My wife asked me why Scotland appears to be so different from England politically? That's an excellent question and my answer here will be necessarily superficial as this is a huge question for which I can only give a summary. The first difference is cultural. Scotland has a cultural history that is rooted in the clan system, thus, Scotland has a more tribal history than England, which I argue helps to explain why Scotland is culturally more socially and community minded and has not been so deeply poisoned by the dominant individualism. This tribalism is not manifest in Scotland today as no-one in Scotland is at all affected by their historical clan roots and their only connection is their name. However, the Scots still identify with that system culturally through our national symbols that we exploit through tourism, tartan, bagpipes, haggis (which almost no-one ever eats), kilts (which almost no-one ever wears), and a clan system we barely identify with but exploit when it suits us. As a result, Scots have an identity that is recognisable throughout the world that the English do not share. In addition, most Scots identify as British, but importantly, and this is another historical legacy, as European. As a result, Scotland is a genuinely multi-cultural society, made even greater by the rich variety that has been embraced by successful immigration, rather than by a rejection.
I consider it a truism that the more identities that people share the freer they are. People who adopt a singular or a set of limited identities are far less free that a person who adopts a pluralist outlook. That is why pluralist societies are far more attractive and freer than totalitarian. A slave for example, or a prisoner, have only one identity. People who are very religious and adopt that badge as their defining identity are not free in the sense that they become a self-imposed limited personality. As a result, a very religious person may be Scots but may well identity themselves by their religion first and actually reject their Scottishness because of the demands of their religion. In other words they become alienated from their social reality in a form of self-imposed slavery. They consciously reject their multiple identities and become hostile to the society that threatens their exclusivity, paradoxically, the society whose pluralism encourages their diversity in the first place. Far too many people exploit the pluralism of our society and seek to impose their form of exclusiveness. Whilst society respects their difference, they refuse to respect the pluralism and tolerance afforded them.
However, it is not only the religious who impose exclusiveness. I have been writing to you about how this was the political model that Thatcher imposed on British society, with the result that we have developed a political system whose entry to the top demands that you are white, predominantly male, privately educated and a product of the Oxbridge system. You must also be rich, but most importantly, subscribe to the dominant political and economic doctrines of neoliberalism. In other words, as Thatcher repeatedly stated, you must be 'one of us'. As a result, British society is becoming more and more dominated by groups of people who reject pluralism and multiple identities. The most obvious rejection in modern times is their European identity and a retreat into an Englishness which is hostile to others.
The European referendum was decided by whole areas of England and Wales that represent the poorest and most working class areas of the country. These are the areas where, as the Bible tells us, "where there is no vision the people perish". These are the areas of large-scale unemployment and poverty, caused, not by immigration, but by the rapacity and greed of the British elite and the doctrines of free market economics. Both Adam Smith and Karl Marx identified the human being as a worker, a labourer and producer. That is the principal identity that Mark labelled a human being's 'species being' and is the defining identity that far too many people in this country have been quite deliberately deprived of by deliberate pigsty policies of mass unemployment. As you become alienated from your species being you also become alienated from society and from your fellow human beings. You are progressively stripped of your essential identities, those identities that are the essence of the human species, and comprise your social self. You are reduced to an atomised individual with no meaningful social loyalties. That is the end result of the Thatcher agenda for far too many people and it was quite deliberate. You become selfish as you have no other option, and you become hostile to others. Add in unscrupulous politicians relentlessly blaming those others for your plight, providing you with a scapegoat you can vent you wrath at and blame for a situation that you really cannot understand, and you have the answer as to why Britain voted to leave the EU. The Scots have a different vision, we have other options and a legacy of a rejection of the Thatcherite agenda. The Tories were well warned of the consequences of Thatcher's hatred of the Scots and her insistence on using Scotland as a laboratory for her free market experiment. So, whilst the English were charmed and persuaded by the Spider and his hideous henchmen, they made little impact on that most intelligent and civilised part of Britain. You have been warned.
Your Servant
Doktor Kommirat
Wednesday 29 June 2016
Monday 27 June 2016
Welcome to the dark side; England post Brexit.
I have seen literally dozens of ordinary people interviewed in our media who voted to leave the EU in both England and Wales and every one of them, without exception, gave as their reason immigration. As they all say, I'm not a racist, but....! Well, I'm sorry England and Wales, but you have been exposed for harbouring a deep seated and vindictive racism that was just waiting for an outlet. In the pigsty today, at Prime Minister's Question Time, the Camoron had to pledge several times to combat the outright threats and intimidation that foreigners have been subjected to, openly on our streets in broad daylight. People have had literature posted through their letterboxes telling them to f..k off back home where they came from. Modern Britain is a disgrace and I shall no longer call myself British as it is a shame and a badge of dishonour. I watched an interview with a young man in Ebbw Vale in Wales who passionately voted leave because of immigration. When he was asked what immigration there had been in his part of Wales and how it had affected it he was speechless as there had been none. This is the type of country we have become, where our politicians are shameless liars and our electorate are happy to collude with such lies and scapegoat people whom they must know are innocent of what they are being accused of. This referendum was conducted on purely emotional grounds with no regard to facts or honesty. The electorate were targeted on what we call their affective interests, their emotions, and all reason and logic was abandoned in favour of raw hatred and prejudice. I was reminded of the warnings of Sigmund Freud when he told us that
"Students of human nature and philosophers have long taught us that we are mistaken in regarding our intelligence as an independent force and in overlooking its dependence on emotional life. Our intellect, they teach us, can function reliably only when it is removed from the influences of strong emotional impulses; otherwise it behaves merely as an instrument of the will and delivers the inference which the will requires. Thus, in their view, logical arguments are impotent against affective interests, and that is why disputes backed by reasons…produce so few victories in the conflict with interests. Psycho-analytic experience has, if possible, further confirmed this statement. It can show every day that the shrewdest people will all of a sudden behave without insight, like imbeciles, as soon as the necessary insight is confronted by an emotional resistance, but that they will completely regain their understanding once that resistance has been overcome".
Sigmund Freud, Thoughts for the Times on War and Death (1915)
The British public has indeed behaved without insight, like imbeciles, rendering logic and reason impotent and delivering the inference that the collective will of far too many of the British people required .
My criticisms of the leave campaign have been substantiated by events as they are now openly admitting that they did not mean what they told the public. One of the principal themes of their campaign was that the EU free movement of people was the fundamental cause of uncontrolled immigration. They are now telling us that they wish to continue accessing the single European market after we leave the EU and that will mean signing up to an agreement that allows for the continuation of the free movement of people, and so, they will not be able to effectively control immigration, the core pledge of their campaign. They are admitting that they did not mean it when they told us that they would pledge the £350 million per week savings they would make by leaving to the NHS with Britain's Eichmann telling us on national television that their promises were simply ' a series of possibilities'. These promises were plastered all over the country on posters, on the literature they posted through people doors, and on all of the transport they utilised during the campaign, and you wonder why I refer to Westminster as a pigsty and tell you that we have some of the most appalling politicians imaginable? The gang of scoundrels who made up the leadership of the leave campaign are indeed quite probably psychotic as their conduct, lies, and lack of shame is quite breathtaking.
But, as I have told you before, sequences carry with them consequences. The two most prominent newspapers in Scotland, the Daily Record and the Herald, both of whom campaigned strongly for a No vote in the Scottish referendum have come out in support of independence following this most disreputable and mendacious campaign. In addition, prominent anti-independence people such as JK Rowling and the Labour ex-First Minister Henry McLeish have stated that they are now going to support it. In addition, the Scottish papers are full of people writing to say that they have changed and that they have made a mistake by supporting the leave campaign. If the Scottish Labour Party, who are engaged in their usual dithering and vacillation do the only thing that will save them as a viable force and come out in favour of an independent Scotland, then independence will become a certainty. Scottish Labour will have to do something positive in order to survive because if you are watching events in this sorry nation you will see that the British Labour Party is in the process of committing ritual seppuku. The United Kingdom is finished. As Nicola Sturgeon told the nation, the United Kingdom that the Scottish people voted to remain with in 2014 no longer exists. Britain is in a serious political crisis of its own making and the denizens of the pigsty really have not grasped this fact, they are really so out of touch in their own little elite bubble. But if it is bad just now, wait until all those working class voters in the North of England, the North East and Wales waken up to the fact that they have been duped and betrayed. You have been warned
Your Servant
Doktor Kommirat
"Students of human nature and philosophers have long taught us that we are mistaken in regarding our intelligence as an independent force and in overlooking its dependence on emotional life. Our intellect, they teach us, can function reliably only when it is removed from the influences of strong emotional impulses; otherwise it behaves merely as an instrument of the will and delivers the inference which the will requires. Thus, in their view, logical arguments are impotent against affective interests, and that is why disputes backed by reasons…produce so few victories in the conflict with interests. Psycho-analytic experience has, if possible, further confirmed this statement. It can show every day that the shrewdest people will all of a sudden behave without insight, like imbeciles, as soon as the necessary insight is confronted by an emotional resistance, but that they will completely regain their understanding once that resistance has been overcome".
Sigmund Freud, Thoughts for the Times on War and Death (1915)
The British public has indeed behaved without insight, like imbeciles, rendering logic and reason impotent and delivering the inference that the collective will of far too many of the British people required .
My criticisms of the leave campaign have been substantiated by events as they are now openly admitting that they did not mean what they told the public. One of the principal themes of their campaign was that the EU free movement of people was the fundamental cause of uncontrolled immigration. They are now telling us that they wish to continue accessing the single European market after we leave the EU and that will mean signing up to an agreement that allows for the continuation of the free movement of people, and so, they will not be able to effectively control immigration, the core pledge of their campaign. They are admitting that they did not mean it when they told us that they would pledge the £350 million per week savings they would make by leaving to the NHS with Britain's Eichmann telling us on national television that their promises were simply ' a series of possibilities'. These promises were plastered all over the country on posters, on the literature they posted through people doors, and on all of the transport they utilised during the campaign, and you wonder why I refer to Westminster as a pigsty and tell you that we have some of the most appalling politicians imaginable? The gang of scoundrels who made up the leadership of the leave campaign are indeed quite probably psychotic as their conduct, lies, and lack of shame is quite breathtaking.
