Is the new world brave enough?

It’s a strange old world, isn’t it? Man is undoubtedly a pack animal and as such we are always happy to have a set of rules to follow. Rules mean we don’t have to think for ourselves and generally speaking, the majority of humans who have ever lived have done so without needing to synthesize an original thought. The sun comes up; it goes down. It gets warm in summer and cold in winter and the crops respond; learn to make hay while the sun shines and you have the basis of survival despite the tyranny of nature.

Once you get rules you get religion, with a bunch of men dressing funny, saying that god told them to and by the way, here are some more rules. And he said he wanted Keith here to be in charge. Now, call me cynical, but how come nobody called Keith out on his literally ridiculous new dress, his insistence that god wanted us to multiply and go forth and - much as he’d love to help with the graft - toil harder in the fields so Keith didn’t have to? Religion has tyrannised mankind for millennia and devised ever more structures, strictures and controls in the process; the divine right of kings, good ones or bad, is sanctioned by such irrational beliefs.

And we’ve lapped it up. It seems we are never so happy as when we are under some kind of tyrannical regime, doing as we are told – and here’s the best bit – actually punishing each other for falling out of line. The age of religion may be waning, at least in the civilised world, but the need to be bullied into conformity – even the kind of youthful conformity that tries to look different by all dressing and thinking the same – endures, deep in our instincts. Here, in the age of global politics, with the promise of a level of scrutiny over the internet which challenges even the omnipotence of former gods, we still seek the tyranny of thought.

However, when we try to exercise our rights to abide by the common consensus it seems that might is no longer right. The high priests of the new religions, born of post-religious political thought, will not relinquish their hold on us without a fight. And in the new language, straight from the literal word of Marx (peas be upon him) what was once worshipped as democracy becomes, in the words of John Major, the tyranny of the masses. The epithet, 'post-truth', is apt. Up is down, left is right and right is wrong... if those in charge say so.

Castro. G... T... ex.

It is fitting then, that yesterday, post-truth met its apotheosis  - its elevation to divine status – as the world acknowledged the death of a man who has been a tyrant to his people for over fifty years, yet lived as a shining beacon of social justice for millions of devoted followers who would never have to bear his wrath. It is interesting to see which world leaders praised Castro, as one of the last bastions of communism began its inevitable descent into destruction. Tyranny of the masses, Mr Major? It looks more like the clear vision of the forgotten. Democracy may yet have its day.

Legal Eagles

The watchword of these days is ‘uncertainty’, as if the absolute certainty of all those dire economic forecasts that were to befall the post-referendum nation had been realised and now the only thing that can save us is to believe the same doom-mongers and overturn the will of the people. In the seventies they warned about global cooling. By the nineties it had become global warming and now it is referred to as climate change. Why not call it what it is – climate uncertainty, because it’s uncertainty that is the real evil here?

But that is a bogus claim, as uncertainty is the normal state of affairs in human society, so it is a clever trick that has been performed, to demonise that normal state, blame it for everything and then imply that somehow threatening to ignore the outcome of a vote will restore us to certainty. In fact, people already voted for more certainty; they want the certainty of their wages not being undercut by outsiders with no stake in Britain. They want the certainty that criminals will be deterred from their actions. Most of all, they want the certainty that when the government seeks a mandate and gets it, the government will act on it.

There are few real certainties, other than death and taxes... and Tony Blair seeking a return to public life. But there is one cast iron certainty - to paraphrase the pledge that put us in our current state of turmoil – and that is, whatever happens whatever it costs, somebody, somewhere will be making money from it. Financial gurus, stoking the fears and making the markets, rent-seeking, professional ‘advisors’ attaining positions of influence and altering the circumstances of many without ever having to atone for their mistakes. And of course, the legal profession.

In Dickens’ Bleak House, the law firm Jarndyce and Jarndyce which is, ‘of course’, acting only in the best interest of their clients, emerge the only winners, having spent the entirety of a considerable fortune to pay their fees and thus solved the knotty problem of how that fortune was to be distributed. Recourse to law has been the refuge of both victims and their villains throughout social history and its verdicts have been the source of much anger and frustration. So it is unusual to see the passing of lawyers as the reason for national morning.

But, on one recent occasion there was an enormous turnout to witness the laying to rest of not one, but two prominent local legal eagles. The funeral procession included two horse-drawn hearses behind which walked a man leading a large Rottweiler. A few paces behind, several hundred more people followed the man and his dog. Curious, I approached the man and asked what was going on. “The first hearse carries my ex-wife's lawyer," he said. "My dog bit him and he died two days later. The second hearse is for the lawyer who opposed me in some business litigation. My dog bit him and he also died.”

I pondered for a moment what he had told me and walked a few paces alongside the pair. Like many of us, I have harboured my share of animus with the legal profession. I asked him, with a wry smile as I did, “Could I borrow your dog?” He barely glanced up, but I could see a ghost of a smile on his lips. “Of course, you can. That’s fine by me” he said, and gestured at the procession behind, “but you're going to have to wait your turn, like all the others.”

