The Press - Problem Rather Than Solution

Those who know their Heidegger will be aware of the concept of Gerede or 'idle chatter', the fallen and inauthentic mode of speech used in every day life. In fact we cannot do without it. It is essential to social cohesion which is an inauthentic necessity as far as the individual is concerned but has its own authenticity as one element amongst many in constructing a framework of relations within which individuality can express itself. To speak of 'Gerede' is not to take a moral or value standard against it but simply to note that it is fallen and inauthentic in respect to 'Dasein' - the human being whose mind cannot be known by other minds and who cannot know other minds and (to express the grim aspect of Heideggerian philosophy) must face their own death alone. This aloneness of death applies to the late Queen Elizabeth II as much as to the man who dies more obviously alone in a hospice in some small town without relatives or friends. Social Gerede includes our commentary on the deaths of others and their doings. 

What does all this have to do with the media? Only that our responses to events as social chatter have always had to deal with a 'higher level' of inauthenticity and fallen-ness which is the chittter-chatter of journalists and intellectuals as 'public discourse' where the cohesion being encouraged is not that of the ordinary human relations designed to help us get things done in the world and survive but the cohesion of a ruling caste that is simultaneously determined on its own hegemony and terrified of losing control of the chatter in case loss collapses that hegemony. The recent Coronation of King Charles II was an object lesson in these matters - private reactions bonding families and communities at the lowest level in a dialectic with a myth in which ancient mystery had been replaced with the magic of 'glamour' and a higher level traditional discourse that bonded society through the marriage of Church and State and the subordination of the political to the socially cohesive irrational.

The mediation between these worlds is (as the word implies) the media but how many of us were thoroughly irritated by the inane chatter from journalists that we heard before, during and after the Coronation - and that we hear before, during and after every major event, inbetween the music we hear on radio and programmed as nothing more than inane chatter on broadcast channels and in newspaper columns. This mental wall paper, democratised through social media (which mainstream journalists use but deeply resent as rival to their hegemonic control of information flows and opinion), is not only inane but serves a dysfunction in simultaneously communicating socially cohesive messaging from above while anarchically destabilising society in order to provide more fuel for the chatter. 

As fossil fuels are said to pollute and heat up our planet so the sheer scale of inane chatter pollutes and heats up our society - and yet, despite the fact that we are told we must restrict ourselves in the use of carbon, there is no attempt to restrain or manage this inane chatter which might be likened to a memetic Ponzi Scheme with the worst offenders now demanding social restrictions on potential worse offenders to come to protect their own collapsing monopoly on idiocy. The mainstream media, in short, and the politicians, in their attacks on the platforms are not interested in turning inane chatter into something educational, analytical, factual and thoughtful but only in preserving their own right to offer what they see as a vaguely more rational form of inanity rather than give that right of inanity to all of us.

Some months ago, journalists got terribly excited about some of their type being picked up by the police at a highly disruptive eco-demonstration. Journalists like to stoke outrage in their readers but are never so outraged as when one of their own gets into trouble. I am not interested here in the specific case. I don't know the facts of an essentially trivial incident any more than I care about George Galloway's or Matt Hancock's appearances on popular TV shows. The probability is that, under pressure, the police made a mistake which they then had to unwind, that the 'Press' were intrusive on an operation in which perhaps lives and certainly individual safety were at stake and that there was no intention whatsoever by the 'State' to limit the freedom of the Press on that day and in that place. 

More concerning should be that a pub which represented the livelihood of a family has had to close down because a couple of holier-than-thou corporations refused to supply them with key product thanks to publicity about a stupid police raid on their collection of golliwogs. The politicians caused the police to blunder, the media created hysteria and the 'corporate liberals' stepped in to destroy a small business. That is the 'regime' in a nutshell - confused authority, inept politicians, narcissistic journalists and complicit Uriah Heep-like capitalists creating a vortex of destruction for the 'little man'. 

We might also cite the idiocy around the Oath of Allegiance to the Coronation. It always was voluntary. It was a relatively minor addition to the Service put forward in good faith by Church and Crown almost certainly at the behest of the former (which has been busy turning the event into a soft power assertion of its own authority). An oath is serious to some (mostly to the military). Trivial to others (mostly the public). It was a nice idea for traditionalists without negative implications for sceptics. If you can't say it, don't take up your invitation to Westminster Abbey and stay silent at home. The media turned something voluntary, restricted in force to a few hundred people in an Abbey and private for most people into a divisive 'story', adding yet another brick of negativity into our dying culture.

