Alternatives to the Current Political Order Part 3 - Emergent Alliances Against The System?

There has been a long delay since the first two parts of this investigation because we wanted to assess changes in the overall political situation that might be relevant to the process. You may need reminding of what we are about. Our current situation was covered in a Blog Post in May. If anything, things have got worse. The Government is struggling to deal with problems of its own making. The economy faces, according to the Bank of England, three years of zero growth. Inflation is only slowly coming down and interest rates are rising. We are stuck in an unwinnable war that drains our Exchequer and undermines the global trading system. The Labour Opposition is flaccid and offers more of the same. The public is alienated from its political class. The methodology of our investigation was covered in a Blog Post in June.

Changes in the last three months were sufficient to delay analysis. We should note a number of factors that make a major change to our political system more likely after the failure of a Labour or Coalition Government (in other words somewhere around 2030) rather than as a result of the expected 2024 Election. This latter election is likely to be less interesting than the 2024 elections (Presidential in the US and European Parliamentary) elsewhere for one very simple reason - our national political culture still cannot get out of the mind-set of the solution to a bad Government being simply its replacement with an equally likely to fail Official Opposition. In order to effect serious change not only does the Tory Party be seen to have failed but Labour or whatever amalgam of established parties emerges out of the election must also be seen to fail. The key phrase is 'seen to fail' since, like a frog slowly boiling in water, the atomised British electorate has a tendency to fear radical change and to accept slow decline and moderate privation (or short term unstable asset growth and moderate taxation) rather than face the facts of national decline and weakening social cohesion. 

In other words, if failure is not dramatic, there is a risk that the Buggin's Turn of British politics will continue for generations while the nation sinks remorselessly into provincial status at a global level (which may be no bad thing) and infrastructural collapse, mounting social conflict and deteriorating morale (which are very bad things) without any decisive action being taken

So what has happened in recent months? First, the situation of the Government has seen no recovery, its leading figures are scuttling and looking for new opportunities and there is no enthusiasm for its probable successor. Second, electoral revolt has started on specific single issues - initially on ULEZ and implicitly Net Zero. Third, Farage is back in play leading a highly focused anti-woke campaign on de-banking that has thrust him back into prominence on the national political stage. Fourth, national populism in Europe is becoming more viable and more aggressive in its challenge to the dominant liberal system (although it has its own internal contradictions) while Trump seems to be strengthened rather than weakened by the legal warfare operations being undertaken against him. Finally, the Ukraine War, although low on electoral priorities, looks like another elite failure of policy to follow the failures in Afganistan and Iraq. 

In this context, the official Left has little to say that is not an opportunistic attempt to exploit the Centre-Right's troubles - the message is merely that Labour will be more effective than the Tories at managing a broken system (which is in itself barely credible) rather than being the agent of questioning whether anyone can be effective under a nineteenth century constitution underpinning a twentieth century state under conditions of twenty-first century complexity. In this context, only the populist Right appears to have something to say that might get public traction and it is poorly led in the absence of Farage.

The first of our five 'investigations' was, therefore, of "around nine broadly centre-right challengers to the Tory status quo" but including the Social Democrat Party which is arguably centre-left. The intention was to short list from the four or five categories under review (see relevant posting) and present them as a set of rational alternatives to the existing parties that dominate Parliament and which are clearly failing or may be expected to fail the British people. As we will see in a later blog posting, there is one potential serious alternative on the Left but the blunt truth is that, so long as the 'Corbynista Left' quixotically insists on blind loyalty to the Labour Party in the hope of take-over one sunny day, the energy for real change is mostly on the Right.

 

The SDP is definitely interesting. Reform UK, derived from Farage's earlier efforts but currently without his active involvement, has the more potential. The SDP could perhaps win a seat or two (it has a strong presence in Peterborough) but only Reform can strip votes from the Tories and from the Labour Red Wall to create a phalanx of MPs under FPTP that could be decisive in coalitional negotiations. Their commitment to proportional representation gives us the prospect of a pragmatic single issue alliance in Parliament with the Liberal Democrats that could transform British politics.

 

The fact that the SDP and Reform UK have announced an electoral alliance in advance of 2024 means that Reform UK are the best option for the material destruction of the Tory Party while the SDP permits 'revolutionaries' (in the context described in earlier postings, where there is no truly left-wing alternative, to support that destruction but from a moderate centre-left position and then hope to strengthen that position so that their guns can be turned on Labour and the Liberal Democrats at a much later stage.But this is a long game. The problem is that, without funds and reach (including dedicated activists), the danger is that sympathetic voters might simply remain at home or even vote for the least worst option in the establishment parties and implicitly endorse a broken system for another five depressing years.

In this context, there should be an honourable mention for Fox and Daubney's Reclaim Party which might be regarded as part of the emerging populist coalition and which has the virtue of having the right attitude to the hysteria surrounding Ukraine. Although an out-rider organisationally, it provides a convenient home for those concerned about freedom of speech and the widespread manufacture of consent. However, its recent by-election vote was derisory and its cultural politics only resonate with a small minority as a voting issue - many more may agree with it but not enough to push economic interests aside. It could perhaps deliver 2% of the vote to someone who could use it better.

 

We might also note as interesting the minor anti-globalist right wing green party The Populist Party (in case it develops legs in the discontented Tory heartlands) and the populist right wing Heritage Party (because it seems to have the only coherent set of policies related to the Ukraine crisis on the centre-right despite probably being a tad too right wing even for most thinking populists). These last two parties both have some organisational potential and the latter appears to offer a threat to Reform UK. The damaging effect of sectarianism on the Right matches its effects on the dissident Left.

