Keir Starmer’s determination to use his refusal to alleviate child poverty as the issue with which to demonstrate his macho Thatcherite credentials, has provided one of those moments when blurred perceptions crystallise.
A Labour government in the UK under Starmer will bring no significant changes in economic or foreign policy and will make no difference whatsoever to the lives of working class people.
If dividends were taxed at the same rate as wages, that alone would bring in very many times the cost of lifting the two-child benefit cap. But that would hurt the owners of capital and be redistributive, so it is firmly off Starmer’s agenda.
Starmer, Reeves and Streeting have no intention of attempting to bridge society’s stunning and ever-growing wealth gap.
Rather they seek to emphasise “wealth creation” and return to trickledown theory. Alongside “wealth creation” they talk of “reform”, by which they mean more deregulation and more private, for profit provision of public services.
The Labour Party has not only abandoned all thought of securing a capital interest for the worker in the enterprise where they work. The Labour Party has also abandoned the ideas both of state intervention in the unequal dynamic between worker and employer, and of facilitating and supporting self-organisation of Labour.
Tory anti-union legislation is to remain, and who can forget Starmer banning Labour MPs from official union picket lines?
The Labour Party in power is also not going to repeal the hostile environment for immigrants legislation, or the Tory attacks on civil liberties and the right to protest.
What precisely therefore is the purpose of the Labour Party? An extension to which question is, what then is the purpose of the next UK general election?
To register disgust at the rule of the Tories by voting in an alternative set of Tories?
There has been an undercurrent of concern about the sprint to the right under Starmer, but somehow the two-child benefit cap has crystallised it in the public mind. The fact that there is no real choice on offer to the electorate has even broken into the mainstream media narrative (the embedded video, not the tweet, though I agree with that too).
The Labour Right are the most disgusting, duplicitous cvnts in British politics pic.twitter.com/bfJSLTphgg
— ian westell ?️??️⚧️? (@ianwestell) July 17, 2023
It is not just a Westminster thing. Famously, the SNP have won eight successive electoral mandates on Scottish Independence while their elected representatives have done absolutely zero about it. They have not even really pretended they intend to do anything about it.
Western democracy appears to have failed in the sense that elections can achieve nothing that makes any difference to the lives of ordinary people. They only make a difference to lives of members of the political class, who jump on or off the gravy train according to the result.
This is not an accident. Those who have threatened the neoliberal order have been destroyed by lies like Corbyn – lies which the billionaire- and state-controlled media were delighted to amplify – or cheated out of election like Bernie Sanders.
In the United States, the current lawfare attempts to remove Donald Trump as a Presidential candidate are an extraordinary denial of democracy. Trump is accused of paying off sexual partners and of retaining classified documents.
Bill Clinton paid off sexual partners in a much more egregious fashion and Hillary’s data-handling arrangements were much worse, with zero legal consequences for either, but that does not seem in the least to concern the “liberal” Establishment.
The role of the US security services in the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story during the last Presidential election should have been a giant wake-up call. But liberals were more interested in stopping Trump than in preventing the security state from manipulating the result of elections.
There is an “end justifies the means” approach by supposedly liberal thinkers that supports any action against Trump, as it supports the banking ostracism of Farage, because their views are not entirely those of the neoliberal Establishment.
Neither Trump nor Farage are close to my own views, though I differ from them in different ways from, but no more than I differ from, Starmer and Biden. But what is happening to both of them should be put together with what happened to Corbyn and with the gutting of Labour by Starmer, and even (God help us) with what happened to Truss, as part of the same process of ensuring the political agenda does not offer any real choice.
It has become banal to note that concentration of media ownership between state and billionaires, and social media gatekeeping by billionaires’ corporations in cahoots with state security services, has contributed to the limitation of accepted “respectable” viewpoints.
I am less and less confident I see any solution.
In looking to start this chain of thought, I was thinking of saying that I no longer believe in the Western model of democracy, but can find no acceptable alternative. On writing I find that I do in fact believe in the western model of democracy, but that model no longer exists.
What we had from roughly 1920 to 1990, when voting really could make a difference, is not what we have now.
Voting for Clement Attlee made a difference. The Establishment won’t make that mistake again.
The concentration of media ownership is only one facet of the concentration of wealth and political power which appears irreversible by democratic means, in that we will never be given the opportunity to vote for anyone in official politics who opposes it, or to hear the arguments against it on any media platform with an equal access to the market for ideas.
We live in a post-democratic society. That is difficult to accept, but it is true.
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Agree with you except for what you say about Trump. He aided and a betted insurrection and is suspected of overthrowing the US government. He should not be allowed to rerun.
i don’t think that was an insurrection, it was a mild riot. and im pretty sure he didn’t overthrow the us government, or we would know about it. Both Biden and Trump should be before a court for war crimes, i don’t see the US government as having legitimacy anymore. i hope to god this doesn’t lead to another civil war.
“i don’t think that was an insurrection, it was a mild riot.”
Barely a riot I thought.
As Dr Chomsky has pointed out with his usual tact, if any attention were paid to the Nuremberg Principles and the precedents of the Nuremberg Trials, every US President since FDR (inclusive) should have been hanged.
FDR died before the Nuremberg trials started, so there was no precedent for him, but you would have to include most of them going back if the Nuremberg trials had been a precedent.
Ask Dr Chomsky if Putin should be hanged. He appeared on “The Duran” channel on YouTube, which is nothing but Kremlin propaganda.
200 idiots taking selfies in the Capitol. I could never understand what the risk was, if any? Had they been highly trained hackers or secret agents, maybe… but nothing even close to that. What a farce.
It was a put-up job by the secret shows.
I always felt it was semi-staged – hardly any police – building not secured etc. Crowd were not really armed or revolutionary, just stupid and postering and allowed a free hand for a while.
Indeed. All that was needed was a couple of hundred police with riot shields and batons – no guns needed nor wanted.
Read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/January_6_United_States_Capitol_attack for a good example of utterly overboard one-sided propaganda. Enough in itself to deter me from ever giving any money to Wikipedia. Either they have some integrity, or they don’t – evidently they don’t.
Yes that is the way I saw it too.
The House of Representatives is “The Peoples House”!
The idea that ordinary people are not allowed in or to lobby it is anti-constitutional.
The Riot, to the extent it was, involved provocateurs (recruited from law enforcement) the details of which are kept secret, “not in the public interest”. No-body died as a result of any buffalo head protestors. All Fantasy narrative spewed obligingly by the Media.
Much disinformation around this event which seems to have been manufactured in advance to pre-emtively smear Trump. And like Craig I am no Trump fan but he was democratically ELECTED. He was not, I believe, democratically un-elected, The late swings toward Biden during counting were about as statistically likely as a sample of 60% of 7 million counted votes having a 10% swing after 100 % are counted in Pennsylvania. (roughly from memory between when I went to bed and when I got to work).
Craig is sadly right, and this is happening here. There is very funny business going on in the UK with postal votes. Sunak wasn’t even properly elected by his own party. Truss (who is an idiot) was usurped by… “the markets” :-O Code for financial Institutions. The policies she was lambasted for were later implemented by Sunak anyway.
The French have the right idea. Brits are just nodding empty heads while their rights & needs are trodden into the dirt. Dont get me started on Foreign policy which isn’t even mentioned in electioneering.
Please note that Jefferson wrote, “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants”. Almost everyone leaves out the final two words – I wonder why?
“God forbid we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion. The people cannot be all, and always, well informed. The part which is wrong will be discontented, in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive. If they remain quiet under such misconceptions, it is lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty. … What country before ever existed a century and half without a rebellion? And what country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure”.