In the eco-case, the poor Plods were trying to find a way to restore the freedom to travel safely of significant numbers of people while not endangering the life of any narcissist who decided to protest at their expense. The arrests of protesters before the Coronation are more troubling perhaps except that, on further thought, this tiny minority of activists were not actually putting forward arguments for republicanism and creating a political organisation capable of winning elections to impose it in accordance with the will of the people but simply ruining the day for a lot of other people and risking violence and disorder during a difficult high security operation. After all, there are some worse people even than activists and journalists out there.

 

Perhaps I am wrong. Perhaps the police are on the verge of imposing monarchical tyranny (rather than rank stupidity) and perhaps the Press are the only effective barrier between ourselves and authoritarian rule but I think not. England is England, marked out more by blunders than malice. The Press have no interest but advertising revenue, jobs for journalists, telling tales (rather than the mysterious 'truth') and allowing their posher end to rant at their owners' expense. The frustration for the public was that the eco-protests caused real distress and misery for many individuals and that they existed in good part because of a collusive relationship between protesters and the media, creating a vicious cycle in which more outrageous protests get more publicity which encourages more protests. Instead of a cycle of socially cohesive idle chatter with space for criticism, a transmission belt from below as well as from above in stabilising society and reforming it, we have cycles of inane chatter which destroy social cohesion and block off intelligent analytical criticism of society when and wherever it fails. There is a sound criticism of monarchy in the UK and there are dipshit protesters at the margins and the latter always destroy the ability of the former to be heard.

Here is another example. If you believed the media, the Passport Office is in total disarray and the civil service is falling apart. This is the accepted version doled out to people with no immediate connection to the service based on the complaints of the few in a genuinely complex system. Yet, in our household, two passport applications were handled effectively within three weeks and my request for some facts on pension arrangements was delivered in writing within the promised time-scale. Freedom increasingly seems to be defined by the 'right' of activists to engage in performative street 'art' at the expense of others and by the 'right' of the media to tell 'stories' where stories are as likely to mean 'lies' as the word is often used in popular parlance as not. The half-baked accounts of the Ukraine War are simply the relation of one-sided dossiers issued by psychological operations specialists. NGOs produce 'papers' designed to manipulate. Journalists lap up PR material. We live in a miasma of story-telling.

 

This 'freedom' to engage in a concatenation of half-truths helps to enable a presumed right to interfere in other peoples' lives, insult their values beyond fair reason (of which Pussy Riot behaving badly in an Russian Orthodox Church must be exemplar) and place people at risk. All on the dubious basis that (for example) direct extreme action (say) got the women the vote as opposed to reliance on civil disobedience, peaceful protest and political action ... you know, the hard way but the sure way. African-American strategies to win civil rights are models of their kind in which major social change took place because a mass of people (like women) needed it and not because a few crusties or obsessives wanted it. In fact, extreme direct action put back the suffragette movement whose final victory was inevitable on the strength of the social forces involved.

 

We have seen a similar destructive relationship between terrorism and the media. Terrorists can be assured of sometimes hysterical coverage creating fear and anxiety that then expresses itself in over-reaction by the authorities who then restrict the civil liberties of everyone except the media who are at the root of creating the initial crisis of anxiety in the first place. Unlike most people, I am not hysterical about terrorism. Exhausted doctors and truck drivers are more of a threat to me and my family than loons with a bomb. But the Islamist errorist wave of the 1990s and 2000s was never adequately analysed in the media as a) the fruit of inept foreign policy, b) a marginal threat to the vast majority of the population for the vast majority of the time, c) an opportunity to whip up hysteria by special interests to ensure budgetary allocations and d) a greater opportunity for ambitious technocrats to get their noses in the trough. The media never really exposed a) or made b) clear and were wholly complicit in the pursuing the ambitions of those concerned with c) and d).

 

It seems that terrorism was also a terribly convenient excuse for the authorities to impose excessive surveillance and social controls and to build huge industrial-security complexes creating jobs for the pals. The media have been as important in creating a less pleasant and authoritarian society as they have been in stoking up the war-mongering of the neo-cons and the absurd foreign policies of a bunch of NATO incompetents. Radically, I would go so far as to say that the role of the media is also to ensure that we forget the right of violent resistance where there is a radical imbalance of power and where power resides in an authority that is not accountable to its subjects. Let me explain the issue here which is that any regime must work or be subject to the Mandate of Heaven and fall. Western liberal democracy today and its accountability is a Potemkin Village, We have reached the tragic point where only the media may be gluing the paper together at the same time as it is playing with matches around it. 