 

From this perspective 'revolutionary bourgeois' Leftists who cannot relate to what we call the 'real' Left (to be covered in a later blog posting) should contemplate joining the small SDP to strengthen it for the future while 'revolutionary' Rightists, swallowing some doubts about the influence of the Johnsonite troglodytes, should be attracted pragmatically to Reform UK, backing it to replace the Tories on the back benches in order to effect some key reforms. Those more concerned with core individual freedoms and resistance in the culture wars might consider a third member of the emergent coalition - Reclaim - but the chances of this making an impact are slight now.

The reference to the Johnsonite Troglodytes is important because the radical dissidents on both Right and Left have the same problem - infiltration by the discontented elements in the main establishment parties in such a way that the revolutionary potential of 'real' Left and national populists is shattered by the presence of these essentially conservative forces. For the newly emergent working class parties on the Left (see later blog postings), the danger is of a rush of urban liberal-left excitable public sector graduate Corbynistas trying to create the eco-liberal party they wanted Labour to become and disenchanted with Starmer. 

 

For Reform UK (and so for the SDP) the risk is a rush of Tory pseudo-populists creating a new Party of war-mongering Atlanticists in return for a primitive small business low tax policy package based on an unworkable Trussanomics. The Tory pseudo-populists will be faced with a choice of capturing the Tory Party after defeat or taking over Reform UK. Such an outcome is likely not to be good for major national reconstruction - the parallel in Europe is the traditionalist conservatism of Meloni. For the discontented Left, the risk is of becoming Red-Greens on speed run by activists and graduates with no working class links.

 

But here we are only concerned with the centre-right populist challenge to the mainstream. In the next few weeks we will move on to look at the Far Right (where the probability but not certainty is of rejection as unviable for electorsal purposes), then to some centre 'process-driven' parties and thence to challengers to the Labour Party on the Left and to some single issue parties that we may perhaps add to the 'watch list'.But let us look at the centre-right contenders more closely. In the next couple of weeks, I will be looking at the Far Right before moving on to the Centre and Left.

The Social Democrat Party

The Social Democrat Party is not the same as the Social Democratic Party of the 1980s. This merged with the Liberal Democrats in 1988 but saw a surviving breakaway group implode in 1990 only to be re-formed under yet another breakaway group, emerging as a syncretic combination of centre-left economics and centre-right cultural policies. It is small but cogent in its policies which can be studied in summary in Wikipedia. 

 

It has undertaken an electoral pact with Reform UK in advance of the 2024 Election suggesting that it is positioning itself as the left-wing (socio-economically) of any revival of British populism. In policy terms it broadly meets the criteria laid out in our initial posting with one exception - a strong historic allegiance to NATO which fails to understand perhaps that the NATO of the era of Dennis Healey and David Owen is very much a different animal from the NATO of constant mission creep and complex global alliances that bring the UK back into responsibility for politics and war East of Suez. We consider this naive but not politically stupid since the majority of voters are equally naive. 

 

In all other respects, their policies are sensible. The entire package would not be a million miles away from the normal position of the moderate wing of the old Labour Party in the pre-Thatcher era. Although organisationally it seems quite competent, it is severely underfunded and relies on a dedicated team of outsiders so it really needs to show that it can exploit any populist resentment of the existing political class without being outplayed by the more ruthless Reform UK. Despite doubts about its foreign and defence policy (on the grounds of naivete in the modern world), the SDP gets shortlisted as a potential long term challenger to the dominance of the current bunch of clowns and comic singers. It is, however, a long play. 

 

The position on Ukraine (which we have made a marker during this process) is, in fact, considered and measured. It suggests the SDP have some understanding of NATO's mission creep but it clearly fails to understand the historical context for the invasion. Nevertheless, this position is vastly more intelligent (given the realities of British public ignorance) than that of the rest of the official political class.

 

Reform UK

 

The major contender for changing the structure of politics remains Reform UK, albeit that it is weak without Nigel Farage as Leader. It is successor party in turn to first UKIP and then the single issue The Brexit Party. Each iteration becomes more politically sophisticated and more capable of moving towards some sort of power although the latest version of British populism is largely dependent on the possible collapse of the Tory Party before 2024. 

 

This means that a broad-based single-issue Party (based on leaving the EU) has had to transform itself into a right-wing populist party with a broader base of policy aiming to capture the discontented working class who feel betrayed by both Labour and the Tory elite and the lower middle class Tory vote that simply feels betrayed. The class tensions are evident: they push Reform UK into a mix of right wing economics, aspirational libertarianism and cultural conservatism. 

 

The tension in this is expressed by the difference of position on the marker policy of Ukraine between current leader Richard Tice, who adopts a nationalist 'Western' line suitable for the Johnsonite trogs he needs to attract and Farage, the populist king-in-waiting, whose own public pronouncements show more sophistication and understanding of what is really going on. In other words, Reform UK (which is already capturing disillusioned Tories) is forced into becoming more Tory than it should be in order to get any chance of breaking through to Parliament in sufficient force to ensure proportional representation (which will break the monopoly of power of the three corrupted establishment parties) in, no doubt, cynical alliance with the liberal-Left. 

 

The electoral alliance with the SDP is thus rational because the SDP can theoretically hold more left-wing and state interventionist eurosceptic votes in trust and each can lend the other sufficient of its base to divide non-Leftist political dissent between them. The SDP is the weaker link and Reform UK better organised and financed but Reform UK has to be on the short list for all its faults as the home for more centre-right 'revolutionary' spirits. However, it is hard to see how the SDP could remain allied to Reform UK if the Ticean appeal to discontented Tories results in the adoption of absurd Trussonomics.