– Thomas Jefferson, Letter to William Stephens Smith (13 November 1787), quoted in Padover’s “Jefferson On Democracy”
That wasn’t an insurrection; it was a distraction…
…from a couple of B52s, callsigns GRIM11 and GRIM12, which Trump had loaded with outdated tactical nukes and sent to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities. Stratotankers rendezvoused with them over the Strait of Gibraltar; I heard them go over from their base in Mildenhall. A fighter jet escort joined them as they flew over Israel, and the combined force was welcomed in Saudi skies before disappearing (transponders off) over the Persian Gulf; all very symbolic.
It’s all on flight radar sites and the plane-spotter forums, but you can also see the personnel replacements Trump had to make in the chains of command, including the head of nuclear weapons safety. A most senior US military lawyer had to be wheeled out of retirement, and Trump was taken aside for a few hours, the ‘insurrection’ providing a remarkably convenient cover. “We can’t tell you what he’s trying to do because it’s classified, but he has to be stopped” or similar, on the lawyer’s Twitter stream. Eventually the B52s were called back without bombing anything, but they’d been in the air continuously for over 24 hours and I dread to think what state their crews must have been in.
I’m guessing it was an old plan trawled out of military archives, as might be found among the documents Trump had in his shower.
this seems seriously fishy. a minor riot is not going to distract anybody but the news organizations. and it is a remarkably convenient distraction from the constant warmongering of Biden and the very elites who purportedly “saved” us from Tump.
Professor Richard Murphy (https://twitter.com/RichardJMurphy) summed the situation up:
‘Keir Starmer is really dangerous. He’ll win in 2025 and refuse to spend any more on public services so they will descend into chaos. In 2029 the Tories will be back saying privatisation is the only answer. And it will happen. It’s as if that’s what Starmer wants.’
Streeting is openly enthusiastic about privatisation. Which in a Shadow Health Secretary is terrifying.
Somewhat reassuring, thank you.
In the USA the Republicans and the Democrats have always been joined at the hip. As Gore Vidal wrote nearly 50 years ago,
“There is only one party in the United States, the Property Party… and it has two right wings: Republican and Democrat. Republicans are a bit stupider, more rigid, more doctrinaire in their laissez-faire capitalism than the Democrats, who are cuter, prettier, a bit more corrupt – until recently… and more willing than the Republicans to make small adjustments when the poor, the black, the anti-imperialists get out of hand. But, essentially, there is no difference between the two parties”.
It’s just the same here with the “Conservatives” and “Labour”. The former conserve nothing except their money and power, and those of their “friends”. “Labour” couldn’t care less about the workers. What all of them want is money and power, which are essentially fungible. What none of them want is for the Great Unwashed (which means us, no matter how fragrant our persons) to have any influence, let alone power.
We have it from Adam Smith himself that,
“People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices”.
How obvious, and yet how much overlooked, that this applies in spades to the trade of politics!
Sometime ago I suggested at his site as here and others what the solution is to our railroading into open fascist anti democratic election fixing.
By recognising and naming the wrong to make it right.
Wrong – is the exponential increase in postal votes since the beginning of this century – under Blairism first and accelerated by Cameron/and that little obnoxious LibDem Clegg, both of whom have gone off to enjoy their rewards of a billionaire lifestyles and millions in the bank.
So, first cancel postal voting. For these who medically can’t travel to a very local voting booth. Have their votes collected by council workers travelling in pairs to their places of abode.
Second and most important organise a vote spoiling campaign – which clearly shows how to spoil the vote and mark ‘none of the above’ when there is no local candidate that is selected /imposed candidate by central office. And no local independent is available.
This would result in a genuine number of total voters and an absolute number of the electorate dissatisfied with the fixed voting system and imposed candidates. Anything over 1% would show that the system is broken and the electorate won’t be taken for mugs anymore.
Anything over 2% would be game over for the establishment status quo.
Then we march onto Whitehall and the Mall if they don’t instantly surrender.
I notice that in the recent by-elections a rash of obscure fringe parties has appeared and I wonder if this some sort of machination by the property party.
If postal voting was banned then myself and tens of thousands of others like me would rarely get to vote. There are vast numbers of workers who travel around the country for work and that does not take elections into account.
However I’d agree it needs tightened up. I’ve often wondered how many of the vast number of people with dementia have a close relative or carer decide how their postal vote is used.
The only example I’ve found while searching now for a general election shows 0.3% of ballots spoiled. But I think you under estimate the amount of spoiled votes that would be required to make an impact. Being short of double figures would hardly get a mention in my view.
Maybe at long last people are finally waking up to the fact that a tiny fraction own the vast majority of the wealth, and that they steal from, lie to, cheat, enslave and kill the rest. It’s been this way for a very long time. Periodically there were uprisings – all ruthlessly crushed.
As has been pointed out here and elsewhere, if anyone thinks Heil Starmer’s going to be an improvement they are deluded.
Here is a view on voting taken from the website, ‘Architects for Social Housing’:
“The first and most important thing you do when you vote in a General Election is consent to handing power over yourself and everyone else in this country — as well as over other countries in which the UK has colonial and financial interests — to a ruling class, which then has the entire apparatus of the state at its command.
This includes the power of the courts to, for example, lock us up in Belmarsh Prison indefinitely and without charge or trial at the request of a foreign power; the power to take whatever percentage of our income they decide away from us in tax and allocate it to their business partners in the form of public funding; the power to pass laws that have absolute authority over us, even when that means criminalising protest against those laws or being made homeless by them; the power of the police to assault, imprison or — if we’re black — kill us with impunity for breaking laws passed by Parliament but written by private think-tanks, no matter how much they infringe upon our human rights; the power of both public security services and private security firms to spy on, investigate and record every aspect of our lives, no matter how private we may think they are, without our knowledge or consent; the power of the UK military to wage war against other people whose land or oil or lithium or water the state wants to take at the point of a ‘peace-keeping’ force; the power to sell military arms manufactured in our name for genocidal wars waged by repressive dictatorships; the power to sell the public assets built by past generations for the common weal that we believed were only in their stewardship to further enrich the private wealth of the highest bidder; and, in order to affect this dispossession, the power of municipal and local authorities to demolish our homes, destroy our communities and force us off the land on which we have lived for generations for the profit of the rich of this and other countries.
The nomination of which political party will exert this governmental, military, legal and administrative power over us is secondary and almost irrelevant to our willing collaboration in our own subordination to the capitalist state.
So, before you proudly exercise your ‘democratic right’ to put a tick in a box every five years, first think about what you are doing.”
Very true. The first step everyone should take is totally to ignore all elections under the present power structure. As Jerry Garcia memorably summed it up, “Continually choosing the lesser of two evils is still choosing evil”.
Not to mention the immense difficulty of discriminating between levels of evil assiduously shrouded in impenetrable secrecy.
The video said it all. Yvette Cooper and her ballsy husband Ed claimed back the daily taxi rides of their children to school from the taxpayers.
She and her ilk are selfservers par excellence whose hauchy noises/lies towards helping women and children have reverberated in staged media appearances since they served the dark Lord and hist B rate liar.
Thanks for your clarity Craig, Im sure that thousands of Corbyns young supporters would agree.
A lottocracy which randomly chooses a representative from NI numbers to serve for one year would be a bulwark against corruption and a cheap way of selection/gender balance. wasting 300 million on this rigged event will not be needed, no more nights of counting.
It would make political parties superfluous and replace partypolitics with issue based politics and policies ( most important to the majority of reps.)
Urgency of certain issues and the one year seat reps occupy would entice a busy schedule.
They could sit anywhere, Parliament would make a great Hotel/ reception center for tha refugee barges anchored outside it on the river Thames.
pitchfork times indeed.
??
I have to be careful what I write because I am not 100% sure what happened!
Take it with tea spoon of salt!!!
On Tuesday I was at Warwick Uni (Economics) celebrating graduation of a friends son.
To my understanding the “award for outside of curriculum” was given to a person promoting ABCD + rights by the name of J Cooper.
I just realised that more information and details might hurt my friend
That is not true, is it, Craig?
