The meltdown of humanity began with Thatcher

In his excellent book, Small Is Beautiful, the economist Eric Schumacher told us how people who work in large bureaucratic organisations lose the ability to think independently. I agree with him with one reservation, that I do not think that such people have the capacity to think independently in the first place. In the past month, British television has exposed three major international companies for reducing their workforces to a positon that I have outlined here of modern slavery. This, as I have been telling you for some years now, is the inevitable outcome of globalisation and of the experiment that Thatcher embarked on in 1979. This situation is quite deliberate and purposeful and has been the goal of free market neoliberals for the past forty years. The three companies exposed on our television are of course simply the tip of the iceberg and are easily exposed because they are so blatant and visible. We had the news this month of a firm of egg producers in England who were exposed keeping Lithuanian workers in appalling conditions, described on our news channels as slavery, to the extent that the workers were provided with paper bags and cans in which to urinate and defecate because they were denied, either the facilities, or the time off, to toilet. This is reality in modern Britain, the real legacy of the Blessed Margaret and her henchmen. On each occasion in those exposes on television, the companies indignantly denied point blank that such terms and conditions were either company policy, nor were the reality for their workforce. On each occasion, the television were able to produce official internal documents outlining the very policies and practices that they were so righteously denying, as well as the visual evidence from hidden cameras and recordings. We can chart the slow descent of the British state from civilisation into barbarism from 1975 when Thatcher became leader of the Tories.

However, what I have been reflecting on is how easily and happily ordinary people will implement such conditions and impose them on a day to day basis on behalf of such companies. It is the ordinary workers themselves, the middle and under managers, the petty bureaucrats, who are inflicting such conditions on their fellows. I often wonder about the ordinary soldiers in Guantanamo Bay who enthusiastically carry out the daily inhumanities on people who they know are innocent. Civilisation is truly a very fragile phenomenon and I find it extremely disturbing how so many ordinary people who live ordinary lives will unthinkingly cooperate in the inhumanity required of them by the imperatives of economic and social organisations driven by free market ideology. This is what Hannah Arendt termed the banality of evil. We are daily regaled in our news outlets in this benighted nation of tales how the Department of Work and Pensions are driving people to their deaths through inhuman harassment, insisting that people with terminal illnesses etc. are fit for work and having their benefits removed. This is Tory policy and is too well documented to deny, but my concern is with the ordinary people who implement such policy and who must know they are party to a modern day evil. We expect nothing else from the Westminster filth but surely can expect more from people who are themselves only a hairsbreadth away from being in that position themselves.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn explains in his writings how people have the capacity to, in his words, voluntarily step into the bottomless pit, and divest themselves of their humanity. They lose the capacity for normal human feelings and become something else. He experienced this at first hand, and I suspect we are seeing this today under the influence of a perverted and destructive ideology. It was a similar destructive and perverted ideology that drove the people witnessed by Solzhenitsyn. I had a discussion with a pompous middle class person recently who was fulminating about the workers who are taking industrial action and who didn't care about the disruption they were causing the public. I asked him why the workers should care? He was taken aback when I told him that he was completely indifferent to what companies and managers did to their workers as long as he was not inconvenienced, so why should other people care how their actions impacted on him. I told him that as far as he was concerned, employers could chain their workers to the walls and routinely whip them, and they had better not take any action to remedy such a situation if it inconvenienced him. I asked him if he ever gave a thought to the impact of free market policies on the families of such working people, on their children and their future. Of course he never gives such things a thought, nor cares either, as long as his train runs on time and his bus turns up. The fact that such disruption happens is of course, never the fault of the company or the employer, it is always the fault of the workers who are fighting to maintain a semblance of survival and decent living standards. The prominence of people like Trump, Farage, Boris the Spider etc. tells us much about who the ordinary people in our respective nations are looking to for guidance. We are in a dark place and it is getting darker, and our first priority is to expose our dominant ideology for what it truly is. When we do that, its exponents will be similarly exposed and we can begin the process of recovery to a semblance of sanity and decency. You have been warned

Your Servant
Doktor Kommirat       

The meaning of life? What if it doesn't have any?

I have been reflecting on the seemingly inordinate amount of so-called celebrity deaths we have encountered over the past few months and am struck by the number of these people who have had problems with drugs, drink, depression etc. Celebrities amass considerable fortunes and widespread fame and I know I will be missing something terrible important, but I cannot conceive how someone with that amount of wealth and fame can have problems in the sense that the rest of us have getting by each day.

If I understand it properly, such people suffer from what the Bible describes as people who gain the world but lose their soul. The soul in this context is the 'nephesh' what I generally consider to be the life spirit and appears to describe people who gain wealth, fame, power etc. but who fail to find any real meaning in their life. The Bible is of course referring to God and that such people are disconnected to him/her and that their lives are meaningless because they have no connection with the only thing that can give your life real meaning. Of course religion is not the only thing that can give your life real meaning, and I suspect that they are lost in the sense that they are in a state of dislocation and are failing to understand their own location in a world that seems to make no sense, and, as God makes no sense to many people that option is not an acceptable one and they are driven to look elsewhere. Why are we all here? is a phrase many people seek an answer to, and my reply to that is because we are not all there. I argue that my reply makes as much sense as the question because the question is predicated on the assumption that there must be a purpose in life, a plan etc. that we should be seeking to uncover and understand. This is what gives rise to religion. People must individually have a purpose in life, but that is quite different from the concept of a 'grand plan' hatched by some supernatural entity. The legal profession, when seeking to apportion blame for corporate mismanagement or responsibility for an industrial accident caused by corporate neglect or criminality etc. looks for what is known as a directing mind in order that the law can be implemented correctly and blame can be properly apportioned, and that seems to be the goal of people who seek an answer to the question, why are we all here, or what is the meaning of life. They are searching for a directing mind, whom they simply call god. There must be a reason for life, for war, for tragedy etc. in the sense that it must be meaningful and part of a bigger purpose. No there doesn't, why should there be? Indeed if there is such a directing mind then it must belong to an entity of incredible callousness and indifference to human suffering and misery, a being of such evil that I want nothing to do with it.

As opposed to the search for a directing mind, I was awakened to the liberating notion of the Sophist Protagoras who told us that man is the measure of all things. We live in a material world and a material universe, and, most importantly, a world of choice. Human beings make their own world and must determine their own meanings. Here Protagoras is telling us that there is no such thing as absolute truth. This gets its best expression in the writings of David Hume, and I encourage everyone to read Hume. It is both comforting and liberating to learn that truth is a relative concept and that we all have our own truths if we just look for them. We can find meaning in our lives from a multitude of different sources, from art, music, sport, from pursuing a dream, even if we never realise it. We can make and shape our own meanings. A life dedicated to others, or to animals, is incredible meaningful according to the people who live such lives. Celebrities often live a life of self-destruction because they can find no meaning in fame and wealth. Their music or their art, or whatever brought them their fame is not an end in itself, when it often should be. Of course many celebrities do find such meaning in their chosen field as they are able to understand that it is not the fame and the wealth that brings the good life, although it certainly helps, but in being the best they can be and appreciating that their pursuit of their chosen field is itself a meaningful goal and that they have been incredibly fortunate that it has also brought them the fame and the wealth that other people think are the purpose of such a life, when the purpose is actually in the performing of the talent that has given them success and being the best they can be. Why would you choose to live in misery and uncertainty, in denial of the good things in life in preparation for an afterlife you have no knowledge exists, or even can exist? Why do you want to even contemplate such an afterlife when you live in a world that will give you all you require spiritually if you only appreciate what is all around you in all its incredible majesty and potential. In the words of the popular idiom, get a life! You have been warned

Your Servant
Doktor Kommirat    

British values? - authoritarianism, intolerance and inequality

I warned you some time ago about the Tory MP Sajid Javid, who has risen to stardom as a result of trying to out right-wing even the most right-wing free market fundamentalists. An example of rising to the top despite a staggeringly limited intellect, he has come up with the brilliant idea of requiring all persons who secure employment in the public sector to pledge an oath to uphold British values, foremost amongst which he cites democracy, tolerance, and equality. This is from a British Tory MP, you genuinely couldn't make it up; it is farce of the highest order. This is to counteract the evil influence of foreigners and immigrants who are swamping the public sector and stealing all the good British people's jobs and undermining our great British way of life with their foreign and therefore inferior values, people presumably like Mr Javid's immigrant family. As I have said before here, there will never be a lack of irony in this unfortunate country as long as people like him are prominent. Think about that, democracy, tolerance and equality, all concepts that are almost completely absent from British society thanks to people like Sajid Javid and his mates. If anyone should be forced to take such an oath it should be all those in the pigsty.