 

I would personally regret that Farage seems (understandably) not to wish to return to front-line politics (although his righteous rage at de-banking might indicate a potential change of heart). I find Tice's neo-Johnsonianism faintly ridiculous except as a strategy for smashing the Tory Party, Nevertheless, this is the operation most capable of breaking the spine of the current political structures and getting a debate on change which includes the prospect of a proportional representation decision capable of terminally weakening the three failed 'parties of State' and returning more power to the wider population. 

 

Wikipedia gives again a useful summary of the history and policies of Reform UK. Despite the Thatcherite economics (in contrast to the SDP), not only does it offer sensible policies in other areas but permits some important leeway for national interest economic interventionism as well as constitutional radicalism closer to the position of the Left.

 

Tice's and so the Party's current position on the current international crisis adopts the mythology of the West but remains critical of 'lack of preparedness'. It actually contains wiggle room for a more sophisticated position closer to that of Farage but its purpose is to reassure Johnsonite right-wing trogs in the Tory Party that their idiotic foreign policy will not be disrupted in the hands of Reform UK. This may be unfortunate but it is logical since Reform UK is much less interested in the Eastern bloodlands and pleasing Washington than in national regeneration, keeping out of the EU and democratic reform. It has a Trump aspect though that risks realigning the UK even more firmly with Washington under a populist Presidency.

 

Farage's more intelligent but dissident position on Ukraine can be studied online. Given public sentiment and the mass of propaganda pouring out of the establishment media where we see Tory elites, pro-Europeans and Atlanticists combining on a narrative that must not be questioned, Farage is almost certainly wise to remain in the background on this issue and await events.

 

The National Liberal Party

 

The third on our Stage 3 list is the National Liberal Party which is ideologically attractive as classic liberalism with a strong sense of the importance of national self-determination. It seems to be largely London-focused but organisationally very weak - a classic case of placing ideas ahead of political reality. Reluctantly in some ways, we cannot take it seriously because the likelihood of it making any significant impact even within London is small. 

 

The Alliance for Democracy and Freedom

 

The Alliance for Democracy and Freedom is one of a number of populist right wing parties that have appeared in the wake of Brexit. It appears to represent many of the concerns of the angry lower middle class - eusoscepticism, anti-lockdowns, farming and fisheries concerns. migration, anti-net zero and international aid, support for military veterans combined with a broadly welfarist agenda alongside libertarian economics. What is striking is how many small start-up parties have a leadership cadre made up of ethnic minority British nationalists (see NLP immediately above). 

 

The best way to regard the ADF is as a source of policy ideas (like the NLP , the ADF strikes me as an ideas rather than an organisational party) but largely for the more right wing populist side of the 'revolution'. This is not a serious contender for effecting major change. In addition it is in danger, like many new small right wing parties, of getting trapped in discontents that may be short term in nature when political change is best ensured by hooking activists and voters not into expressions of immediate anger or outrage but into a long term determination to change the conditions of existence, 

 

The Party is strangely silent on recent foreign policy events which may suggest a struggle to square right-wing impulses in the street with what had stood as opposition to any embroilment in European defence. It is probable that there is a serious split in the interpretation of the world between Johnsonites who are essentially Atlanticist Cold Warriors with some notion of 'the West' and Faragists who are essentially nationalist isolationists with a more restricted view of national defence as defence of the nation. 

 

We have seen above how Reform UK has to try and square these policy tensions in order to attract Johnsonites while keeping Faragists queiscent in order to gain power. Whatever the AFD believes, it looks as if another response to these tensions, in a country whose consent for NATO expansion has been thoroughly manufactured by state psychological operations and the media, is one of silence until it all blows over. That, of course, is not good enough when there is a direct correlation between the central problem of the cost of living crisis and an inept foreign policy. This cannot be taken seriously for organisational reasons but also because of this evident failure of nerve during the 'polycrisis'.

 

Reclaim Party

 

Reclaim is yet another small populist party which tends to give primacy to cultural politics, notably freedom of speech. It might be called more Faragist than Reform UK nowadays but it is clear that there are good relations between the two parties. It might be considered a vehicle for pulling together 'culture wars' activists for a voice in any emergent Reform UK-led populist success. It could be argued that it is part of an informal coalition that includes the centre-left SDP as well as Reform where differences of emphasis and economic policy are overridden by a broadly shared ideology of national self-determination and a cultural politics geared to 'British working and lower middle class norms'. 

 

It gets an honourable mention (see our introduction) and a place on the short list as a potential home for those concerned primarily with cultural restoration rather than economic policy and on the basis that it is part of the 'transvaluation of values' required to contain and dismantle our national security state and its strategies of manufactured consent.

 

Laurence Fox, founder and leader of Reclaim, easily passes the Ukraine test if only for causing total outrage at The Indie for having the most intelligent reaction yet to the deification of Zelensky. In this sense he is a foreign policy Faragist, will refuse to apologise (which in itself endears him to me in an age of liberal buttock-baring at the first sign of offence) and acts as a possible counter-balance to the growing troglodyte Tory element transferring to Reform UK. 

 

The Libertarian Party

 

The Libertarian Party is what is says on the tin and represents a right-wing non-populist middle class position of small government and low taxes. It has made little political progress and is not taken enormously seriously except as the representation of an intellectual position. If you are a libertarian of this type, you are probably a member of the Tory Right already. 