Voting for Harold Wilson made a difference.
So “they” carried out a coup against him in 1976.
Peter Wright recorded it all in “Spycatcher”. And Maggie Thatcher shut him down and stopped him warning the British people.
When Wilson left he was replaced by James Callaghan. And James Callaghan was only too happy to carry out that which Wilson had refused – he created the Bank of England Nominees setup which allowed certain “dignitaries” to carry out financial transactions in legal secrecy (via BCCI).
So if you want to know who “they” were who defenestrated Harold Wilson just do the research on who was enabled by the Bank of England Nominees. Simple.
If you cannot bring yourselves to reveal who it was who stole democracy from the British people, what chance have you of ever getting it back?
Watch “Hidden Agenda”.
A lot happened in the 1970s. Whitlam. Watergate.
I blame Callaghan and Healey for opening the door to the IMF and neoliberalism. Their compliance with the demand to halt the reform of education was a dead give-away. And don’t forget the Gang of Four. They failed to create a credible third party (if they ever meant to) but it was on the back of their defection that the pivot to the right became pronounced. If there is one thing I have learned, it is that liberalism and social democracy are incompatible.
If you cannot bring yourselves to understand that the British people have never had any “democracy”, what chance have you of ever getting it?
Not so. There was democracy under George VI, and that’s why he had to go.
Did you know that George VI “died suddenly” of lung cancer?
And at a time when Elizabeth was conveniently away on safari?
George VI died of a coronary thrombosis, not lung cancer, John – or murder. That was his old man:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertrand_Dawson,_1st_Viscount_Dawson_of_Penn
(Still, involuntary speedballing’s not a bad way to go, so George Snr can’t have too many complaints. Bugger Bognor.)
Hello LA
I was going on what I had been told by my late mother (Londoner, born in 1919)
The truth is I don’t know the truth.
I left England in 1994. Since then I’ve lived overseas.
What I’ve learned in that time, to my astonishment, is that virtually none of the official history that we were taught is true. It is all a tissue of lies.
I’ve watched the British reporting on the Ukraine-Russian conflict, and realise that we simply continue with the course of our history with another tissue of lies.
The lies never end.
On the issue of the death of King George VI I take a rather different view to what you might call a “battle of the information sources” between us.
You see, if you understand how the system works and where the power lies, the payoffs were so enormous as to be overwhelming. Certainly overwhelming towards Mary of Teck and Elizabeth Bowes Lyon.
In order for the plan to be carried out “Bertie” had to go. For the same reason that Wallis Simpson had to go.
Now “your sources” will tell you that Wallis was barred because she was a divorcee.
Yet Camilla is a divorcee.
So “your sources” must be telling a lie, no?
Thanks for your reply John. As Carl Sagan put it, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence: with George V we essentially have a signed confession.
Re: ‘Now “your sources” will tell you that Wallis was barred because she was a divorcee. Yet Camilla is a divorcee. So “your sources” must be telling a lie, no?’
I believe that there have been one or two changes in the social attitudes of the UK population, as well as in statutory law, in the intervening period.
Hello LA
I’m afraid your final paragraph is a bit of a copout.
There is no statutory basis for the monarchy, and it rules in the name of God.
The absolute zenith of parliamentary control over the monarchy was the Coronation Oath Act of 1688/9, wherein the king and queen were required to swear to uphold and obey the law (and to keep out the Catholics). All that time ago it was inconceivable that anyone would break an oath before God. Nowadays, who still believes in the almighty?
That is the real change in social attitudes.
Breaking an oath before God is a triviality. Yet that is the only protection available to the common folk against an overbearing sovereign.
That overbearing sovereign did not want Wallis in 1936.
That overbearing sovereign did want Camilla in 2022.
Thanks for your reply John. There may not be a statutory basis for monarchy, but there is a statutory basis for some of what the monarch is or is not allowed to do. For example, the king cannot convert to Catholicism and remain the king even now.
Re: ‘That overbearing sovereign did not want Wallis in 1936.’
That sovereign did very much want Wallis, which is why he chose to abdicate (at a time when she was still married to her second husband).
‘Nowadays who still believes in the Almighty?’
Quite a few people I’m sure.
“That sovereign did very much want Wallis, which is why he chose to abdicate”
He also was very much not interested in being King. He much preferred Wallis to kingship.
John Cleary, thanks for laying that out so clearly.
I agree that Craig has overlooked the coup against Harold Wilson, but Attlee made a big difference nonetheless, and Corbyn very nearly got a chance to.
Democracy has to be fought for. Continually. The power of the people isn’t a right or an aspiration; it’s a practice, and for too long, a smaller and smaller proportion of the population have been practising.
Right now, local and national government and electoral systems all need major structural upgrades that open them to public participation; free yet accountable media needs to be practised and resourced; and the private sector has to lose most of its rights to secrecy. Such powers are rarely just handed over to the people, they have to be taken by making them a reality on the ground, to make the old way redundant, irrelevant and impossible, and to expose the existing order’s lack of legitimacy.
Excellent article. Jonathan Cook has just published an article on his web site which is equally as good and is about how we no longer live in a functioning democracy !! His angle relates to excess deaths since COVID.
I note a direct parallel between the famous question put by Noam Chomsky to Andrew Marr as he sought to argue that he was not subject to censorship or promoted establishment propaganda….. (paraphrased)
Do you think you would have your job and be sitting in that seat asking me questions if you said anything different?
The same is true for any candidate put forward for election,
As this *selection” process has been going for a number of decades we are left with the establishment selecting for more of the same.
It has a lot to do with economics. Democracy only ‘works’ – or appears to – when most voters are becoming richer. It always breaks down when most voters realise they aren’t getting what they ‘want’. Quite likely, that was why Attlee was encouraged/allowed to win in 1945 – the establishment preferred some socialism from a man who had, after all, been in Churchill’s Cabinet, than the risk of protests or the threat of revolution.
I am cynical that democracy really exists at all – it often seems like a power struggle at the top, with the public appearing to legitimising it. The 2019 election in particular looked like a black farce rather than a legitimate democratic exercise, with Johnson an obvious stooge. Ordinary people are conned and browbeaten by a media owned by the rich, and quite possibly there is more sinister trickery at elections too. I am of the left, but if anything I prefer Sunak to Starmer, and certainly preferred Major to Blair.
As well as only ‘safe’ or useful opposition leaders being allowed to win elections, there is also the fundamental issue that the most important matters are not debated at all. I can think of quite a few issues that are deemed ‘untouchable’ in mainstream politics and the media – Ukraine and other wars, the covid lockdowns, the royal family, Brexit, criticism of the United States in any way (except for allotted fall-guys like Trump), and the housing market. There are probably many others. What is the point of opposition leaders who don’t seem able or willing to oppose on the most significant policies?
Liarbour would probably have won a general election in 1940, postponing it helped the “landslide” of 1945. (Correct me if I’m wrong but doesn’t 6% of the electorate who don’t abstain, changing their votes from one far right partei to the other, amount to a landslide because of the Acerbo Law er, FPTP I mean?)
Tom74,
” I am cynical that democracy really exists at all – it often seems like a power struggle at the top, with the public appearing to legitimising it. ”
Don’t you see it?
There is a Tory party of the right; then there is a Labour party now far right of purported left.
So, where is the choice?
“Democracy only ‘works’ – or appears to – when most voters are becoming richer. It always breaks down when most voters realise they aren’t getting what they ‘want’”.
Which is why inflation is such a popular tool of the rulers. Most people blandly believe that they are getting richer, while they are actually getting steadily poorer.
Clement Atlee secretly armed the British Empire with the atomic bomb, enslaved most of its foreign policy to its boss Empire, the USA, and clung on to what colonies he could, which hardly seems democratic.