I decided to post this because I saw this cretin on the news immediately after having watched a programme about the Third Reich that had shown footage of the German Army and the SS collectively taking the Fuhrer Oath and I was reminded that such behaviour is symptomatic of authoritarian and tyrannical regimes. In addition, as I have posted here before, there is no longer such a thing as a United Kingdom in the sense that there is a united entity that shares a common set of goals and values. I would be deeply offended to be classified as sharing a universality with any of the Westminster gang of whatever party, so there is no possibility of me taking an oath to uphold any values that are held by the British elite, or even their middle-class useful idiots. But we should consider what this offensive clown is actually proposing. Tolerance as a British value? We have just witnessed two years since the beginning on the EU referendum campaign of the most outrageous propaganda against foreigners. The majority opinion has demonstrated the British to be amongst the most intolerant people in the western world. Our papers were, and still are, full of racist and hate mongering propaganda. But the British don't stop at foreigners and immigrants. They hate their own people if they are workers and union members as our political class and our newspapers are filled with anti-union and anti-working class bile and hatred on a daily basis. They hate the disabled and the disadvantaged. If the British represent anything it is intolerance. Of course many people think like I do and the British are not all like that, but a significant enough majority do support such hatred and intolerance, do support the Tories and the Farages of the world, and do buy the Mail and the Express who encourage this vile characteristic to be dominant.

It also beggars belief that any member of the political class, but especially a Tory, can stand up in public and advocate equality as a British value with a straight face. All statistical evidence shows Britain to be the most unequal country in the developed world. We have inequality on an Olympian scale with obscene levels throughout our whole society. Inequality in Britain transcends far more than wealth, it is manifest in opportunity, in gender, race and ethnicity. It is regional and of course is most graphic in social class inequalities. In Britain you can be judged by your regional accent and one of the greatest influence of the Beatles was not in music, but in culture, in forcing people to come to terms with a Liverpool accent and from the fact that Britain did not cease to be civilised outside of London and the Home Counties. Who can ever forget John Lennon telling the people in the cheap seats at the London Palladium to applaud by clapping their hands and the Queen and her entourage to rattle their jewellery.

I will not comment on the wonderful Sajid's claim for recognition of British democracy as I have fulminated over this farcical claim many times on this blog. For example, the pigsty and its press endlessly accuse people who challenge the Brexit result as seeking to deny the will of the British people. I remind you, the referendum vote for leaving the EU was 51.9% of a 72.2% turnout. This gives the leave vote 37.5% of the British electorate. However, in the fevered imaginations of the pigsty, this 37.5% represents the 'settled will of the people' to quote our illustrious Prime Minister. However, in Scotland 62% of a 67.2% turnout voted to remain which means that 41.5% of the Scots voted to remain. This cuts no ice with our dedicated democrats in the pigsty however, despite the fact that many people voted to remain part of the UK in the Scottish independence referendum in 2014 because they were assured that the only way they could remain members of the EU was to vote No. If people like Sajid Javid did not exist we would have to invent them. They are a continuing reminder how vile our ruling elite are and how out of touch London and the pigsty are with reality. This post is too long and for that I apologise, but you have been warned

Your Servant
Doktor Kommirat

We don't do economics today, we do a perverted class driven poison

Since Thatcher took over the Tory party we have been constantly bombarded with the propaganda
that the most important sector of society is the business and financial communities. They are the key sectors of society and their success is the foundation for everyone's success. Thus, all taxation policy has been geared to enhance business. All regulatory policies have been the same. This is because the interests of the business and financial communities are the interests of the nation. Trade unions have been systematically demonised because they oppose the naked self-interest of business as they seek to increasingly exploit their workforce and withdraw their rights, which, in the philosophy of the Westminster pigsty, are both anti-social and unpatriotic. This is accepted as right and proper because when workers oppose fundamental business practice they are obviously opposing the national interest and therefore both anti-social and unpatriotic. Rights are a cost and all costs must be minimised which is the proper patriotic thing to do. Thus, rights to holidays, overtime payments, pensions, etc. but most importantly of all, the right to withdraw your labour, are unacceptable costs that constrain the ability of business and finance to represent the national interest, which, in our 'post-truth' society translates into the will of the people. This is standard and received economic wisdom according to the perverted narrative of the modern free market world.

As I told you, I will refer to Adam Smith in my analysis of this narrative, as there is no necessity to appeal to Marx or Engels or any of the other latter day demons whose very name evokes scorn and derision if you raise them in respectable company. There is no one so respectable as Smith in a discussion of market economics as he is the person responsible for guiding us in how we make the market work to our best advantage, isn't he? Well no actually. For a start, Smith is quite unequivocal, the real wealth of a nation is labour, which, when I raise this in 'informed' company, is greeted with derision. We truly hold all working people in utter contempt today. I have raised this in earlier posts so will not expand on it here, I will merely quote Smith

"The wages of the labourer, it has already been shewn, are never so high as when the demand for labour is continually rising, or when the quantity employed is every year increasing considerably. When this real wealth of the society becomes stationary, his wages are soon reduced to what is barely enough to enable him to bring up a family, or to continue the race of labourers. When the society declines, they fall even below this. The order of proprietors may perhaps gain more by the prosperity of the society than that of labourers; but there is no order that suffers so cruelly from its decline".

Smith goes on

"But though the interest of the labourer is strictly connected with that of the society, he is incapable either of comprehending that interest, or of understanding its connexion with his own. His condition leaves him no time to receive the necessary information, and his education and habits are commonly such as to render him unfit to judge, even though he was fully informed. In the public deliberations, therefore, his voice is little heard, and less regarded; except upon particular occasions, when his clamour is animated, set on, and supported by his employers, not for his, but their own particular purposes".
He then goes on to discuss the attitude of employers and all those who live, not by labour, but from the profit of that labour, but, tells us that the rate of profit 'is always highest in those countries that are going fastest to ruin'. How apt that is for twenty-first century Britain, and why does that happen? because the interests of those who live by profit 'has not the same connexion with the general interest of the country' as those who live by their labour. With respect to the interests of 'employers, merchants and master manufacturers', I must include a rather lengthy quote so you can see I am not distorting his work for my own argument

"As their thoughts, however, are commonly exercised rather about the interest of their own particular branch of business. than about that of the society, their judgment, even when given with the greatest candour (which it has not been upon every occasion), is much more to be depended upon with regard to the former of those two objects, than with regard to the latter. Their superiority over the country gentleman is, not so much in their knowledge of the public interest, as in their having a better knowledge of their own interest than he has of his. It is by this superior knowledge of their own interest that they have frequently imposed upon his generosity, and persuaded him to give up both his own interest and that of the public, from a very simple but honest conviction, that their interest, and not his, was the interest of the public. The interest of the dealers, however, in any particular branch of trade or manufactures, is always in some respects different from, and even opposite to, that of the public. To widen the market, and to narrow the competition, is always the interest of the dealers. To widen the market may frequently be agreeable enough to the interest of the public; but to narrow the competition must always be against it, and can only serve to enable the dealers, by raising their profits above what they naturally would be, to levy, for their own benefit, an absurd tax upon the rest of their fellow-citizens. The proposal of any new law or regulation of commerce which comes from this order, ought always to be listened to with great precaution, and ought never to be adopted till after having been long and carefully examined, not only with the most scrupulous, but with the most suspicious attention. It comes from an order of men, whose interest is never exactly the same with that of the public, who have generally an interest to deceive and even to oppress the public, and who accordingly have, upon many occasions, both deceived and oppressed it".

In his discussion of money and the banking system he argues for necessary regulation to restrain them exercising their freedom if that freedom will damage society. I have used this passage before in other posts, so forgive me for repeating it

"Such regulations may, no doubt, be considered as in some respect a violation of natural liberty. But those exertions of the natural liberty of a few individuals, which might endanger the security of the whole society, are, and ought to be, restrained by the laws of all governments; of the most free, as well as or the most despotical. The obligation of building party walls, in order to prevent the communication of fire, is a violation of natural liberty, exactly of the same kind with the regulations of the banking trade which are here proposed".

He then reminds us of the character of our ruling classes in his famous passage which Tories and modern free market economist conveniently love to forget

"All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind".

