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?)