On Keir Starmer, apologies for cross-posting but the significant point I think is this:
I was thinking the exact same thing a few days ago as I reading data which shows, “China is currently adding new renewable energy capacity at around the same speed as the rest of the world combined.” It is also building 19 nuclear power reactors.
While the UK is declining in almost every way and can achieve very little and is unwilling to invest to make anything better. The West loves money too much and believes that inflating assets is a good way of generating wealth, it doesn’t. Unless we change our focus to investment in society and production, the West’s influence will fade.
“….Bill Clinton paid off sexual partners in a much more egregious fashion and Hillary’s data-handling arrangements were much worse, with zero legal consequences for either, but that does not seem in the least to concern the “liberal” Establishment.”
Flat out false. I could give you chapter and verse on the Right wing Hillary Clinton nonsense.
“In the United States, the current lawfare attempts to remove Donald Trump as a Presidential candidate are an extraordinary denial of democracy.”
This is a disturbing claim from a commentator I usually respect for his good judgment. Trump is up on well-founded charges of wrongful possession of classified information, the removal of records after receiving lawful subpoenas for their production, the unlawful revealing of high level classified information to persons having no business receiving them.
He is also being summonsed to a grand jury in relation to his January 6 behavior in the Congress invasion. Scores of participants have already been charged and sentenced to jail time. On your grounds they should be released as well. Democracy does not trump judicial charges on criminal offenses. If Trump gets in you will see the wholesale dismantling of the judicial system.
Oh, did I mention? — Trump is a mentally certifiable person who should not be anywhere near public office.
Craig is just imploring you to think. Trump isn’t being removed as an electoral option for high principled shining city on a hill reasons. it because he exposes the venality of the whole US political class in too crass a way.
how can his removal be celebrated as a triumph of order, good governance, and democracy when we know Biden is just as unscrupulous? one of the most corrupt politicians in Washington going back fifty years. when everyone knows a story exposing his seedy self serving in Ukraine was crudely suppressed on the eve of the last election by the US security state, TV networks and social media. how must we view that? good governance by noble people on behalf of a good man? this is what Craig is encouraging you need to think on.
“we know Biden is just as unscrupulous?”
Really? When did Biden ever encourage the violent overthrow of his country’s government to stay in power after he lost an election? Trump did. The Ds anti-Trumpism is/was often pure partisan lawfare. Russiagate, malicious prosecution based on nothing of Trump officials for doing their jobs. But not so much this.
Sure the Dems are corrupt and often crazy. . But not quite as corrupt and crazy as the Trump controlled Republican party. It’s the difference between rotten government – and fascism.
i don’t agree with that. Biden’s suppression of the NY Post story – in cahoots with legacy media and the intel agencies – was just as unscrupulous. if anything it is more frightening because it is still being represented by America’s most respected elites as normal or even praiseworthy behaviour. going back further those same elites also knew Biden was the prime mover in pushing the lies that won crucial Senate approval for the catastrophic Iraq invasion. so looked at with clear eyes i do not think Trump is an obvious winner over the liberal wing of the US establishment when it comes to lack of scruples.
I wouldn’t call anybody’s eyes clear – or seeing accurately – who can’t tell the difference between the crimes of Biden and the elites — and the taking it to a whole other level by a reckless attempt to violently overthrow a superpower armed to the teeth. I’m not viscerally ill-disposed toward Trump – and I have been in the same room with him. Close enough to check out whether his hair is real. It is / was – nobody makes toupees that look that bad 🙂 ). Actually, that time, I felt sorry for him, but also that he showed some character in an embarrassing situation.
But this is the kind of thing, the kind of difference that local knowledge and understanding ( I’m a USAn) — trumps the detachment provided by the distance that Craig Murray and most here have. Trump became much worse than Biden has been. Most Americans breathed easier when Trump lost the election- and felt they had dodged a bullet after January 6.
People here, to a small extent, our esteemed host even – some who put some credence in Trump’s ridiculous claims of victory… People who bend over backwards in absurd contortions to defend him – are the kind of liberal [the US meaning is more “social democrat / socialist”, especially back then] that won’t take their own side in an argument. [William Ernest Hocking, Robert Frost].
that wasn’t a violent insurrection. and the difference between the D’s and the R’s is increasingly hard to see.
“Flat out false. I could give you chapter and verse on the Right wing Hillary Clinton nonsense”.
Go on, then. We look forward to reading and evaluating your evidence.
“Trump is a mentally certifiable person who should not be anywhere near public office”.
Which specific doctors have thus certified him? Are you a doctor? Have you ever been in the same room with Mr Trump?
Knowledgeable commentators have pointed out that the whole Clinton emails saga has been baseless. The chief claim was of 30,000 emails deleted from her server which even the FBI admits were mostly private communications by Hillary and none of them labelled in any identifying way as classified documents, or containing material which was classified at the time time they were sent or received by Hillary. FBI Director James Comey admitted only three emails contained minor matters normally deemed ‘confidential,’ but even he admitted these would not have met the standard of security classified. A small number of political matters discussed by Hillary were later retroactively classified (after the hearings) but even this had no merit. The issues referred to were all political commentary views which could be found freely in media reports. The whole Hillary Clinton alleged security breaches was a monumental load of crock by the Republicans and Right wing media.
https://www.newsweek.com/squalid-case-against-hillary-and-her-emails-492017
https://cannonfire.blogspot.com/search?q=hillary+emails
it is not “nonsense”, or “right wing” to point out the whole massive campaign of lies behind Russiagate. I would say Clinton committed more war crimes than Trump (both of them, Bill as president and Hilary as SOS.
Perhaps russiagate was created to distract from the content of the emails which told of how the DNC fixed the candidate selction process to exclude Bernie Sanders.
I don’t need to be in the same room as Trump to identify him as a seriously disturbed and dangerous person. In a political leader such characteristics are dangerous to the body politic by inciting violence against his perceived enemies. Psychology experts have formed the same view.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-shared-psychosis-of-donald-trump-and-his-loyalists/
Clinton was absolutely careless and reckless with her email setup, and she started the whole Russiagate nonsense. you could say it was her campaign, but she has obviously all in on those lies.
For your interest Craig. The UK and US Right have extensive links aimed at overtaking the political landscape in both countries. A pressure group called Atlantic Bridge was founded in 1997 intended to build and maintain the economic and military links fostered by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. In 2007 the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) set up a US nonprofit called the Atlantic Bridge Project, in order to “foster positive relationships between conservatives on both sides of the Atlantic.” Atlantic Bridge fell into disrepute in 2011 after its head and then UK Defense Secretary Liam Fox was found to have been implementing a “shadow foreign policy” involving corporate lobbyists and military contractors using dark money donated to Bridge in its legal role as a charity. Understand, this is high level conservatives on both sides of the Atlantic running covert foreign and domestic policy changes in tandem.
Atlantic Bridge returned in 2016 with key Conservative players working seamlessly together to back Donald Trump: Steve Bannon, Raheem Kassam, Nigel Farage, Liam Fox, Jeff Sessions, Sen Jim DeMint and Robert Mercer. Organizations aside from ALEC included the Heritage Foundation, Cambridge Analytica, UKIP and the Henry Jackson Society, a UK right wing anti-Islam think tank. The extent of these conservative political links, which continue to this day, is truly staggering. The UK and US Conservatives are linked and of a common mind to own US and UK governments totally. Remember, Steve Bannon was a major supporter of the Jan 6 2021 attack on the US Congress. Voting rights mean nothing to these people. Political control is everything.
https://medium.com/textifire/cambridge-analytica-the-tea-partys-new-atlantic-bridge-a25ffcaa70e4
Fred the biggest problem is the limp opposition, if it can even be termed opposition, from the centre right: the corporate Democrats and Blairite Labour.
you talk of the Right attacking the Clintons but nobody has advanced the Right’s economic agenda more effectively than did Bill Clinton. following NAFTA, executives from Ford, the steel industry, etc., were quoted in the WSJ saying his administration was better for corporate America than Ronald Reagan’s. it’s not for nothing he’s spoken of as being one of the best presidents the Republicans have ever had.
between 92 and 2000 his team of economic super-hawks (Rubin, Summers) oversaw the most significant reduction of the welfare state in US history. he told his economic team, ‘we’re all Eisenhower Republicans – we stand for lower deficits, welfare reform, free trade and the bond markets’. his strong cultural message (gays in the military, etc) was deliberately calculated as ideological cover for stringent neoliberal economic reforms. (a lesson learned by every centre right politician since, from Blair to Sunak).
during Clinton’s two terms, wages stagnated and the US haemorrhaged jobs overseas. pursuing ‘trickle-down’, he cut capital gains taxes on investments in property and securities and stocks. compensation packages for CEOs soared to new heights, and the 2000 US Census revealed a dramatic widening in economic inequality even compared with the Reagan-Bush years.