But, as I have told you before, sequences carry with them consequences. The two most prominent newspapers in Scotland, the Daily Record and the Herald, both of whom campaigned strongly for a No vote in the Scottish referendum have come out in support of independence following this most disreputable and mendacious campaign. In addition, prominent anti-independence people such as JK Rowling and the Labour ex-First Minister Henry McLeish have stated that they are now going to support it. In addition, the Scottish papers are full of people writing to say that they have changed and that they have made a mistake by supporting the leave campaign. If the Scottish Labour Party, who are engaged in their usual dithering and vacillation do the only thing that will save them as a viable force and come out in favour of an independent Scotland, then independence will become a certainty. Scottish Labour will have to do something positive in order to survive because if you are watching events in this sorry nation you will see that the British Labour Party is in the process of committing ritual seppuku. The United Kingdom is finished. As Nicola Sturgeon told the nation, the United Kingdom that the Scottish people voted to remain with in 2014 no longer exists. Britain is in a serious political crisis of its own making and the denizens of the pigsty really have not grasped this fact, they are really so out of touch in their own little elite bubble. But if it is bad just now, wait until all those working class voters in the North of England, the North East and Wales waken up to the fact that they have been duped and betrayed. You have been warned
Your Servant
Doktor Kommirat
Saturday 25 June 2016
Our first priority must be to reform the voting system
I do not need to tell you that British politics is in serious crisis, a crisis that has been brewing since Thatcher first took office. There are many reasons for this, but one of the principal culprits is Britain's first-past-the-post (FPTP) voting system which is unsustainable and is seriously damaging the social cohesion of the state. The principal effect of FPTP on the political culture of the United Kingdom is what we call ‘the two party system’ which I argue, is a fundamental cause of the increasing erosion of social cohesion in the United Kingdom and has resulted in alienating the public from the political process and political participation, and that no meaningful solution to our problems are possible until FPTP has been replaced. Electoral systems are not simply mechanisms for electing people to public office. They have a more profound impact than that. They impact on a nation’s culture and help to shape the political structure of the state. In addition they impact on people’s everyday lives as they are responsible for the make-up of the parliament and other decision-making forums in a state, and affect policy formation and implementation. They shape the nature and composition of Parliament, local government, the European Parliament, the Scottish and Welsh Assemblies etc. and therefore impact on the decisions themselves.
As early as 2006, an influential group of academics produced what is known as The Power Report that made many observations about the British political system and stated that Britain was suffering from what they termed a ‘democratic malaise’. The Commission also stated that there was
‘a well-ingrained popular view across the country that our political institutions and their politicians are failing, untrustworthy, and disconnected from the great mass of the British people.’ And that
"The British party system is based on the dominance of two parties constructed around the pursuit of the interests and ideological leanings of the two dominant classes that existed during the industrial era" in which "even Members of Parliament have little say because all the decisions are made by a handful of people at the centre and then driven through the system. Politics and government are increasingly slipping back into the hands of privileged elites as if democracy has run out of steam.”
We must always be aware when we are operating within the context of modern British politics, that in the absence of a written constitution and a judiciary with the power of legislative review and veto, the British people invest an enormous amount of trust in their parliamentary institutions. Elections in the UK are therefore votes of confidence, not just in the parties, but in the system itself. Should a government betray the trust of the electorate, there are no constitutional mechanisms outside of the next election to remove such a government. Another purpose of election in Britain is therefore an affirmation of the elected Parliament by the British people as a safeguard of their securities and rights and in the elected representatives as the watchmen of the people over the executive. Should the parties betray that confidence and trust, then the party system, and the entire political system itself is in danger of losing the confidence and trust of the people, and that, I am arguing is the real cause of the catastrophic vote to leave the EU on Thursday.
I have written before how the UK has a set of some of the most appalling politicians imaginable. This is the result of how FPTP has entrenched a two party system that has consolidated a very powerful centralisation of power and removed the process of accountability. This has in turn bestowed significant political privilege onto the political elite within the two main parties that has institutionalised a form of hereditary government within the UK. What do I mean by this? To pursue a meaningful political career in British politics, one must, almost by necessity, attach one’s future to one of the two main parties. Regardless of your ideological position, or your political preferences on policy matters, if you wish to have a successful political career at almost any level of British politics, then membership of, and loyalty to, one of the two major parties in Britain is essential. Of course some individuals pursue long careers in another party, but they are few. This produces the situation where many candidates for election are standing for a constituency on a party ticket quite simply in order to be elected as an MP, not necessarily because they believe in that particular style of politics. They are political careerists whose loyalty and focus is not to the people who elected them, but to the party to whom they owe their nomination. This is because the motivation of such people to being elected is not to any particular programme, constituency, cause, ideological commitment, or any of the standard explanations why people seek to enter politics; it is simply to get a job as an MP, preferably a job for life in a safe party seat. In most constituencies, the combination of FPTP and the party system almost guarantees the successful candidate a job for life, regardless of the performance of the elected MP once in office. This happens because FPTP has produced an electoral system whereby people vote for parties as opposed to persons. Thus, to succeed in British politics, at all levels, not just at Westminster, you need neither be competent, hardworking, nor know anything about politics. You simply have to belong to the right party and people will continue to vote for you even if they have never heard of you
This is the opposite of a meritocracy. If the British get a competent Prime Minister and a competent government, that is largely by accident. If they get a competent constituency MP or local councillor etc, then that is almost wholly by accident. They get what the party is prepared to give them. As a result, the MP and councillor etc become dependent on, and answerable to, their party. They very quickly become detached from the people who elect them, and become submerged into the world of party politics. British politicians, especially at Westminster, have, because of the effect of FPTP, become almost wholly detached from the British people. One of the most visible signs of Westminster's irrelevance is that this system has produced a parliament that is almost wholly unrepresentative, a parliament that has been almost totally purged of real working people with a spread of talents and skills that reflect the wider society. In the UK we have a government that is almost wholly staffed by millionaires. Thus, whilst the British political system is not hereditary in the sense of family, it is most certainly hereditary in the sense of class, education and particularly economic and social outlook. Thatcher defined this process as: only those who were considered ‘one of us’ would be considered suitable for success in her political system. Now, it can be argued that not all of this elite share the same economic and social background, but regardless of background, if one fails to subscribe to the dominant ideology of this ruling elite, then they will most certainly be excluded from it. If you don’t become ‘one of us’ you don’t succeed and Mad Tony actually took Thatcher’s ‘one of us’ philosophy to a level that would have been ridiculous were it not so serious. The party that was founded by manual labour to represent manual labour, had, by the 2010 election, almost cleansed itself of manual labouring influence and representation, and they still cannot seem to understand why they have been deserted by their traditional supporters in the millions.
The UK political system rewards parties. As a result, individual candidates are relatively unimportant in terms of party success. The party selects the leader and the party hierarchy. In return, the leader surrounds him/herself with favourites and people who only agree with him/her. They owe their career to a successful leader and leadership policies. This leadership therefore becomes the natural focus, particularly for the media, and supposedly intelligent people who advance within the party system become craven apologists for leaders and their policies and will happily lie through their teeth on the party’s behalf. The sociologist Max Weber argued that modern democratic states encourage what he terms ‘Caesarism.’ This happens because in countries with universal suffrage, political leaders are deemed to require charismatic qualities that will appeal to the majority of the electorate. As a result, regardless of the ability or quality of a modern politician, they will have great difficulty reaching the top positions in the political structures if they fail to display charismatic leadership. Caesarism therefore presents a genuine threat to the democratic process. It encourages the increasing centralisation of power and decision-making in the leadership and his/her immediate chosen circle, it threatens to corrupt the leadership itself by inflating their sense of importance whilst diminishing others, and it has the effect of elevating the executive at the expense of the legislature. All those tendencies are very evident in modern Britain, and the democratic institutions and structures that are supposed to counter caesarist tendencies in our society are failing us and not working. Principal amongst those failures are an effective and accountable Parliament and an efficient electoral system. This post has become far too long and I thank you if you have read this far. This topic is obviously huge and I have only really given you an introduction. But Britain will never be able to offer meaningful solutions until we reform its politics and that will have to start with the electoral system. You have been warned.
Your Servant
Doktor Kommirat
As early as 2006, an influential group of academics produced what is known as The Power Report that made many observations about the British political system and stated that Britain was suffering from what they termed a ‘democratic malaise’. The Commission also stated that there was
‘a well-ingrained popular view across the country that our political institutions and their politicians are failing, untrustworthy, and disconnected from the great mass of the British people.’ And that
"The British party system is based on the dominance of two parties constructed around the pursuit of the interests and ideological leanings of the two dominant classes that existed during the industrial era" in which "even Members of Parliament have little say because all the decisions are made by a handful of people at the centre and then driven through the system. Politics and government are increasingly slipping back into the hands of privileged elites as if democracy has run out of steam.”
We must always be aware when we are operating within the context of modern British politics, that in the absence of a written constitution and a judiciary with the power of legislative review and veto, the British people invest an enormous amount of trust in their parliamentary institutions. Elections in the UK are therefore votes of confidence, not just in the parties, but in the system itself. Should a government betray the trust of the electorate, there are no constitutional mechanisms outside of the next election to remove such a government. Another purpose of election in Britain is therefore an affirmation of the elected Parliament by the British people as a safeguard of their securities and rights and in the elected representatives as the watchmen of the people over the executive. Should the parties betray that confidence and trust, then the party system, and the entire political system itself is in danger of losing the confidence and trust of the people, and that, I am arguing is the real cause of the catastrophic vote to leave the EU on Thursday.