Autumn Statement

Why do we put ourselves through the annual – recently bi-annual - ordeal of suspending our natural inclination to pragmatism for a day in which everybody has to pretend to believe in A) what the Chancellor of the Exchequer says, or B) the opposite of what the Chancellor of the Exchequer says? The big guns of the Office for Budget Responsibility is wheeled in to present grandiose projections of what might happen in the future, always supposing the world doesn’t end tomorrow, after which everybody gets up and A) agrees with the OBR’s projections, or B) flatly refutes the OBRs outrageous assumptions.

The economy, one might paraphrase, is an ass. It is an ass, donkey-wise, in that it is driven by simple desires and it is an ass, sphincter-wise, in that it has the propensity to shit on anybody at any time, unless you have taken the wise precaution to stock up on economic Imodium®. Of course the notion of saving for a rainy day has taken many knocks of late given the ultra-low interest rates and the dangerously uncertain nature of investment in shares, whose value is determined not by reality but by perception.

For a start, there is the sheer generalisation of all the forecasts, assuming that everybody will behave in the same way and not seek to act independently of groupthink. Actually, that’s not so bad an assumption - proportion of people who do actually manage to go off-grid is vanishingly small. But you don’t need to decouple from the economy altogether in order to exert some control over it. There is talk of falling consumer demand; surely a large part of that is down to simple caution. The numbers don’t need to be very large for the cumulative effect to be noticeable.

If every family – say 30 million households – spends £2 a week less, (less than a stupidly-named coffee in Starbucks) that’s £100 per year and thus, at a stroke, £3billion fewer pounds-Sterling per year circulating in the economy. And if an outcome is that Starbucks branches close down, consumers have lost nothing but the spurious notion of choice. Oh, but wait, they have exercised choice in quitting the daft habit of queuing with hipsters to collect an overpriced cup of brown liquid to then wander the streets with. (I never did understand the attraction of portable coffee as a status-signalling fashion accessory.)

But, you object, what of the employees of those now empty cafes? Well, tough, but it may just have the knock-on effect of making those now ex-employees seek more fruitful and useful employment. It might cause more parents to encourage more kids to work harder at more useful subjects than ‘Being Everybody’s Soulmate Studies’ and in a few years Chancellor Hammond’s longed-for increased productivity might actually come about. As gently as you might want to be with others it is my experience that a kick up the arse is often a far better way of focusing the productive mind than groups hugs and clearing-the-air meetings; everyone’s input is not of equal value.

How the budget works...

Of course, everything bad is blamed on Brexit and everything good is just – phew – lucky happenstance. In reality the budget is never either good or bad, it is a simple fucking about with numbers, a political prestidigitation to make believe that somebody, somewhere has their hairy mitts on the levers of economic power. If the media gloom over ‘the cost of Brexit’ manages to achieve one thing – the big kick up the arse that persuades more people to take responsibility for their own budgets, rather than imagining government can do it for them – it will have been worth every penny. 

Weird Science

The biggest problem in trying to explain what is happening to the west right now is the sheer number of commentators trying to explain what is happening to the west right now. Yesterday I linked to this piece by Paul Mason in The Guardian. Reading it again I am struck by the way he seems to happily contradict himself, and tie his argument up in knots, determined to try and make ‘the facts’ fit his novel thesis that Brexit is a result of a fear of freedom and not the forty-year-long desire to attain that self-same thing. But as all good Orwellians know, freedom is slavery in the same way that ignorance is strength.

I blame psychology, sociology and all the other second-rank ‘ologies masquerading as science and practising the art of making something simple into something complicated. Add enough questionable theory into the process and you can make a career out of it. An ant colony is complex, but its constituent parts are pretty simple. I grant you a human is more complicated than an ant, though in all fairness, not a lot. But we are suckers for flattery, so tell a mob of simple shaved apes that they are marvellously sophisticated and you can lead them quite a long way up the garden path for a pat on their bony skulls.

Leaders have, of course, been exploiting what we now refer to as psychology for ever. Inspire loyalty, fear, loathing and common purpose in the mob and they will roll over to have their tummies tickled. Trump knows this and can appeal to the normal human instincts for self-preservation and unity and a defence of the values that bind ordinary Americans, despite himself having travelled a long way from ordinary. This is why the left-leaning intelligentsia both despise him so much and despair at his popularity. Why, with their superior, big caring brains, were they not able to persuade people against?

See, the trouble with psychology is it works both ways. While you were busy studying away inventing subtle explanations for simple things, we simple things were just getting on with it. After all, somebody has to keep the vending machines filled, put goods on the shelves, move money around and manufacture all that stuff we seem unable to do without. Every now and then we looked up and scratched our heads and wondered what on earth you lot were thinking, but we always imagined, or hoped, you’d grow out of it and come and join us in building a decent society.