We can see here, that, according to Adam Smith, the inordinate profits that business considers their right, and which are supported enthusiastically by the pigsty, are, 'an absurd tax' on the British people. In addition, when we see the pigsty proposing tax relief on billionaires, cutting corporation tax, paying outrageous bonuses etc. such proposals should be 'long and carefully examined, not only with the most scrupulous, but with the most suspicious attention'. There is much I could write on how Adam Smith has no relationship with the economism we see in today's world. That is why I tell you that it is evident that no-one actually reads him today, and why I tell you that modern economics are a fraud and a lie. It is a gross impertinence and a libel to associate a great man's writings with the perverted filth that we call economics in today's world. What we call economics is not economics, it is actually something else. What it is, is something for another time as it would take far too long to elaborate here, but suffice it to say that economics, as it was envisaged by its great founders, has been dead for a long time, deliberately destroyed by gangsters and charlatans. You have been warned

Your Servant
Doktor Kommirat

 

 

 

There is no such thing as post-truth there are only damned lies

I was discussing the free market perversion of language. Right now in Britain we are witnessing continuing riots in our prisons, a drop of prison officers by one-third in the past four years under the Tories, industrial action within the prison system by the remaining officers, by railway workers, in the ambulance service, within the medical profession, in the post office, lorry drivers etc. The care system is collapsing under a regime of 39% cuts in budget since the last election. I could go on but the facts are that the free market system of privatisation of public services is a total shambles and the Tories management of those public services that still remain is a disaster. Even those of you from outside Britain who read this must be aware that I am not exaggerating or propagandising. There are no empirical arguments left to support the free market neoliberal model of government. It has failed, demonstrably and dangerously. Yet in the language of British politicians it is still not their fault, but mostly the result of the European Union, and immigrants who are putting intolerable pressure on such services, which is quite demonstrably untrue, but suits the inherent racism of the majority of the British population who would rather comfort themselves with a barefaced lie than admit that it is of their own making. Polls are persistently showing that the British on average believe that 15% of the population are Muslim when the number is around 5%. Where do they get such beliefs from? The pigsty of course and the lying filth that work for the Mail, the Express and the Sun. They voted for these disgusting reprobates and they continue to support them and buy their newspapers even although it is daily demonstrated that they are lying through their teeth. It is the same in the United States, their economic model has failed but they are applauding a President-elect who we see daily on our televisions admitting that all the things he said during his campaign, all his promises were lies. He is boasting about lying and his supporters are cheering him for it. The world is most certainly enduring cultural insanity on a widespread scale.

In Britain the elite still condemn every form of industrial action and are supported by a right-wing press who detest working people and their representatives with a passion. The working people of this country have persistently voted for their descent into slavery but prefer to blame everyone but themselves and their own stupidity. In all of this they are aided and supported by a perversion of the English language from the pigsty and its henchmen in the media who persistently demonise everyone who seeks to challenge the dominant narrative. No-one ever seeks to understand why there is so much discontent and anger amongst working people and why they are so estranged from society. We have even witnessed respectable sources of reportage unwittingly adopting this form of perversion in describing such a development as 'post-truth' when they should be describing it as bare faced lying. Describing what is happening as post-truth is investing it with a character that will not be readily understood by most people and that is exactly what the elite want, to confuse, divide, and conquer. In addition it is perverting our understanding by embedding the assumption that such people ever told the truth in the first place, there never has been a truthful dominant narrative in this country. I do not apologise for reminding you that everything, and I mean everything, that the Scottish people were told by the pigsty and its revolting government and major parties during the 2014 referendum, was a barefaced lie. In addition, we now see that everything we were told by the Leave campaign during the EU referendum was also completely untrue. So, we are in a political system on both sides of the Atlantic whereby we are being expected to respect the outcomes of farcical campaigns of lies and distortions and respect personnel who should be barred from holding political office for all time.

Our free market politicians are persistently telling us that the interests of business and the interests of the nation are the same thing. I will show you in my next post how Adam Smith, the supposed father of free market economics says something quite different. Not Marx, but Adam Smith. You have been warned

Your Servant
Doktor Kommirat

The free market perverts everything, but particulary our language

I attended a carol service at a primary school this morning. Around forty pupils participated in this service none of whom were older than eleven years. It was not really a service as there was no religious input and was simply a joyous celebration of children singing Christmas songs, old and new. The audience was composed of family members of the children, parents, grandparents, uncles and aunts. We were addressed by the head teacher who spoke to us for just over five minutes and in that time referred to the children's performance as 'an enterprise' three times and described the audience as 'customers' three times. My wife restrained me from remonstrating with the teacher at the end. This is an example of why I never assume that someone is educated just because they have academic qualifications. They obviously display a modicum of intelligence, but no educated person, or even someone who reflects on reality, would employ language like that in such a context. That episode reflects on someone who has been brainwashed to a degree and who utilises language without any understanding of what they are saying.

This may seem a rather trivial matter but I ask you to think about it as it demonstrates how deeply the free market narrative has perverted our understanding and in particular our language. I have just been described as a customer as I enjoyed my grandchild's Christmas carols. This would suggest that there was an economic relationship taking place during this social event, which of course is simply nonsensical. By describing the performance as an enterprise you are similarly assuming an economic relationship between what you are doing and the outcomes you are seeking to achieve. Describing it as an enterprise is itself not provocative, but by immediately relating it with the description of the audience as customers, that is exactly what you are doing.

Anyone who has an understanding of sociology recognises that language is symbolic and conveys meanings. Every day we see governments and politicians go to inordinate lengths to distort language and 'spin' it in order to avoid people seeing their lies, understanding their evil and identifying their motives. One of the distinguishing characteristics of the pigsty and its inhabitants is how they constantly parrot that there is no alternative to the dominant economic and political model that is destroying our societies. This was the theme tune of Thatcher and her cronies and it has been very successfully embedded in the British collective conscience. This is evidenced by teachers describing a Christmas performance by eight to eleven year olds in the language of the economic market as an enterprise and their families as customers. Children are not able to discriminate between such use of language and will accept such terminology as the norm. Indeed most adults will fail to discriminate and identify such perversions of the language. However, a parent is a real live flesh and blood person, they are not a thing. A customer is an abstract concept, a thing, a description of a person performing one particular aspect of human behaviour, and such language employment is part of the free market process of dehumanising and atomising people. This is the language of modern British education, providers and customers. No-one learns anything nowadays, they consume, and, if they consume, then of course they should pay for the privilege. Thus, education ceases to be a right or a necessity, it becomes a purchase which, if you cannot afford, then you will have to do without. The same poison is destroying the health service, care, and all sectors of our society. This is the kind of development that produces what sociologists call 'anomie' or normlessness where people experience fewer and fewer reference points in their lives. It is no accident that we are seeing a literal explosion of mental illness within society as people are losing touch with reality; and viewing a family enjoying their children's performance as customers is indeed truly detached from reality. This is a huge problem and a huge topic, but we must challenge all forms of free market perversion, this is just the most recent I have experienced. You have been warned

Your Servant
Doktor Kommirat   

OK Kommirat, what about political reform?

If we are to tackle the evil that is the neoliberal free market then it becomes imperative to reform its political bedfellow, the dominant political systems in our western societies, but in particular Britain. One of the most serious problems facing our modern nation states is the curse of centralised government, and this is a problem in Scotland as much as in the UK as a whole. It is an authoritarian form of centralised government that is required by free market economics. In his ‘Representative Government’ John Stuart Mill argues that

‘The very object of having a local representation, is in order that those who have any interest in common which they do not share with the general body of their countrymen may manage that joint interest by themselves.’
If we are serious about democracy we must accept that democracy requires a system of limited government with defined independent centres of power; there can be no meaningful democracy in a centralised system. A proper democracy requires legitimacy and representation and as wide a dispersal of power as is necessary, and all those three defining characteristics are wholly absent in modern Britain. The principle of local government is neatly summed up by Mill and is designed to satisfy such requirements. When such local responsibility is replaced by a centralised administration, whether from London or Edinburgh, a local individuality of approach is always sacrificed to uniformity, with the flexibility of local decision-making giving way to rigidity and the centralised imposition of a bureaucratic ‘only one way’ of doing things. In addition, given that proper systems of local government necessitate meaningful autonomy from the centre, the power of the state is therefore fragmented and limited. As I have been arguing since I started this blog, the elimination of local government is a symptom of totalitarianism and that was the process begun by Thatcher.

The diversity of life in any modern state requires different approaches to similar problems. This is one of the great strengths of the European Union with its emphasis on subsidiarity. For example, consider policing or refuse collection. It is not rocket science to understand that the solutions to both such fundamental requirements of modern life require differing methods of implementation in different locations. Policing and refuse collection in London will be markedly different in style and implementation from that in Devon or Cornwall. The principles remain the same, but the methodology will differ quite considerably. As a result, direct responsibility for the government of a locality can harness powerful forces on behalf of that community and imaginative and meaningful solutions to local issues. However, for local government and democracy to be effective, local government must be much more than local administration. Local governments are elected locally by the people in that community, and are directly accountable to them. Indeed they are normally very visible in the local community and therefore available and approachable, whereas wherever we find a system of local administration, rather than local government, with education, health gas, water, electricity etc administered by boards and by people appointed from outwith the community, control, in effect, comes from the central government, through ministers and the courts. Membership of such controlling bodies are appointed by central government, and their activities are only accountable to the system, not to the local community they are supposed to serve. One of the features of modern British life, is just such systems of administration replacing local government control through the outsourcing of such functions to the private sector and companies located in London and even overseas.
The principle of subsidiarity is the idea that matters should be handled by the lowest competent authority. The Oxford English Dictionary defines subsidiarity as the idea that a central authority should have a subsidiary function, performing only those tasks which cannot be performed effectively at a more immediate or local level. The concept of subsidiarity is applicable in government and all forms of management. It is a fundamental feature of federalism. Subsidiarity is derived from the Latin subsidiaries, and has its origins in Catholic social teaching.  As I said earlier, it is presently best known as a fundamental principle of European Union law. According to this principle, the EU may only legislate where member states agree that action of individual countries is insufficient. This principle has always underpinned the European Union, and argues that government should undertake only those initiatives which exceed the capacity of individuals or private groups acting independently. The principle is based upon the autonomy and dignity of the human individual, and holds that all other forms of society, from the family to the state and the international order, should be in the service of the human person. Subsidiarity assumes that human beings are by their nature social beings, and emphasizes the importance of small and intermediate-sized communities or institutions, like the family, the church, and voluntary associations, as mediating structures which empower individual action and link the individual to society as a whole.