I have written before how the UK has a set of some of the most appalling politicians imaginable. This is the result of how FPTP has entrenched a two party system that has consolidated a very powerful centralisation of power and removed the process of accountability. This has in turn bestowed significant political privilege onto the political elite within the two main parties that has institutionalised a form of hereditary government within the UK. What do I mean by this? To pursue a meaningful political career in British politics, one must, almost by necessity, attach one’s future to one of the two main parties. Regardless of your ideological position, or your political preferences on policy matters, if you wish to have a successful political career at almost any level of British politics, then membership of, and loyalty to, one of the two major parties in Britain is essential. Of course some individuals pursue long careers in another party, but they are few. This produces the situation where many candidates for election are standing for a constituency on a party ticket quite simply in order to be elected as an MP, not necessarily because they believe in that particular style of politics. They are political careerists whose loyalty and focus is not to the people who elected them, but to the party to whom they owe their nomination. This is because the motivation of such people to being elected is not to any particular programme, constituency, cause, ideological commitment, or any of the standard explanations why people seek to enter politics; it is simply to get a job as an MP, preferably a job for life in a safe party seat. In most constituencies, the combination of FPTP and the party system almost guarantees the successful candidate a job for life, regardless of the performance of the elected MP once in office. This happens because FPTP has produced an electoral system whereby people vote for parties as opposed to persons. Thus, to succeed in British politics, at all levels, not just at Westminster, you need neither be competent, hardworking, nor know anything about politics. You simply have to belong to the right party and people will continue to vote for you even if they have never heard of you
This is the opposite of a meritocracy. If the British get a competent Prime Minister and a competent government, that is largely by accident. If they get a competent constituency MP or local councillor etc, then that is almost wholly by accident. They get what the party is prepared to give them. As a result, the MP and councillor etc become dependent on, and answerable to, their party. They very quickly become detached from the people who elect them, and become submerged into the world of party politics. British politicians, especially at Westminster, have, because of the effect of FPTP, become almost wholly detached from the British people. One of the most visible signs of Westminster's irrelevance is that this system has produced a parliament that is almost wholly unrepresentative, a parliament that has been almost totally purged of real working people with a spread of talents and skills that reflect the wider society. In the UK we have a government that is almost wholly staffed by millionaires. Thus, whilst the British political system is not hereditary in the sense of family, it is most certainly hereditary in the sense of class, education and particularly economic and social outlook. Thatcher defined this process as: only those who were considered ‘one of us’ would be considered suitable for success in her political system. Now, it can be argued that not all of this elite share the same economic and social background, but regardless of background, if one fails to subscribe to the dominant ideology of this ruling elite, then they will most certainly be excluded from it. If you don’t become ‘one of us’ you don’t succeed and Mad Tony actually took Thatcher’s ‘one of us’ philosophy to a level that would have been ridiculous were it not so serious. The party that was founded by manual labour to represent manual labour, had, by the 2010 election, almost cleansed itself of manual labouring influence and representation, and they still cannot seem to understand why they have been deserted by their traditional supporters in the millions.
The UK political system rewards parties. As a result, individual candidates are relatively unimportant in terms of party success. The party selects the leader and the party hierarchy. In return, the leader surrounds him/herself with favourites and people who only agree with him/her. They owe their career to a successful leader and leadership policies. This leadership therefore becomes the natural focus, particularly for the media, and supposedly intelligent people who advance within the party system become craven apologists for leaders and their policies and will happily lie through their teeth on the party’s behalf. The sociologist Max Weber argued that modern democratic states encourage what he terms ‘Caesarism.’ This happens because in countries with universal suffrage, political leaders are deemed to require charismatic qualities that will appeal to the majority of the electorate. As a result, regardless of the ability or quality of a modern politician, they will have great difficulty reaching the top positions in the political structures if they fail to display charismatic leadership. Caesarism therefore presents a genuine threat to the democratic process. It encourages the increasing centralisation of power and decision-making in the leadership and his/her immediate chosen circle, it threatens to corrupt the leadership itself by inflating their sense of importance whilst diminishing others, and it has the effect of elevating the executive at the expense of the legislature. All those tendencies are very evident in modern Britain, and the democratic institutions and structures that are supposed to counter caesarist tendencies in our society are failing us and not working. Principal amongst those failures are an effective and accountable Parliament and an efficient electoral system. This post has become far too long and I thank you if you have read this far. This topic is obviously huge and I have only really given you an introduction. But Britain will never be able to offer meaningful solutions until we reform its politics and that will have to start with the electoral system. You have been warned.
Your Servant
Doktor Kommirat
We're out and the future is definitely not what it used to be!
Well it's happened, and the bookies got it so wrong. I told you last week that I was coming to the conclusion that Britain would vote to leave the EU, but could not really believe that the bookies could be so wrong, but such is the division and volatility of politics in this sorry country today that it is almost impossible to predict what will happen next. What is of great concern is how the English working classes have swung very sharply right, because make no mistake, the entire leave campaign was about immigration and a xenophobia which was utilised as a scapegoat for the hardships imposed by the government's ferocious austerity. The other great concern is how this campaign, like the Scottish referendum was won on a farrago of lies. The morning after the Scottish referendum the British government immediately went back on its word and betrayed the Scots. Already the out campaign leaders are going back on their word and showing that they were prepared to lie through their teeth to get the result they wanted. That does not bode well for the future because one of the main themes of this campaign has been the shocking lack of trust between the public and the pigsty and already the people they put their trust in in this referendum are betraying them. One of the great themes of the referendum that was on all of the posters and plastered on the buses they utilised for transporting the great and the good was a promise to invest £320 million pounds a week that we send to Europe in the health service after we leave. They have immediately denied that today, and it is not going to happen. Britain is now going to be governed by the biggest gang of liars, scoundrels and charlatans imaginable, but also by the most right-wing neoliberal government in our history. The British have just delivered a catastrophic vote and will have to live with the consequences, but we in Scotland don't and won't. I have no hesitation in saying that this decision will give new meaning to the concept of a Pyrrhic victory. The other major consequence of this vote is that it could have profound consequences for Northern Ireland and its fragile peace.
Another serious consequence concerns the future of the Labour Party as they have been decisively rejected by their own traditional supporters. Already a vote of no confidence has been lodged by Labour MPs against their leader Jeremy Corbyn whose conduct during the campaign was quite disgraceful for a major party leader as he was almost invisible and failed to speak at any of the major debates. Significantly, we had Donald Trump in Scotland today to open his new project in Turnberry telling us that Brexit was fantastic. That tells you all you need to know about leaving the EU. We are truly facing the possibility of a fascist British state as the joy within all the far right European parties has been unconfined and that is who the leavers are identifying with.
As the Scots are far more intelligent and civilised than the rest of the UK, they voted en bloc to remain in the EU, with not one electoral district voting out. The Scots voted 62/38 to remain in contrast to the rest of the UK with England voting 53/47. Only Northern Ireland voted to remain. In England I pay homage to the noble people of Liverpool who voted remain and who I hope will be made honorary Scots. The Scottish people were persistently warned during their own referendum that the only way to ensure continued membership of the EU was to reject independence and vote to remain within the UK. That was clearly a lie as we now find ourselves being forced out of the EU against our will and the Scots now have no doubts left that everything the pigsty tells us is a lie and are now becoming clearly disgusted with everything Westminster stands for. We have had a parade of leading politicians in Scotland who campaigned strongly for an in vote in 2014 telling us how they have now changed and are prepared to support independence. The Scottish government are already laying the groundwork for another referendum on independence and are in talks with the EU to see if there is a way that Scotland can remain within the EU despite what the English and Welsh have just done. On that matter, it is astonishing that the Welsh have voted Brexit as Wales survives on EU funding. I will end by simply asking people what on earth can they expect under Prime Minister Boris the Spider. The man is a clown and a pathological liar and will only hasten the breakup of the UK. I will keep you informed to the best of my ability. You have been warned
Your Servant
Doktor Kommirat
Another serious consequence concerns the future of the Labour Party as they have been decisively rejected by their own traditional supporters. Already a vote of no confidence has been lodged by Labour MPs against their leader Jeremy Corbyn whose conduct during the campaign was quite disgraceful for a major party leader as he was almost invisible and failed to speak at any of the major debates. Significantly, we had Donald Trump in Scotland today to open his new project in Turnberry telling us that Brexit was fantastic. That tells you all you need to know about leaving the EU. We are truly facing the possibility of a fascist British state as the joy within all the far right European parties has been unconfined and that is who the leavers are identifying with.
As the Scots are far more intelligent and civilised than the rest of the UK, they voted en bloc to remain in the EU, with not one electoral district voting out. The Scots voted 62/38 to remain in contrast to the rest of the UK with England voting 53/47. Only Northern Ireland voted to remain. In England I pay homage to the noble people of Liverpool who voted remain and who I hope will be made honorary Scots. The Scottish people were persistently warned during their own referendum that the only way to ensure continued membership of the EU was to reject independence and vote to remain within the UK. That was clearly a lie as we now find ourselves being forced out of the EU against our will and the Scots now have no doubts left that everything the pigsty tells us is a lie and are now becoming clearly disgusted with everything Westminster stands for. We have had a parade of leading politicians in Scotland who campaigned strongly for an in vote in 2014 telling us how they have now changed and are prepared to support independence. The Scottish government are already laying the groundwork for another referendum on independence and are in talks with the EU to see if there is a way that Scotland can remain within the EU despite what the English and Welsh have just done. On that matter, it is astonishing that the Welsh have voted Brexit as Wales survives on EU funding. I will end by simply asking people what on earth can they expect under Prime Minister Boris the Spider. The man is a clown and a pathological liar and will only hasten the breakup of the UK. I will keep you informed to the best of my ability. You have been warned
Your Servant
Doktor Kommirat
Tuesday 21 June 2016
Britain, where is the decency and sanity?
With two days to go till the referendum the momentum appears to be swinging back to Remain according to the latest betting with the Remain betting getting tighter at 1/4 again and Leave going out to 3/1. With the opinion polls indicating a very tight race with a one or two point lead for Remain, the betting is indicating a minimum 60/40 vote to Remain with the average forecast at 63% for Remain. So, one of them is getting it wrong. I am beginning to think that the bookies are probably correct, but not quite accurate, as the odds suggest an 80% vote for Remain but that is not going to happen, and the 60/40 prediction is much more plausible. There has been a definite change in tone in the campaign since last week's tragedy with the leading Tory Brexiters desperately trying to distance themselves from Nigel Garbage. It tells you something when people like Gove and Boris the Spider are registering their disgust and disapproval of the language and tactics of The Great Garbage. Gove told us on national television that UKIP's latest poster campaign 'made him shudder', and yesterday we had the prominent Tory peer, Baroness Warsi, abandoning the Leave campaign and joining Remain because of the 'hate and xenophobia' of the leavers. However, this is definitely a case of rats deserting a sinking ship as those leading Tories are every bit as culpable for stoking up the fear and paranoia about immigrants and foreigners as The Great Garbage, but they have realised that they are now tainted by their racism and xenophobia and are in danger of being unable to escape it, so like all good members of the pigsty they are acting with total self-interest now (not that they ever do anything else). As far as this forum is concerned they will never be allowed to escape their racism and xenophobia, and there is indeed a definite scent of good news because Gove has been hinting that if the vote is for Remain he will pick up his ball, leave the field and withdraw from the government. We can only live in hope.
