of actions which by themselves do not constitute an actual offence, but are felt to need to be recorded. I’ll let the College of Policing explain further;

“They [Non-crime hate incidents] may also be the precursor to more serious or escalating criminal offending. Non-crime hate incidents may form part of a series of incidents that, together, may constitute a crime, such as harassment. Retrospective review of crimes will often highlight earlier non-crime hate incidents that could have presented opportunities to intervene to reduce the threat.”

(Website, ‘Responding To Non-crime hate incidents’)

This, in fact makes some sense. It’s the pain of many a bullied person; when the Authority Figure is sitting there, peering at you and saying ‘well, did they actually do anything?’ the ‘do’ meaning ‘something we can actually book’. As a person who’s been bullied before, this can be really hard to actually prove. And many a bully knows exactly how to dance on this line, leaving the complainant looking petty, thin-skinned and/or nuts. Which can be almost as bad as the bullying itself.

What’s more, police record non-crime incidents all the time (not just the hate ones). It’s part of their constant intelligence-gathering systems. It helps identify problem areas, times and people; that (for example) when the Drug Squad turns up at 5AM with their door-knocker, it’s always because a case has built up to a critical point, and much of it would have been ‘non-crime’ in nature (at least at first). To deny the police their ability to record such things would be to cripple their powers of investigation, to understand patterns of behaviour and to spot warning signals.

My Twisted Knickers

So, why do I object to the ‘non-crime hate incidents’? Again, I’ll let the College tell you.

“Where it is established that a criminal offence has not taken place, but the victim or any other person perceives that the incident was motivated wholly or partially by hostility, it should be recorded and flagged as a non-crime hate incident.”

(Emphasis Mine)

In this, there is no burden of proof. The complainant’s word is taken as gospel, with zero questioning. What’s more, the definition of ‘hate’ is pretty wide; ‘causing distress’, ‘dislike’ and ‘unfriendliness’ all falls under this. And some people feel ‘distress’ when they see views which clash with their own; they’re ‘distressed’ by the fact they’re not completely comfortable, despite the fact that they have no right to be as such at all times.

Which is why I am guilty of a non-crime; for there are people out there who identify so strongly with ‘LGBT’ they take any criticism as homophobic and/or transphobic. I know this because I’ve been entrapped/punished for it online and some of the crowd applauded because I had ‘started to make them uncomfortable’.

Clearly, this is wide open to abuse. The most touchy of complainants are reinforced in their belief they have a right to never be threatened by contrary views or questioned, while those wishing to wage vendettas can happily do so. Even the plain weird are pandered to; like when (as a test) a barrister said on Twitter she thought her cat was a Methodist and a colleague reported it to the police – because they implied that Methodists were ‘wandering pests that defecate in other people’s gardens’. It is now on their file, perhaps evermore.

Which is the second strand – these ‘non-crimes’ appear on DBS checks. Yes, a teacher, doctor or youth worker (and many more) may be declined for employment or even lose their current job because some crazy grassed them up because they made a comment on Facebook they didn’t like. Like for example, stating a medical fact such as ‘it is currently impossible to change your biological sex’. (Question: would you trust a medical doctor who didn’t accept such a basic fact?)

The last strand is the worst of all; there’s no easy way to discover what ‘non-crime incidents’ have been logged about you, and no way you can dispute them either. The guidance says the criminal individual is meant to be informed, but I suspect many are not – on the simple fact some 120,000 were logged in five years and I had not even heard of this until today.

We Have A File On You…

Let’s recap the situation. A person or persons unknown can make an allegation against you for making socially disliked (but legal) comments, which are not questioned, the defendant is not often aware of, is clearly unable to defend themselves on and may drastically damage their life.

Often the right-wingers are very quick to start making the usual, tired comparisons with the KGB, 1984 and so on – but in this case, I say they’ve got a point; if the above isn’t a decent description of a Chinese-style ‘social credit’ system in embryo, I don’t know what is.

For that’s how such things work. You may have committed no crime, but at some point you did something which caused the ‘bad’ stamp to be put on your file, causing doors to silently close on you and you don’t even realise it. Overlooked for promotions, forced to wait in line longer for goods, more perfunctory service from officials and so on. Or in the modern British sense, having employment issues because the police tacitly warn your probable employers you might be ‘trouble’ and they’d not want that – the enforced conformity of social media (and spying on new hires) is bad enough, but now the state is in on the game too. Or more correctly, has been for some time and we’ve only just found out, like the Snowden mass leaks a decade ago.

Enlightened Self-Interest?