Clinton supported initiatives at both federal and state levels for contracting public services out to private companies and undertook some of the most comprehensive deregulatory reforms of the 20th century. his Telecommunications Act of 1996 led to spectacular mega-mergers and monopoly control of US media by a tiny number of giant corporations. the Financial Services Modernisation Act of 1999 reflected his willing capture by Wall Street. it removed the legal divisions between commercial and investment banking, thus scrapping one of the major Keynesian regulations of the New Deal. we all know the repercussions of that.
Hillary was intending to use Bill’s same trickledown team again, with a Rubin or Summers making economic policy. corporate coup d’etat and strangulation of US economic and political democracy would have continued apace under her as it has under Biden.
they know that the only way of ennobling their centre right party, owned and bankrolled by billionaires and corporations, is to wave scare stories about someone even further right. but people know who the centre right are by now. very few still believe they are good people doing good things.
“During Clinton’s two terms, wages stagnated.”
Grossly misleading. In data collected by the Economic Policy Institute, the growth in productivity has more than doubled that of hourly compensation for U.S. workers since 1948. With net productivity in the country growing by roughly 253 percent in the last seven decades, hourly compensation has increased by just 116 percent. The divergence between productivity and wages can be traced back to Reagan. Clinton could not have stopped the tide even if he wanted to. He was facing a Republican Congress wedded to Corporate interests holding a veto proof majority.
https://cdn.statcdn.com/Infographic/images/normal/23410.jpeg
https://www.statista.com/chart/23410/inequality-in-productivity-and-compensation/
From 1955 to 1994, there were Democratic majorities in the House of Representatives.
“The Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999 reflected his [Clinton’s] willing capture by Wall Street.” He did not author the bill and was “willing” about none of it.
The right wing lie that Bill Clinton caused the GFC by repealing the Glass Steagall Act also needs to be rejected. The original bill threatened to end the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA), a piece of legislation passed by Carter in 1977 that outlawed ‘redlining,’ where notably black and poorer residential areas were targeted by banks for fewer loans and higher mortgage rates. Clinton fought to ensure that blacks were not discriminated against in their mortgage applications. Further, the final bill repealing Glass Steagall passed with a veto proof majority in both houses of Congress. Clinton had fought hard against the bill and could not have stopped it even if he had used a stalling Presidential veto. The increased number of bad mortgage loans that followed the legislation did not do so because of any forced sales to uncreditworthy black people; they followed because the issuing banks were out selling mortgages to anyone who was breathing. The banks made their profits by the on-selling of the mortgages through the securitization process that ultimately led to the GFC. And it was George Bush who doubled the amount of bad loan debts that the banks could carry on their books.
In the late 90s Brooksley Born was head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), the federal agency which oversees the futures and commodity options markets. She resigned in 1999 because Congress refused to give the CFTC oversight of off-markets derivatives which formed the bulk of the derivatives market and was a major contributor to the GFC meltdown. Blame Congress, not Clinton.
The GFC was all about Bush who let the crooks reign. He was warned by the FBI and 50 State Governors that financial crimes were rampant and would lead to a collapse of markets. Bush ignored them.
In Oct 2008 Mr Lynn Turner, former chief accountant of the SEC, gave evidence to the US House Oversight Committee investigating the collapse of insurance giant AIG. He testified that the SEC Office of Risk Management, which had oversight responsibility of all US securities, including swaps worth hundreds of trillions of dollars, had been progressively cut by the Bush administration from 146 personnel. By Feb 2008 only one person was left for assessing corporate financial risk management for the entire US securities market. Absolutely nothing to do with Clinton.
Clinton critics seem to forget that it was Republican Presidents and Congresses that produced these horrendous financial outcomes.
Any honest chronicler of US working-class will confirm that the Clinton years led us to the abyss ever more.
It was the beginning of the end because it left no second option no more.
The beginning of what we have now in the US.
Just today Seymour Hersh has a moody interview with a Chicago guy, Thomas Frank (He wrote that bestseller “What’s the Matter with Kansas?”).
“Ordinary People by the Millions
July 21, 2023
https://scheerpost.com/2023/07/21/seymour-hersh-ordinary-people-by-the-millions/
e.g.
“(…)
SH: Which candidate or president in recent history was most responsible for this turn?
TF: I think Bill Clinton was the pivotal figure of our times. Before he came along, the market-based reforms of Reaganism were controversial; after Clinton, they were accepted consensus wisdom. Clinton was the leader of the group that promised to end the Democrats’ old-style Rooseveltian politics, that hoped to make the Democrats into a party of white-collar winners, and he actually pulled that revolution off. He completed the Reagan agenda in a way the Republicans could not have dreamed of doing—signing trade agreements, deregulating Wall Street, getting the balanced budget, the ’94 crime bill, welfare reform. He almost got Social Security partially privatized, too. A near miss on that one.
He remade our party of the left (such as it is) so that it was no longer really identified with the economic fortunes of working people. Instead it was about highly educated professional-class winners, people whose good fortunes the Clintonized Democratic Party now regarded as a reflection of their merit. Now it was possible for the Democratic Party to reach out to Wall Street, to Silicon Valley, and so on.
(…)”
However I would nerver seriously compare Obama with FDR, as Frank does in a way.
As Chris Hedges pointed out: Blacks in the US live under worse conditions under the black President Obama than before. With Obama being a Chicago grassroots guy it couldn´t be more “pogressive” than that. Still it failed big time. so it is structural and this structure did not develope overnight.
Barbara Ehrenreich during her research as a working-class persona for “Nickel and Dimed” made close contact with that pink coloured fairy dream of Clinton´s JFK-light mania.
As far as I remember the personnel and legal foundation enabling the mortgage crisis and the horrific consequences originated with the “Clinton Years.” Among others of course.
p.s. I had fierce discussion 25 years ago with a then friend both of us students (me in Berlin, her in Chicago) about Clinton. She had in fact worked on his election campaign as a high-schooler.
We agreed on so many things. But not this.
Dont know why.
Dont know what she would say today.
p.p.s. I am aware this is on a different level of argumentation than what you point out. Sry for that.
Unfortunately I lack the time to dig deeper to find more specific material.
you’re just dancing on the head of a pin there. Clinton’s presidential record showed he is a neoliberal to the core – a fact recognised by corporate America at the time and something he has never attempted to refute. your counterpoint villain dubya Bush regards Clinton as ‘a brother from another mother’ (and Hillary as his ‘sister in law’). Obama likewise has never sought to deny he is a neoliberal, openly describing himself as ‘a moderate Republican’. if these are the elements you align with politically then you yourself are not on the left. not in any conventional understanding of the term. you are firmly of the centre right.
exactly, it’s amazing what passes for “left” these days among the democrats.
“Further, the final bill repealing Glass Steagall passed with a veto proof majority in both houses of Congress. Clinton had fought hard against the bill and could not have stopped it even if he had used a stalling Presidential veto. ”
A veto proof majority would require a lot of support from the Democrats. If Clinton was opposed to these actions what was he doing in the same party as them? Perhaps his opposition was in the sure knowledge that the bill would go through anyway.
