At the End of today, does anyone who cares know which way is up any more?
Perjury is no longer lying under oath in a criminal court of law, apparently: it is lying in a way that could have been material to a verdict. Really? I don’t remember ever being told that before. Coulson lied about being involved in phone hacking. He was found guilty of phone hacking. Why did the Judge not give the jury a chance to decide if they believed a man found guilty of something he’d earlier denied…when it was his word against a man accused of perjury?
11th hour negotiations have been going on about the Greek debt issue. Half the Greek debt is owed to the ECB, which can write it off with zero ramifications. Half of the remaining half was incurred using the fractional reserve banking system of lending, which invents half the amount. The real Greek liability is 25% of the claimed amount, and it’s been the eleventh hour now for nearly seven weeks. Can these people add up, and have they discovered how to suspend time?
A Syriza MEP makes a request of the EC fiscal commissioner Lord Hill to be given details of the export deal accountancy involved in selling to the Greeks, in a bid to garner evidence for a charge of odious debt. Hill refuses to do so. Why is he allowed to do that when it is every MEP’s right to ask for information he needs to defend himself? Is Lord Hill under the impression that the Treaty of Rome has been nullified by the Lisbon Accord?
If all taxpayers by definition must have a bank account, what’s the difference between a taxpayer bailing out a bank and a bank customer bailing out a bank? Two answers: in the latter case, 1. the State gets off scott-free; and 2. the ‘out’ is replaced by an ‘in’. Anyway, we are no longer bank customers, we are creditors. Apparently it’s always been that way. Anyone ever open a bank account and get told the bank will nick the lot if they go up the pictures? No, I thought not.
For four years from 2010-2014, the Greek austerity programme produced a deepening recession in that country, proving every single IMF and FinMin economic projection wrong. Then Syriza get elected early in 2015, and in just two months it had made the recession “much worse”…in fact, Greece had “slid back into recession”…quite a feat given that it never came out of it.
In 2014, Andy Coulson was fund guilty of illegally invading privacy on an industrial scale. He was sentenced to 18 months and served four. His fellow defendant Rebekah Brooks – who’d been his CEO and with whom he was sleeping – apparently knew nothing about phone hacking. She got off. Coulson faced a further charge of bribing public officials. The cps decided it was “not in the public interest to go ahead with that prosecution”. Coulson never faced trial. Now he’s found guilty of lying under oath, but not guilty of perjury. The Judge ordered that there was no case to answer. The lady on the top of the Old Bailey is apparently blind to the existence of power and privilege. But it looks like her hearing is very acute indeed.
I can tell you exactly which way up things are. Corporate interests in the shape of multinational business, big banks and globalised media are right at the top – the only people that matter any more in the West. We the citizens are right at the bottom, waiting for yet another rock-hard quince to land on our heads.
We are the ones to blame, not them.
In the last General Election, of those turning out to vote, 37% voted for the Party actively promoting this model of politics. A further 30% voted for an Opposition that stood by and gaily watched the process happening, without ever once alerting the British people to the danger. Another 8% voted for a Coalition partner that had blithely colluded in the process of selling our birthright to the corporate sector. And a final 5% voted for a Party using what it sees as a foreign Parliament for its own Machiavellian ends.
All up then, 4 out of 5 British people voted for a cross section of the greedy, unprincipled and incompetent mediocrats who had between them over forty years created our current cultural, social, sovereign and economic mess.
Throughout the election I said “Anything could happen, but nothing will change”. I urged people not to vote for the same old same old. I was shouted down. 1 person entitled to vote in 3, however, did what I did. If we’d all voted Labour, it would’ve kept the Tories out. Would that have materially changed anything? I don’t think so.
1 person in 8 voted for a Party demanding a completely different approach to business and immigration. And 1 Person in 25 voted for giving a lot more thought to sustaining our water supply in particular, and environment in general. Both of those Parties did, however, put forward some policies of quite outstanding irrelevance and impracticality.
This tells us quite a lot about just how much attention the British electorate is paying these days. It’s not an entirely uplifting reality.
When I first started blogging in 2003, I used to write quite often, “The elite really do think we’re ignorant, stupid and lacking in any discernment”.
Tonight, I can be far more definite. I know that 80% of the electorate is ignorant, stupid and lacking in discernment. The elites know this too…and they can see the number rising inexorably with every general election. One would imagine that someone being anally raped with a broomstick spikey end first, day in day out, would notice. But 4 out of 5 Brits don’t feel a thing. Either that, or they enjoy it: who can be sure any more?
“I like Tony Blair, he’s a safe pair of hands”. “To be fair, you have to see this Greek thing from the German point of view”. “People who knock Simon Cowell are just jealous of his success”. “Rupert Murdoch cleaned up Fleet Street and made top-class football available to every family in the land”. “I don’t care what you say, Jeremy Hunt is doing a good job under difficult circumstances”. “Who cares what Baron Green did or didn’t know at HSBC…he knows his stuff about exports, and that’s what we need”. “Austerity has been proved to work in Britain, and the Left just can’t stand that”. “George Osborne has got the workshy off the sofa and created a million new jobs. I call that a success”. “The reason Labour lost is simple – we weren’t left-wing enough”.
I’m sure a lot of you hear the same robotic, starry-eyed wishful thinking and selfish, amoral cynicism all the time as well. For over half a century now, one new development after another has been hailed as a “realignment of British politics”. We have lurched from 1960s consensus to 1970s radical chique to 1980s loadsamoney and then finally the capitulation of New Labour to corporatism disguised behind socially liberal pc legislation about everything from fox hunting and smacking kids to LGBT and the gender ceiling. All Camerlot has done is gratefully pick up the pieces, and carry on with the process.
Throughout the entire process, two things have been missing: the common sense to retain the important achievements of the past; and the creativity to think of something better.
When the econo-fiscal reality finally hits at some point in the near future, we will see millions of bamboozled faces, and dozens of new laws (or “legal instruments”) taking an even further grip on truth, dissent and State access to privacy. I’m beginning to seriously doubt whether – even when it becomes obvious they’ve been conned – the British people will know what to do – or indeed, whether they can be bothered.
The Slog 