The last few straws...

If you chain a baby elephant with a barbed wire snare to a deeply driven stake it quickly learns that to try and resist its restraints brings pain. Soon it submits meekly and somewhat fearfully to its incarceration. The elephant grows but the stake remains the same; its hide thickens but it remembers the pain and never again attempts to escape as the mahout cruelly forces the giant beast to do its bidding. By full growth the elephant is restrained by little more than a toothpick in relative terms, but still it does as bid. Until the day it is pushed too far and, enraged, forgets its chains and goes on a rampage.

The hold that western elites have on their beleaguered populations, forced from a position of relative affluence to a daily grind to just get by, is that toothpick. Where once a working man could support a small family on a single wage, it is now two wages plus tax credits to just stay afloat. Dreams of home ownership remain just dreams, social mobility belongs to the past and the sense of all being part of the same national endeavour has long ceased to register. Rampant consumerism, assisted by poor education and a lack of imagination drives the herd to be complicit in their own captivity.

Meanwhile the ruling elites are themselves in thrall to the cult of the advisor who will tell them, for a fee, magical stories about the economy, climate and ‘what the people want’. Perversely, one of the things that the little people seem to enjoy is to be taxed and berated into further submission: Pay more tax to fix the climate that you broke by demanding all the stuff you were driven to buy. Pay more tax to help the brown people that your forebears robbed to make you so rich. Pay more tax so that we can import ever more poor people here to do the jobs that our own poor people can’t afford to do. Stop complaining when all the new poor people lower your standard of living.

You’re a racist for not welcoming the people who priced you out of work. You’re a bigot for saying you identify as British and not European. You’re an islamophobe for noticing how your cities have changed and for not welcoming the ‘vibrancy’ of the mosques that now dominate your skyline, mysteriously granted planning permission against all the protestations. And you’re just plain ignorant when you question the wisdom of better people than you – it’s the economy, stupid, and furthermore you still owe us.

And to a point they’re right, the elites, as they watch from the lofty perches, high up on the moral high ground, the little people really aren’t very good at looking after themselves. But the elephant in the country is waking up and there is a sense that it may not be able to take much more. Bit by bit the electorate who have always been told they hold the reins of power through democracy are realising that the mahout has no more control of the forces they marshal than they do the weather. Across Europe those national elephants are toying with the idea of going rogue.

The slow death of Europe...

Do as you are told! Shout the mahouts. The whips crack and we shuffle a little and step back into line. But they only rule by consent and gradually that consensus is being eroded, straw by straw. You can always take a little more of the strain; now stand still, they say, while we load you up. Be patient, we’re all in this together... Now we just have this one more straw for you to bear...