Democracy?
Where?
The one exception to what you say about billionaires controlling the media is a billionaire controlling media – Elon Musk. Perhaps there’s some hope.
I lived in Switzerland in the early 90’s and found their system to be ‘real’ democracy. Most people know of the citizen initiated referenda, but more important than those are the constitutionally required referenda at all levels of government. Any change to tax, any large expensive projects, are required to go to the people. The elected representatives can not force their ideas onto the people, instead their role is to respond to the society’s needs by coming up with solutions and then advocating about those solutions to the people, who ultimately decide. Four times a year. At all levels from local councils to the federal government. Seems to work.
just a footnote:
Hollywood director Oliver Stone who I never was sure what to think of politically (his infatuation with “Camelot”) when in Zurich said a good thing at a public meeting (he has close business and private relations to Zurich): No one really knows the names of Swiss politicians. At least not in the way politicians are known in other countries. In Switzerland they were simply regarded as employees of the government. Nothing fancy. That would be the best thing one could say about politicians in a democratic community. “Ought to be the way everywhere.” Surprised me a bit in its “maturity” at least regarding what he used to show about the US in his films when he was younger.
p.s. however, it is a rich country where you actually cannot live as a poor foreigner. So there are reasons for the good stuff to work out
The question is whether democracy is a durable system. Idiots like Johnson quickly find out it is easily subverted, and employ demagoguery to misuse it for their own ends. The first model of democracy, ancient Athens, was only shortlived
You could say that oligarchy is the most stable system – a gaggle of people who’ve reached the top by fair means or foul, and who run the country mainly in their own interests. I myself don’t believe that autocracy is real either. All autocrats usually depend on an oligarchic group of leaders to maintain themselves in power, with very rare exceptions. The autocrat can impose his personality, like Stalin or Louis XIV, but stable government usually requires a group.
“The first model of democracy, ancient Athens, was only shortlived”.
A considerable understatement. It self-destructed sensationally, losing a number of whole armies and fleets, and soon had its walls knocked down (by its own citizens, who were compelled to do so under threat of death) and was governed for a while by its greatest enemies, the Spartans.
The finest achievement of the Athenian Boule (Assembly) was to launch a huge attack on Syracuse, the only other significant democracy in the Greek world at the time.
Classical Athens is strangely reminiscent of the modern USA in so many ways… and modern Russia rather redolent of Sparta.
Athenian democracy was quickly restored after the defeat in the Peloponnesian War, and went on to survive for nearly another century, until Athens was defeated by Macedon in the Lamian War, after which the Macedonians imposed oligarchic rule for several years. But, even then, through Hellenistic times, Athenian democracy, complete with sortition, was periodically restored. The surviving kleroteria (sortition machines) are all from Hellenistic times. Athenian democracy was not finally killed, never again to be revived, until Sulla, around 90 BC.
So Athenian democracy lasted from c. 510 to c. 90 BC, with some oligarchic interludes.
I looked up the exact dates. The reforms of Cleisthenes establishing Athenian democracy were in 508 BC, and Sulla’s abolition of Athenian democracy was in 86 BC.
Personally I think you’re confusing democratic exterior forms with oligarchic reality. As I said, in the 5th century, Athenian democracy was “guided” by the aristocrat Pericles between 465 and 429, when he died of the plague. It sounds very much like the “guidance” of the Iranian democracy by the clergy under Khamenei. But apparently we’re not allowed to call Iran a democracy.
To be honest I don’t remember much of Athenian history in the 4th century, I would have to check, but I don’t have time at the moment.
Quite possibly, but it was a lot more democratic even so than what passes for “democracy” these days, which in the main, isn’t democracy because the people don’t get to rule, they only get to choose the people who choose the people who have some say over how the country is run, out of a list of candidates that they haven’t chosen.
Bayard
I think you’ll find there wasn’t a lot of a difference. ‘Democracy’ was and is an idealistic slogan, but it’s easily perverted, as it was by the demagogues in Athens, and recently by Johnson and the Brexiters.
“I think you’ll find there wasn’t a lot of a difference.”
If you can’t tell the difference between a legislature elected by lot and one elected from party lists, they you are either not looking or not trying.
Life of the latest Labour MP, elected to Parliament last night:
-Private school
-Oxford undergrad
-Oxford postgraduate
-PR for Confederation of British Industry
-Parliamentary researcher for Wes Streeting
-Back to doing PR for the CBI
-MP
As close to the Uniparty ideal as it gets.
Re: ‘PR for the Confederation of British Industry’
How did that work out for him?
At 25, this latest Keith is now the ‘baby of the House’, but his mother has told the Beeb she thinks he could become PM one day, not least because “he just loves speaking”.
I’ll leave the last word to Mr Morrissey:
‘You kicked and cried like a bullied child
A grown man of 25
Oh, he said he’d cure your ills
But he didn’t and he never will’
The Smiths – This Night has Opened my Eyes.
(Copyright: Morrissey/Marr & Universal Music Publishing Group. Used without permission. Anyway, buy some Smiths CDs – like I’m going to have to do after my rogue ex-landlords stole all mine, along with plenty more of my stuff – and also music by other artists licensed by UMPG. There’s a free advert for them by way of compensation. RIP Andy Rourke.)
Enjoy the weekend, people.
thx!
thats the spirit
and
u
2
Thanks for your reply AG, and for your good wishes. I believe that the famous (and famously tax-efficient) Irish rock combo U2 also have their recording rights licensed by UMPG since Island Records got taken over by them a few years back. Landlords have helped themselves to their complete album back catalogue (minus Songs of Surrender) as well.
“Re: ‘PR for the Confederation of British Industry’
How did that work out for him?”
If he managed to blame the latest disaster on somebody/something other than his employers, that would have been a strong recommendation for his selection as an MP.
Thanks for your reply Bayard. Young Keith is openly gay* apparently, so at least he’s unlikely to have been harassing/abusing swathes of the CBI’s female employees.
* This fact slightly detracts from Moz’s lines above about the 25-year-old firebrand who’s left his pregnant teenage lover in the lurch, though I still think they’re largely appropriate – as ever, time will tell.
I wasn’t suggesting he was, I was suggesting that if he got those who were off the hook, it could only by being very economical with the truth, which would mean that he would be well fitted to be an honourable member of the lower house.
Talking of which, I came across a beautiful example of politicospeak today, where the Minister of State for the Armed Forces described dumped and cannibalised tanks as being in a state of “extended readiness”.
Thanks for you reply Bayard. I wonder whether the 14 Challenger 2’s we’ve sent Ukraine will soon be on the ‘extended readiness’ list too. Apparently, the West has sent less than 15% of the mine-clearing equipment that Ukraine asked for. I’m beginning to think that the US doesn’t want them to win this war:
https://www.businessinsider.com/ukraine-cannot-do-anything-with-tanks-alone-top-general-says-2023-7?r=US&IR=T
Western democracy is collapsing in parallel with economic and biophysical collapse. Suggest you read Bendell’s Breaking Together for a full and well referenced account of this.
Excellent article and some brilliant comments. To be honest, both my kids got the main point that Craig is making about 20 years ago. The first time they were old enough to vote. I tried every argument, I could come up with trying to encourage them to vote. They defeated every one, by telling me the truth. I was really scraping the barrel, with my last point…”Why not just go along to your old primary school, to observe the democratic process..”
Almost a chorus..from them both..
“Dad please do not vote for any of these horrible people”
“They are not worth your vote”
Tony
Congratulations on having raised really intelligent children!
“If dividends were taxed at the same rate as wages”: they are, as close as makes no difference. The firm pays 25% corporation tax with a further 8.75% on the divi. Whereas the worker pays 20% income tax plus 12% National Insurance.