The Libertarian Party certainly does not pass the Ukraine test with its somewhat militarist concept of a citizen conscript army on the Swiss model - these policies too are indistinguishable from the far reaches of the establishment Tory Right. The reference to this policy has unfortunately disappeared from the internet so it may have changed since the late Spring.

The English Constitution Party

The English Constitution Party is a right wing English nationalist populist party but committed to democracy (it might pass for the Far Right 'Andrew Bridgen' wing of the Tory Party) It gives the initial impression of being primarily for rather cross pensioners and it is anti-vaxxer and anti-immigration. It is on the verge of being classed as Far Right (which we will deal with separately). There is as much of an argument for English nationalism as for Scottish nationalism so it should not be disregarded on those grounds but only as something that marginalises itself with its own policies.

 

Curiously, with its radical anti-globalist agenda which merges with that of some left-wing parties (to be studied later), the ECP actually passes the Ukraine test but swings too far in the direction of conspiracy theory, almost certainly because of its interpretation of NWO control over Ukraine and extreme view of the national self-determination rights of the Donbas, Crimea etcet. as Russians. Athough its position was originally published in 2014, it was re-published to make a point in January before the invasion so we do not know exactly what the position is on the invasion itself.

 

The Populist Party

 

The Populist Party is a new lower middle class anti-globalist right wing Green Party which has a strong localist and ecolgical approach to politics but interprets this through espousing some right wing policies including immigration control and protection of the green belt. It is hard to judge what appeal, if any, this Party may come to have so we are putting it on a 'watch list'. Logically it is a threat to rural Tory votes and, if it grew, one might expect the informal Reform UK coalition to adopt its policies or find some other way to appropriate it. We can find no reference to Ukraine on its web site but its stance of armed neutrality suggests a critical attitude towards NATO. 

 

The Heritage Party

 

Finally we must note another London-based right wing populist party led by a partially ethnic minority British politician, The Heritage Party, which emerged out of the Brexit Party. Accusations of racism directed at the bulk of the populist wing of the Right look increasingly absurd in relation to the facts of their activist memberships. Their candidate actually beat Reform UK in the Hartlepool By-Election so they should not be dismissed outright but the anti-vaxxer position ensures that they will be classed as Far Right by the media regardless of any other policy positions.

They undoubtedly pass the Ukraine test with a very clear set of policies that actually link sanctions and the cost of living issue and propose a reasonably long term policy strategywith a strong No Net Zero focus.

 

A WARNING TO THE INTREPID! - The Chilling Effect of Corporate Social Media Censorship and the Matriarchal State

Recently I found myself apparently guilty of 'hate speech' in one of my own administered Facebook Groups (as if its members were not all known to me and sophisticated adults). It was, of course, nothing of the kind (see below). I have had similar experiences with the comments allowed (or rather not allowed) on The Guardian and Financial Times. Others have had similar experiences here on Blogger. In my most recent case, this was expressed as a threat to the very existence of the Group. Nothing happened of course, the 'offending' item simply disappeared, murdered by either an algorithm or some young under-paid dim-wit in some back office but the threat got me thinking about the 'chilling effect' on freedom of speech from such implied threats. 

 

Perhaps the 'West' may not be a patriarchal authoritarian 'tyranny' like China or Russia (at least as they are seen in our popular mythology) but is instead becoming a manipulative matriarchal variant. Perhaps it is deviously in the process of becoming more totalitarian by stealth than its 'evil' (apparently) rivals. Instead of having clear rules with clear punishments (which I can deal with) we have the mauvaise foi of desperate attempts to tell us we are all free (which is only a half truth at the best of times) and then exert social control through hints and passive aggression, weak threats and subtle pressures to effect behaviour change. In psychological terms we have the worst of the traditionalist masculine in one bloc replaced by the worst of the traditionalist feminine in the the other. 

 

Our authorities seem to be too weak to control us directly. They do it through pressure exerted through corporate mummies and institutional set-ups. Daddy is a coward so Mummy has to be brought in to exert discipline over the kids (that's us, folks!). Like good little children in a conservative household, we are shamed into compliance or made guilty after the fact or (if we are to have any fun or freedom or learning experience) we have to become devious law and rule breakers hoping to get away with a bit of naughtiness and not get caught. It is not only our behaviour and language that is controlled in this way within a rather weird liberal/progressive pseudo-theocracy but increasingly our thoughts (something the 'tyrannies' actually do not tend to tamper with). 

 

We have to be right thinkers in order to ensure right speech and right behaviour because Daddy (the State) is too weak and cowardly to wield the whip and impose good behaviour let alone good speech on us. In the eyes of our political culture we are not adults but children who have to be frightened, cajoled, rewarded and lied to in order to ensure that we do not go wild and ask all the questions that developing children should be asking about authority and our environment. Our punishments are generally light - exile, isolation, exclusion - rather than the Gulag. Everybody just takes it on the chin not realising that they are frogs slowly being boiled on the hob. The Western State is the ultimate bad parent no less than the Eastern tyranny - in our case, the absent father who relies on the corporate mother to bring up the children.

 

In fact, there was probably no immediate danger to the Facebook Group in question although I am sure there are people (including the usual suspects in the psy-ops fraternity) who would love to close the Group down. What was happening was a 'warning' designed to weaken the force of inconvenient debate and to confirm that our freedom existed on sufferance and not by right. The Group in question consistently challenges the given narratives about events in the bloodlands to the East whose mismanagement threatens us all with nuclear immolation. In fact, much of that debate has, in any case, shifted to Telegram which, of course, Keir Starmer wants to close down as a 'progressive' (God help us!). Perhaps he thinks Number Ten is a walk in if only he can appear more conservative and authoritarian than the failed and confused Conservatives. Depressingly, he may be right. Most voters seem terrified of real freedom.