Now for the secret question – why the hell you should care about this. After all, I don’t generally agree with Mr Miller. In fact, it’s in my immediate interest to have folks like him silenced. But that relies on you having a very myopic, short-term view of things. Because once such a system is constructed, it can easily be turned on you.

What’s stopping the system designed to silence Mr Miller being turned against pro-transgender commentators (for example)? It’s grown in the dark, in the dark bowels of police procedure, not actual law. How about if Ms Patel at the Home Office starts writing this definition? Or someone even worse? We’ve been here before. And when you connive at suppression of views you simply don’t like, you’re sharpening a blade which might slice your arm off later on.

Remember the definition; the offence is in the eye of the beholder and it’s not questioned. This very blog is littered with ‘non-crime hate speech’ towards Mr Johnson and other Conservative Party members, for example. Posts by Another Angry Voice detailing their aura of corruption is also ‘hate speech’. And so are articles in The Guardian criticising the Government’s actions in general. What’s stopping the police from padding their way to ‘agin the government’ critics and trying to bully them into silence over threats of it getting out to their employer’s HR people, like they did with Mr Miller? The term ‘chilling effect’ is also overused, but correct here. And couple this with the fact the government desires to remove the anonymity of online accounts…

With the final ruling partly in favour of Mr Miller, the guidance has been updated – with the apparent introduction of the old legal principle of ‘the reasonable person’; a concept which is the whole justification for trial by jury (for starters). What’s more, the police are allowed to start judging whether there is actual ‘hostility’, rather than simply taking the accuser’s word for it, however clearly demented it may be. Context is also now permissible; such as during a debate.

* * *

Yet it leads me to ask; why did it take a long, expensive legal case to for Humberside Police to quit active resistance to the idea of ‘introducing common sense’ to the guidelines? Didn’t anyone think of this in the two years of legal action? Or when the College of Policing was writing said guidelines? Did nobody think the conclusions through?

My conclusion: crappy British management strikes again; our own ‘nomenklatura’ more interested in defending their own arses and institutional reputation than doing the right thing. Believing it could bully Mr Miller into surrender, or then bankrupt him with crippling legal costs if he tried to fight his corner. It’s frankly unbelievable – no, unfortunately it is believable that they’d allow this to go on right to the bitter end. And the buck-passing non-apologies from both the Humberside Police and College of Policing show that despite this minor setback, they are utterly unrepentant.

In my book, one of the reasons this country’s going to the shit, and no, it’s not because of ‘enforced wokeness’ or some right-wing drivel.

As everything on this blog, merely my own thoughts and opinions. Part of my Essays series.

Environmentalism’s Class Issue

The ‘green agenda’ is seemingly everywhere these days – from Extinction Rebellion to heat-pumps, veganism to electric cars; it does feel that it is finally gaining decent traction with the Big Public in the advanced nations, which normally means it gets translated into political action (as it finally becomes a ‘vote winner’). Yet, this is a bit of a false dawn, for one critical issue:

The working classes are generally not on board with it. In fact, at times they’re actively hostile towards it.

This is much larger than many of the ‘chattering classes’ suspect; partly due to the simple fact the above folks generally don’t enter their lives or feature in their media – social media itself is a very powerful tool of creating ideological bell-jars. Their scepticism, cynicism and outright denial towards the whole topic often leads to a sneering derision from the ‘climate conscious’, writing off the concerns and questions as stupidity, greed, laziness and/or manipulation by ‘Them’.

Now, there’s some element to truth to this; anti-intellectualism has been a fertile, seemingly inexhaustible resource for the right-wingers to mine electorally since… well, the day universal suffrage came along (particularly if it’s lovingly fed by tabloid news and populist hacks). But it also means that their concerns are rarely heard, and if they are they’re either dismissed or minimised.

The Inconvenient Truth

Is a simple one; ‘climate activism’ (of various stripes) has become not only fashionable but effectively obligatory for the liberal-leaning middle class Anglosphere – something ‘one has to do’ between taking the knee for BLM and proclaiming yourself to be a ‘straight ally’ for the LGBT ‘community’ (for LGBT are a monolithic bloc, just like all ethnic minorities are, which is why they were given BAME. Plus, I object to ‘allyship’ as a concept, but that’s another post). Result; the vast majority of green campaigns are crewed by middle-class liberals, who are mainly thinking in middle-class liberal ways and talking to other middle-class liberals.

Case in point; Extinction Rebellion – I (the personal ‘I’ here) can’t afford to take a day off work to protest, half the time I wouldn’t be able to afford to travel to protest and I certainly wouldn’t be able to afford any mandated fines for protesting. Similar was pointed out by minority groups; having legal entanglements as a campaign strategy was less viable when it came to folks who have always been shit on by said legal system and a criminal record – however minor – can fuck up your entire life.