 

The media have taken on the role of making power accountable on paper but they do nothing of the kind in actuality. Indeed, the media is part of Power. Its interest tends to be merely in maintaining politics as a soap opera and getting political scalps in an eternal game of political musical chairs. National liberation remains a worthy struggle as does the overthrow of tyrannies from within (without foreign interference) or foreign occupation but, honestly, Britain today is, if anything, at the other end of the tyrannical spectrum, not a tyranny but an unstable mess. What we need now is to face this fact and start to reform how we do things within our ancient traditions where they do not get in the way. It is the media that are getting in the way.

 

Britain is a failing State led by bunglers but with the opportunity for us all (even if inadequately taken) to overthrow the bunglers through effective political organisation and persuade the slightly less stupid bunglers through argument and peaceful protest. Of course, the fact that we invariably replace one set of bunglers with another is not the point ... being a democracy, we could theoretically remove all bunglers if we were not so lazy, distracted and poorly educated even if we did not do so. We willnot do so because we are lazy, distracted and poorly educated and that's just how it goes. But we could still have a more effective, more intelligent and more capable elite whose first allegiance was, at least in principle, to the People rather than to its own class or to the liberal internationalist and neoliberal ideologies that got us into the mess we are in in the first place.

 

A strong State serving a strong People would place social cohesion alongside justifiable analytical criticism (not emotional performance art) at a premium. The media has become complicit in our collective weakness and so complicit in the dodgy panicked attempts of the authorities to plug holes in the dam holding back anarchy instead of building new and stronger dams. Our freedoms are in danger because of the media more than we will accept. As we say, the issue must be whether our ruling caste has the Mandate of Heaven or not. If it does, it should be accepted, If it does not, it should be overthrown. We are at the point, thanks to weak politicians, narcissistic activists and the media, where what should be preserved is moving into territory where overthrow becomes not merely a possibility but may become a duty one day. We are not there yet but the almost inevitable failure of the next Government and world conditions may bring us close to the precipice ... pushed constantly in that direction by an irresponsible media!

Of course, this problem of the media as hysterical licence in the face of a weak State holding together a collapsing society is probably not fully resolvable in a free society and freedom must remain a core value in our society. But freedom always collapses when society collapses. Perhaps the chaos of social media will do the job for us. The benefits of a free and open media usually and generally outweigh the risks created by such a media and the benefits of freedom of speech, responsible protest and free political organisation are unarguable but we should be under no illusions about what is going on here. The mainstream media have become a socially corrosive and destructive element in society (far more than the claimed negative effects of social media) about which nothing can be done under the current regime just as, ultimately, a weak State can do little effective to deal with social corrosion - whether poverty, illegal migration, administrative incapacity, lack of resources, terrorism (when it is determined enough), organised crime or destructive protest. 

 

Why? Because certain liberal interest groups ensure that it will not even discuss appropriate and proportionate action in legislatures. (The appalling quality of our political class is another issue for another time). We are slipping into a vortex of social collapse as a result. The media represent an important trigger for that collapse because it self-censors any radical voice with the ability to deal with the issues head-on. New ideas are systematically silenced as inconvenient or uncomfortable. The media are no longer (to the extent that they ever did) acting as responsible reporters of fact and analysis but, instead, only as hungry creators of narratives designed to excite and trigger strong emotions in order to attract eyeballs. We are now all supposed to emote and judge complex political and international issues on the basis of individual 'stories' which appeal to our 'humanity' but apparently not to our reasoning capacity. As a result, we get fables, fairy stories at worst and the 'profession' (actually a 'trade') is filled with desperate narcissists looking at the main chance because their employment is precarious and their moral sense is constructed from the rules of their profession and nothing higher.

So, let journalists fight the struggles for other journalists' 'freedoms' but I suspect many of the rest of us may think there are other more important battles to fight. We might be inclined to fight their own solipsistic wars about Freedom of the Press more vigorously if only the media itself was a little morally correct and a lot more active in supporting the real heroes who are prepared to strip away the hypocrisies and lies of official systems (such as Assange) rather than dedicate their limited resources to promoting extreme actions by non-state small-scale actors and attractive figureheads like 'Greta'. 

 

The flow of journalists in and out of political offices also creates embedded conflicts of interest. There was the depressingly easy acceptance in the Thatcher era of 'honours' by Editors. There is the noticeable and shameful degree to which the BBC bends itself to the narrative of the political establishment. There is the flow of funds into 'campaigning' journalism that clearly meets the agenda of Western fixers in the international relations world. There is the back-scratching and back-biting involved in leaks and sources designed to break this or that political spine or promote the career of this or that rising manipulative psychopath. There is the aura of terror for individuals and corporations if some small blunder is exploded into a 'story' that wrecks careers out of all proportion to the 'crime' and disrupts any ability to solve a problem and move on. We often have visions here of the media with firebrands and pitchforks setting out to vanquish a monster as if we lived in a Universal horror movie.