 

Perhaps I should suggest caution in particular uses of emotional but still non-harmful language and let the algorithms train us like a dog owner trains its hound but I am disinclined to give way.  If my Group members are courageous enough to defy the imposed narratives about (say) the 'War' as other Groups' members in my territory are courageous enough to defy given narratives about politicised science and art, diversity and even equality or gender and identity, because they think for themselves in reasoned and intelligent ways, then I am 'd----d' if I am going to act like Mummy's proxy. I would rather kill off the Groups entirely when that day comes, stick to Telegram until they destroy that too, cultivate my garden and wait for the whole system to implode as all sclerotic cultures eventually do. I am old enough not to care over much if Western civilisation collapses under the weight of its own malice and ineptitude.

 

As I say, there was no hate in the relevant comment. It simply made the point that I opposed conscription by any Government under all but the most extreme circumstances and possibly not then. I made it clear that I would be personally protective of anyone evading conscription if at all possible no matter which country they came from. Facebook may simply have taken exception to a standard and rather mild British expletive (never forget that Facebook comes out of an American psychological and cultural bubble) which was directed at State entities and certainly not at individuals or identity groups. It was a mild expletive found elsewhere on Facebook without effect so perhaps suspicions should be roused about another agenda. To be fair, the algorithms do not seem to be very bright (although in saying that perhaps that I am demonstrating hate speech towards algorithms!). AI is unlikely to improve things since the people who are programming AI are the people trying to control our mental mapping.

 

Be aware that all the big social media sites except perhaps Truth Social and Twitter (and this last is looking uncertain after the latest CEO appointment) are running scared at the moment as the European Union and the British Government are intending or undertaking major legislative campaigns to 'control' what information we can have access to. This is not such a problem in the US with its First Amendment although those freedoms are also under constant lawfare pressure from 'liberals' and the Federal State. There is a tinge of Emergency Powers legislation lurking in the anterooms of some of these campaigns since we seem to be positioned in a 'phoney war' situation that could turn into a shooting war at any instance without any of us having much of a say in the matter any more than we did in 1914 or 1939. 

 

Elites know that there is substantial doubt about where we are heading and a lot of resistance to the narrative that they wish to promote. The mainstream media, of course, are broadly on side with that narrative as they were on, say, Vietnam for the bulk of that war. This time around, social media provides an alternative narrative that almost certainly reflects social reality - society in general is quite simply more indifferent to claims about Ukraine and Russia than people like Ben Wallace and Tom Tugendhat would like. There are larger oppositional minorities at this stage in the context between our empires than at the equivalent stage of (say) the Vietnam imbroglio.

 

The evident fear in the system is that populations could switch from a large majority for the elite narrative to a large majority against it (which is exactly what happened in the Vietnam War in the US) and so destabilise a system that was put in position in stages over some seventy years to benefit large-scale capital and a self-reinforcing political caste and which is now failing abysmally in terms of both cultural governance and economic stability. Controlling social media and encrypted communications like Whats App, Telegram and Signal are becoming of vital importance to established political elites as Starmer's outburst in the Commons has indicated.

 

That switch in sentiment in the Vietnam War, in a country where free speech is guaranteed by the First Amendment, took place in barely nine months and changed history without benefit of social media so we can see why they are rattled in the White House, Brussels and Whitehall. The existing system in the UK and Europe has a great deal at stake in using any weapon at its disposal to ensure that it does not lose control of power or policy, citing in an exaggerated way both disinformation and particular and real but still often marginal forms of abuse as excuses for increased social control of the free social media. 

 

Instead of Daddy moving on on the abuses directly (after all, it is a bit rich for the British State to claim moral guardianship after its sustained failure to deal with care home child abuse or widespread fraud), the legal framework is created to frighten Mummy into doing the job for it. Major platforms have to be complicit in this because they are businesses and not public services. The legislative and regulatory power of existing elites is sufficient to seriously affect their profitability and a recession may well be on the way. They have no option in the game of survival.

 

Certainly, as Mick Lynch pointed out today, the working population and even the lower middle classes are getting much poorer even as the asset rich get richer and while large corporations make ever-increasing profits on high inflation and war booty. Algorithms too are just defensive blunt instruments that can be designed to be 'conservative' (in fact, 'conservatism' is the cultural liberal agenda and the 'progressive' business-friendly politics that got us into the mess we are in in the first place) and defensive of corporate interests.

 

In short, you cannot take your freedom of expression for granted nor your ownership of your invested information on social platforms nor that arbitrary power will not be exercised to exclude you from a platform if you cannot behave along prescribed lines. If I get censored again (I do not intend to be deliberately provocative but I will never hide my honest opinon reasonably expressed), then you know it is political.

Evading the Causes of the Current Cost of Living Crisis

We need a more open debate about the causes of the current cost of living crisis. The elites would like us to blame a pathogen and an alleged autocrat but this is far too simple. It is certainly not caused solely by Vladimir Putin’s alleged weaponisation of Russia’s immense gas supplies. In fact, despite the furore over the Nordstream explosions and the closure of the Baltic pipelines, Europe continues to be supplied with gas at rates not dissimilar to those that applied before the war. Supply chain issues related to COVID recovery and many other fundamentals have certainly contributed to price rises not forgetting the pressure on commodity prices from the disruptions involved in the Green Agenda and problems with food supply accentuated by climate issues. But the disruption to trade caused both by the economic sanctions on Russia and threats of sanctions on China are a significant contributing factor and these policies are those of our leaders.