Naturally, this is something which has been seized on by the forces of reaction; right-wing rent-a-hacks painting campaigners as nothing more than blinkered, naïve ‘metropolitan elites’ and stupid lazy students engaging in their hobby in a most ‘irresponsible’ manner. This looks a kinda stupid strategy when spelt out like this, but it’s powerful when wrapped up in the language and tactics of Us/Them and done in a manner which panders to the prejudices/preconceptions of the audience and plays on their emotions.

But the most powerful element to this strategy was the ‘psychological wall’ which has formed within the working class regarding climate activism – by portraying it as a middle-class hobby, it’s become something that ‘people like us’ don’t do. This mentality is all around us; social conformity is a bitch, even more so when you don’t even realise it’s the conformity kicking in and making the decision for you (one of the lessons I had from getting into fitness; how much BS I’d been spoon-fed on the subject).

Class Agency?

And a rather expensive hobby it is; as the recent discussions around the London Ultra-Low Emissions Zone (ULEZ) showed. Hearing one of the proponents clearly richsplaining how we oiks should simply use public transport / muscle power, or get an electric car – which were ‘affordable’ now. Well, the first two options are clearly non-starters for folks who work in the trades, deliveries and so on – we can safely assume that any poor person driving in London does so because they must, as it’s so damn expensive to do so already and thus highly unlikely to be ‘an extra’ for them.

But the second bit – that of affordability – is something worth looking at in more detail.

I mean, citing the fact electrics were ‘so affordable’ from twenty grand means nothing to people who don’t buy new cars. For a minimum-wage worker – like say a carer – that’s their whole annual pay. Okay, you can go used – but a quick search on AutoTrader tells me they’re around three times the price of an equivalent conventional. Then there’s the issue of ‘battery leasing’, which might cut the sticker shock but saddles you with higher monthly costs to the point it could nullify all the savings in the fuel change (or even push you into the red).

Then there’s the issue with charging the thing. To put in a proper home charging station appears to cost around £750, but this assumes that you a) own your home and b) have a driveway. Many folks in rentals don’t have this ability either way – landlord won’t get it put in, and most places don’t have a place to put it either.

This issue is an excellent illustration of how class blinkers work. Our bourgeois greenie here may be personally 100% committed, well-meaning and honest, but not only are they living in a whole different world (which has their own problems, beliefs and norms) but they’re also ignorant (unwittingly or not) of the cardinal rule of wealth – the more you have, the more ‘agency’ (the freedom to made decisions) you possess.

Trick Of The Century?

In their defence, it’s not all the bourgeois greenie’s fault here – because they’ve been tricked. By masters of their craft. In fact, I sometimes wonder whether the folks at Ogilvy & Mather who coined and popularised the term ‘carbon footprint’ and then used it to shift the blame from the likes of BP to us still smirk and hug themselves on thinking about just how damn successful that campaign was.

Like most successful campaigns, this one did have have a bit of logical underpinning; after all, if nobody wanted BP’s planet-killing products – well, they’d not fuck up the planet getting them, would they? BP only does it because it’s demanded by consumers. Therefore, it’s up to us to take ‘personal responsibility’ (another term who’s knickers warm their ankles) and not use the product. In effect, BP is gaslighting us, spewing out their oil while bellowing ‘look what you made me do!’ – a line beloved by many an abuser.

Useful Idiots?

Part of me wonders whether if those ad people knew what would happen next – with the zeal of the convert, our bourgeois greenies would then go off to hector us plebs on our ‘carbon footprints’. I use the religious analogy for good reason; I see similarities between them and the culty Christians I used to live with for a bit as a kid. About the same level as buzzkill, too; the whole austere ‘for the planet’ personal denial of so many things. Flying. Meat. Exotic fruits. Consumer goods. New clothing. Everything, really save smugness.

Yet… poor people are already leading ‘greener’ lives in regards to carbon emissions; while stats are somewhat difficult to come by (for reasons worth a post by itself) it would appear that the carbon footprint for the ‘working poor’ (around £20k/year) is only a quarter of those earning £40k/year.

This makes perfect sense when you think it through. When your world is close to minimum wage, there’s not a lot of flying going on and it’s unlikely your home is either over-heated or full of new carbon-heavy consumer goods. Bitching about cheap ‘fast fashion’ is all well and good, but for many of these folks said clothes are the only ones they can afford and are worn until unusable. In this respect, ‘green’ has become a marketing niche, something for the well-heeled to enjoy, not ‘normal folk like us’.

