Thanks to contemporary ideo-political bollocks, the contemporary novel as farce is dead, and Orwell’s 1984 nightmare has been rendered feeble. No fiction writer will ever again be able to beat the reality of Singapore, Republican tax gymnastics, feminist appeasement of Islamics and the cynicism of Brexit politics.
“Singapore and the United Kingdom enjoy a natural affinity thanks to a common history, as well as sharing a rich and enduring relationship”, President Halimah Yacob said a month ago . She dated the sharing thing back to 1819, when the infamous cat burglar Sir Stamford Raffles founded a trading port in Singapore, thus setting the stage for the development of a City-State into the corporate fascist enclave we see before us today: a safe haven where the disgustingly rich grow enduringly richer at the expense of the appallingly poor.
Ms Yacob is a practising Muslim. On 13 September last, she was declared President-elect in a walkover, as no other presidential candidate was issued a Certificate of Eligibility. She was sworn in the following day, thus becoming the first woman in the country’s history to “win” the Presidency. Setting aside the gender identity bollocks, she is also the first Islamic ever to hold the post….and she did it in the inimitable style of both Gordon Brown and Theresa May: by oligarchic decree.
Halimah will from here on inherit a unique duo of admiring British tendencies: foreign secretary Boris Johnson and his City mates…..and Momentum feminists who thrill to the idea of successful Muslim women as the last remaining fingernails of credibility they have in the glorious field of muddled cognitive dissonance.
When forty percent of the nation earns less than the minimum tax band – and, whatever “the data” say, a further 18% are either under (or un) employed – any radical tax cut is, by definition, going to give zero benefit to three citizens in five. So before one even examines the bedevilled detail of Donald’s Big Dividend, the following is certain:
* 40% of Americans are going to have to fix the failing consumption growth all on their ownsome
* $1 trillion dollars will be added to the sovereign deficit (In a US split by as never before by loopy ideology, everyone agrees on this)
* Any credit bubble deflation produced by Fed rate rises will be reversed
* Wealth inequality will go from the hopelessly dysfunctional to the socially obscene
* Market directionalisers will pump-up enthusiasm as a vital alternative to reasoned analysis
* That honey-rush will deliver more Washington-manufactured dividends for the ‘Pooh Bull’ shareholders to pocket
* When Crash2 comes, the ‘correction’ is going to involve the sort of whiplash discipline that few people beyond Emmanuel Macron really need.
Why, you might therefore wonder, has the Tax Bill passed into Law? This involves an answer in two parts.
First, Donald Trump has a vision of the American economy’s architecture that is at least forty years out of date. That’s not me jumping on the DNC/Antifa Nutwagon; rather, it is the outcome of listening to what the President has been saying for the last two years. I didn’t believe a bloody word of it, but over 50% of American voters did.
Second – and to my mind, far more important – the Republican Party is in a corner more painful than an Elephant cornered in a small room where the walls have extra-sharp knives sticking out at regular intervals….blades specially honed to pierce the hide of invisible elephants. The passage of the Trump tax reform is almost entirely about breaking Donald’s duck.
Given the level of Congressional control they have, the GOP should be passing legislation at the kind of rate the UK Labour Party managed for four years after 1945. Sadly, the Party’s big home-run score up until the tax reform passage was 0/10. Trust me: the US now has a piece of insane tax legislation on the statute because the Fat Old Elephant doesn’t want to go down in history as the only top-notch baseball batter in history who went an entire season missing every ball from the pitcher.
Ludicrous, but true: Trump hijacked the Republican Party, defied the Party’s fervent desire to nominate another android candidate, and then compounded his crime by winning when everyone said he’d lose. The American political Inquisition couldn’t cope with such a level of wicked heresy, and so it has variously fillibustered, sabotaged and emasculated every potentially useful thing The Donald suggested….and let through a piece of econo-fiscal antimatter purely to make the batting average look better.
Yes folks, that’s how focused on the citizen’s best welfare the political class is.
But for we Brits, it’s all horribly familiar. The end goal being Establishment Party survival above any Duane and Bianca wellbeing considerations, our Brexit divorce from the European Union has gone from “Brexit means Brexit at a £20 billion cost for the sake of goodwill” to “Round in circles at three times the cost for the sake of Conservative Party unity”.
Screw the cheated Waspi pensioners, unretrained unemployed, genuine entrepreneurs looking for relief on their business rates and expat Brits smart enough to find somewhere cheaper and more pleasant to live than the politically correct Septic Isle: the real need now is keep the Remoaner Fifth Column in power, and hope that Theresa Mayormaynot limp through to the end of a full term.
Because let’s get real, the last thing we want is all those hard left hands on the tiller of the good ship Britannia…..for the crew of that ship is equally mutinous. On the one hand, the virtue-powered compass of the scurvy swabs dictates that the EUHCRist feminist socialist Islamist triumph is more important than any disgusting considerations about new trade routes and social order. On the other, Cap’n ‘Jesus’ Corbyn – along with his petty officers Dai Abacus and ‘Long John’ McDonnell – share a deep (and on the whole justified) distrust of the longer-term NATO/neoliberal fascist tendencies of the Brussels-Bankfurt-Berlin axis powers.
And on a third hand that ordinary humans don’t possess, the Corbynista Mob will do, say, promise and hide anything on the grubby road to gaining power. Because the political supremacy of their ideology is infinitely more important than any distractions of a practical nature.
The same of course applies to Nicola Sturgeon, who in the context of Brexit can perhaps be best described as a small fish brain in a big pool of blood. As the avowedly lesbian Führerin of the Scottish Nazi Party, Nico is desperate to pull off the Catalonian maneouvre – via which any seriously representative voting procedure is eschewed in favour of her barmy preference for Brussels over London.
The Truth on offer out there is that a majority of Scots don’t want that, Brussels has already poured a Channel full of cold water on the idea, and London would rather bring on another Glencoe Massacre than allow it. The best bet for Scotland – as indeed it is for all of us – would be more local power aongside dramatically declining influence from London, Brussels and Washington in turn.
But that’s so off-message for the power-seekers, it merits not an iota of consideration.
All four of these subjects – Singapore, Islam, US politics and Brexit – have one thing in common: the repetitious hypocrisy of ideologues with self-consciously virtuous principles busy bending, twisting and breaking all of them in the pursuit of power. The congruity of aim between apparent enemies like serial jihadist fgm practitioners, radical feminists, financialising neoliberals, Islamic cynics, Wall Street troughers, nationalist opportunists and Brussels mafiosi seems to pass all of them by. Indeed, it seems to pass way over the heads of Western electorates too.
We need to neuter the geopolitical meddling of those peddling false Truths. We need to choose those media offering genuinely objective assessments, and to elect those candidates with nothing to sell beyond practical solutions based on sound socio-anthropological observations: wealth does not trickle down any more than onanist academic collectivism does.
Homo sapiens is in dire and desperate need of new ideas, not ancient ideologies.
The Slog 