The truth is in here...

As ever, Twitter has been alight with left and right arguing the toss over immigration. Depending on your perspective it is variously: a human right, an unmitigated disaster, essential for our survival, pivotal to our overthrow and all stations in between. Whatever the merits, or demerits of net immigration exceeding 300,000 per annum into the UK it surely cannot be denied that it is a strain on every aspect of our nationhood: housing, health education, transport and welfare are negatively impacted beyond our ability to deal with it rationally. And our identity as a nation is threatened as a result. It has been and will continue to be at the heart of our politics, when it really ought to be a near non-issue.

Despite the Blair government’s desire to ‘rub the right’s nose in diversity’ I don’t have enough faith in human cooperation to believe it is part of some sort of global conspiracy. I realise, however, that my often repeating that “I don’t believe in conspiracy theories, but...” makes me sound like I do believe... or worse, makes me a ‘conspiracy denier’, denier being the pejorative word of choice to silence common sense.

So what is going on in the civilised world? What about the Frankfurt school, Agenda 21, Common Purpose, Cultural Marxism and New World Government? What about Davos and the Bilderberg Group and the well-known inner circle of bankers who, ‘as everybody knows’, work with the Zionists to keep everybody poor? All these theories about shadowy movements, cliques and cabals have traction with malleable minds, especially those of the young and the disadvantaged and the mentally feeble, as the driving force behind every bad thing in the world.

But think about it for a moment. Oxfam’s annual wealth report is intended to feed the anger at apparent inequality when a simple examination of everybody you, personally, know should tell you that we are far from equal. The very diversity that so many worship as a new faith is directly contrary to the fanciful ideal of equality. It is not in the interests of anybody to keep those they control poor; poor people have a nasty historical habit of actually conspiring to bring down their governments. Where rulers have amassed great wealth at the expense of their citizens it has usually been through simple, crude greed and they have often met with sticky ends.

In sorting the truth from the chaff, I usually look to the mighty razor of Occam to solve the ‘mystery’ and I think the explanation is at once both simpler and more complex than the idea of an elite setting out to control the world. Oh, for sure, I have no doubt that such things have been discussed, but such plots soon unravel. For the current crop of theories to bear examination, literally thousands of world leaders, parliamentarians, influencers, advisors and financiers would have to be ‘in on it’. And I just don’t believe that people greedy enough to want it are capable of the levels of agreement and secrecy that would be required, especially given the huge timescales involved. This whole inequality ‘conspiracy’ goes back generations.

No, our willingness to see connivance everywhere is down to the fundamental flaw of democracy. In the absence of the mythical ‘benign dictator’ representative democracy is the least-worst system yet devised. Its most democratic aspect is the fact that it cannot please the majority who vote for it; to a greater or lesser degree almost all people are tasked by the societies it creates. Those least disadvantaged don’t see what the fuss is all about and the rest insist that this group pays a penalty for that lesser disadvantage by way of tax, thus increasing their level of discontent. It’s the closest thing to equality we are ever likely to get – equality of disenchantment.

We all want fairness, I believe that, but we don’t want to be responsible for it, so we elect governments to impose fairness on our behalf and hand to them the instruments of control. What do we expect? And as each successive generation wants ever more nuanced fairness we get ever more fractured thinking and legislation intended to make us be nicer turns us all into potential thought criminals. Locking down imagined ‘hate speech’ is quickly portrayed as police-statery. Those with wealth try to hang on to it, avoiding tax via the very loopholes designed to encourage wealth creation for the good of all. We end up with the inevitable ‘them and us’ scenario as the demands on welfare grow and those who fund it try to avoid doing so.

It’s not a conspiracy inflicted on the many by the few, but a series of uncoordinated strictures imposed by the disjointed, but well-meaning will of the majority on themselves. Mass self-harm, if you will. Yes, some groups practise deception and exclusion, as any ‘club’ will do, but not in concert with any planet-wide communion of evil. This, of course, is a disappointing conclusion and the more dramatic spectre of global domination by dark forces – as inhabits every branch of superstition and folklore and religion and cultish creed – is a far more attractive story to tell around the camp fire. You want a lightbulb moment? The illuminati are in your head*.

(*Or is that just what they want you to think?)