This leads to a huge misfiring of many green campaigns; telling people to ‘fly less’ completely puts the back up of the family who fly once a year for a week’s holiday. A meat tax? Great, removal of the only cheap source of protein from my plate, while it merely means a bit more on the price of your steak.

All this feels completely hypocritical. The bourgeois, after enjoying the fruits of mass carbon production then reaches down to deny a cut-down version of said fruits to those below them. This is replaying on a global scale; where the rich nations hector the poor on how they cannot reach a level of consumption that we’ve enjoyed for eons because that would be bad for the planet.

Not like this is a new thing. For centuries, our ruling classes have held working-class ‘materialism’ and ‘greed’ against us, saying that that’s wrong. Y’know, wanting a little taste of the prosperity our masters had every day (and we produced!) and desiring to have a fair wage for fair conditions. Their agents in religion weighed in, preaching that poverty was somehow a virtue and put us on the fast-track to eternal bliss. Just don’t ask for any of that in this life, mate. The Wobblies put it well, in one of the parody hymns sung against the Salvation Army;

‘Pie in the sky… that’s a lie.’

Different Viewpoints?

Of course poor people reject this. Our bourgeois greenie doesn’t realise they’re basically telling us ‘ordinaries’ to be colder, have less stuff, travel less and to consume less foodstuffs – remembering these are folks who in national terms have the least to start off with. Their message comes in as ‘for the good of the planet, your life must get more shit’ and the message-maker wonders why they’re told to fuck off. That message is about as appealing as an outbreak of cholera and doesn’t even have the promise of eternal bliss the above one does.

What’s more, poverty warps your mindset. Why should I cut down on the few ‘nice things’ in my life for something in the undefined future? I don’t even know where I’ll be in a year’s time, let alone thirty. A brain, faced with constant juggling of deficient resources, chronic letdowns, routine deception and an insecure, chaotic life does the best it can; focuses on the immediate situation and doesn’t really think about anything further ahead. After all, what’s the point? You can’t do anything about it, you’ll cross that bridge when you get to it. If you get to it.

Déjà Vu?

It’s not like they’re unfamiliar with the experience of dealing with greenies; in fact, it’s been happening for over a century – that is, to be lectured, hectored and coerced by ‘middle-class do-gooders’. For as anyone who’s actually experienced poverty knows all to well; as your income drops you lose certain rights. Often, that of privacy; that when you’re poor, you’re expected to put up with intrusive questioning regarding your personal life way past the point a wealthier person would have to. Or having to justify everything all the time – the need for something, or a decision.

That in this respect, our greenie is merely another ‘do-gooder’ with their condescending tone and crap ‘advice’, often lying through their teeth and with corkscrew logic while trying to impose their constipated view of things on everyone else. The ‘Great Bourgeois Saviour’, striding fearlessly into sink estates with budget-plans and healthy eating charts, just like their ancestors did with Africa a century back, with their Bibles and sneers. The worst elements of the classic missionary, imposed on our own Lower Orders.

I overdraw, of course. But less than you’d think. As I write this, I can see in my mind’s eye the litany of such ‘encounters’ I’ve had with such people over a quarter-century, and I’ve now got the vague desire to spit. That on reflection some of their advice was the correct one, but delivered in such a cack-handed manner that the message itself was rejected. Playing the person and not the ball? Yes. But it takes a conscious effort to counteract your own biases which invariably means most folk don’t bother.

The Path Ahead?

The above are not unsolvable problems – in fact, some only require better salesmanship and different messengers. But there’s two critical problems which cripple any movement on this front, and that’s even before we rule out outright denialism and the wholesale manipulation by forces of the Status Quo, like the legions of lobbyists who attended the recent conference in Glasgow and when the fossil fuel industry alone outnumbered any nation’s delegates (and folks wonder why the agreement was barely worth the paper it was written on!)

The first is for an acceptance of their lack of agency. Or more correctly, their lack of willing agency, for the reasons given above. There’s the issue that for poorer people, the percentage of ‘discretionary carbon’ is pretty low, meaning that most of their footprint is out of their hands. Case in point; my annual three tons from domestic energy.

Now, I’ve done the modifications I have ‘agency’ to and I refuse to cut further because, say living without hot water is deemed ‘unacceptable’. This means it’s down to the energy companies to quit using natural gas for generation, my landlord to bring my heating into the 21^st Century and getting a cash incentive from the state so I can afford to replace my ancient, inefficient white goods quicker.