 

And yet so much is swept under the carpet or not investigated because it is too complicated or inconvenient for the short term mentalities and butterfly minds of the media. There is the length of time it took to investigate child abuse in the care home sector, the lack of interest in the details of the crisis in the NHS rather than its results, the lack of interest in the weird and wonderful financial wheezes that pop out now and then to threaten the stability of the capitalist system on which we all currently depend to survive, the easy acceptance of any bit of propagandistic crud issued out of Kiev, the lack of investigation into the relationship between inflation and dumb foreign policy decisions and the utter disinterest in the structures and meaning of organised crime and its relationship to illegal migration until thousands start bobbing in little boats over the Channel in a perverse parody of Dunkirk.

 

As to the lost heroes, Julian Assange is now in danger of being sent to rot in an American jail after many years of vicious persecution yet he exposed serious wrong-doing in a way rarely done by a mainstream media protective of its symbiotic relationship with 'sources'. He is flawed but has not deserved this level of cruel and vengeful persecution. Instead of fighting for Assange (after all, he is not 'one of them'), the mainstream media ignore him as inconvenient. They prefer to worry not about getting more honest truths out of a dodgy system but 'maintaining their sources' and backing manipulative campaigners trying to provide us with yet more half truths to pile on the punter like Pelion on Ossa. It is a system of complicity in which a game of mutual manipulation has long since departed from both truth and social responsibility.

Journalism seems to have become a closed world of mutual back-scratchers, fundamentally irresponsible, as careful of its 'rights' as any factory shop steward but also incapable of understanding how its publicity can trigger dangerous extreme actions in the political process, encourage extreme illegalities and disruption and yet fail to support serious exposures of wrong-doing in the political and social structures into which it is embedded and on which it is as dependent as on a Class A drug. Contemporary journalism has long been part of the problem rather than part of the solution. Something must be done ...

The Allies Get Played - The 'Genius' of American Strategy

Centred on a highly spurious and somewhat paranoid concern with security, Washington is 'playing' its allies. Whether European or East Asian, they are now being drawn into co-dependence on Washington within an increasingly closed bloc instead of being free as independent nations to compete and trade as part of a one world system. That might be fine if each of these nations had a proportionate 'vote' in their own destiny within this bloc but they do not. American nuclear and economic superiority creates an intrinsic subordination to its strategy. As the US prepares to plunder the Ukraine through 'investment' in recompense for the expenditures on its regime, it arranges with local elites that allied populations be terrified with fears of a Russian bear which cannot do much more than hold the territory it has gained to date and the admittedly more formidable Chinese dragon. The eagle can sit back comfortably and watch the profits roll in from the coming age of increased and unnecessary arms sales and demand for its surplus LNG. No wonder the American financial markets are shrugging off inflation and interest rates.

A form of shock treatment (not the invasion but the sanctions) has detached Europe from its cheap and reliable supply of energy and commodities as well as access to a near if not particularly important export market and has made it dependent on more expensive US 'spot' energy. The next stage is to weaken European ability to export to China and Chinese ability to invest in Europe, impoverishing the latter more than the former. Russophobia must now be replaced with Sinophobia. In East Asia, where some concern about China is reasonable but still over-excitable, a slower moving cold war approach is designed to detach these vibrant economies from what will be the largest and nearest consumer and industrial market, certainly at its high tech end. Instead they are to bind their industries into an American-centred industrial strategy and weaken their access to cheap and probably reliable energy and commodities from the Russian Far East.

The con trick is working. Based on narratives of fear and loathing, both wings of the so-called West are now seeing their economies battered by inflation and high interest rates - most notably the basket case that is now the United Kingdom after the depradations of the Member for Kiev Central and the idiot economics of his successor. The prospect of fiscal destabilisation and deindustrialisation now emerges for some key countries as vast sums have to go on more expensive energy and food supplies and on military expenditures at the expense of social cohesion.