As I have repeatedly said over the past few weeks, all of this turmoil, hate and racist opportunism is the lasting legacy of the Blessed Margaret. It is the result of the cult of individualism she so assiduously fostered, the denial of human social nature, her insistence that no-one had any responsibility for others, the irrational hatred of the state and her 'no such thing as society' nonsense. Her ideological aim was a society of selfish atomised individuals, good Samaritans in reverse gear. She was very successful. All those cultural weapons she so skilfully utilised were designed to rid society of obstacles to the unfettered free market she so idolised and to begin the process of dismantling the institutions that Britain had erected to produce a fair and equable society as far as it was possible. Thatcher began the process of gradual enslavement of the working class in Britain and was ferociously exclusionist in that anyone who failed to share her ideology or who was not prepared to submit to her elitist class based structural vision would be allowed any part in the social and political life of the nation. She spent her premiership systematically excluding such people from any meaningful participation in the Conservative Party. When this was successfully completed she extended that principle into public life and determined to control appointments and policies throughout the entire fabric of the state system. This was then adopted by Mad Tony who did exactly the same thing within the Labour Party with the result that, by the time Mad Tony left office there was no talent of any substance left in either of the two major parties and why we are now saddled with incompetents like the Camoron and Osborne. Both Thatcher and Mad Tony ruthlessly marginalised anyone with a speck of brains who might be seen as a challenge to their domination, or who might point out such obvious things like there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. That is why even the best brains in today's Westminster pigsty barely reach the level of mediocrity and why this referendum campaign has descended into such filth. These people have no substance, no gravitas, and no discernable intellect. Above all, they have no dignity. The exception is the intake of minor party candidates at the last election such as the Greens and the SNP. A British politician today has less credibility than a car salesman and is universally distrusted and widely loathed. I mean, in what form of intelligent polity could a man such as Boris the Spider ever gain prominence let alone national office? The important point about all this is that those same personnel all widely applauded what Thatcher and Mad Tony did because they benefited from their cringing acquiescence and subservience, and are now paying the price; the universal contempt of the electorate.
There will be no real hope for Britain, even with a vote to Remain, until we begin the process of seriously dismantling the Thatcher legacy and rebuilding an ethical society based on the concept of the human being as a social animal whose individualism is recognised as a reflection of his/her milieu, of his/her socialisation, that is, a recognition that each individual is firstly a social being. This will necessitate a complete rejection of free market neoliberalism and the poison of individualism. The recovery of a decent and sane society, represented by sane and decent people, must start with a philosophical and ideological rejection of the dominant ideas that are destroying decency and sanity. I am not confident that can be achieved, but will continue to try. You have been warned.
Your Servant
Doktor Kommirat
As I have repeatedly said over the past few weeks, all of this turmoil, hate and racist opportunism is the lasting legacy of the Blessed Margaret. It is the result of the cult of individualism she so assiduously fostered, the denial of human social nature, her insistence that no-one had any responsibility for others, the irrational hatred of the state and her 'no such thing as society' nonsense. Her ideological aim was a society of selfish atomised individuals, good Samaritans in reverse gear. She was very successful. All those cultural weapons she so skilfully utilised were designed to rid society of obstacles to the unfettered free market she so idolised and to begin the process of dismantling the institutions that Britain had erected to produce a fair and equable society as far as it was possible. Thatcher began the process of gradual enslavement of the working class in Britain and was ferociously exclusionist in that anyone who failed to share her ideology or who was not prepared to submit to her elitist class based structural vision would be allowed any part in the social and political life of the nation. She spent her premiership systematically excluding such people from any meaningful participation in the Conservative Party. When this was successfully completed she extended that principle into public life and determined to control appointments and policies throughout the entire fabric of the state system. This was then adopted by Mad Tony who did exactly the same thing within the Labour Party with the result that, by the time Mad Tony left office there was no talent of any substance left in either of the two major parties and why we are now saddled with incompetents like the Camoron and Osborne. Both Thatcher and Mad Tony ruthlessly marginalised anyone with a speck of brains who might be seen as a challenge to their domination, or who might point out such obvious things like there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. That is why even the best brains in today's Westminster pigsty barely reach the level of mediocrity and why this referendum campaign has descended into such filth. These people have no substance, no gravitas, and no discernable intellect. Above all, they have no dignity. The exception is the intake of minor party candidates at the last election such as the Greens and the SNP. A British politician today has less credibility than a car salesman and is universally distrusted and widely loathed. I mean, in what form of intelligent polity could a man such as Boris the Spider ever gain prominence let alone national office? The important point about all this is that those same personnel all widely applauded what Thatcher and Mad Tony did because they benefited from their cringing acquiescence and subservience, and are now paying the price; the universal contempt of the electorate.
There will be no real hope for Britain, even with a vote to Remain, until we begin the process of seriously dismantling the Thatcher legacy and rebuilding an ethical society based on the concept of the human being as a social animal whose individualism is recognised as a reflection of his/her milieu, of his/her socialisation, that is, a recognition that each individual is firstly a social being. This will necessitate a complete rejection of free market neoliberalism and the poison of individualism. The recovery of a decent and sane society, represented by sane and decent people, must start with a philosophical and ideological rejection of the dominant ideas that are destroying decency and sanity. I am not confident that can be achieved, but will continue to try. You have been warned.
Your Servant
Doktor Kommirat
Sunday 19 June 2016
The EU is not a matter of life or death
Well it has happened. The hate and inflammatory speech that has so characterised the EU Referendum has cost a life with the political murder of the Labour MP Jo Cox. It is no use those in the Brexit campaign desperately trying to deny that this crime was motivated by their campaign as, when he was asked his name in court he replied, "Death to Traitors. Freedom for Britain". As I told you in my last post, the level of hate and the language of violence in this campaign is something I never thought I would ever encounter in this country, and I include the Remain campaign in this assessment because one of the worst offenders in lying and stoking fear has been our own Prime Minister, the great CaMoron. What is ironic is that this act has given an immediate boost to the Remain campaign as people have been sickened, and perhaps ashamed, as they realise what is happening to decency and fairness in this appalling nation and are beginning to draw back from such dangerous rhetoric. As I continually tell you, almost all of the claims made by the Leave campaign are a lie, because the Leave spokespeople know that what they are telling you is untrue. The great, and it must be admitted very effective, slogan of the Leave campaign is "Take back control" arguing that we no longer have any control over our own affairs and are ruled by a set of 'faceless unelected bureaucrats.' For example, the appalling Michael Gove gave a speech in which he argued that he wants the British voters to take back control from EU institutions that are "distant, unaccountable and elitist' (I loved the arch Thatcherite Gove complaining about elitism, that's one thing about the British, they have no problem with irony). However, my point is that Gove knows full well that he is telling a quite deliberate lie.
It is really sickening when you hear a British politician complaining about the European bureaucracy. The European Union employs just over 55,000 civil servants, those much vaunted and much maligned bureaucrats. The Westminster pigsty employs over 400,000. In addition, anyone with even a passing knowledge of politics knows that all European legislation is subject to the agreement of two different institutional sets of elected politicians, the Council of the European Union which is composed of democratically elected government ministers from each member state, and the European Parliament, whose membership is all directly elected. Thus, there are no bureaucrats in the EU making laws that override the will of the pigsty. That is a lie. In addition, the government of the UK contains members of the House of Lords who are unelected and are the political appointments of whoever is the Prime Minister of the day. So, who is the more undemocratic, the EU or the Westminster pigsty?
I repeatedly warn you that one of the most overriding priorities of the free market leavers is the continual enslavement of the British workforce. We are continually being asked to consider democracy from the most undemocratic people in the world. We are continually being asked to consider fairness from people who have erected, and preside over, the most unequal society in the developed world, but perhaps most importantly we are being asked to consider the plight of what they call "decent, hardworking taxpayers" from the people who will strip those same hardworking taxpayers of all their rights and protections the day after we vote to leave the EU. How else can we interpret the intentions of the free market Tories? In an address to the Institute of Directors last week, the Employment Minister, Priti Patel told them that
“If we could just halve the burdens of the EU social and employment legislation we could deliver a £4.3 billion boost to our economy and 60,000 new jobs.”
I wont go into any particular detail because I have spoken of this many times, but the EU social and employment legislation she speaks of are our rights and protections, particularly health and safety, which employers hate with a passion, and remember, this is the political party who told the country that unionised employees are the enemy. Thus, when I was a union representative, I was genuinely considered to be an enemy of the state by these people. Not even Donald Trump talks like that. The other major hatred of the free marketeers is the Working Time Directive. The melodiously named Priti Patel fiercely denounced the Directive and was particularly keen to argue that lorry drivers should be exempt from this measure. Her name may be quite melodious but her message most certainly wasn't except to those people who believe they should be able to make profit completely unrestrained from common decency. Can you imagine such stupidity, effectively arguing that employers should be able to demand that drivers drive on our roads and motorways until they are exhausted? This highlights the intellectual level that we in this country have come to expect from the pigsty, but particularly the Tory part. The woman is a genuine halfwit. These are the same people who foamed at the mouth denouncing the minimum wage arguing that it would cost the country over a million jobs when in fact the exact opposite happened. She was quite keen to avoid how she came to the figure of £4.3 billion by the way.
It will be interesting to see what happens now in the wake of this genuine tragedy. Karl Popper tells us that the study of politics is the study of the unintended consequences of intentional human action. I think that the deliberate murder of an MP will have the opposite effect to what was intended and that the people of the country will react with disgust and waken up to the reality of this atrocious referendum. I hope so regardless of the outcome on Thursday. We cannot continue with this form of politics as we slide deeper into fascism and intolerance. You have been warned.
Your Servant
Doktor Kommirat
It is really sickening when you hear a British politician complaining about the European bureaucracy. The European Union employs just over 55,000 civil servants, those much vaunted and much maligned bureaucrats. The Westminster pigsty employs over 400,000. In addition, anyone with even a passing knowledge of politics knows that all European legislation is subject to the agreement of two different institutional sets of elected politicians, the Council of the European Union which is composed of democratically elected government ministers from each member state, and the European Parliament, whose membership is all directly elected. Thus, there are no bureaucrats in the EU making laws that override the will of the pigsty. That is a lie. In addition, the government of the UK contains members of the House of Lords who are unelected and are the political appointments of whoever is the Prime Minister of the day. So, who is the more undemocratic, the EU or the Westminster pigsty?