The invasion itself need never have been much of a factor in itself - it is just that Western leaders (without much consultation with their own peoples) decided that the costs of economic warfare against Russia were a 'price worth paying' and then got suprised by just how open-ended that price would turn out to be. It is not only the effects on trade and inflation but also the ridiculously high commitments of capital being made to prosecute an unwinnable war (shades here of Afghanistan) and eventually to the reconstruction of a nation that has been encouraged to fight that unwinnable war. The Ukraine War had emerged from a failure of diplomatic dialogue between the West and Russia over the previous two decades and the fault for that lies as much in London and Washington as in Moscow. The UK must take part (though certainly not all) of the blame for that and so for the immensely damaging rise in the British cost of living which is to a considerable extent attributable to the disruption caused by its foreign policy priorities and its extremely poor understanding of the consequences of its actions. 

Over a year on from the invasion, we have to draw some distinction between the energy component of inflation and 'core' inflation - the underlying inflation in food and services that has triggered high interest rates. Energy inflation if it does not go on for too long is something one works through. European governments could deal with it by adding to their fiscal burden with what amounted to massive dole outs - another price that might not be worth paying as national debt levels, already burdened by COVID social cohesion doles and green agenda doles (soon to be added to with increases in defence budget expectations) reach levels that require austerity and high taxes under conditions of low growth, that is, if the Western system is not to crumble under the weight of its own debt mountain. But energy inflation has triggered core inflation so that as energy prices fall, the lag in wage and commodity inflation continues to drive prices and forces up interest rates.

Nevertheless, funds to deal with energy inflation could be regarded (like the Green Agenda), at least in part, as a debatably necessary adjustment and an 'investment' in future energy security. After another year of recessionary misery (or soft landing from an optimistic point ov view) everything will be fine and recovery from 2024 and after will allow the debts to be paid off and prosperity to return. Except that the game is not over. The Europeans (which includes us) have just shifted their energy dependence from being one on Moscow to one based on the US and Gulf dominated spot markets. Renewables are not managing to fill the gap left by the decline in hudro and nuclear energy. Europe is still vulnerable not only to increases in the spot price of LNG and OPEC+s determination to maintain fairly high oil prices in at least the $80-$90 band (Brent Crude) but to the Russians deciding to turn off the spigot for gas or oil directed at Europe because they have (eventually) an adequate market in East Asia and have just had enough of European insults and support for Ukraine. The Chinese are busy committing to long term Gulf contractual terms while dilatory Europeans sit and hope for pries to come down regardless.

In other words, the 'headline' inflation problem has not gone away - it has just been pushed forward to next winter if the Europeans in particular do not manage to sign their own long term contracts for energy, Chinese recovery sucks in energy from elsewhere, there is a cold winter, the spot markets rise and the alternative energy structures that are supposed to displace Eurasian energy are not in place. If conditions deteriorate between Russia and the West to the extent that Eurasian gas is no longer available in Europe at all and the grey market in Russian crude going to refined products that serve Europe dies off in favour of East Asian needs, then European governments may face a fiscally destructive demand for yet more social cohesion payments to protect the most vulnerable households and businesses and this will be ... inflationary. 

So, we are in a position where markets are convinced that recessionary tendencies must mean that interest rates have peaked and are buoyant but a) the continuing rise in 'core' inflation means that, even if interest rates peak, central banks may be obliged to hold them at near peak levels for a considerable period of time while the mounting costs of all this to governments, households and businesses starts to unwind the viability of at least some of all three in a slow-burning creative destruction that weakens confidence and contains multiple political risks while b) the current relatively beneficial state of the energy market could simply be the eye of the hurricane, vulnerable at any time to a whole number of political grey swans and risking, if things go down hill, significant fiscal interventions for which there may no longer be united national political consent (or the cash) as the costs mount.

Looking at the world before February 2002 and after that date, we can see only one major trigger for a polycrisis that was probably waiting to happen on many other fundamentals - an ill-thought-out sanctions approach that was supposed to bring Russia 'to its senses' or even trigger regime change and Russia's economic collapse. It has clearly not done so nor is Russia isolated. At best, sanctions may achieve their ends only at immense cost to the poor and vulnerable at home and overseas, to working households and to those small businesses who may not survive beyond the doles they have been given to survive the next round of energy price hikes. A lot of the damage caused by COVID and sanctions is silent. About a year into COVID, I produced a list of local Kent and Sussex small breweries and put it to one side. This week I went back to it to see what had happened to them. Roughly a quarter seem to have crashed and burned as independent businesses. Walking around our mid-sized Kentish town, we see the gaps where shops used to be.

Inflation driven by huge fiscal inputs to deal with both crises and ideological convictions (such as Net Zero and the insanity of increased weapons expenditure) and by incompetently drawn up economic warfare policies, added to COVID-related supply chain problems, have meant interest rate rises. Short term subsidies to the population have meant high borrowings. High borrowing has meant weakened currencies against the dollar. Weakened currencies mean imported inflation which means yet more interest rate rises. Interest rate rises eventually mean recession. Recession means job losses and business failures. High borrowing eventually means high taxation yet recession means lower tax take. Increased taxation to deal with this and high interest rates mean a drag on growth. And so it goes ... a spiral of failure. All this is, at root, not down to Putin but to our collective paranoid and hysterical reaction to Putin led by a bunch of loopy ideological Tories and their fellow travellers in the Labour Party.