The principle of subsidiarity was developed in the encyclical Rerum Novarum of 1891 by Pope Leo XIII, to denounce both the excesses of laissez-faire capitalism and authoritarian government. The principle was further developed in a papal encyclical, Quadragesimo Anno in 1931, and in a report by the National Conference of Catholic Bishops called Economic Justice for All. In the encyclical Quadragesimo Anno, the Pope specifically said, in paragraphs 79 and 80:
"As history abundantly proves, it is true that on account of changed conditions many things which were done by small associations in former times cannot be done now save by large associations. Still, that most weighty principle, which cannot be set aside or changed, remains fixed and unshaken in social philosophy: Just as it is gravely wrong to take from individuals what they can accomplish by their own initiative and industry and give it to the community, so also it is an injustice and at the same time a grave evil and disturbance of right order to assign to a greater and higher association what lesser and subordinate organizations can do. For every social activity ought of its very nature to furnish help to the members of the body social, and never destroy and absorb them.....The supreme authority of the State ought, therefore, to let subordinate groups handle matters and concerns of lesser importance, which would otherwise dissipate its efforts greatly. Thereby the State will more freely, powerfully, and effectively do all those things that belong to it alone because it alone can do them: directing, watching, urging, restraining, as occasion requires and necessity demands. Therefore, those in power should be sure that the more perfectly a graduated order is kept among the various associations, in observance of the principle of "subsidiary function," the stronger social authority and effectiveness will be the happier and more prosperous the condition of the State."

As neoliberalism crumbles and is finally discarded it is imperative that we recognise the need for political as well as economic reform. This post has only briefly touched on certain necessary steps, but I trust it will give cause for reflection. You have been warned

Your Servant
Doktor Kommirat

 

Britain is getting quite dark and nasty, but also stupid

I was motivated to post this following a programme I listened to discussing the government's appeal against the Court's decision to require the government to consult Parliament before triggering Article 50 announcing our intention to leave the EU. The BBC interviewed several people in a street in London who all cheerfully denounced the court for attempting to thwart the will of the people, who had all voted to leave, but who all confessed to not having a clue about politics. We have had the spectacle of the Daily Mail publishing the names and addresses, incomes, background and the value of their property, of all eleven Supreme Court judges. This is following on from branding them the enemies of the people. Now if this is not an act of pure hatred and fascist politics then someone will have to tell me what it is. This is getting dangerous and threatens, not only democracy and the rule of law, but the very foundations of the British political system.

Any non-British person who takes an interest in British politics and current affairs must look on in disbelief at the character and the total unprofessionalism of British politicians and of a tabloid press that is quite seriously beginning to look like Germany in the 1930's. We voted to leave the EU in June, and in December, every foreign politician who has been required to negotiate with our government reports how completely at sea they are and devoid of any idea of what they are hoping to achieve except to have all of the benefits they enjoyed whilst being members of the EU, but none of the responsibilities. Foreign politicians respond with incredulity at the ignorance and stupidity of Britain's leading political figures who are demanding what every EU politician repeatedly tells them is quite impossible. If those of you reading this are keeping up to date with British current affairs you will know I am not exaggerating. I was watching an interview with a leading EU diplomat who summed our position up as how we are insisting on a divorce but demanding to keep the house, all the money and all the assets.

What is evident is that none of our political class did any homework before they embarked on the most important exercise in British politics since World War Two. They reveal daily that they really don't know how the EU works  or what membership actually entails. But what is most revealing is that they are now demonstrating their entire case was founded on what I and many others told you during the campaign were a pack of lies. They are now seriously telling us that we may pay to stay in the single market. These are the people who campaigned for six months on a message that when we left the EU we would save at least £350 million per week that would be invested in the NHS and are now telling us that we are prepared to pay even more to stay, not in the whole EU, but only in the single market. This is genuinely verging on insanity and they are getting away with it because all of the people who voted leave are now happily admitting that they know absolutely nothing about politics and voted to halt immigration, simples.  But of course these good people are not racist, perish the thought and are only following the excellent example of their immigrant hating Eton and Oxbridge educated betters, Boris the Spider who was born in the USA and whose family are immigrants, Nigel Garbage whose wife is an immigrant, Michael Gove whose wife is an immigrant etc. etc. If hypocrisy was an Olympic sport British politicians would sweep the medal board. We are in a dark place and its going to get worse as our leaders incompetence translates into crisis. At least we have the possibility in Scotland of independence. You have been warned.

Your Servant
Doktor Kommirat

If Conservatives are Christians then heaven and hell are the same place

Sarah Palin has told us that god intervened in the American Presidential election and describes herself as a Bible believing Christian. If that is the case then god must have a peculiar sense of humour. I was then left wondering if she thinks that god must have intervened to prevent her from becoming Vice-President and if he/she prefers a male imbecile in the White House to a female imbecile. My last reflection in this area was being reminded that Hitler also believed that he had been chosen by whatever he imagined was god. So, if Sarah Palin's god is the god of Christianity she can keep him/her.

I then began to reflect on all those people who call themselves Christian, especially the ones who go into politics but never go into a church. I read an article about a group of Tories being described as Christians and members of something called the Conservative Christian Fellowship. Now, most of the people I have met in my life who boasted of being Christian were some of the most highly hypocritical and at root, nasty people I have ever met, people who were the most brazen liars imaginable. The Christians I have met always claim to love the sinner but hate the sin, but in my experience it's the other way round. They hate the sinner but absolutely love the sin. Two of the kindest, most generous and loving people I have ever met were both gay men who were despised and held in contempt by the good Christian people I knew, not for who they were, but for what they were. If there is such a thing as a good Christian, then my two friends are definitely candidates, despite what the official Christians I know say about them. The Christian never even attempted to look for the character, only for 'the sinner' despite the fact that the Christian clergy is riddled with gay men and women, and if I ever need conformation as to the shallowness of the average Christian I only need to look at people like Sarah Palin, or those good Christian Tories who infest the pigsty. However, I feel that if you are a Bible believing person, then it is not possible to be a political conservative.

If we are to take Christianity at face value and separate it from those who practice it, there are some fundamentals that even a cursory understanding of Christianity must highlight. As I just alluded to, it must show how a Christian and a modern Conservative (whether British or American) are mutually exclusive. The first thing that springs to mind is the instruction in the Bible to love thy neighbour. Now I have searched the Bible and can find no reference to the instruction that this only applies if your neighbour is not an immigrant, or a Mexican, or a Muslim, or that your neighbour must be white, or indeed must be Christian. As the Brexit campaign highlighted, Tories, indeed all right-wingers I have ever met, hate their neighbours with a passion, they hate foreigners of every description, but particularly those who are not white. They also hate their own kind if they are poor, disabled, unemployed etc. A Tory is the antithesis of a Good Samaritan; whilst the Samaritan is tending to the sick and injured the Tory is going through their belongings, stealing their wealth while charging them for any assistance they need. My experience tells me that Christians have a capacity for hate that is quite awesome. If god is indeed a Christian then he/she keeps very unfortunate company.

I do not wish to burden you with a recital of what are supposed to be Christian values as I am sure you are all more familiar with them than I am, but I will make the observation that the last thing Britain and America are, are Christian countries. For example, there are many instructions in the Bible concerning 'the stranger within thy gates' and none of them refer to demonising such people as we demonise our immigrants. There are instructions on the welfare of the poor and needy etc. instructions we used to at least pay lip service to but have long ago abandoned. What characterises today's societies that have adopted the free market ideological narrative is their complete indifference to ethical behaviour and common decency. The biggest culprits are the British who are shameless in their greed, inequality and mendacity. In their claims to be Christian, they must also be the world leaders in self-delusion and hypocrisy. You have been warned

Your Servant
Doktor Kommirat

OK Kommirat, what would you do?

Given that I am so hostile to the dominant ideology of free market neoliberalism and active in its denunciation, friends frequently challenge me to provide an alternative. When I give them my thoughts on that they then ask me why I have never written of this in this blog. They are of course correct, and, until recently, it had never occurred to me. People like me should be tasked with providing alternatives given that there are none being provided in mainstream society. Many of my following thoughts are also applicable in the United States, although the average American will be horrified and immediately condemn me for communism, which of course is nonsense. As I keep telling you, I am not an 'ist' and have never advocated any form of 'ism'. In addition, it is no use simply condemning the following as socialist or communist because they are no such thing and indeed much of what I will advocate can be found in Adam Smith and Alfred Marshall, so, if I am a socialist so are they. 