I repeatedly warn you that one of the most overriding priorities of the free market leavers is the continual enslavement of the British workforce. We are continually being asked to consider democracy from the most undemocratic people in the world. We are continually being asked to consider fairness from people who have erected, and preside over, the most unequal society in the developed world, but perhaps most importantly we are being asked to consider the plight of what they call "decent, hardworking taxpayers" from the people who will strip those same hardworking taxpayers of all their rights and protections the day after we vote to leave the EU. How else can we interpret the intentions of the free market Tories? In an address to the Institute of Directors last week, the Employment Minister, Priti Patel told them that
“If we could just halve the burdens of the EU social and employment legislation we could deliver a £4.3 billion boost to our economy and 60,000 new jobs.”
I wont go into any particular detail because I have spoken of this many times, but the EU social and employment legislation she speaks of are our rights and protections, particularly health and safety, which employers hate with a passion, and remember, this is the political party who told the country that unionised employees are the enemy. Thus, when I was a union representative, I was genuinely considered to be an enemy of the state by these people. Not even Donald Trump talks like that. The other major hatred of the free marketeers is the Working Time Directive. The melodiously named Priti Patel fiercely denounced the Directive and was particularly keen to argue that lorry drivers should be exempt from this measure. Her name may be quite melodious but her message most certainly wasn't except to those people who believe they should be able to make profit completely unrestrained from common decency. Can you imagine such stupidity, effectively arguing that employers should be able to demand that drivers drive on our roads and motorways until they are exhausted? This highlights the intellectual level that we in this country have come to expect from the pigsty, but particularly the Tory part. The woman is a genuine halfwit. These are the same people who foamed at the mouth denouncing the minimum wage arguing that it would cost the country over a million jobs when in fact the exact opposite happened. She was quite keen to avoid how she came to the figure of £4.3 billion by the way.
It will be interesting to see what happens now in the wake of this genuine tragedy. Karl Popper tells us that the study of politics is the study of the unintended consequences of intentional human action. I think that the deliberate murder of an MP will have the opposite effect to what was intended and that the people of the country will react with disgust and waken up to the reality of this atrocious referendum. I hope so regardless of the outcome on Thursday. We cannot continue with this form of politics as we slide deeper into fascism and intolerance. You have been warned.
Your Servant
Doktor Kommirat
Tuesday 14 June 2016
This referendum is destroying the United Kingdom
The betting on the EU referendum is now 8/15 to remain and 7/4 to leave. So, we are still favourite to stay in according to the betting, with the Leave campaign rapidly closing the gap. However, I am beginning to think that we may actually leave, because it must be difficult for people outside the UK to envisage just how poisoned and polluted our politics has become during this campaign with the blatant racism and hatred of foreigners that is posing as a concern for immigration and the Leave campaign targeting all of our baser and lower instincts and prejudices. What is the worst part of this is that it is working. The Camoron's decision to call this referendum has become an unmitigated disaster. The Leave campaign has descended below the gutter in its lies and propaganda and their propaganda genuinely reflects the type of filth last seen in 1930's Germany. Yesterday, in the wake of the tragedy of the Orlando night club massacre, Leave launched a national poster campaign
seeking to capitalise on this tragedy and claiming that the same thing will happen in the UK unless we leave the EU because of radical Islamic immigrants, which are all the fault of the EU of course and have nothing to do with British foreign policy or their wars in the Middle East. Their poster actually said "Islamic extremism is a real threat to our way of life. Act now before we see an Orlando-style atrocity here before too long". This is politics in modern day so-called Christian Britain, and I have been taken to task for telling you that Britain is drifting into a fascist style state. The people who peddle such atrocious filth have neither decency, dignity nor self-respect, but more importantly are quite indifferent to the consequences on ordinary Muslims and other immigrants of their poisonous hate, and they are the people at the very heart of the British political elite. They are determined to win at all costs, and is why I told you in my last post that the pigsty is showing itself in its true colours. Because of this type of politics we are witnessing, in all of our news bulletins, the England football supporters in France for the European Championships rioting, fighting with other supporters and the police, and chanting "F..k off Europe we're all voting out". As a result of their behaviour before the competition has even begun, the English, along with the Russians, have been told by football's governing body that if there is any more violence they will be banned from the competition. Thatcher's legacy? I hope she would be proud!
If you demonise immigrants it is next to impossible not to breed hatred for all foreigners, because you cannot contain the ripples you have caused by throwing the stone into the pond. Immigrants are foreigners and we are now telling such people loud and clear that they are not wanted here. My comment about the type of language not heard since 1930's Germany was actually the comment of a lady on last week's Question Time who immigrated to this country over twenty years ago and she stated that she was really scared now because of the language being used as a matter of course as well as being presented as matters of fact. I persistently tell you how such people refuse to accept any restraints on their activities and now they also refuse to exercise any restraint on their language and hatred. As a result of their determination to defy any authority or respect the common decencies, they have abandoned all self-respect or self-constraint, and it is a common truism that policies decided at the top of any organisation will filter down and affect the behaviour of those at the bottom. As a result, what is certain about this disastrous referendum is that the United Kingdom will never be the same again regardless of the result because Britain is being poisoned and hatred is becoming institutionalised, and I will return to this theme in my next post as this post is getting too big. I want people to understand the type of Britain that is likely to emerge from the wreckage of this horrendous referendum if the Leave camp win, and I trust you will remember who warned you.
This morning, the Sun newspaper, the flagship paper for the Murdoch empire in Britain, came out in headlines backing Brexit. It did not do so in its Scottish edition because in Scotland it always attempts to curry favour with Scottish nationalists who are promoting the Remain agenda (Murdoch always seeks to back a winner, but more importantly he will support almost anything that will damage the British state and the British elite for whom he has a visceral loathing). In seeking to explain why Murdoch would do this two weeks before the actual referendum, the columnist on the London paper the Evening Standard, Anthony Hilton, wrote how he
"once asked Rupert Murdoch why he was so opposed to the European Union. 'That’s easy,' he replied. 'When I go into Downing Street they do what I say; when I go to Brussels they take no notice.'"
With respect to my warnings about Britain becoming increasingly fascist and how the people that lead the Brexit campaign are, in my opinion, latent fascists, the columnist Andrew Brown, whose father was a British diplomat who spent the Second World War years as a prisoner of the Nazis, writes in today's Guardian newspaper about the Leave.eu campaign. I will simple reproduce part of Brown's article in which he says
"Last week Arron Banks’s Leave.eu campaign tweeted out a cartoon so disgusting that it would have reminded my father of the newspapers he was given to read as a prisoner of war. The cartoon shows a sailing ship, representing the EU, heading over a waterfall, while behind it a lifeboat labelled Brexit escapes into the sunrise, a Union Jack for its sail. So far, so unimaginative. But in the central section of the EU boat things get vivid. Two swarthy, bearded figures, one carrying a scimitar and one a bag of money, would have been immediately familiar to my father, except that in the cartoons of his captivity they would have been Jews. Here they appear to represent Muslims. The one with the scimitar is forcing a blond Aryan young man carrying a Swedish flag to walk the plank while the one with the money bag holds it excitedly. At the front of the boat another of these figures attempts to grope the figurehead. A cannon on the afterdeck labelled “Diversity” is firing a hole in the bottom of its own ship. Oh, and a shark labelled “political correctness” is waiting to devour the figure representing Sweden when he is forced off the end of the plank. The cartoonist really does not believe in subtlety. These tropes are not just racist. They are callbacks to the particular style of nationalist antisemitism that we thought had been purged from Europe for ever in 1945. The figures in those cartoons are drawn from the same stock as those that populated Nazi papers".
I have been warning of these trends for years now, and I understand how people, before now, had difficulty taking me seriously, but the evidence is now too graphic to be denied. Britain has become seriously divisive, perhaps terminally so, and it is the fault of the British elite and their slavering poodles in the pigsty. Perhaps we will vote to remain in the EU and I will keep you up to date with the bookies predictions, but regardless of the outcome, we will never be the same country again in my lifetime. If leave win I shudder to contemplate the consequences, particularly in a nation that will be effectively run by Rupert Murdoch. You have been warned.
Your Servant
Doktor Kommirat
If you demonise immigrants it is next to impossible not to breed hatred for all foreigners, because you cannot contain the ripples you have caused by throwing the stone into the pond. Immigrants are foreigners and we are now telling such people loud and clear that they are not wanted here. My comment about the type of language not heard since 1930's Germany was actually the comment of a lady on last week's Question Time who immigrated to this country over twenty years ago and she stated that she was really scared now because of the language being used as a matter of course as well as being presented as matters of fact. I persistently tell you how such people refuse to accept any restraints on their activities and now they also refuse to exercise any restraint on their language and hatred. As a result of their determination to defy any authority or respect the common decencies, they have abandoned all self-respect or self-constraint, and it is a common truism that policies decided at the top of any organisation will filter down and affect the behaviour of those at the bottom. As a result, what is certain about this disastrous referendum is that the United Kingdom will never be the same again regardless of the result because Britain is being poisoned and hatred is becoming institutionalised, and I will return to this theme in my next post as this post is getting too big. I want people to understand the type of Britain that is likely to emerge from the wreckage of this horrendous referendum if the Leave camp win, and I trust you will remember who warned you.
This morning, the Sun newspaper, the flagship paper for the Murdoch empire in Britain, came out in headlines backing Brexit. It did not do so in its Scottish edition because in Scotland it always attempts to curry favour with Scottish nationalists who are promoting the Remain agenda (Murdoch always seeks to back a winner, but more importantly he will support almost anything that will damage the British state and the British elite for whom he has a visceral loathing). In seeking to explain why Murdoch would do this two weeks before the actual referendum, the columnist on the London paper the Evening Standard, Anthony Hilton, wrote how he
"once asked Rupert Murdoch why he was so opposed to the European Union. 'That’s easy,' he replied. 'When I go into Downing Street they do what I say; when I go to Brussels they take no notice.'"
With respect to my warnings about Britain becoming increasingly fascist and how the people that lead the Brexit campaign are, in my opinion, latent fascists, the columnist Andrew Brown, whose father was a British diplomat who spent the Second World War years as a prisoner of the Nazis, writes in today's Guardian newspaper about the Leave.eu campaign. I will simple reproduce part of Brown's article in which he says
I have been warning of these trends for years now, and I understand how people, before now, had difficulty taking me seriously, but the evidence is now too graphic to be denied. Britain has become seriously divisive, perhaps terminally so, and it is the fault of the British elite and their slavering poodles in the pigsty. Perhaps we will vote to remain in the EU and I will keep you up to date with the bookies predictions, but regardless of the outcome, we will never be the same country again in my lifetime. If leave win I shudder to contemplate the consequences, particularly in a nation that will be effectively run by Rupert Murdoch. You have been warned.