The worker gets an extra benefit: his NICs bring him the promise of an eventual State Retirement Pension.
In most cases, dearieme, it’s considerably more profitable for company owner-directors to receive most of their income from their businesses in the form of dividends rather than salary, not least because there are several ways for companies to reduce their corporation tax liability, and there are employers’ NI contributions (13.8% of salary) as well as employee ones to consider. Even if you haven’t paid a penny in NI contributions over the years, Pension Credit is available and these days amounts to almost as much as the full State Pension – though, of course, things can change.
Pension Credit will be means tested though, so almost all the capital built up in a business, and any other financial assets owned, will have to be used up first before it can be claimed; the State Pension is universal.
Thanks for your reply Mr S. Unlike other benefits such as Universal Credit, with Pension Credit people can have not-insignificant amounts of financial assets and still qualify. For example, you can have 60 grand in the bank and still get about £100 a week. Alternatively, people can sell their business, buy a big pile in the country, fill it with precious gems and diadems and pearls* but make sure that the value of their bank accounts, shocks & scares etc comes to less than 10 grand in total, and then claim the full whack. (Don’t forget: the more money the UK government has to spend on pensioners, the less it has to spend on dropping Paveway IVs etc on kids in the Middle East.)
Re: ‘the State Pension is universal.’ Not for people who haven’t paid any NI contributions it isn’t.
* Watch Paddy’s legend grow and grow (with a bit of help from Cary Grant):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5WnATZLcXuA
Another ad: Buy some Prefab Sprout CDs.
“Re: ‘the State Pension is universal.’ Not for people who haven’t paid any NI contributions it isn’t.”
You still get the basic state pension, even if you have paid no NI.
Thanks for your reply Bayard. You won’t get any State Pension unless you’ve paid in at least ten years’ worth of NI contributions. What you can get however is Pension Credit which, provided you have less than £10k in financial assets, is almost as much as the full State Pension.
https://www.gov.uk/new-state-pension
Matt Taibbi links to the House Hearing of RFK Jr.
“Twitter Files Extra: The Democrats’ War on RFK, Jr
After Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. faces contentious questioning in the House, a look back at requests to Twitter involving the presidential candidate”
video 9 min. / The article I assume is behind the paywall
https://www.racket.news/p/twitter-files-extra-the-democrats?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=1042&post_id=135333312&isFreemail=true&utm_medium=email
I am still having doubts it makes any difference who is running, but this subject will be very huge I guess. Unless there is any major war escalation or another major war, it will be “2024 election” everywhere around here.
Including unsettling attempts to block this Trump guy. Regardless of rightly so or not. And then lets not forget Cornel West who must be pretty pissed off privately.
And Time Magazine will announce “democracy” the “person” of the year 2024.
And then people like us will repeat ad nauseam the more they talk about democracy the less it´s real.
An then perhaps aliens gonna land. And I will subcribe to The Telegraph.
Thank you Craig, for a great article.
What we have now is not democracy, but something approaching totalitarianism, using 1984 as a model.
If we want true democracy my suggestion is for the second house to be called up from the general population to serve in the same way as jury service.
Functional democracy needs checks and balances. These have been eroded completely because of the complete control by the political establishment of the narrative. The majority billionaire controlled mass media help to control this narrative and are in cahoots with governments in imposing this control either by omission or by commission. Is now interesting to see that when you google a current event Google will come up with the usual British American mass media take on these events with the BBC, Guardian, CNN, NYT etc.. on top of these searches. It would take pages of looking to view any other sources outside these. Even European media rarely figure in a search from UK, let alone Russian, Chinese or other media. The reporting is also now not real neutral reporting of actual events by reporters but managed as to reflect the desired narrative.
The obvious examples of these is the reporting on the Russia Ukraine war and the fake trial of Julian Assange. It is amazing that such serious events as the blowing up of the NS gas pipelines have received such little proper probing by journalists and such a conspiracy of managed narrative.
A recent example of how the narrative is managed and the way that this is carried out is the hounding of Tobias Ellwood, not my favourite politician but at least one who tried to redress some of the unbalanced narrative about Afghanistan, a country occupied for 20 years by US and NATO allies without any improvement and then abandoned without any due consideration for the citizens of this country which then received the sanctions of the west. Tobias Ellwood sinned because he send the a tweet, accompanied by a video after a visit to Afghanistan:
“In a tweet and accompanying video, Ellwood described Afghanistan as a “country transformed” and talked up the group that seized power in August 2021, claiming “security has vastly improved, corruption is down and the opium trade has all but disappeared”. reports the Guardian and the BBC ‘fact check the allegations https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-66250592 and finds them all wrong or exaggerated never mind that the fact checkers themselves are wrong and present a distorted picture about the opium growing in Afghanistan which has now almost disappeared according to this website https://www.alcis.org/poppy.
It is interesting but unsurprising that now the original tweet and video have disappeared and the some within the Tory party would like to get Tobias removed as chair of the defence committee according to the above Guardian report.
The criminal invasion and its consequences, and the poor way it was ended, and the sanctions, are according to these politicians not a crime; but stating the truth has to be erased and punished.
Every recent President has retained far more documents and kept them far less securely than Trump. However I am not sure the Biden laptop would have changed many voters, there was a far longer plan to corrupt that election by early, unverified postal voting.
The idea that Biden got 10 million more votes than Obama (while not accompanied by any decrease for Trump) and the utterly inexplicable statistical anomalies of where the votes landed in States with prolonged delays to counting is the lie that dare not say its name.
the depths they plumbed to suppress and blacken the laptop revelations shows that when it came to getting Biden the win nothing was off limits
And so it has continued in the last week with the main media brands virtually ignoring the Biden corruption hearings that essentially confirm massive Ukrainian and Chinese payments for nothing other than political influence.
They will leap on even the most superficial or outlandish rumour over a Trump, Boris, Putin, Corbyn, Musk, etc or whoever is their bogeyman of the week, while ignoring or downplaying documented malfeasance from their opponents.
Biden’s corruption does not concern them at all and they know people can see that. however it gives them no pause whatsoever in posturing about probity and good governance.
This western ‘democracy’ is an endlessly repeating disaster. ‘Representative democracy’ is a caricature of the original Athenian idea: dēmos + kratos = rule by the people. Two and a half millennia ago they knew that a small group of largely self-selecting rogues wouild inevitably be corrupted by greed and factionalism, so they didn’t do that.
We need a return to the Kleroterion.
The link should be (sorry):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kleroterion
Well, as none other than President Putin said earlier in the week without a trace of irony on his part. “I believe the ruling elites (in European countries and the United States) have usurped and abused their position and their monopoly on power”. Democracy loses out as a result and allows Putin to declare Russia as a land of opportunity. Ho ho!
By the way this is when the Big Lie first came to the now apathetic general public in Britain. It was a wholly PR constructed politics. We are paying a big price, a lethal one now two generations along.
‘ Margaret Thatcher addresses the Conservative Party conference in 1983.’
https://youtu.be/xvz8tg4MVpA
The Big Bang, that screwed us.
We are in a new paradigm now.
We saw how Corbyn was destroyed when he dared to present a programme of much needed economic and democratic renewal.
We have seen how (Sir) Kid Starver has usurped the former Labour Party.
Now we are seeing the most comprehensive, crude (ie flat out lying) propaganda assault, including support for neo-nazis, including by the BBC, along with the entirety of the mainstream media, to support America’s proxy war against Russia.
Simply put, a new party is needed but where is the progressive leader who is prepared, or who has the ability, to stand up to the full spectrum nuclear assault that they would most assuredly face from the British establishment?