These have been many serious failures of policy derived from poor analysis and intelligence. We know this now whereas a year ago we only surmised that this might be so. Exactly how bad Western analytical intelligence has been perhaps only became clear with the release of the latest batch of Pentagon Papers. It is said that the professional foreign policy and intelligence community in Washington are distraught at the poor quality of their own political masters who are driven by simplistic ideological seat of the pants policy-making. Western democracies are, in any case, no longer fitted for the sort of long-range planning that seems to be the norm in Moscow and Beijing. A 'price worth paying', seen originally perhaps in terms of eighteenth century type war subsidies (wasteful but not critical to our own economy), has been transformed into a massive price for war and the reconstructive integration into the European and Western system of a basket case of a state riddled with corruption .

This is a price certainly not worth paying, incurred at the expense of national populations, long term economic prospects and future generations yet a reversal of policy is no longer acceptable to elites not for simple ostensible moral reasons but because back-tracking will shatter confidence in them. Like Macbeth, they are so steeped in metaphorical blood they may as well go forward as back but their doubling down constantly increases the risks that a serious situation could become a critical one. The financial technocrats remain extremely worried about more bank failures and so should we be, The system is under enormous strain and yet there is no way forward for Western leaders to do anything more than carry on being as stupid as they were in the far less critical situations of Iraq and Afghanistan. As in those two cases, the end game is now predictable - defeat or a victory earned at such cost as to be Pyrrhic.

Here, in the UK, the Government, the media and the political class are all in denial about these truths because are fully complicit in February's blunders and the even worse blunder of not using British influence to encourage peace talks back in April. We all know Boris was a chancer but his gambling sucked in everyone around him. Now our political addicts think that just one more throw of the dice (presumably this time it is the touted Ukrainian counter-offensive) will win back the shirt they are losing off their back. They now have no way out of the hole they have dug except to dig ever deeper and then cross their fingers, hoping that if they do so vigorously enough they will come out in Australia and all will be well. It is now no longer theoretically possible that Russia, clearly backed by a China throughly alienated by the incompetents in the State Department and in Brussels and Berlin, will collapse, be forced to withdraw from Ukraine or the Putin regime be replaced. Even if these events happened, none of them are likely to take place within the time frame required to avert serious damage to the Anglo-European economy and social cohesion. The cheap and hitherto reliable Eurasian energy resources in question are Russian and not ours so we cannot seize them any more than we can seize its massive mineral resources (much of it vital for Western industrial development) and grain output. They, not us, decide what is to be done with these assets of global importance.

It will take years for Europe to put in the infrastructure necessary to restore permanently lowered energy and commodity price structures in a global context. Europe will be competing with Asia for both sets of input and its competitive advantage in having cheap Eurasian energy to hand is now lost, almost certainly forever. Germany, apart clearly from the unstable coalition that rules it, has begun to fear de-industrialisation and has just, with immense stupidity, managed to undo all Macron's good work in China ten days or so ago. The German Foreign Minister alienated China under the massive illusion that its opinion on the Ukraine matter actually matters to Beijing. Macron to a great extent and Orban to a complete extent 'get' what is at stake for Europe and 'get' that it (and we in Britain) have been played by Washington. The embarrassment of watching Sunak kow-tow like all his predecessors to a President who touts a united Ireland tells us all we need to know about national decline. A nation has liberated itself from Brussels only to be a vassal to Washington.

The confrontation between Putin and Western liberal elites is likely to last years as Russia pivots to Asia while a Trump victory and growing European resentments and fragmentation could leave us Britons high and dry in any case. We could take the economic hit now only to see the rug pulled out from under us later. Whatever short term wheezes are being promoted by this Government to take the heat off itself and secure its position for an election, the huge damage to our economy of yet further tranches of borrowing (following the COVID experience) and to social cohesion from the inevitable austerity and increased taxation in the long term are certainly not 'prices worth paying' for the bulk of the population. It is as if (surely not) Government continues to undertake every wheeze to protect the asset rich middle classes in the rather stupid belief that they are the majority of voters and the rest of the electorate has no choice other than to vote for a variant of the liberal establishment that protects that class. This is true in a world made up of Red, Green, Orange and Blue 'Tories' but all four are skating on thin ice. That world may collapse under sufficient economic pressure.

These are all self-inflicted wounds on the British nation not so much by the Government alone but by an entire political class that continues its arrogant neglect of its own population in order to meet the needs of moral philosophy (as interpreted by Oxbridge, the media and the liberal intellectual class) and its own self-serving class interests. The media is wholly complicit. The butterfly minds of the elite have left an apparently powerless population to do what it can to get by - the Government has simply stopped inflation becoming intolerable for the middling sort but pushed those costs forward in time. Huge numbers of the Crown's loyal subjects will face a serious loss of living standards regardless. Perhaps the assumption of the liberal establishment that they are too stupid to see this and who is responsible will be its eventual downfall.

For a brief moment (maybe this coronation) we will now get to see what our nation can be at its most romantic but we note that the strong national engagement in respect for the late Queen Elizabeth has already diminished for her successor in opinion polls. We are seeing how national decision-makers are divorced from the condition of the people as much now as in the age of Victoria. The open debate we need may never happen - evasion of the conditions under which power is exercised may be what holds this nation together as it sinks slowly but steadily into penury. But never mind ... perhaps the upper middle classes think they can survive and since this is their Kingdom more than ours, then we must judge that all is good in the world. Why question such good order, they may ask. Why not, we should reply.