Your Servant
Doktor Kommirat
Friday 10 June 2016
The EU referendum is showing the pigsty in its true colours
With under two weeks to go to the EU Referendum the political scene is quite strange and I suspect that opinion polls are being seriously manipulated, because, despite polls showing a surge by the Leave campaign and the latest polls actually giving them a lead of 10 points, the betting odds are still predicting a 60-40 vote to remain. The average odds are still 1/3 to remain and 11/4 to leave. Because Scotland is by far the most enlightened and intelligent part of this sorry United Kingdom, Scotland is 1/200 to remain. Northern Ireland is also showing a great deal of common sense and humanity at 1/25 to remain. So, a leave majority in both Scotland and Northern Ireland is unthinkable as the bookies could never get it as wrong at such odds. As a result, there is quite a large disparity of opinion and voting intentions between Scotland, Northern Ireland, England, the opinion polls, and the bookmaking fraternity. Scottish voting intentions should not surprise people because the Scots do not share England's hatred of others and do not share their racist attitudes to foreigners, attitudes that are being ferociously encouraged by the English press and the fascist elements within the pigsty, and it is only 18 months since the Scots were themselves subjected to this kind of utterly shameless lying propaganda. We are still very acutely aware that all the promises of the British establishment were a pack of lies in September 2014, and so are very sceptical about anything a pigsty politician tells us.
If you read me during the Scottish referendum you will remember that I ignored the bookies and believed the pollsters and got it quite wrong in the end. Of course the bookies can get it wrong, but experience makes me more inclined to trust their judgement on such things. One of the issues highlighted in the press is how the Leave campaign are employing what is known as 'push' polling. This is an American form of polling that poses the question in a way that you are very likely to get a desired answer, such as "Would you vote to Remain in the EU and be swamped by two million refugees within the next two years that will include thousands of criminals and terrorists who will rape your wives and daughters and blow up all your towns and cities?" That is of course an exaggeration, but it is that type of polling that I suspect is skewing the figures.
Such is the appalling level of propaganda and blatant lying that is taking place, particularly by the Leave campaign, that two Tory MPs have, in the past two days, abandoned the Leave campaign because of their lies and racism (that is what they called it, not me), saying that they cannot continue supporting such a mendacious and despicable campaign. They are both now going to vote to remain. People from outside the UK will have difficulty believing the atrocious level of politics that we have sunk to in this sorry nation, we are really right down in the gutter. It also comes as quite a surprise that Tories can actually have a conscience as lying and racism is their default position; however, a penitent is always welcome. Today we had a young lady tell the Prime Minister on television, that she was going to vote remain despite the fact that in her opinion he has f....d the country up. That is how sickened the general public have become, that the Prime Minister can be spoken to in this way in public. What this young lady told the Camoron in this very public forum was
“I’m voting remain but nothing to do with you guys, I hate the Tories and I’m just going to say you’ve f....d every f...ing thing up in this country; you’ve screwed students, you’ve screwed the disabled, the vulnerable. I’ve heard that you want to take back the Human Rights Act and I could totally believe that, I wouldn’t put it past you at all, Dodgy Dave.” She then went on to say that she did not want to see the Conservative party given any more power because that would be the “worst thing for us right now”.
What interests me most about this encounter is that I told you recently that one of the characteristics of this Tory Party and its determination to consolidate free market neoliberalism, was its anarchic tendency to consistently undermine traditional authority, whether it was the law, traditional institutions, or the moral and ethical framework of society etc. The Camoron's confrontation with an ordinary member of the public who showed no respect whatsoever for his authority, either of his person or his office, should give him and his disciples immediate pause for thought, because what is good for the goose is most certainly good for the gander. The pigsty had better think carefully about how they conduct themselves because this was a classic case of the unintended consequences of intentional human action. Their authority is slipping and they are coming under increasing scorn, ridicule and disgust. They are being revealed for what they truly are, despicable. You have been warned.
Your Servant
Doktor Kommirat
If you read me during the Scottish referendum you will remember that I ignored the bookies and believed the pollsters and got it quite wrong in the end. Of course the bookies can get it wrong, but experience makes me more inclined to trust their judgement on such things. One of the issues highlighted in the press is how the Leave campaign are employing what is known as 'push' polling. This is an American form of polling that poses the question in a way that you are very likely to get a desired answer, such as "Would you vote to Remain in the EU and be swamped by two million refugees within the next two years that will include thousands of criminals and terrorists who will rape your wives and daughters and blow up all your towns and cities?" That is of course an exaggeration, but it is that type of polling that I suspect is skewing the figures.
Such is the appalling level of propaganda and blatant lying that is taking place, particularly by the Leave campaign, that two Tory MPs have, in the past two days, abandoned the Leave campaign because of their lies and racism (that is what they called it, not me), saying that they cannot continue supporting such a mendacious and despicable campaign. They are both now going to vote to remain. People from outside the UK will have difficulty believing the atrocious level of politics that we have sunk to in this sorry nation, we are really right down in the gutter. It also comes as quite a surprise that Tories can actually have a conscience as lying and racism is their default position; however, a penitent is always welcome. Today we had a young lady tell the Prime Minister on television, that she was going to vote remain despite the fact that in her opinion he has f....d the country up. That is how sickened the general public have become, that the Prime Minister can be spoken to in this way in public. What this young lady told the Camoron in this very public forum was
“I’m voting remain but nothing to do with you guys, I hate the Tories and I’m just going to say you’ve f....d every f...ing thing up in this country; you’ve screwed students, you’ve screwed the disabled, the vulnerable. I’ve heard that you want to take back the Human Rights Act and I could totally believe that, I wouldn’t put it past you at all, Dodgy Dave.” She then went on to say that she did not want to see the Conservative party given any more power because that would be the “worst thing for us right now”.
What interests me most about this encounter is that I told you recently that one of the characteristics of this Tory Party and its determination to consolidate free market neoliberalism, was its anarchic tendency to consistently undermine traditional authority, whether it was the law, traditional institutions, or the moral and ethical framework of society etc. The Camoron's confrontation with an ordinary member of the public who showed no respect whatsoever for his authority, either of his person or his office, should give him and his disciples immediate pause for thought, because what is good for the goose is most certainly good for the gander. The pigsty had better think carefully about how they conduct themselves because this was a classic case of the unintended consequences of intentional human action. Their authority is slipping and they are coming under increasing scorn, ridicule and disgust. They are being revealed for what they truly are, despicable. You have been warned.
Your Servant
Doktor Kommirat
Thursday 9 June 2016
Thatcher's legacy Part 4
I hadn't intended developing this series of posts any further as it is threatening to become a political version of Game of Thrones, but Thatcher's legacy of inequality and the virtual enslavement of much of the British workforce has become so bad now that it is actually embarrassing some Tory MPs and threatening to be a scandal. As a result, I feel that I should continue to highlight the real consequences of Thatcher's legacy, and make no mistake, it is her legacy as it is the result of the processes she quite deliberately put into practice, and reveal the true depth of her hatred for and loathing of, ordinary working people. One of the most graphic example of the Thatcher legacy is the nature of the casualised and dehumanised British workforce, where, in a factory just 6 miles from where I live, 200 workers were made redundant with 15 minutes notice. You see, those workers weren't actually people, they were merely expendable units of production, in fact they were a nuisance, but even worse, they were a cost, and that is inexcusable. What Thatcher achieved was a deliberate and massive shift of power within the workplace with the purpose of allowing employers and managers to do exactly as they wish with no restraints. Power relations within the workplace are now so polarised that we had the case in the UK where a lady was so scared to seek time off work that she delivered her baby in the toilet, because in her workplace she was subject to a six strikes and you are out policy. In this workplace, if a worker was not considered to be working fast enough they were warned over a tannoy, because the entire workplace is monitored by cameras. If you received six black marks, or 'strikes' over a six-month period you were instantly dismissed. Strikes included periods of reported sickness, excessive toilet breaks, errors, excessive chatting, horseplay, using a mobile phone, or wearing one of 802 banned items of clothing. Now, could I be accused of hyperbole if I likened such conditions to Nazi Germany or Stalin's Russia? Perhaps, but I can most certainly liken them to an Orwellian scenario. This is happening today, in modern Tory neoliberal Britain.
It is now quite usual for workers in Britain to be under constant surveillance from security cameras and have to undergo body searches at the end of their shift. What this tells us is that employers now routinely regard their workers as criminals who seek to steal and pilfer at every opportunity. Where do such attitudes come from? When Thatcher became Prime Minister she made no secret of her hatred for organised labour describing Britain's trade unionists as 'the enemy within.' This was a Prime Minister speaking about ordinary working people, many of whom may have voted for her. She banned trade unions at the government's surveillance headquarters, GHQ in Cheltenham, on the grounds that all trade union members were potential Soviet spies. She then proceeded to pass six major anti-trade union Bills designed to neuter the influence of workers organisations on any and every workplace. This transference of power into the hands of avaricious employers and managers has had quite devastating consequences. For example, 1.5 million British workers are now on zero-hour contracts, which is a form of slavery. We had an employer answering to a House of Commons committee yesterday as to why his workforce are penalised 15 minutes wages if they clock in one minute late, and why these same employees have to pass through a fingerprint security check going into and leaving their work, after being bodysearched. These employees are given a list of 802 brands of clothing that they are forbidden to wear at work. In this particular workplace, people were so afraid of losing their job if they took time off for any reason that there has been 110 ambulance call-outs in the past three years for workers who suffered chest pains, strokes, injuries, live births and miscarriages, in addition to the lady who had her child in the toilet. Any, and all of these described would have counted against the workers as strikes.
The neoliberal obsession with 'outsourcing' has handed power to a series of quite appalling employment agencies, some of whose personnel, according to female employees, demand sexual favours in return for a job. In addition, they announce that anyone can be dismissed at any time with no notice and no explanation. Now, if all that I have just described is not a state of slavery, then some enlightened person will have to tell me why it isn't. This is the end result of Thatcher's demonising of organised labour and subsequent dehumanising of individual labour. What she successfully did was deny the essence of the genius of Adam Smith and promote the notion that profit and success was the result of executive and entrepreneurial genius, rather than the result of labour. A profitable enterprise is a communal effort, but the actual value of the product comes from the labour of the workforce according to both Smith and Marx, but not in today's neoliberal universe. In this world, the individual worker has been completely dehumanised and is regarded as a thing, a cost that must be minimised as much as possible. An organised labour force is the devil incarnate and heralds the end of civilisation, and the tragedy is that much of the British population has bought into this narrative and are active participants in their own increasing slavery. You can certainly fool some of the people all of the time.