There is no doubt that we are in a crisis, and my arguments are designed to address this crisis, they should not be interpreted as an ideological position. They are what I feel are necessary in the short to medium term to recover some form of civilisation and decency. I will not rehash all the statistics about poverty, foodbanks, malnutrition, inequality etc. as you are all very aware of them yourselves, even though some of you may be indifferent to them, but will merely give you some of the things that
I would do as social and economic imperatives were I given the opportunity. My proposals are not in any particular order of either merit or necessity as I have not planned this post and am simply making it up as I write. If I were to do this properly I would take far more care. Anyway, the immediate priority of any recovery is a massive and significant redistribution of resources in tandem with the creation of jobs, homes and an efficient welfare system. A low wage multiple job economy is stupid and I don't apologise for reminding you that Adam Smith also condemned a low wage economy as economically nonsensical. If the bulk of your population has little income, who are you going to sell your goods to?

As the biggest potential employer in any nation is its local government I would free local government from the shackles of the pigsty and allow them to create jobs and local opportunities for their own communities. They must be given powers of local taxation for which they will be responsible to their local electors and by which they can recoup the functions they have been forced to hand over to a rotten and corrupt private sector. That criticism of the private sector is not ideological, it is empirical given that the private sector has abysmally failed in almost every area it has been given responsibility for. There cannot be, nor ever should be, a profit impetus in public service, all surplus that may be, or can be, generated within the public sector must be immediately reinvested. We must have a radical change in taxation and divert much of our tax away from indirect and onto direct. I would immediately reduce VAT for example and put the reduction onto income tax. I would immediately outlaw the bonus system. I find this system abhorrent and completely insensible. People get paid for a job and the incentive for you to perform that job to the best of your ability is to avoid the sack if you don't, that is how 'normal' workers live. I would severely restrict corporate salaries and transfer the money saved to the workers in such corporations as it is they who actually create the wealth and their increased wages will stimulate economic activity instead of that money disappearing into foreign banks where it does no good.

There must be large-scale public spending on job creation, paid for largely out of taxation instead of borrowing. Firms that we all know pay no or little tax would be immediately billed for their deficit and if they still sought to avoid taxes their licence to operate in this country would be immediately withdrawn and all their assets nationalised. Councils would be required to embark on large-scale council house programmes and the bulk of the managerial staff in all public sector services, but particularly the NHS, would be replaced and their salaries downgraded. If they don't want to do the job there are plenty of people who will, and, given the persistent negative reports we get about the efficiency of such managerial staff they will never be missed.

I could obviously go on, but these are just some of the things I feel must be addressed as a matter of priority. I could tell you so much more I would do politically, but that is for another time.  If anyone wishes me to expand on this please ask, you have been warned

Your Servant
Doktor Kommirat

Free Market Economics - The Abomination that Maketh Desolate

I do not wish to give the impression that I have gone quite mad and taken up religion, but there is a very interesting passage from the Bible that I wish to use as a metaphor for neoliberal free market economics, and this is neatly complimented by criticisms levelled at this economic model by religious leaders. I am doing this because the situation we find ourselves in as a result of the neoliberal market experiment is moral and political as well as economic. In chapter 11 verse 31 of the Biblical Book of Daniel, we read,

“And arms shall stand on his part, and they shall pollute the sanctuary of strength, and shall take away the daily sacrifice and they shall place the abomination that maketh desolate”.

The Jewish Encyclopedia tells us that this verse refers to a historical incident in 168 BC when on Kislew (Nov. – Dec.) 25, under orders from the Greek king of the Seleucid Empire Antiochus 1V Epiphanes, the Temple of Jerusalem was desecrated when ‘the abomination that maketh desolate’ was set up on the altar of the burnt offering and the Jews were required to make obeisance to it. My 8th Edition copy of Young’s Analytical Concordance published in 1939, tells me that the word ‘abomination’ in Daniel 11.31 comes from the Hebrew word ‘shiqquts’ which means, abominable, a detestable thing. This particular abomination was reputed to be a statue of either Zeus or Jupiter. Thus, the abomination that maketh desolate was an idol, a false god that brought desolation to the very core of a people’s culture and directly attacked their fundamental belief system. It was designed to humiliate and subjugate them under an alien set of beliefs and norms, to destroy their existing society and culture. Thus, to the Jewish people this representation of a false god, implanted at the very heart of their most holy place, was a pollutant, an abomination, a detestable thing, designed to render the Jewish way of life desolate. I find this description of a historical catastrophe for the Jewish people a very suitable analogy for the desolation caused by the abomination that is modern free market neoliberal economic and political theory and practice. Neoliberalism is an idol, a false god that has attacked and transformed traditional British cultural norms and values, and, as our very own Antiochus Epiphanes, the blessed Thatcher so brutally told us, was an instrument for the destruction of our society. It is a pollutant that was designed to corrode and eat away at our modern sanctuary of strength, the Welfare State, with the ultimate goal of destroying it. It is an ideology that has brought desolation to British society, that seeks to destroy that society leaving a remnant collection of individuals and families with little or no social ties to each other, with no meaningful norms and values other than those prescribed by the neoliberal political and economic elite and who are motivated solely by the selfishness and greed that is promoted by a particular type of market individualism that elevates injustice to a moral imperative. And, as I continually tell you, all this was quite deliberate and unleashed upon us consciously by a corrupt gangster elite. 

We were greeted this week with the revelation from Parliamentary archives that, despite Thatcher endlessly claiming that the NHS was safe in Tory hands, she actually provoked what was described as a riot within her Cabinet by her insistence on the privatisation of both the NHS and our education system. Her crusade to destroy the welfare state and reduce the working class to the level of a modern form of slavery was relegated, because of opposition to its brutality (from which the modern day Tory party has recovered), from an imperative to a long-term strategy that we see beginning to reach fruition with the NHS reduced to such a crisis that privatisation will be presented as the only alternative. Thatcher's planned destruction of British society and state was only delayed, not abandoned. With your permission I will continue with some religious observations because on many things I find myself in the unusual position of being at one with the Catholic Church. I know you may find this strange coming from me, but, as I have told you, I am not an 'ist' and do not believe in 'isms' and am quite prepared to give credit wherever it is due, whether that is Adam Smith, Karl Marx or the Catholic Church etc.  On 29th June 2009, the Catholic Church published a Papal Encyclical "Caritas in Veritate" by Pope Benedict XVI. In it he wrote
"Economic activity cannot solve all social problems through the simple application of commercial logic. This needs to be directed towards the pursuit of the common good, for which the political community in particular must also take responsibility. Therefore, it must be borne in mind that grave imbalances are produced when economic action, conceived merely as an engine for wealth creation, is detached from political action, conceived as a means for pursuing justice through redistribution."

This was an early criticism of the free market from the Church and was followed in November 2013 by a ringing denunciation of neoliberal ideological theory and practice in an Apostolic Exhortation published by Pope Francis entitled "Evangelii Guadium" in which the Pope said

 “Just as the commandment “Thou shalt not kill” sets a clear limit in order to safeguard the value of human life, today we also have to say “thou shalt not” to an economy of exclusion and inequality. Such an economy kills. How can it be that it is not a news item when an elderly homeless person dies of exposure, but it is news when the stock market loses two points? This is a case of exclusion. Can we continue to stand by when food is thrown away while people are starving? This is a case of inequality. Today everything comes under the laws of competition and the survival of the fittest, where the powerful feed upon the powerless. As a consequence, masses of people find themselves excluded and marginalized: without work, without possibilities, without any means of escape……Human beings are themselves considered consumer goods to be used and then discarded. We have created a “disposable” culture which is now spreading. It is no longer simply about exploitation and oppression, but something new. Exclusion ultimately has to do with what it means to be a part of the society in which we live; those excluded are no longer society’s underside or its fringes or its disenfranchised – they are no longer even a part of it. The excluded are not the “exploited” but the outcast, the “leftovers”.

He continued

“One cause of this situation is found in our relationship with money, since we calmly accept its dominion over ourselves and our societies. The current financial crisis can make us overlook the fact that it originated in a profound human crisis: the denial of the primacy of the human person! We have created new idols. The worship of the ancient golden calf (cf. Ex 32:1-35) has returned in a new and ruthless guise in the idolatry of money and the dictatorship of an impersonal economy lacking a truly human purpose. The worldwide crisis affecting finance and the economy lays bare their imbalances and, above all, their lack of real concern for human beings; man is reduced to one of his needs alone: consumption.”

I welcome such comments, regardless of who makes them. This post must surely be self-explanatory and I will end here as it is already too long, but as usual, you have been warned, and I have powerful allies now, though the papacy may not welcome me, I welcome them to a good cause, the ultimate end to the poison that is the free market, a poison that is economic, political, moral and spiritual.