This new division of the world into blocs does not do China or Russia too much harm in practice. Both lose some market access only to create new synergies with each other. Both are now circumventing the West to go straight to the emerging world for influence, deals and natural resources. Russia merely pivots East to China as the latter's junior economic partner - a commodity supplier playing a role similar to Australia and Canada within the Western system. Indeed, we now hear that any Chinese restrictions on taking Russian crude oil died in February in frustration at the confrontational approach of Washington. Germany, on the other hand, is threatened with deindustrialisation under its inept left-liberal coalition yet Chinese industry gets cheaper inputs for its industry in a reversal of the traditional cost of energy relationship between it and Europe. Those caught up in 'Western' (aka Washington's) strategy are seeing declining (Russia) and rising (China) nuclear superpowers brought into closer alignment, able to dominate the land mass of Eurasia, This new and strenghened Eurasian bloc can also co-operate in developing a shared approach to the emerging world, notably in the Middle East and Africa, as the 'West' retreats behind its cultural 'limes'. Europe and 'Western' East Asia are now just continental North America's 'front lines' rather than nodal points in a flourishing global economy. The developed world has circled its waggons and abandoned the emerging world to its rivals.

This new Cold War 2.0 does not do the US much harm at all - only its allies. The US may be a political basket case with gun violence and dreadful mortality figures amongst its young males but it is still the most significant economic and military power on the globe. Its constitutional arrangements ensure that systemic internal chaos has no real effect on its structures of military and economic power. We are looking at Rome revisited. The US will probably stay quasi-hegemonic for some time to come because it is largely self-sufficient in a crisis (as is the Sino-Russian bloc). It may be challenging its rivals on at least equal terms but at greater cost to its allies, as it drives those allies to blow huge sums of cash on feeding the maw of its arms sector because of exaggerated security threats.  Those allies (notably those in Europe) are losing the chance to become an independent global player to match at least China and India - and it is quite probable that Washington likes things that way. The US has all the comforts of the old Cold War in the new one. It and the SCO carve up the world between them just like the good old days with the old Soviet bloc. Of course, the first Cold War resulted in the collapse of one side from internal strains - the second one may see a similar outcome in another seventy years. It may not be the Eurasian bloc that crumbles this time. It may be the European Union and UK that need liberating when it happens.

The cover for all this imperial posturing is, of course, a rather spurious 'defence of democracy' argument. Yet, to be frank, democracy has never been at threat within the West from any of its authoritarian rivals. It is threatened from within by the manipulative and authoritarian instincts of its own elites and the countervailing forces of an angry populism. If there is a threat to democracy it almost certainly comes from the greed, lack of strategic thinking and ineptitude of the political classes within the West. Ukraine and Taiwan are merely 'imperial border' issues which have no necessary implications for the security of either NATO or Japan or South Korea any more than Vietnam, Iraq or Afghanistan proved to have for the West. However, American strategy does have the unfortunate possible consequence of creating the conditions for security threats that did not exist before. Washington might eventually say 'I told you so' to its allies but only because it had prodded its rivals into action. It is now more likely than it was in February 2022 that China will assert its claimed sovereignty over Taiwan. It is more likely than it was in April 2022 that Russia will switch off the gas for Europe and plant tactical nuclear weaponry on the borders of an EU that remains fragmented and weak.

The major threat to Japan and South Korea has actually been North Korea. The new Cold War mentality has increased that threat because Beijing and Moscow have no incentive to collaborate with Washington on containing the country. The North Koreans have proportionately raised the local stakes in the last year. The Russian Pacific Fleet has lodged itself alongside the Kuriles while China mounts ever more provocative exercises around Taiwan. In other words, the break-down in relations between the West and the SCO has created the SCO as general threat out of a very particular and containable situation in Ukraine. Similarly, not only has Russia not had any material interest (quite the contrary) in challenging NATO until now (after all, the flow of energy to the EU and East-West trade argued to the contrary) but everyone's real interest should have been in the de-nuclearisation of Europe. This is what Russia always wanted. The skill for Europe would have been to ensure that price for denuclearisation West of the Urals would actually mean demilitarisation but the military-industrial complexes of the West and Mr. Stoltenberg cannot have that, can they?

It gets worse by the month - two Baltic nations have now been bamboozled into joining NATO quite unnecessarily (adding to their risks if there is a confrontation between blocs) while Europe in general is being bounced into an economic confrontation with China when it has no essential geo-political interest in getting involved in conflict with a superpower on the other side of the world just to buttress the defensive concerns of Washington. It all comes down to the fact that 'democratic' leaders in Europe and East Asia are almost certainly not strategically very bright. They are trapped in ideological formulations derived from experiences seventy years old (three decades in the case of Eastern Europe). They have been 'spun' into policies that work directly against their first duty which is to the lives and livelihoods of their own peoples. Europe and Pacific Rim East Asia have been played by Washington. Their peoples have been played by their elites.

 

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.