The second is to appreciate the lack of ‘reward’. The current system at the moment – outside a few exceptions, such as converting to electric vehicles – does not grant any tangible benefits to the actor. In fact, doing ‘the right thing’ in ecological terms usually costs more – in money, in time and/or effort, like going to the local tip vs simply dumping my crap in a handy drainage ditch. Or taking a £200 eight-hour train journey rather than a £50 two-hour flight.

Nor is there any compensation for any ‘cancelled consumption’. Okay, it may be good for the planet that I don’t get yet another pair of trainers or to go without that new sofa, but… why should I? There’s no tangible reward for me to not do it (at least not further than ‘retained cash’). In fact, often the ‘right’ option runs against my own personal, immediate interests.

Lastly, to embrace ‘enlightened self interest’. ‘Tis a dirty phrase; ‘what’s in it for me?’ (partly due to the ‘you’ll be rewarded in heaven’ shit peddled by the ruling classes) but one which poorer people generally follow more acutely (or at very least more openly). You cannot blame them for this; after all, you can’t pay bills with heaven-rewards, oddly enough. It’s a general problem in our society, noted back in the 19^th Century by John Stuart Mill; that while we have a system which punishes bad behaviour, we generally lack any similar mechanisms to reward good behaviour. A society of sticks but no carrots.

Some of the current large plans need better selling for this; to make them more attractive for other, non-ecological reasons. Example; heat-pumps. Why not push hard ahead with them, wrapping them up in the Union Jack – for they will help us ditch gas boilers, and with that cut off Putin’s hand which is currently around our balls heating-wise. Stress that they’ll be made domestically as much as possible, giving decent, well-paid jobs for Britons. Point out that they’ll cut down on our utility bills, and the state is putting in a load of funding to turbocharge development so they’ll be cheaper and better than now.

* * *

It’s rather clear that the planet is getting very close to the ‘tipping point’; the time where the damage has become irreversible and we – and our immediate descendants – will be forced to cope with an increasingly unstable dying world.

This requires drastic action now, but this requires action on a national, governmental level. This requires – for the democratic states at least – a level of public outcry to force real change on them, for only ‘vote winners’ are catered to. That means getting the Big Public to demand these changes, or at very least to stop opposing them. Which relies on two critical points first; one, for the ‘greenies’ to stop thinking they’re already perfect and two, to quit assuming all who oppose them do it for stupid / greedy / sociopathic reasons.

For the first is the worst example of the dogmatic ideologue, and the second is an obvious Bulverism. This combo is seen all the time, but when it comes to climate change we cannot afford to let this fuck up.

As everything on this blog, merely my own thoughts and opinions. Part of my Essays series.

Coronavirus: In Retrospect

So, a committee of MPs has spoken; that there was much left to be desired regarding the UK Government’s response to the pandemic. In fact, the levels of non-desired outcomes were so high they called the pandemic ‘one of the country’s worst public health failures’. That’s quite strong words, particularly when you remember that this committee was not even a full enquiry with powers to summon witnesses to provide evidence under oath.

But on the plus side; we now know why Johnson went on holiday a few days before, don’t we?

The Government’s partisans and rent-a-hacks instantly rushed to defend this, trying to explain away the bad news by saying they’d acted the best they could at the time, it was the advice they were getting and nobody could have improved the results. Hmm… really?

Let’s put that to the test. By doing a quick review of some of my old blog posts and seeing how they held up with the lens of hindsight. And what the Government actually did.

Risk, Statistics and You

15^th February ’20

I’m way off the mark here. I completely fail to appreciate the coming storm; if I remember right I didn’t even consider the possibility it would become an pandemic. I think I felt that we were going to see a repeat of SARS some twenty years back; a epidemic which was contained before it was lapping on British shores.

The only bit I was sort of right about was my fagpacket fatality rates, which at 2% was rather close to the ~1.5% we eventually saw in the UK in 2020. But because I never even considered the possibility that we’d end up seeing 50,000+ plus cases weekly for several months, I never considered the cumulative effect on our heath services. Or what it would do if it ripped into the UK’s rather vulnerable-heavy demographics (such as obesity and age). But in my defence, that post was not a real focus on Coronavirus, more a talk about risk and statistics. Though at this point the whole UK known case-load was nine.

(That bit is important, but that’s a topic for another day).

How Presenteeism Will Cause the Pandemic

2^nd March ’20

My first proper focus is much more on the ball. I still don’t appreciate just how contagious the virus is (measuring in months, not weeks), no – but I do realise that we were cruising fast towards a full-blown pandemic which would require ‘China-level controls’ (aka lockdowns) to break the transmission rates. I got the issue that the current system of sick pay etc was simply inadequate to the task, that many employers could not be trusted to allow their workers to take the time off to isolate unless forced to.