America - Learning Nothing and Forgetting Nothing

What is that cliche about the Bourbon restoration - learned nothing and forgotten nothing?  This certainly applies to American policy wonks who were trying to work out what was to be done after the Afghan fiasco. The result would appear to have been another fiasco in the making over in the Eastern bloodlands of Europe. The insistent political ambition of the American elite to engage in ideological intervention overseas at the expense of their own taxpayers remains dominant regardless of past errors (an ideological mind-set shared by many in our own British political elite and now infecting Europe at its highest levels). And yet dreadful domestic problems continue to rot the US just as the social democratic consensus in Europe collapses under the pressure of liberal economics. Poverty, lack of healthcare, poor education and collapsing infrastructure, guns out of control (which makes the FT's insistence that Russia is lawless look stupid to say the least). American foreign policy incompetence adds to domestic disenchantment and foreign doubt. It feeds populism by the back door.

Exactly what is America's game here? The cynical view is that its upper middle class political leaderships have abandoned their own people because growing empires require constant expansion and increasing asset values for its upper middle class clientele is all that matters in American politics. The fraying theory, of course, remains that the rich 'trickle down' wealth to the poor. The 'trickle down' of the alleged benefits at home was supposed to be sufficient to retain power in democracies fixed by party machines and big money. This, of course, looks a highly problematic strategy at the moment. Russia, far from isolated, has turned to a receptive China that has a ready ear for its own anti-imperialist narrative across Africa and Latin America. Multipolarity is becoming a fact this year rather than just the propaganda fantasy of the Kremlin. Constant market and asset expansion was to be enabled by building up equally neglectful and narcissistic upper middle class elites elsewhere in the world yet these elites have developed the same resistance to being patronised by the West as the working classes within the West. Markets are shrinking and not expanding. Perhaps those 'fixes' can continue for quite some time - but what happens when the money runs out?

 

With recession on the way we can already see a class war looming where the asset holders will want the system they think they own to ease up on interest rates and allow more inflation. Yet the intelligent part of the elite understands that their rule may collapse on sustained high inflation because it hurts the asset-poor (the majority of voters) far more than high interest rates hurt the asset-rich. The asset rich are relying on the asset poor to remain 'stupid' and disorganised which is why they so deeply resent the arrival of politicians like Trump who organise far from stupid people using only apparently stupid political tropes. A less economically cynical view, however, is that middle class politicians in the West simply have nothing to say to their own masses any more. Their culture is simply different. They only want to talk to people like them who they can nurture in foreign climes ... they had hoped that a nice liberal middle class would emerge in Moscow, Beijing, Tehran and Kabul, one that would construct the institutional forms that would require no concern for the 'damned of the earth' except as beneficiaries of aid, 'trickle down' and 'culture' from on high while the ownership of the assets around them remained theirs. When a Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (now removed) can effectively abandon his own constituency and become de facto Member for Kiev Central in Parliament, then you know this propensity for class internationalism has reached its most decadent phase.

As to the official American strategy in relation to Ukraine, it is simply a sign of weakness ... pouring funds into the Ukrainian money pit, evading the use of hard power, promoting an economic war that is undermining the West itself and dying to the last Ukrainian with weaponry whose use only enriches the major arms manufacturers. Apparently there are 40,000 committed Ukrainians in eight brigades (or whatever) armed to the teeth by the West just waiting to enter the meat grinder without perhaps realising that any victory will be Pyrrhic - their land and assets are already assigned to Western private capital as the only means of getting the finance for reconstruction. Blood and soil is not going to mean much when the blood of the most fit leaches out onto the soil and that soil belongs to some corporation listed on the NYSE or operating from a headquarters in Berlin or Tokyo.

But do Japan and South Korea (or Taipei) really believe that the US will do anything much more than they have done for Ukraine (prolong a devastating war at the expense of a people and a land) if China moves against Taiwan? I doubt it - it will be moral posturing once again, psy-ops directed at the homeland suckers and rhetorical gestures. Even the moralising American middle class know that they will be the losers if a strategy that largely hurts the poor, the young and the developing world ever became a real war. Those assets will eventually become cinders. Fortunately, the Chinese almost certainly have no intention of going into Taiwan with military force in the short to medium term - they are hoping the opposition Kuomintang will do that job for them. We should perhaps hope that they are right.

As for legislatures of 'hawks' getting involved in international relations, little makes me more scared - whether Congress, the Duma (which has to be restrained by the Kremlin as much as used), the UK Parliament or the greatest ineffectual moral posturing organisation in the world, the European Parliament. Congress is scariest of them all because Congress is at the heart of the most terrifying war machine the planet has ever seen and the most excitably irrational. The Taiwanese situation had been significantly worsened by Pelosi's blundering into it. Just as bad, here in the UK, Parliamentary hawks in the Tory Party, copied slavishly by one of the intellectually weakest Labour leaders in its history, have set the agenda for the nation. Their policies have resulted in 10% plus inflation, actual shortages and rising interest rates. It is not much better in Russia where nationalist expectations almost certainly limit the ability of the Kremlin to cut any reasonable deal with the comedian who runs Ukraine. Zelensky, in turn, is trapped by the nationalists on his own side and his need to keep on trucking to ensure he gets what he really needs - huge tranches of post-war reconstruction aid and support to rebuild his military as cat's paw for NATO in the East. Really, we 'ordinary folk' in all countries need to start standing up to the political class before they destroy us all. We need alternatives and we need them fast.