14 Jan 2013

Invasion of the body-politic snatchers

The Slog: During the last Government, there were many cries of foul about the number of unelected advisers popping up all over the place. The most infamously dense and dangerous of these was Lord Birt, a man who once proposed to Tony Blair a reform whereby the whole “system of government could be speeded up” if some Cabinet votes were allowed to replace a majority in Parliament. He was a man ahead of his time, Birt.
The trend was, many of us protested, oligarchy and kitchen Cabinet rule by the back door. But in 2013, the present Government airily invites them through the front door, and simply ignores the criticism.
The latest example of the syndrome in the DfE is perhaps the most brazen so far. Michael Gove’s appointment of Conservative donor and private education enthusiast John Nash as an education minister had this tweet getting record RT numbers on Twitter two days ago: ‘Venture capitalist donates £300k to Tories. Takes on academy. Gets life peerage. Becomes education minister’. Just when you thought there was no point to Twitter, you realise there is.
Thus the privatisation of politics continues apace, and lobbying rules the roost: give £3.5m to the Conservatives, get planning laws relaxed; make Bottomley your discreet private health sector cypher in the Lords, make sure her acolyte Hunt gets the Health secretaryship, get lots of cooperation from rich private health insurers; support Murdoch’s bid for BSkyB, get Newscorp support for the Tory election bid. ‘Open for business’ is the new graft.

Ludicrous sound-morsels get bandied about now like playground insults: “Let’s get away from regulation and show we’re open for business, let’s bring in the skills of the private sector and give people more choice, we should be cutting government down to size and getting rid of red tape, stop bashing bankers and let them get on with keeping London as the world’s greatest financial centre, because wealth creators must be rewarded and let’s face it, in the end we’re all in this together“.
Naturally, old curmudgeons like me would fill those inverted commas with slightly different terms: “Let’s just have no rules so we can all get as rich as we like, let’s have everything run by globalist gargoyles with no ethics and even less social perspective, let’s give all the plum contracts to our mates and then become non-execs later, let’s cut every legislator’s balls off and blackmail the rest, treat bankers like rock stars, and buy tons of gold just before they completely f**k the currency and cut the welfare bill by starving the Underclass into non-existence”.
So far, this Coalition (spade a spade and all that, the Conservative Government) has publicly embraced Rupert Murdoch, Baron Green, Grant Shapps, Sir Richard Branson, and a veritable soccer team of shady donors or treasurers. This is a long-standing Tory tradition going all the way back to Jeffrey Archer and Lord Ashcroft, the only difference being that whereas Archer was simply a fantasist idiot and Ashcroft a rich bloke with delusions of grandeur, the characters coming through the revolving doors these days are beyond shady: they represent the forces of total darkness.
In this sense, the British government is running entirely in tandem with all the major Western democracies. Former Wall Street troughers infest the US Federal Treasury, mine owners tell the Aussie government when to fart, and banker technocrats run the southern half of the eurozone: in Britain, it’s expat media moguls like Murdoch and bankers like Stephen Hester, but the exact profession is irrelevant. We are witnessing the logical end of a long-term econo-political process.
That process was enabled in the UK by the failure of soft collectivism after the Second World War, fertilised by the Man-Woman Margaret Thatcher, accelerated by the City’s Big Bang, and finally cemented in place by the ‘relaxation’ of super-rich groupies Tony Blair and Peter Mandelson.
But that only gives one a narrative. The reasons why the outcome was near-inevitable are myriad but very clear. After the war, the US showed its gratitude to the one steadfast ally it had by presenting it with a lead neck-anvil, and heaping massive pressure on the Government to break up the Empire…which, being Socialist and principled, it did with alacrity. While Europe was given Marshall Aid with which to modernise, plucky Blighty stumbled on with a self-image of debt, dwindling colonial income, and somehow seeming unable to match the pace of others less encumbered by the twists of fate.
After this low self-esteem turned into first the patrician obfuscation of Harold Macmillan and then the white-hot bullsh*t of Wilsonian Labour, three serious pretenders to Sovereignty became convinced they could do the job of running Britain better than Parliament: respectively, they were the TUC, the bankers, and the information revolutionaries. These movements had within their ranks extremists who made the challenge a very real one indeed: the first knackered an already under-invested and old fashioned economy; the second emptied an already over-subscribed Treasury; the third is trying to privatise politics.
The residue liquid produced by this alchemy – governments perpetually short of tax income and congenitally unable to curb spending – was poured into a new brew called The Internet to create the final hemlock for liberal democratic politics and small retail ‘community’ business.
So it is that conviction politicians with authority have been replaced by politicians desperate to avoid being convicted by the authorities, and the third wannabe sovereign sees its chance: that is, a multinational media set pushing the case for neocon globalist business.
These are the information illuminati, and they could yet turn out to be unstoppable: Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, Newscorp, AOL, Orange and other online presences yet to be born. They are a natural to collaborate with the sovereign security agencies – and thus ensure that every last truculent citizen everywhere is watched, heard and otherwise monitored 24/7. Anyone who doubts that this progression is already far-advanced simply isn’t awake.
But oddly enough, just as the trade unions became arrogant and the bankers insolvent, so too the infowar technocrats and the globalists they support will stumble on the road to Dystopia. The reason is remarkably simple: their vision has no resolution. Ineluctably short-term greed-centric, it can’t work out how the pauperisation of the 93% can be squared with its desire to get richer and richer, more and more powerful, and ultimately unassailable; while equally, it can’t fathom how global mercantilism can avoid everything from siege economies and currency wars to nuclear conflict.
The misanthropy of the info-élite is based on a near-total ignorance of species and social anthropology, the real pleasure centres it obeys, and its ability to desert techno-toys and inflating money when they can no longer be an effective balm poured on frustrated lack of fulfilment. It’s why their product manuals are impenetrable, the gadgets themselves idiotically over-specced, and the business model of never-ending replacement just another South Sea Bubble doomed to burst when currencies are destroyed alongside massive wealth and income write-downs.
But for the time being, carpetbaggers are in. The job of ambitious politicians like Boris Johnson and Jeremy Hunt is to invent reasons why such fish-eyed sickos are quite nice really, and nothing to be frightened of. The job of online commentators, therefore, is to keep digging up the rich seams of evidence which show precisely what anarchic sociopaths the vast majority of them are. The MSM still has some pockets of resistance, but almost all the press titles and broadcasters are either hiding behind the sofa or collaborating with the Nazis. We are the maquis. That’s it.
Footnote: Newscorp for the first time emerged naked from the manipulatron closet last Friday and ran the same headline in both the Sun and the Times about Jimmy Savile: ‘He groomed a nation’. Consciously or not, Murdoch is turning Savile into Hitler, and the BBC into Dachau. This has two advantages for him: it depicts the dead DJ as a one-man paedophile industry, a unique oddball, a monster responsible for an untypical outbreak of perversion the like of which we shall never see again. And second, it demonises the Beeb to a degree capable of helping people forgot what a disgusting gulag Newscorp itself is.
The parallel here really is how the Germans love to depict Hitler: as a one-off mad Austrian totally unrepresentative as an expression of German culture. The marvellous film Der Untergang smashed this confection forever. Who, I’m left wondering, is going to smash the pernicious influence of the Wapping Liars?

Source

banzai7 

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