Your Servant
Doktor Kommirat

Impoverishing the middle classes is just not cricket

My apologies as I have been away and have not posted for a week. I am spoiled for choice about subject matter as the British press are today full of reports on the state of the economy. After six years in office, and after assuring us that they would have the British economy in surplus by 2016, the Tories are presiding over a £1.9 trillion national debt. This is actually a meaningless sum for ordinary people for whom £1 million is a lifetimes fortune. What it does highlight is the proof how your Kommirat has been warning you how spectacularly incompetent the Tories are. However, even I have underestimated them, this is Olympic gold medal incompetence. What it also highlights is how I have been warning you that the long-running saga of free market economics is now in its death throes. The papers are also reporting the growing disillusionment with Theresa May, our running joke of a Prime Minister. Remember, you read about her unsuitability for the job here first.

People occasionally take me to task for my assertions that the British ruling class are quite deliberately and systematically reducing the working people of this nation to a state of modern slavery. Such people mean well and feel that I am being unnecessarily dramatic and alarmist. In addition, most people feel that their country would not do that to its own people, they are, by different degrees, patriotic and don't want to think ill of their own nation, the 'it couldn't happen here' syndrome. The first thing I do with people is ask them to reflect on the gains that working people made following the Second World War and how, since Thatcher came to power, they have been systematically removed. I ask them to reflect on the gradual descent of Britain into an uncivilised society where working people and the disadvantaged have been systematically impoverished and deliberately made to feel that they deserve their fate and should know their place. I have written before how I consider one of the fundamental benchmarks of a civilised society is its housing conditions and how this country's housing situation is now in permanent crisis. However, the pigsty passed into law the Investigatory Powers Act last Thursday making Britain the nation labouring under the most comprehensive surveillance in the western world. This Act requires search engines to record every site visited on the internet by everyone living in Britain for government information. In other words, the British now, by an Act of Parliament, have no privacy whatsoever. In addition, Brexit is now estimated to cost every household in the country £1,250 per annum for the foreseeable future, whilst by 2021 real wages will be below where they were in 2008. That is what the British voted for last year. They voted for a pack of lying incompetents, their own impoverishment, levels of surveillance Goebbels would have been proud of and increasing poverty. But good luck to them, because after all this is all the fault of immigrants isn't it?.

Britain is a shockingly exclusive society, it is a class society. We had a short history of some thirty years after 1945 where efforts were made to be an inclusive society and care for all classes through a meaningful distribution of resources. This took the form of council housing, free further and higher education, a serious pension scheme for the elderly, welfare benefits for the disadvantaged, occupational pensions, steady and permanent employment, apprenticeships for the young, and protective employment legislation. On top of the heap was an inclusive and embracing health service. This was paid for by taxation, primarily direct taxation. But then Thatcher came in with her ideological hatred of the state and taxation. She conclusively won the battle of ideas and so people like me became oddities and an anachronism, and so, rather than raise taxes on income, we have run up a £1.9 trillion national debt. That's what ideology does to you.

In those thirty years of attempting a more just distribution of resources, Britain still had its monarchy, its upper classes, still had wealthy people and the sky did not fall, nor the world come to an end. But this redistribution of wealth and resources enraged the elite, particularly those people, championed by Thatcher, for whom enough is never enough. It also irritated the middle classes who resented uppity working people, and particularly their representatives in the trade unions, getting above themselves and demanding to be treated as human beings instead of cattle. As Thatcher declared war on workers, the poor and the disadvantaged, the middle classes cheered to the rafters, they are not cheering now. They have seen the elite turn on them once they had soaked the workers for most of what they had, well you get what you vote for. This post has been a bit general but Britain is in a crisis and I wish to give you something to think about that you may not get in the media. Brexit has been, and will continue to be, a disaster, the free market has always been a disaster but was able to appear a boon to many people for a long time before its inevitable repercussions came home to roost. At the end of the day however, the only people to blame are the British electorate, as a wise man once said, never underestimate the stupidity of the average voter. You have been warned.

Your Servant
Doktor Kommirat

Boris, it's getting beyond a joke

I just had to update you on The Spider's latest demonstration of his grasp of his remit and his grasp of politics in general, which is indicative of the general level of incompetence of the British government. At first I thought I had misread the latest reports because even I did not believe that he could be so stupid, but on a visit to the Czech Republic Boris stated that the idea that free movement of people is a founding pillar of the EU is 'bollocks'. That was the word the British Foreign Secretary used in an interview with a national newspaper in another nation state (you can of course do that if you went to Eton and Oxford, because those Europeans are obviously lesser beings). He then went on to claim that the Treaty of Rome does not mention the free movement of people. He told the Czechs that

“Everybody now has it in their head that every human being has some fundamental God-given right to move wherever they want. It’s not true. That was never the case. That was never a founding principle of the EU. Total myth,”

Now, that was a quite astonishing thing for any politician to say, let alone the third ranking politician in the United Kingdom and betrays a complete lack of understanding of the EU that he spent over six months during a referendum campaign assuring the British people he was expert in and must be listened to. He is, in the proper definition, ignorant of a fundamental understanding of the most important area of his political remit as Foreign Secretary. What I cannot understand is why he has not already been sacked. If any worker in any organisation displayed such a blatant ignorance of their job they would not last five minutes. I went back to the Treaty of Rome and simply cut and pasted some of it for your convenience. For example in Part 1 of the Treaty it says

Treaty of Rome - Part 1 Principles

Article 3. For the purposes set out in Article 2, the activities of the Community shall include, as provided by this Treaty and in accordance with the timetable set out therein:

(c) an internal market characterized by the abolition, as between Member States, of obstacles to the free movement of goods, persons, services and capital;

If we move to Part 3 which sets out this principle in detail, covering ten different articles of principle it includes

Part Three - Community Policies

Title Three - Free Movement of Persons, Services and Capital

Chapter 1 - Workers
This Chapter then details the ten different Articles that I have just spoken about and I will not bore you with details, I will simply reproduce the first of the ten Articles contained in Part 3 Chapter 1. This begins with Article 48 which reads

Article 48.
Freedom of movement for workers shall be secured within the Community by the end of the transitional period at the latest.
Such freedom of movement shall entail the abolition of any discrimination based on nationality between workers of the Member States as regards employment, remuneration and other conditions of work and employment.
It shall entail the right, subject to limitations justified on grounds of public policy, public security or public health:
(a) to accept offers of employment actually made;
(b) to move freely within the territory of Member States for this purpose;
(c) to stay in a Member State for the purpose of employment in accordance with the provisions governing the employment of nationals of that State laid down by law, regulation or administrative action;
(d) to remain in the territory of a Member State after having been employed in that State, subject to conditions which shall be embodied in implementing regulations to be drawn up by the Commission.

Believe me there are another nine Articles expanding on this concept of the free movement of workers and the British Foreign Secretary is blissfully unaware of their existence. This Treaty has been in existence since 1957 by the way, before he was born, and it is even more telling given that he was based in Brussels for a time as EU correspondent for the Daily Telegraph. Now, I have frequently referred to how I categorise many so called experts as well-schooled but not well educated. Here we have a graphic example of someone who can attend the most prestigious educational establishments in Britain, if not the world, pass through them with full honours, rise to the highest offices in the land and not even reach the level of well-schooled, never mind educated. This is the British class system. Is it any wonder that real intellects like Adam Smith and Jeremy Bentham called Oxford a complete waste of time. David Hume spent six months in Cambridge and asked for his money back.

Now in the Bible the proverbs tell us to answer a fool according to his folly, lest he be wise in his own conceit. I recount this matter to you, not as a jibe at Boris Johnson, but as an example of the kind of people who rise to the top in our societies because they belong to an elite, attend elite schools and universities and think that rules, regulations, decency and dignity are for other people, because they have a sense of entitlement that absolve them from the constraints that apply to the rest of us. Johnson is an opinion former and was one of the chief advocates of Brexit, demonising the EU and persuading enough people that he knew what he was talking about. He was listened to because in class ridden Britain his background ensures that his opinions will be listened to and respected, even when they are (and I will use his own language here) bollocks. His class position even absolves him from the need to do his homework and apply a bit of diligence to his job. Johnson is a product of a sick society. This man is making a fool of himself throughout the world and the rest of the world is now seeing the imbecile that we have all witnessed over the past ten years in this country, but, he went to Eton and Oxford, was a member of the Bullingdon Club along with all his other Tory mates who went on to become Prime Minister and Chancellor and who brought Britain to a crises in both political and economic matters, and must be treated different from the plebs, even allowed to insult other nations and their elected representatives. I will end here but trust this will give you a flavour of the corrosive poison that is the class system and the damage it can wreck on society, giving us a ruling class that are simply appalling. You have been warned.

Your Servant
Doktor Kommirat

 

Turkeys voting for Christmas? How dare the British insult turkeys!