By way of raising the tone, I just came across this on YouTube (ignore the YouTube title, it’s misplaced):
https://tinyurl.com/Charlie-Chaplin-Unite
The elimination of democracy is not a British problem. It has occurred across nearly all of the western European world. Britain demonstrates this more obviously than most by demonising the last truly socialist leader and replacing him with a “peer of the realm”. However the same has happened in Canada, New Zealand, Australia, France, Germany the USA and the rest. There is no longer any real difference between political parties in these countries. In addition all have locked themselves into a neo-liberal financial model created in the USA which ensures capital is king and labour must suffer and diminish in value.
There is nothing wrong with wealth creation. The problem is “trickle down”. The emphasis is on trickle. Not even a stream, let alone a river. Consider the statistics for the last 25 years. In western Europe GDP has grown by 200%. Average wage by 65%. In China GDP grew by 800% and wages by 2000%. That’s the evil authoritarian Chinese for you. They need to be more “democratic”.
I am a capitalist. I was an employer and business owner for most of my career. Capitalism requires a wealthy customer base to generate profit. Today we have instead a small number of large businesses sheltering under government protection and receiving large sums of money which are sourced from taxation. It is all a delusion and a downward spiral. Unless you live in China.
…since I was looking into some Marx lectures from 1960s just today, somewhere he suggested, that eventually the in his time “class of factory-owners” and their workers would have to become allies against the class of the financial elite…
“Capitalism requires a wealthy customer base to generate profit.”
Industrial capitalism does. Financial capitalism doesn’t. Industrial capitalism adds value, financial capitalism extracts value. We are where we are today because constructive capitalism, by and large, has been replaced with extractive capitalism.
The thing is….this is how western “democracy” works: you are given a choice of 2 or 3 (or perhaps more) different representatives, but in almost all cases the top two promoted by the media and the establishment will be those who are similar, with minor differences which are pointed out, and are the ones who will retain the status quo, while the rest are either removed (Corbyn, Sanders) or presented as cute little contenders that just add a flavour to the selection, and nothing more. I don’t think it’s a recent thing that we are given only one option disguised as two, but that maybe the few times there was a valid alternative are the exceptions, like Clement Attlee.
So, no, Western Democracy has not failed – it was always intended to work like that, to give the illusion of choice to the masses, when there is none. We just now notice it better as we have more access to information, and can see more of what’s happening around us. We were always meant to choose who will rule over us and make decision for us without consulting us first, this was the democratic society of the West from the start. Major changes have always happened through popular uprisings and revolutions, not elections.
The postdemocratic extreme centre has not learned a sod from what they termed the ‘populist’ revolts of the last decade (Trump, Brexit, Sanders, Corbyn et al). They think they have righted the ship and restored the ‘end-of-history’ Noughties – the high noon of NeoLiberalism – simply by means of lawfare, intra party fixes, fake antisemitism and People’s Vote psyops. None of the crises of NeoLiberalism that gave rise to the revolts has been addressed. Rather they have all been allowed to deepen, any attempt to address them now being deemed fiscally irresponsible, childish, antisemitic, etc. The British establishment will now no longer tolerate even Ed Miliband-Ed Balls levels of opposition to Thatcherite ideology. There is simply no opposition at all. Balls now co-hosts a politics buddies podcast with austerity prince Osborne. ‘Tribal Labour’ man Alastair Campbell also co-hosts one with Rory Stewart as well as hosting Good morning Britain. Campbell’s complete rehabilitation, along with his old boss, as the sensibles’ Voices of Reason is another flashing red light that the extreme centre has learned nothing and never will.
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/opendemocracyuk/britain-loves-war-criminal/
Maybe it’s because they have emerged from the scares of the last decade knowing they have it sown up tight and no amount of inequality and anguish can dislodge them. The sad reality is they are probably correct. I have seen some offering proposals here for restoring/installing democracy – sortition, PR and whatnot. I doubt any of those would be allowed to deliver meaningful change even if enacted. What more evidence do we need to know the politicians and media would act as one to ruthlessly crush any attempt to challenge Thatcherite postdemocracy? In any case who is to enact these democratic reforms that the entire British media and political class oppose? Corbyn? Alex Salmond? Mick Lynch? How is that to happen?
I can only see a political future in Britain akin to that which exists in the USA. The only permissible political struggle being between extreme centrists and the even further right and fought solely on culture war. A postdemocratic dystopia where the rich always win at the expense of the general public and the public good.
All true, though I’d call it a pre-democratic dystopia, as we’ve been here before – for almost of all of this nation’s history in fact.
And that of most others too.
Seems to be the default setting for human societies; scum rises to the top, and we are perpetually ruled by gangsters.
Very sad.
You’re right of course. The narrowness of choice these days though is so comically extreme that even mainstream Ivy League PolSci professors have taken to describing the western political system as a postdemocratic oligarchy. I believe even Jimmy Carter has.
@ frankywiggles
“Maybe it’s because they have emerged from the scares of the last decade knowing they have it sown up tight and no amount of inequality and anguish can dislodge them. The sad reality is they are probably correct.”
Not so fast.
It is quite possible, I put it no stronger than that, that the next US presidential election will be between two contenders who both commit to undertake profound reform of the US ‘deep state’ and who both reject the lies and propaganda of the US proxy war in Ukraine – Donald Trump and Robert Kennedy Jr (despite what he says, it seems inconceivable that Biden will run again).
I see no equivalent politician in the UK, but in the US the next twelve months will be very interesting and may (or may not) inspire a similar response in the UK.
I would like to see that, if only for how much it would boil establishment piss on both sides of the Atlantic. I cannot help but have doubts though about the strength of Kennedy’s commitment to peacemaking (Trump’s too it goes without saying). Max Blumenthal, a big Kennedy admirer in many ways, spells it out: if RFK suddenly becomes an ultra Zionist apartheid man after just a teensy bit of pressure from AIPAC how would be hold up in the face of demands from every corner of power that he become a Slava Ukraini man?
https://twitter.com/MaxBlumenthal/status/1682167745046016005
Notwithstanding those doubts it would still be tremendous fun if those two are the nominees!
Yes, thanks, I take your points.
Regarding Kennedy’s candidacy, we got a foretaste of his battle to come with the Democratic Party when he testified last week before a House Judiciary subcommittee on censorship. The smearing began before he even spoke with the presentation of the ‘Ranking House Member’ Plaskett and continued during his testimony and again after he had finished with the Ranking Member and a queue of other ‘Democrats’ – shameless, blatant lies and smears. It’s amazing to watch, the true ‘deplorables’, highly reminiscent of the demonisation of Corbyn.
Kennedy’s testimony begins at 46:50 :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-ElUW70yFg
Plaskett at 28:30.
For a few months I looked hopefully to RFK, Jr as a last political hope for Western civilisation. Sound and reasonable about Covid, “climate change”, and Russia. His book about Fauci is a fine example of rigorously argued and thoroughly documented polemic.
And then… he pledged himself body and soul to Israel. How can anyone run for President of the USA after making it crystal clear that his main allegience is to a foreign country? To my mind, that is treason.
Mind you, maybe it is literally true that no one can run for President, congresscritter, senator, judge, or town dogcatcher without pledging allegiance to Israel. In which case, of course, no one honest should run at all.
I feel sad, but in a way justified. I was sure that an honest man could never become President… and now we know.
Neither JFK nor RFK, Sr would have pledged himself to Israel. Indeed, some believe that it was their scepticism towards Israel and their refusal to bow down before it that got them killed.
I feel sure that with either them as President, the attack on the USS “Liberty” would not have taken place.
RFK jr has talked out of both sides of his mouth on climate change, and was a russiagater. i don’t hold much hope for him as bringing any kind of change we would want.
TW: [Re. RFK] “…Sound and reasonable about Covid, “climate change” ….”
He talked utter nonsense, outright lies and half-truths about these things.
I can see how a conspiracy freak would be nodding furiously at every point this slippery lawyer made. But tell me the strongest point on Covid he made, and I will tell you how utterly disingenuous he was in return – as long as you are willing to stick with the discussion.