At this point, the Government was steadfastly denying there was any real problem. It was still recommending (not ordering) self-isolation for suspected cases (which prompted the above post), while saying that any restrictions would damage the economy. On that very day the number of known UK cases was 36, and the first COBRA meeting was held on the topic. Johnson’s appearance was a negatory. So, round one to me.

The Coronavirus Economic Crisis

17^th March ’20

Most of this post is a quick outline of how consumer economics work, so readers could understand the seriousness of the coronavirus-related implosion – pointing out that the death-spiral was one never seen before economically and thus, needed direct stimulus to the population to stop everything falling apart.

Three days later the first Lockdown was announced, along with the furlough / self-employment schemes – systems which were both more generous but less universal than my suggestion, which was more akin to what they did in the USA. Clearly, at the time I was writing the Government was working hard to assemble the systems to run all this – but I recall the lack of information out of them was so large that the announcement of said Lockdown was a complete shock.

I’ll call that another draw.

The Coronavirus Endgame?

25^th April ’20

The next few Coronavirus posts are better snapshot pieces, so we move forward a month where I tried to apply my mediocre knowledge to make a guestimate on how and when the pandemic may end. Re-reading it with the glories of hindsight, I cannot fault my logic, with one exception.

I did not consider the possibility of vaccinations conferring immunity (or something close to it for most) but not stopping contraction and/or transmission.

At that point, the Government was throwing cash at clinical trials for what will eventually become the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine while the death-toll clears 20,000 and the recovering Bozo announces we have ‘turned the tide (a comment which might have been the catalyst for the very post). Another draw, yes?

Johnson’s Dead Cat

29^th May ’20

The next prediction is once again on the money. Mainly spurred by my ‘reality based analysis’ using the points from above, I make it clear I don’t think it’s over at all, and we were courting disaster by being so blithe in regards to ‘reopening’ – that at best, it was a summer respite, a time to ‘come up for air’ before another Lockdown happened in the Autumn. Which everyone knows should have happened in October, and really happened in November.

Weird, that I win this round despite the fact we drew the previous one. Tentative conclusion; the Government was not listening to the advice. Which has since been proven – that Johnson is an eternal Micawber, ignoring anything that ‘is gloomy’, even if it’s truth.

Could Vaccines Make The Pandemic Worse?

2^nd February ’21

The next predictive post is not until we see the first fruits of the vaccine rollout, and it’s a rather decent one. I finally realise my mistake from April: immunity didn’t automatically mean zero transmission. I fret about how mass vaccinations might cause overconfidence and lead to the disease becoming endemic within our society. I wonder about a vaccine booster campaign will be needed later on. I also complain that the Government was not explaining this to the public. Well, they wouldn’t, because with the vaccine rollout was actually going well, mainly due to the fact they – or their dodgy mates – didn’t have anything to do with it save signing the cheques.

I grant another point for me, the clincher being that Johnson had said the very day before he was optimistic about overseas holidays that summer. Micawber just don’t learn, does he?

Riding The Third Wave!

4^th July ’21

With hindsight, I’m inclined to give myself a half-mark on this. I clearly identify the date where the Government had decided to declare Coronavirus ‘over’ (for political reasons) and try to force a sense of normality on the country. That it was now back to Plan A; to ride the wave of infections out and hope it burns out or something. I also make a as-yet unfulfilled prediction; that another ‘Lockdown’ (of some form) will only happen if the NHS teeters close to collapse under the strain and/or we get a new mutant variant.

Time will only tell on that one.

Results…

Well, I found three times where my predictions were clearly better than the Johnson Government’s – the best one being when I called a UK pandemic three weeks before the first Lockdown. And none of my predictions have been any more wrong than the Government’s either.

In short: if the Government’s actions through the pandemic was ‘the best they could do’, then they were too stupid to be the Government. Similar conclusions can be had when comparing the UK to other nations of our size and level of development; I think the only other which has been worse than the British response is the American, and that’s improved markedly after Trump’s end.

Nor do I think they’ve really learned from their mistakes either.

Let’s try to remember that, even when all the Tory hacks try to practice gaslighting, revisionism and outright lying about the past.

As everything on this blog, merely my own thoughts and opinions. Part of my Covid Pandemic and Essays series.

Why ‘Britcoin’ Is Stupid

It’s been a busy week for the old Johnson Government; working hard to throw lots of ‘news’ in our direction to distract the country from the fact they’re trying a ‘bold experiment’ (perhaps even ‘courageous’, as Sir Humphrey would put it) called ‘let’s see what happens when we encourage mass coronavirus infections’.