We now live in a society that demands 24 hours a day, 365 days a year business activity. Nothing, not religion, not holy days, not sickness, not pregnancy etc. is allowed to interfere with profit-making. No human consideration is allowed as any kind of excuse for a disruption in production. If a worker gets sick, pregnant etc. get rid of them and get someone else. Of course, not all workplaces are like that, but they soon will be. Thatcher did a marvellous thing for industry, if a worker has a complaint, fire him/her, simples. No need for disciplinary or grievance procedures, no need to consider a workers complaint, simply get rid of them. Thatcher had a self-confessed hatred for the public sector and between her and her successors, they have almost destroyed the public sector through competitive tendering that has resulted in increasing privatisation that then drives down costs by forcing fewer people to do more work for less pay in an insecure working environment. As I said, not all workplaces are like this, but this model is spreading inexorably and is now becoming dominant in the care sector, catering. retail distribution, transport, manufacturing and hospitality, and that covers a great deal of the workforce. In conclusion, the greatest cheerleaders for this fascist ideology are the people who will govern the UK in the event of a vote to leave the EU. They are Thatcher's most zealous disciples, and she was a genuinely bad person. You have been warned.
Your Servant
Doktor Kommirat.
It is now quite usual for workers in Britain to be under constant surveillance from security cameras and have to undergo body searches at the end of their shift. What this tells us is that employers now routinely regard their workers as criminals who seek to steal and pilfer at every opportunity. Where do such attitudes come from? When Thatcher became Prime Minister she made no secret of her hatred for organised labour describing Britain's trade unionists as 'the enemy within.' This was a Prime Minister speaking about ordinary working people, many of whom may have voted for her. She banned trade unions at the government's surveillance headquarters, GHQ in Cheltenham, on the grounds that all trade union members were potential Soviet spies. She then proceeded to pass six major anti-trade union Bills designed to neuter the influence of workers organisations on any and every workplace. This transference of power into the hands of avaricious employers and managers has had quite devastating consequences. For example, 1.5 million British workers are now on zero-hour contracts, which is a form of slavery. We had an employer answering to a House of Commons committee yesterday as to why his workforce are penalised 15 minutes wages if they clock in one minute late, and why these same employees have to pass through a fingerprint security check going into and leaving their work, after being bodysearched. These employees are given a list of 802 brands of clothing that they are forbidden to wear at work. In this particular workplace, people were so afraid of losing their job if they took time off for any reason that there has been 110 ambulance call-outs in the past three years for workers who suffered chest pains, strokes, injuries, live births and miscarriages, in addition to the lady who had her child in the toilet. Any, and all of these described would have counted against the workers as strikes.
The neoliberal obsession with 'outsourcing' has handed power to a series of quite appalling employment agencies, some of whose personnel, according to female employees, demand sexual favours in return for a job. In addition, they announce that anyone can be dismissed at any time with no notice and no explanation. Now, if all that I have just described is not a state of slavery, then some enlightened person will have to tell me why it isn't. This is the end result of Thatcher's demonising of organised labour and subsequent dehumanising of individual labour. What she successfully did was deny the essence of the genius of Adam Smith and promote the notion that profit and success was the result of executive and entrepreneurial genius, rather than the result of labour. A profitable enterprise is a communal effort, but the actual value of the product comes from the labour of the workforce according to both Smith and Marx, but not in today's neoliberal universe. In this world, the individual worker has been completely dehumanised and is regarded as a thing, a cost that must be minimised as much as possible. An organised labour force is the devil incarnate and heralds the end of civilisation, and the tragedy is that much of the British population has bought into this narrative and are active participants in their own increasing slavery. You can certainly fool some of the people all of the time.
We now live in a society that demands 24 hours a day, 365 days a year business activity. Nothing, not religion, not holy days, not sickness, not pregnancy etc. is allowed to interfere with profit-making. No human consideration is allowed as any kind of excuse for a disruption in production. If a worker gets sick, pregnant etc. get rid of them and get someone else. Of course, not all workplaces are like that, but they soon will be. Thatcher did a marvellous thing for industry, if a worker has a complaint, fire him/her, simples. No need for disciplinary or grievance procedures, no need to consider a workers complaint, simply get rid of them. Thatcher had a self-confessed hatred for the public sector and between her and her successors, they have almost destroyed the public sector through competitive tendering that has resulted in increasing privatisation that then drives down costs by forcing fewer people to do more work for less pay in an insecure working environment. As I said, not all workplaces are like this, but this model is spreading inexorably and is now becoming dominant in the care sector, catering. retail distribution, transport, manufacturing and hospitality, and that covers a great deal of the workforce. In conclusion, the greatest cheerleaders for this fascist ideology are the people who will govern the UK in the event of a vote to leave the EU. They are Thatcher's most zealous disciples, and she was a genuinely bad person. You have been warned.
Your Servant
Doktor Kommirat.
Sunday 5 June 2016
Thatcher's legacy part 3
A friend asked me yesterday what socialism had ever done for
me, given that the past 37 years of my life have been lived under conservative
right-wing parties, which of course include Mad Tony’s and Daphne Broon’s New
Labour. If I may digress for a minute, I have been asked about my reference to
our past glorious Prime Minister Gordon Brown as Daphne Broon. A Scottish
newspaper, the Sunday Post, has a comic strip that began in 1936 called the
Broons (the Browns). The Broons are a family that live in a tenement in a town
called Auchenshoogle that is a metaphor for Glasgow. One of the family is a
spinster called Daphne who, in my opinion, bears a striking relationship to the
incompetent oaf who unfortunately
became Prime Minister of this sorry country. I am in fact doing poor Daphne a
disservice as she is a kind and harmless person, unlike the spiteful and nasty
New Labour clown aforementioned. The only thing they really have in common is
that they are both Scots.
I told this friend, who is a self-confessed extreme
rightist, that it would take too long to explain, and that it would be
pointless attempting to explain given he simply wouldn’t listen because, in
truth, he was not interested in logic and facts. He has his theories, and that is the problem
with people who ‘know’ the truth; they will never let facts spoil a good
theory. This brings me to the discussion of what socialism is, because most
people use this term without having the faintest idea what they are talking
about. I have mentioned before, I find it quite incredible when I hear people
calling Barack Obama a socialist. That is the height of stupidity and
ignorance, because rightists, but particularly Americans, utilise socialism
coterminous with Marxist and Communist. As I have mentioned in my last two posts, the
west, particularly Britain and the USA, have been rendered seriously brain
damaged by the cult of individualism. Any reference to anything collective is
regarded as socialist, smelling of Marxism, something unclean. That therefore
places people like Adam Smith, David Hume, John Stuart Mill, John Locke etc. within
the framework of socialism, and that highlights how debased the political
narrative in the west has become because all these people were united in their
description of the human being as a social being. All these people also
regarded society as an empirical fact, imposing a definite and defining imprint
on each and every individual. As John Donne told us ‘no man is an island’. As a
result, I never use the term socialist because it has no meaningful explanation
in today’s world of debased and immature debate. Indeed,
what do the Vatican and Karl Marx have in common? Their description of the human
being as a social being. As the Second
Vatican Council, Pastoral Constitution Gaudium et Spes tells us “The human person is by its innermost nature, a
social being,” whilst Marx tells us that “The
human being is in the most literal sense a zoon politikon, not merely a
gregarious animal, but an animal which can individuate itself only in the midst
of society”.
However, if I had to reply to my friend, I could do it quite
easily, even within the parameters of what he regards as socialist. For such
people the state is what Karl Popper referred to as a necessary evil, but that
is quite spectacularly wrong. The state is not a ‘thing’ with an existence
outwith the personnel who comprise the essence of the state and is neither good, nor evil, but
essentially reflects the policies and behaviour of the personnel in charge of
it at any given point in history. The state is not independent of human
activity and behaviour; it is an interdependent set of human institutions, an
administrative concept for the regulation and administration of any given
political entity. People can be evil and can utilise the agencies of the state
for evil purposes, but equally, people can be altruistic and concerned for the
welfare of others and can therefore utilise the agencies of the state for good.
The state can be large, small, intrusive or liberating; it can be whatever the
people directing its activities desire it to be. Two of the most dangerous
Marxists writing for the state control of such things as public works and education were Adam
Smith and Alfred Marshall. Well by today’s standards they must be considered
Marxists, even though Smith was writing 100 years before Marx. So, what has
socialism as defined by my friend done for me?
Well it has constructed, maintained
and refined public works such as roads, bridges, schools, and
social security benefits, as argued for by Smith and Marshall. In addition,
it brought good sturdy and affordable council housing for working people, even
though most of the council houses built in Britain were constructed by that
most dangerous of communist parties, the pre-Thatcherite Conservatives. It has
brought public health initiatives such as sewerage and sanitation, the
necessity for clean water supply, and most importantly the National Health
Service. It provided me and countless others with student maintenance grants,
opened up further and higher education for all who wished to access it,
provided apprenticeships, regulated working conditions, including hours of
work, holidays, pensions, works canteens, and health and safety legislation. As
is obvious, I could write a book about the benefits of state intervention in
people’s lives and how the state has frequently been harnessed for good. Since
Thatcher the state has indeed been harnessed for evil, but that does not make the
state as a collectivity of institutions essentially good or bad, it is simply a
reflection of the people in control. In addition, it is simply stupid and
factually incorrect to label the above state benefits as socialist. Such
benefits are indeed the result of collective social action, but were considered
as beneficial and necessary at different times by people who were indeed socialist,
but also by people who were, like Harold McMillan or David Lloyd George,
conservatives and liberals.
So, Thatcher's influence has been far-reaching and long-lasting, but is now beginning to run out of steam because it is founded on a fraud and riddled with contradictions. However, in its struggle to remain dominant it is descending into fascism and its whole rationale is now founded on hatred, of immigrants, foreigners in general, the poor etc. It offers no hope, only continuing misery. The neoliberal narrative is one of desperation and is manifest in the Brexit campaign, in Donald Trump and the many right-wing neo-fascist movements springing up all over the world. I ask you again as I did in a previous post, how can the Americans even contemplate electing a person who openly advocates torture? The answer my friend is written on the wind as a great man once said, and that is the real legacy of the Blessed Margaret. You have been warned.