But no, the ‘ologies are a rich seam to mine and as you dug deeper into the psychological bedrock you uncovered the fools’ gold of ever more nuanced reasons to feel grievance and hurt. Whatever ails you, you had a reason for it; you’re in the wrong body, the patriarchy is keeping you down, glass ceilings, self-esteem... daddy issues. The worst thing was to invert the simple truth that in most cases what you make of your life is up to you and instead you managed to seduce yourselves into believing your own codswallop, that everything is somebody else’s fault. And that only your acolytes were clever enough to see it.

The left: comfortably numb, uncomfortably dumb

If your investigations had been confined to the merely academic, the findings laid out in dusty, infrequently consulted tomes in library archives then fair enough. Like phrenology, your studies would have been interesting and amusing relics of a bygone, Freudian age. But you managed to persuade the gullible that your complex version of humanity, contrary to your own advocacy of egalitarianism, was superior to the reality of the masses. You succumbed to ‘the precious’ of your own devising. The funniest thing is that as you now reap what you sowed – the disdain of those you disdained – your imagined massive intellects are none the wiser as to how we got here. I think a whole lot of us are going to enjoy Trump’s presidency. 

Repeating History

Goebbels is widely credited as the master propagandist and often quoted as saying: “If you repeat a lie often enough, it becomes the truth. If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.” The Remain campaigners have taken this advice to heart and far from quietly accepting the referendum result are on an effulgent second wind. And they are everywhere, swamping the media and drowning out any message with which Leavers dare to respond. Watch the news, listen to talk radio, read the newspapers and with very few small islands of optimism the dark prophecies of doom are back.

Yesterday, right at the end of You & Yours on BBC Radio 4, Winifred Robinson asked listeners to contact the programme with their experiences of: “What, if anything, have you seen go up in price since the Brexit vote?” That ‘if anything’ was a meagre attempt at injecting balance but you just know they will eagerly broadcast every single penny on the price of anything at all as a direct and dire result of your foolish, foolish vote to leave the warm and welcoming embrace of the EU. (Conveniently enough, although Remainers will blame Brexit for every calamity, whenever the hoped-for economic Armageddon doesn’t materialise they respond that Brexit hasn’t happened yet.)

But it doesn’t stop at the impersonal; they are also happy with the ad hominem. Are you ironing your Hugo Boss black shirt? Polishing up your death’s head cap badge and getting your swastika tattoo touched up? The revelation that Thomas Mair, the nutter who killed Jo Cox, collected Nazi memorabilia is being reported with barely suppressed glee by the mighty media of state. I don’t think it is reading too much into the language and mood of the news outlets that here, in their view, is an example of that very rise of the right represented by ugly ‘populism’. The subtext is plain to see; if you voted to leave the EU you may not be an actual Nazi, but you are definitely an under-educated, crude Nazi sympathiser.

And the dogs are circling Ukip too, sensing blood. Their current travails, the inevitable result of a collection of divergent base ideologies coming together to fight a common cause – which they nominally won – leaves them exposed and as one after another prominent figure gives up under the constant vilification they are left with ever fewer known applicants to lead what is becoming the un-leadable. Iain Dale on his LBC show asked Diane Abbott about the appeal of Ukip to "traditional" Labour voters, to which Abbott had a ready response. “Nazis, she said” (I paraphrase, but this is what she actually meant.) 

She did say, "It's not impossible to understand what the appeal of Ukip might be to someone who in the past voted BNP...the truth is that the Brexit vote was about immigration." Another simple lie, repeated often. The Brexit vote was not simply ‘about immigration’. Yes, mass immigration of an unhelpful kind is the visible face of Blair and Mandelson’s deliberate attempt to change Britain forever, but it is the changing that is the focus of malcontent, not the immigrants themselves; well, ot all of them. Brexit was also not about staying in the single market and the nonsensical use of the term ‘free market’ as if there was no other way to do business is deliberately disingenuous, implying penury otherwise.

Paul Mason bangs the same old racist drum in The Guardian, that figurehead of impartiality in journalism. Ironically, the more the caring left spread their own popular poison and attempt to smear everybody who voted out as some flavour of fascist the more they appear to be behaving like Herr Goebbels themselves. How long before the homes and businesses of Brexiteers are metaphorically daubed with slogans and symbols to mark them out as targets for a bit of ‘persuasive’ action by people who brand themselves as the true British patriots? All the ingredients are there for the left to fulfil their own predictions about the rise of the new Nazis and once again it will be so-called socialists doing the rising, justified by their own sense of entitlement to enforce their views on others.

Quick! Get those history books on the bonfire!

And of course Brexit is being fought from without as EU legal interference and the heads of some member states try to make it sound like an impossible ambition. Brexit is unknowable, but it is far from impossible. The only way to find out what lies ahead is to set out on that journey, which is the only thing Brexit really means; let's crack on and get the job done. But in contrast with the optimism of those of us hoping to see our country independent again, what does seem certain is the terror it holds for those who wish to remain. And as their hysteria rises and the attacks continue the best thing about Remain – The Sequel, is that they are making exactly the same mistakes they made the first time around.