I deploy the quote-marks over ‘news’ for in fact most of it barely warrants as such; a new crime strategy with reheated ideas and no new money, a new disabilities strategy identical to previous, a proposal to get more school-kids learning Latin (and with no new money), opening up the UK for tourism but not getting ‘buy-in’ from the other parties (meaning it’s basically pointless) and this – the fact the Bank of England (the UK’s central bank) is looking into ‘digital currency’ – something that Chancellor Sunak seems pretty keen on.

Let’s ignore the fact that this is in fact re-heated news which first came out in April, which I suspect was dug up as part of the above distraction strategy. For this idea is in fact an interesting one which as far as I can see, nobody within the ‘proper’ media bothered to go any further with than merely reporting the Chancellor’s comments and the Bank of England’s study.

Studying The Bandwagon

Which is clearly the cryptocurrency Bitcoin. Despite the fact many solid folks (like Warren Buffett) are dead against it, it’s too unstable in value to be used reliably as a currency, it’s harder to spend or transfer than e-money and it lacks either an issuing authority, inherent value or assets backing it (meaning that it works simply because folks believe in it, making it akin to magic in the role-playing game Mage The Ascension) – the simple fact that it continues to shoot up in value (the main definition of a asset bubble) means it clearly warrants closer examination by the Very Serious People, like central bankers.

Design Issues…

Most of the Bitcoin detractors have cottoned to the ‘lack of backing or value’ if not anything else. So, couldn’t we simply fix this (and the value fluctuations) by pegging the ‘crypto’s value to say, Sterling and having a bank working on keeping the value steady? The answer is a clear ‘Yes’ as this is what caused central banks to exist in the first place – banknotes started out as ‘promissory notes’ for gold and silver coin held in reserve a couple of centuries ago.

The problem is the fact much of the money in crypto is speculative – people are trying to make a profit out of the massive value swings; from buying coins on the unregulated exchanges, or the mining syndicates manipulating the prices by their dominance of the ‘supply’.

Therefore, a regulated crypto will have a fraction of the demand of the original, simply because there won’t be any hot money sloshing about in it, hoping to turn a profit.

Glass Pockets?

Hot money is half the problem; the other one is ‘dark money’ – aka the proceeds of crime. It’s perhaps the only other thing ‘everyone knows’ about Bitcoin and it’s ilk; that scammers, hackers and dealers use it in the belief that it’s anonymous – something which a direct bank transfer is not.

Like many of these things, Bitcoin isn’t anonymous, but pseudonymous – coins are tied to ‘wallets’, and while said wallets aren’t tied to people (like bank accounts) the link becomes rather obvious when you try to convert your coins to currency (for you need a bank account to pay into). That like the old bank robber unable to spend the wads of cash they’d nicked, it’s very possible to have a tasty haul of coins you’re unable to convert into ‘real money’ without alerting the authorities.

However, despite this crypto does offer more chance for successful evasion than bank transfers; simply because it’s easier to increase the difficulty of tracking the transactions. What’s more, as wallets aren’t tied to anyone, it’s possible to use it as a method of hiding wealth from the authorities too.

Naturally, no central bank or government revenue agency would allow this aspect – the ‘crypto’ – to remain for their own versions. In fact, most proposals have it even easier to trace transactions than traditional e-money; for the currency would be a centralised system where every coin’s location would be known instantly and previous transactions as visible as if you’d simply sent your account statements to the authorities.

And this prospect excites them – the dream of a world where everyone has glass pockets in which not a single penny gained through crime, evasion or fraud can be hidden. Part of the dreams of the ‘virtual panopticon‘ in which Big Data can end up knowing more about you than you do yourself.

I don’t know about you, but I would object to having a fiscal glass pocket on the matter of principle – at very least my bank would resist (usually) the demands from the state into showing my transaction record to them. And knowing that a major user of cryptos are for illicit activities means they’d never touch this digital currency with a bargepole. Which makes you wonder who would.

Begging The Question…

Was what alerted me to this story; when the Chancellor tweeted about ‘looking into a British digital currency’. Because we already have a de facto ‘digital currency’, called electronic banking, denominated in currencies such as Sterling, Euros and so on. It’s known, it has protections against abuse, the infrastructure already exists and most importantly it works. Newer payment options – like most micropayment systems – are merely an extension to this. It was estimated that only 10% of transactions in the USA were in cash by 2018, and I suspect the UK was similar in ratio – and with almost all the rest of the transactions being electronic in some form.