In the aftermath of the Brexit shambles and Trump's electoral victory, our news is now full of our beloved experts writing how both these events mark the beginning of the end for free market liberalism. I do not share their optimism, but they are at least beginning to place the blame for our misfortunes where it should lie. We may even see the beginning of the end of the tedious and sinister narrative that it is all the fault of immigrants, the EU, the unemployed, the disabled etc. If that is true then both events may turnout to be a blessing in disguise. As a result, I returned to my first post on this blog in August 2012 where I wrote
"What I hope to achieve in the future is a clear recognition amongst people with a scintilla of intelligence that the neoliberal free market experiment has been well and truly demonstrated to be a disaster and is both practically and intellectually dead. Free market economic theory is a fraud and is based on flawed intellectual and theoretical assumptions, it is, if I may be allowed to quote Engels, ‘a developed system of licensed fraud, an entire science of enrichment.’"

Another persistent theme of this blog has been to catalogue the continuing descent of Britain's working class into a condition of virtual slavery. It is now evident that the same phenomenon has been occurring in the United States. This of course is a direct and quite deliberate result of free market economics and is the principal driver of both Brexit and Trump. The tragedy is that both the Brexiteers and Trump himself, have successfully convinced enough people that the cause of their misery is still the immigrants, etc. 'the others' of popular mythology, with the result that the mass of the people themselves have still to understand the poisonous legacy of neoliberalism and therefore the true source of where their anger should be directed. Thus, those who voted Brexit and Trump have once again put their faith in false prophets, in fact the same kind of people who caused their woes in the first place.

As I frequently write, this situation is the result of enough people in both nations voting for their own impoverishment and slavery, all I can do is warn them what they are doing and hope that they are misguided and not doing it deliberately. I find it hard to have sympathy for people who are so wilfully blind to their own predicament and willing to place their faith in people who are so demonstrably stupid, incompetent and disgustingly venal as the elites in both our benighted nations, but recognise that they are not the majority, just the enough. I also recognise that me, my family and all my friends are on the sharp end of the gangsters who run our world, and so I continue to highlight their criminality as long as someone is willing to listen. At least there are some people in our societies, ironically called experts, who are at last beginning to realise what I have been telling you for the past four years. I have already written that Brexit and Trump are the natural consequence of the free market, of Thatcher/Reaganism and the institutionalisation of greed and selfishness as deliberate public policy in both societies, and that another natural consequence of this is the continuous war against working people. This has resulted in Britain becoming quite uncivilised and descending into a form of barbarism, and following on from the US election, it is evident that these conditions also apply in the USA. As of this September, there were 903,000 people in the UK on zero hours contracts. There are now more than 7m Britons in what is designated as 'precarious employment'.

Precarious employment is jargon for people who can lose their job at very short, or no, notice. That is one in five of the British workforce and is getting worse all the time. It has grown by two million in the past ten years. Thatcher, Reagan, and their acolytes laid all the foundations that allow such working conditions. In Britain this meant destroying the union movement, making industrial action almost impossible and convincing a gullible British public that trades unions and workers, particularly in the public sector, were the devil incarnate. It also involved the destruction of employment rights and law, and deregulating bullying and harassment by managers and corporations. It is now the norm for employers to utilise self-employed workers and increasingly recruit on temporary and zero-hours contracts. The Tories boast about the rise in the number of self-employed, but over fifty percent of such workers are in low paid poverty wages and take home less than two-thirds of median income. The Chairman of the government's own commission into social mobility, Alan Milburn, one of Mad Tony's cronies, stated that

“There is something profound going on and all of this poses a potential risk to social cohesion and a risk to the potential for social mobility”

It must be bad when even the vilest of the pigsty reach such conclusions, he being of course one of the authors of this situation. He reported that self-employed workers typically earn about half the wage of permanent employees, zero-hours contractors about 40% and temp workers around two-thirds. These are the same people who voted Brexit and so voted to entrench their own misery. You genuinely could not make it up.

Ps. For those of you who feel that I am too harsh on Boris the Spider, I trust you are following his fortunes as Foreign Secretary. It is wonderful to watch him demonstrating every day and with every utterance that he is an even greater imbecile than I gave him credit for. The man is a disaster and will surely need to be sacked as a matter of priority, he is so useless and so obviously mad that I am beginning to develop a fondness for him. This is the sort of person that the British placed their faith in as their future. We can never criticise the Americans over Trump when we have the Spider. You have been warned.

Your Servant
Doktor Kommirat

 

The Unthinkable has just been thunked

Well, it's happened, the unthinkable has been thunked (I know there is no such word because I've just made it up). The Anglo-Saxon world is now dominated by the forces of reaction and irrationality. Both the Trump presidency and the Brexit vote were purchased by appealing to our lowest common denominator, by fostering bigotry, a corrosive and divisive xenophobia, appealing to the huge racist underbelly of both Britain and the US by the demonising of immigrants, Muslims and foreigners in general. This highlights in graphic detail the nonsense of seeing human beings as fundamentally rational beings aware of their best interests, the bedrock of free market economics.

I know there will be endless speculation as to the reasons for these quite revolutionary changes, but let me give you Kommirat's. These will be familiar to you if you read this blog, but they will be quite different from anything you will read from your British and US established commentators because in order to properly understand it you will have to connect with the big bogeyman, Karl Marx, whose name is never mentioned by commentators in either nation as a source of information or enlightenment, he being of course the ultimate demon. It was Marx however who showed us how the political and social superstructure of any society is built upon, and is a reflection of, its economic base. I argue that Marx's description of the relationship of base and superstructure has become so obvious in our modern societies that I find it difficult why anyone would question it, but of course the answer is self-evident, it's by Marx and so must be wrong. However, as Marx shows us, erected upon the economic base of a society, are all the legal, political and social structures within that society that are required to maintain, sustain, protect, nourish, expand and develop the full potential of the economic infrastructure. As a result, in a slave economy for example, the legal system will produce laws to protect the ownership and exploitation of slaves. The belief system will produce a set of beliefs that justify slavery (God meant certain racial and ethnic groups to be slaves and white people to be the masters). The education system will promote these ideas to the young people and teach them that the law, and therefore the system of slavery, is good and just, and the political system will be designed to protect all of the above, with only the ‘correct’ people being allowed decision-making powers. For example, when the Founding Fathers sat down in Philadelphia to design the American political system, they had to decide how to elect a government. This required them to decide who should have a vote. This was a slave economy, and so the same people who had just written in the American Declaration of Independence that “It is self-evident that all men are created equal” decided that, for electoral purposes, a slave only equaled three-fifths of a human being. Ironically, the man who wrote that it was self-evident that all men are created equal was himself a slave-owner.

Similarly, in a capitalist economy such as ours, the legal and political system will be structured to protect, sustain and expand an economic system based on private property. All of the social institutions will similarly reflect that. The belief system will teach that this system is right and proper and good. It will also teach that any beliefs that challenge these assumptions are dangerous, wrong, misguided etc. Such sentiments will be portrayed in the mass media, and the whole political, legal and social system will be structured on a system of social class. This class system will also reflect the ownership and control of the economic infrastructure and the education system will design the curriculum around all of the latest technology in order to prepare young people to enter the world of work and meet the needs of the system, whilst the political system will provide the schools, colleges and universities with the technological equipment necessary for such training. In this way Marx showed us how society reflects the system of economic production upon which it is erected.

The superstructure also reflects the ideology of the economic base and thus it is the dominant ideology of free market neoliberalism that has produced both the Trump presidency and the Brexit vote. The economic model of the free market has determined the ideological approach to all public policy for the last forty years and so our political structures must be designed to support this model regardless of whether it is fit for purpose or not. That is the principal reason for the British Labour Party embracing the free market. All the standard explanations we are getting are actually manifestations of and the consequences of, free market neoliberalism, because the exclusivity of our societies have also scrupulously excluded any other possible narratives. As I have been warning you for years, this is an ideology that is first and foremost exclusive, designed to reward a small sector of society at the expense of the rest. Significantly, the most excluded have been the working classes in both societies along with their representative organisations, the unemployed, the sick and disabled, but, as the greedy got greedier and the exclusive nature of public policy got more intense, a greater proportion of society, particularly the middle classes, found themselves being excluded as well, as the rapacity of the elite and their policy making lackeys broke all bounds of decency. These were people who had hitherto applauded the exclusion of the workers and the destruction of the union movement, but now found that they had unleashed forces that were out of their control, protected by a political class that had lost all sympathy with the rest of the nation, driven by a malignant ideology that told them that the poor and disadvantaged deserved their poverty, it was their own fault.

The free market is an ideology that is devoid of any moral content and has no ethical boundaries, producing a class of elite gangsters for whom enough is never enough. This has had profound implications for the moral and ethical structures in both the USA and Britain. It is an ideology that promotes greed and selfishness as 'goods' with social concerns for other people as 'bads' because such concerns require resources to be raised and distributed to what this ideology labels the undeserving, the shirkers and scroungers of Tory and Daily Mail mythology, but most importantly, immigrants and refugees. Trump and Brexit are the logical conclusion of Thatcher/Reaganism and the spread of the free market poison that has been destroying our respective societies slowly from within for the past forty years. This has resulted in the disenfranchised, the marginalised, the excluded, reacting as all such groups have done throughout history. They have turned to a messiah, a saviour that is going to lead them to the promised land of milk and honey. In Britain it was 'taking back control' 'sovereignty' and looking to the prophets who were promising that once this was achieved everything would be alright whilst salving their conscience with a scapegoat propaganda that their misfortunes were the fault of 'the other'. In America it is the same message, this time labelled 'making America great again'. My complaint is that if these people have pinpointed not only the solutions, but the original problem, why did they have to gain their victories by barefaced lying, bullying, demonising and creating fear and hatred? Answer, because they are false prophets, a fraud.