Your Servant
Doktor Kommirat.
So, Thatcher's influence has been far-reaching and long-lasting, but is now beginning to run out of steam because it is founded on a fraud and riddled with contradictions. However, in its struggle to remain dominant it is descending into fascism and its whole rationale is now founded on hatred, of immigrants, foreigners in general, the poor etc. It offers no hope, only continuing misery. The neoliberal narrative is one of desperation and is manifest in the Brexit campaign, in Donald Trump and the many right-wing neo-fascist movements springing up all over the world. I ask you again as I did in a previous post, how can the Americans even contemplate electing a person who openly advocates torture? The answer my friend is written on the wind as a great man once said, and that is the real legacy of the Blessed Margaret. You have been warned.
Your Servant
Doktor Kommirat.
Thursday 2 June 2016
Thatcher's legacy part 2
Within the UK as I told you before, the Tory Party has come under police investigation for electoral corruption and criminality. There are now 17 different police forces investigating over 30 allegations of breaches of election campaign spending limits and the Tories have just fought a court action to prevent Kent police investigating the South Thanet constituency election at last years general election. The case was thrown out of court. This is the party of openness and transparency according to the Camoron. This, the party that are happy to answer every and any question with regard to their election expenditure, that is, until they are actually questioned of course, then they will go to court to try to prevent being questioned. This demonstrates how the British elite are a group of people who demand freedom for their actions and do not believe that they should be constrained by the rules that they expect the rest of us to be constrained by. That is why they continually refuse to be held accountable for anything and have to be forced kicking and screaming to obey the normal laws and rules of British society. Their freedom is sacrosanct and that freedom has to be total.
As I was commenting in my last post, the modern neoliberal Tory is not a conservative and differs quite considerably from the traditional conservative concept of individual freedom. Traditional conservative thinking has always been characterised by the notion that individual thoughts and behaviour need to be constrained and regulated, by morality, law and the threat of sanctions and punishment. This is considered necessary both for the individual themselves and for the benefit of society as a whole. Conservatives have always stressed the need for moral training to regulate ‘the passions’ and for the necessity of the rule of law to restrain such passions when individual self-regulation fails. However, the neoliberal has an obsession with freedom as a lack of restraint, of a deregulated individualism where any form of regulatory control is seen as threatening ‘the free person’ and a ‘free society’. That is why neoliberal politics must never be confused with either traditional conservatism or liberalism. The philosopher Jeremy Bentham argued that “liberty is the silence of the law” but I will argue that is a stupid thing to say and makes no sense. This is expanding on the thinking of Thomas Hobbes who argued that
"Liberty, or freedom, signifies, properly, the absence of opposition; by opposition, I mean external impediments of motion. A freeman is he; that in those things, which by his strength and wit he is able to do, is not hindered to do what he has a will to do."
That statement looks quite impressive, but what does it actually mean? Am I having my freedom impeded by being physically and/or legally prevented from killing someone if that is what I have a will to do? What if I wish to commit rape? Obviously such statements are far too ambiguous to be taken at face value, and are in fact quite meaningless. But that is the manner in which the neoliberal presents them to us; this is the Thatcherite way of speaking. Bentham actually goes on to tell us that “every law is an evil, because every law is a violation of liberty; so that government, I say again, can only choose between evils” As a result, for someone who adopts Bentham’s philosophical concept of freedom, preventing rape and murder must themselves be acts of evil. We are now straying into the realms of insanity. You see, when Thatcher tells us that there is no such thing as society, then who is to say that rape and murder should not be your right if you have a will to do so? This is the real poison of individualism, the concept that such judgements are the remit of families and voluntary associations. The Ku Klux Klan is a voluntary association. So is Al-Quaida. ISIS calls itself a family. As a result, are their definitions of morality and ethical behaviour as relevant or more relevant than the decisions of the US Supreme Court, or the European Court of Human Rights which are most certainly not voluntary organisations, indeed they are very graphic manifestations of the big bad state. If you follow this line of thought you can only conclude that Thatcher and her acolytes are actually very bad people, because you must ask the question, why do they wish to argue such things?
Anarchists argue for the abolition of the state, and the neoliberal argues for a minimal state. What the neoliberal has actually done is invert the anarchist argument to justify its position. The anarchist argues that it is the state that has created capital and that the capitalist has his capital only by the grace of the state, whist the neoliberal argues that it is the state that is destroying capital and is the greatest barrier to capitalist development. But neoliberals need the state for its purposes. They do not even begin to understand the concept of individual liberty, which, as Marx tells us, can only be individuated within a social context because they continually deny that context. As a result, the neoliberal, whilst actively destroying the foundations of authority, whether that be the authority of law, of the state or the judiciary, or the moral and ethical framework of the society, utilises the institutions of the state to pursue a relentless fascist style centralisation in order to pander to corporate business interests and the financial classes. The pigsty has abandoned the sole purpose for its existence, to represent the British people who elect them, and has substituted a governmental system directed solely at the special interests of business and finance, thus the unceasing war against local government, unions, workers rights and the public sector in general. As a result I conclude that modern neoliberals from whatever party they represent are, at the same time, a form of anarchist and a form of fascist, thus my description of the modern neoliberal as an anarchic fascist. The dominant concept of the isolated individual is an anachronism, but has been promoted very successfully in modern times, despite the empirical evidence that it is a nonsense. Modern society is the product of the scientific revolution and scientific techniques in all areas of collective life. You will all be very familiar with my fondness for Adam Smith, and the key message that runs through Smith's work is that science and scientific technique is a completely social activity. Smith's argument for the wealth of nations is based on a complex division of labour that necessitates the cooperation of many people; it is necessarily a very collective enterprise, and it is not as if this is new, Smith published this in 1776. Since then the continuing empirical evidence of scientific progress highlights very graphically the poverty of an individualist philosophy. The scientific community is itself a good example of a practical and operating social structure, and no individual could possible carry out any real meaningful research except on some very narrow field. I apologise for the length of this post, but once again, you have been warned.
Your Servant
Doktor Kommirat
As I was commenting in my last post, the modern neoliberal Tory is not a conservative and differs quite considerably from the traditional conservative concept of individual freedom. Traditional conservative thinking has always been characterised by the notion that individual thoughts and behaviour need to be constrained and regulated, by morality, law and the threat of sanctions and punishment. This is considered necessary both for the individual themselves and for the benefit of society as a whole. Conservatives have always stressed the need for moral training to regulate ‘the passions’ and for the necessity of the rule of law to restrain such passions when individual self-regulation fails. However, the neoliberal has an obsession with freedom as a lack of restraint, of a deregulated individualism where any form of regulatory control is seen as threatening ‘the free person’ and a ‘free society’. That is why neoliberal politics must never be confused with either traditional conservatism or liberalism. The philosopher Jeremy Bentham argued that “liberty is the silence of the law” but I will argue that is a stupid thing to say and makes no sense. This is expanding on the thinking of Thomas Hobbes who argued that
"Liberty, or freedom, signifies, properly, the absence of opposition; by opposition, I mean external impediments of motion. A freeman is he; that in those things, which by his strength and wit he is able to do, is not hindered to do what he has a will to do."
That statement looks quite impressive, but what does it actually mean? Am I having my freedom impeded by being physically and/or legally prevented from killing someone if that is what I have a will to do? What if I wish to commit rape? Obviously such statements are far too ambiguous to be taken at face value, and are in fact quite meaningless. But that is the manner in which the neoliberal presents them to us; this is the Thatcherite way of speaking. Bentham actually goes on to tell us that “every law is an evil, because every law is a violation of liberty; so that government, I say again, can only choose between evils” As a result, for someone who adopts Bentham’s philosophical concept of freedom, preventing rape and murder must themselves be acts of evil. We are now straying into the realms of insanity. You see, when Thatcher tells us that there is no such thing as society, then who is to say that rape and murder should not be your right if you have a will to do so? This is the real poison of individualism, the concept that such judgements are the remit of families and voluntary associations. The Ku Klux Klan is a voluntary association. So is Al-Quaida. ISIS calls itself a family. As a result, are their definitions of morality and ethical behaviour as relevant or more relevant than the decisions of the US Supreme Court, or the European Court of Human Rights which are most certainly not voluntary organisations, indeed they are very graphic manifestations of the big bad state. If you follow this line of thought you can only conclude that Thatcher and her acolytes are actually very bad people, because you must ask the question, why do they wish to argue such things?
Anarchists argue for the abolition of the state, and the neoliberal argues for a minimal state. What the neoliberal has actually done is invert the anarchist argument to justify its position. The anarchist argues that it is the state that has created capital and that the capitalist has his capital only by the grace of the state, whist the neoliberal argues that it is the state that is destroying capital and is the greatest barrier to capitalist development. But neoliberals need the state for its purposes. They do not even begin to understand the concept of individual liberty, which, as Marx tells us, can only be individuated within a social context because they continually deny that context. As a result, the neoliberal, whilst actively destroying the foundations of authority, whether that be the authority of law, of the state or the judiciary, or the moral and ethical framework of the society, utilises the institutions of the state to pursue a relentless fascist style centralisation in order to pander to corporate business interests and the financial classes. The pigsty has abandoned the sole purpose for its existence, to represent the British people who elect them, and has substituted a governmental system directed solely at the special interests of business and finance, thus the unceasing war against local government, unions, workers rights and the public sector in general. As a result I conclude that modern neoliberals from whatever party they represent are, at the same time, a form of anarchist and a form of fascist, thus my description of the modern neoliberal as an anarchic fascist. The dominant concept of the isolated individual is an anachronism, but has been promoted very successfully in modern times, despite the empirical evidence that it is a nonsense. Modern society is the product of the scientific revolution and scientific techniques in all areas of collective life. You will all be very familiar with my fondness for Adam Smith, and the key message that runs through Smith's work is that science and scientific technique is a completely social activity. Smith's argument for the wealth of nations is based on a complex division of labour that necessitates the cooperation of many people; it is necessarily a very collective enterprise, and it is not as if this is new, Smith published this in 1776. Since then the continuing empirical evidence of scientific progress highlights very graphically the poverty of an individualist philosophy. The scientific community is itself a good example of a practical and operating social structure, and no individual could possible carry out any real meaningful research except on some very narrow field. I apologise for the length of this post, but once again, you have been warned.
Your Servant
Doktor Kommirat
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