Generally speaking, I don’t like ‘If it ain’t broke’ arguments, but it’s completely true in this case. As long as the banking system itself is ‘sound’ and everyone has a functional bank account (or three) there is no need for this pseudo-crypto to enter the situation. In fact, it threatens to make the situation worse by in effect, mooting possible creation of a secondary currency (and thus complicating matters).

I’ve read a couple of abstracts for this concept, and generally speaking the projected ‘advantages’ to the end user are actually almost zero – for example, you don’t need this pseudo-crypto to ‘promote financial inclusion’, merely ensuring everyone has a free bank account will suffice. All the benefits are for the state and financial institutions.

* * *

Let’s return to the original question; so, the Bank of England (amongst others) are thinking to creating a digital currency which holds no advantages to traditional electronic banking for the end user, no chance of speculation, no transaction privacy and would cost a huge amount of cash to set up and then run.

I’ve heard the phrase ‘build it and they will come’ but in this case I think it’ll be only to point and mock. Proof that even supposedly ‘very smart’ people get taken in by fads and fashions.

In defence, perhaps one day central banks will move to a full digital currency than the current ad-hoc, layered abstraction system with all the inefficiencies we currently have. But like hydrogen cars and global veganism, I think this is decades away. And may not even need another currency.

As everything on this blog, merely my own thoughts and opinions. Part of my Essays series.

Riding The Third Wave!

So, apparently it’s full speed ahead for a complete ending of coronavirus restrictions on the 19^th of July; at this point two weeks and one day hence. The signs are obvious; it’s been leaked, Government Ministers have been talking about shit like ‘personal responsibility’ about masks and Johnson has a big announcement lined up for tomorrow. Yay! It’s all ended, didn’t we do so well? Don’t look at the massive deathtoll, or the fact we seem to have scored worst in the general response in the whole of Europe save perhaps Belarus. But…we’re doing well in the footie! Nice weather is here! Horray for us! Boris, our mate doing a moronic thumbs up at us on a big stonking flag, to ‘connect’ with us plebs! Quite coincidently, I wrote about how this government likes to create false, lying narratives literally a year ago to the day. Which slightly worryingly, was the last time they tried to pull this stunt and well… we know how it turned out last time.

Now, a lot from last year’s post applies again here, so I won’t do you a disservice by recycling content (simply giving you another link to read it yourself instead) so I will merely mention new stuff.

It’s quite clear; we’re in the ‘Third Wave’, but it is a rather strange wave. Deaths are still very low, and hospitalisations are thankfully still low when compared to the level of known infection out there. And the majority of this is down to the vaccine rollout; it’s stopping deaths and hospitalisations and blunting transmission and infection (for vaccines don’t make you immune). Most of the folks being infected now appear to be the young (under 30s and teenagers). Luckily, they’re the ones also less likely to die from the infection.

Plan A, Redux.

This means the emergency is over, in the government’s mind – this much I’m sure of. ‘An emergency’ in this case being ‘something which could cost us the next election’. ‘NHS obviously collapsing’ is clearly one of these, along with ‘the nations care homes turned into mortuaries’. Now these two scenarios have been removed, this means it’s ‘time to live with the virus’.

What’s more, the key Tory demographics – the old, the rich and the suburban – are not only the ones highest vaccinated, but also the ones most likely to be able to continue doing virus-limitation strategies, like homeworking if they so desire. This means that now coronavirus is merely a massive nuisance to them; they want to go on holidays, theatres and suchlike.

The groups poised to ‘take it on the chin’ are the ones who don’t vote Tory anyway, so their opinions are worthless. Let the nations twenty-somethings wheeze and stagger with ‘Long Covid’; I’m sure most are just faking it. Need to keep those kids in classes, ‘cos otherwise their parents might have to miss work to look after them. Speaking of which, our landlord mates are sad, so back to the office for you all cubicle-drones! All the previous support was so massively expensive, and now ‘there’s no money left’ when we all trudge back to the coal-face.

The Tories are back, in all their disgusting glory. Time to ride that wave, back to ‘normality’ where everything is exactly like it was in 2019 and we oiks forget any ‘silly ideas’ the pandemic gave us, like flexible work conditions, not being plagued with presenteeism and public services actually getting decent funding and respect.

Instead, we’ll get more lies, more Austerity, more flags and more culture war. And hoping the Tory voters are either too stupid, too blind or too selfish to notice/care for the damage being inflicted on those ‘other people’.

Yet… I’m not so sure that’s going to work.

As everything on this blog, merely my own thoughts and opinions. Part of my Covid Pandemic series.