The source of their problems are not of course immigrants, Muslims etc. it is an ideology, an intellectual disease, and there can be no solution unless we inoculate the body politic against this poison, provide an intellectual antidote, and look to people who not only understand this, but can articulate solutions. There can be no solution within Britain because we are trusting in the biggest set of free market imbeciles imaginable, people who are intellectually incapable of seeing the problem, let alone attempting to solve it. However, I see a couple of potential silver linings in Trump's victory. His campaign and his proposals to make America great again contain hints that he may be prepared to abandoned the free market model. He does not understand the problem, but appears to be hitching his wagon to a solution similar to Roosevelt's approach to the Great Depression. I hope I am right. In addition, he actually seems to take a far more sane view of relations with Russia than our dominant western narrative, discarding the traditional 'he's a bad man' approach to Vladimir Putin, although I suspect he is doing it for the wrong reasons. Regardless of his motives this must surely lessen tensions and the possibility of conflict. I apologise for the length of this post, and if you have read this far you have my sincere gratitude. There is obviously much more I could write on this subject but trust that I have given at least a flavour that will make you think. In any case, you have been warned

Your Servant
Doktor Kommirat

Someone in the UN has been reading Doktor Kommirat

I think someone in the United Nations has been reading Doktor Kommirat. A UN Report, published in Geneva yesterday afternoon has concluded that the pigsty's austerity measures amount to what it called 'systematic violations' of the rights of people with disabilities. Importantly, in support of Ken Loach's accusation of conscious cruelty, the Report also says that the government knew that their policies would be harmful and damaging to the most disadvantaged. This is a quite devastating indictment of the British government, who, without a scintilla of shame, have responded by saying that “While the government continues to improve and build on the support available to disabled people, it stands by and is proud of its record.” This from a government that the UN has just accused of deliberately and systematically dismantling those supports, an accusation Kommirat has been making for years. The pigsty accused the UN of providing a quite inaccurate picture of life for disabled people in the UK, despite the fact that the UN's evidence comes from those same disabled people as the Report was the result of an eleven day inquiry tour by two UN envoys who met over 200 people, officials, MPs and academics. They are indeed despicable. The UN accuses the Tories on the grounds that their measures 'have disproportionately and adversely affected disabled people'. Importantly, the UN argues that this involves disabled people's human rights, and accused the pigsty of creating a climate where they were portrayed as 'lazy and putting a burden on taxpayers'. In addition disabled people live in a society where they experience 'increasing hostility, aggressive behaviour and sometimes attacks to their personal integrity', and concludes that 'There is reliable evidence that the threshold of grave or systematic violations of the rights of persons with disabilities has been met.' I await the response of the Mail and the Express with interest who have been in the forefront of the demonization of the disabled reported by the UN. As a result of tabloid journalism and the pronouncements of Tory MP's the disabled in Britain are routinely the victims of hate crime.

Of all the disabilities that we see around us, a mental illness must be amongst our greatest curses. It would therefore be fitting that society takes greater care of the mentally ill than most other sections of society, as these are people who quite literally are incapable of looking after themselves. Not according to the British government however. It is perhaps the greatest indictment that can be levelled against the pigsty that their treatment of the mentally ill is a national shame and humiliation, and that. rather than doing everything in our power to alleviate these poor souls, the British spend their time looking for as many ways as possible to cut as much of the resources available to them as they can. Don't take Kommirat's word for it, I have the support of the United Nations. This is modern free market political economy, which I continually remind you, considers anything, including the disabled, who appear to have no economic benefit, to be valueless and worthless, they are considered, as the Nazis called them, 'useless eaters'. Let us consider the thoughts of Adam Smith, who is supposedly the theoretical inspiration behind the free market. He wrote

"Of all the calamities to which the condition of mortality exposes mankind, the loss of reason appears, to those who have the least spark of humanity, by far the most dreadful, and they behold that last stage of human wretchedness with deeper commiseration than any other".

Am I being unkind if I interpret Smith to argue that the denizens of the pigsty, but particularly the modern Tory Party, do not possess the least spark of humanity? Who is higher on the Tory ladder of priorities, a disabled person, or a failed banker? I leave the reader to fill in all of the other Tory priorities that take precedent over the disabled and disadvantaged as to do so would turn this post into a book to challenge War and Peace. With what commiseration does the Westminster Parliament behold the disabled, answer, none. People look at me in silent disbelief when I tell them I no longer regard myself as British. Britain has become a shameful place characterised by hate, greed and contempt for the unfortunate and anyone they consider 'the other.' Adam Smith was not British, he was a Scot, a civilised man. He was most certainly not the author of the intellectual filth that poses as free market economics. You have been warned.

Your Servant
Doktor Kommirat

The Kommirat Thesaurus

I appear to have been read by some people who have never read this blog before and for that I am very grateful and I welcome you. However, it also appears that I am confusing some of them with my language. People who read this blog regularly will be aware that my reference to 'the pigsty' is a reference to the Westminster Parliament that is staffed by a set of political charlatans and scoundrels who are only in politics to get their noses in the trough as deep as they can before they are found out for their incompetence and sacked by their constituents. Unfortunately, the British electorate seem to be quite happy to be ruled by gangsters who are enriching themselves at their expense.

I am a Scot, and the other reference that confuses people is 'a midden.' I explained before in another post, that a midden is a Scottish word describing a communal garbage disposal area. Thus midden is used to describe a mess, a shambles, a collection of refuse. In my opinion Britain has become a midden and Westminster is self-evidently a midden as it is the best example of a collection of human detritus imaginable. The inhabitants of the pigsty are bereft of decency, morality, ethical behaviour, and above all, intelligence. They display neither dignity nor self-respect. On national television a Cabinet Minister, the appalling Sajid Javid, whom I warned you to keep an eye on as he is one of the worst examples of the pigsty mentality, announced that the decision of the judiciary to maintain the principal of parliamentary sovereignty over an overweening executive was unacceptable. This is from a creature who voted to refuse entry to 3,000 refugee children, from a member of a government who have been rightly accused of practising conscious cruelty in their public policies. The honourable Sajid Javid is himself a member of a family of refugees, of immigrants. But of course he is a Tory, so that's different.

Under Westminster's care, the British have descended into a place where it is OK to demonise the judiciary for simply doing their job and raising the spectre of homophobia by telling the world that one of the judges who made the decision that so enraged them was gay. What on earth that has to do with anything remains a mystery, but for the British right-wing press it seems important. UKIP has been encouraged to flaunt its fascist tendencies and demand that the judiciary are taken under political control as a matter of urgency. Their leader, Nigel Garbage, has called for demonstrations outside the Supreme Court in order to intimidate the judges who will hear the government's appeal, and is encouraging civil unrest if their decision does not please UKIP. It took this government three days, under pressure from all areas of the nation, including some of their own people, to speak out in support of the judges. They of course do not mean one word of their weasel words and that must raise serious alarm to their intentions to uphold the independence of the judiciary and the rule of law once we have left the EU and its protection of our rights.

As evidence of this, only today, the British government flatly refused to protect working people's basic rights once we have left the EU. I have been warning for years that this is one of their primary goals, the enslavement of working people and reducing them to poverty. Perhaps people will now start taking notice. However, my sympathies principally lie with the Scottish working class, because the workers in England and Wales were at the forefront of the Brexit campaign and so I respect their decision to vote for their own future state of slavery. If that is what they want, who am I to argue? It must not happen in Scotland however.

Under Westminster's care the British tabloid press have ceased reporting the news and exist solely to propagate outrageous lies, propaganda, and above all hate. Like their friends in the pigsty they wallow in filth. Even some of the Broadsheet papers like the Daily Telegraph (described as the Conservative Party house journal) joined the chorus of hatred for the judiciary, but the tabloid press sustain a relentless campaign of hatred and denigration for anyone who seeks any kind of moderation and compromise. Their hatred for all things Scottish is visceral as anyone who ever reads them will find. I am sorry if this post has resembled a rant, but we are indeed heading into dark waters and, paradoxically, I am motivated by one of Toryism's foremost philosophers, Edmund Burke. I disagree with Burke on most things, and advise you all to read Thomas Paine who simply fillets him and dismantles his philosophy. But on one thing he warned us of, we can all agree, when he warned us that 'all it requires for evil to prosper is for good men to do nothing.' Evil is indeed prospering in this sorry nation. You have been warned

Your Servant
Doktor Kommirat