(December 17th,
2022)
It isn’t my normal procedure to re-work and re-issue
material I have already published. In this case, however, I have decided to
withdraw the previously published Parts Two and Three of this series of essays.
For two main reasons. First, I was not happy with the ordering of the material.
Second, I became aware that events over the last year or so have moved at such
a pace, that I found myself chasing after a moving target. This essay,
therefore, replaces the Part Two, which I originally published in May 2022.
Warning: This is the longest essay I’ve written yet! I
hope you will agree it’s worth the read.
Introduction
In the first essay in this set, Indictments – which you
can find at [[1]] –
I was in scientific mode. I was seeking objective, verifiable evidence that the
claimed problem of global “climate change” caused by human emissions of
greenhouse gases was a real and significant one. And I found no such evidence.
Climate alarmists have been proclaiming that “the end of the world is nigh” for
half a century now. Yet there’s no objective evidence that the world actually has
ended due to human emissions of greenhouse gases. Or, indeed, to suggest that
it will end any time soon. Instead, there is plenty to suggest that most of the
claimed “evidence” in this matter either has no substance, or has been
doctored, spun or hyped.
I found much evidence, on the other hand, that those in
positions of power in the current political system are treating us without any
of the concern or respect which is due to all human beings worth the name. I
related the “long train of abuses, prevarications and artifices, all pointing
the same way” (as John Locke put it), that has brought human civilization, and
civilization in the islands called Britain in particular, to this pass.
Over the environment, for example, successive UK governments
have behaved dishonestly towards us. They have corrupted science, whitewashed
wrongdoings by our accusers, and moved the goalposts again and again. These
dishonesties have included re-writing the precautionary principle to “justify”
government action to combat any perceived risk, even when the perception of
risk is not supported by the facts. And to place the burden of proof on the
accused to demonstrate “an acceptable level of risk.” Another dishonesty has
been scrapping the use of the “social cost of carbon,” making it, in effect,
impossible to do objective cost-benefit analysis on issues involving carbon
dioxide emissions.
They have required us to prove a negative, yet they also
seek to suppress our voices, including those of experts. They have violated our
rights to the presumption of innocence, and to a fair and public hearing to
enable us to defend ourselves against their accusations. They seek to impose on
us policies that, far from bringing any gain to us, will cause us, or have
already caused us, chaos, inconvenience, and loss of independence. As well as
huge economic costs, that are already starting to force many of us down into
poverty. And they have failed to do any objective and unbiased feasibility study
or cost-benefit analysis on these policies, or to prototype their effects by
testing them on volunteers.
The situation as of late 2021
I will begin by paraphrasing what I wrote in that first
essay of the set about the state of the UK and the world in late 2021.
Taxation in the UK is at a historic high, and going ever
higher. Those in power use tax laws to impoverish the people they are supposed
to be serving. For example, my own right to free choice of employment, and
thereby my career, has been destroyed by a bad tax law called IR35. They use
tax money to enrich themselves. They also like to use tax money to reward their
cronies with subsidies, and with lucrative contracts that are not done
properly. Moreover, they will make any excuse to fine people huge sums of money
for very minor indiscretions, or for things that cause no harm to anyone at
all.
Meanwhile, our human rights and freedoms are being
routinely violated. Our right of privacy is in tatters, with cameras trained on
us all over the place, and our communications being monitored. Even basic
rights like freedom of opinion and expression, and free speech on-line, are
under serious threat. COVID lockdowns and related measures have violated our
freedoms of movement, assembly and the right to work. They have also disrupted
and damaged the lives and businesses of far too many innocent people,
particularly small business people.
On top of all this, the UK and world political class are
seeking to destroy the industrial civilization, which we have so laboriously
built over centuries. For no better reason than unspecific, unproven and
unlikely accusations that humans are causing some kind of problem with the
Earth’s climate, or causing millions of species extinctions. The juggernaut of
“nett zero” and other green policies, that have no justification in reality,
and that go against the needs and the well-being of ordinary people, has rolled
on unchecked. Even back in November 2021, these policies had already caused
chaos in energy markets. Meanwhile, the media continue to bombard us with lies,
scares, hype and propaganda.
In any case, even if human-caused emissions of greenhouse
gases do cause several degrees of warming, wouldn’t a warmer world be a better
world? Historically, human civilizations have tended to flourish in warmer times,
such as the Roman and Mediaeval Warm Periods. What’s so bad about a bit of
warming?
A look at history
Now, to this, the second essay in the set. Today, I shall
look at how the situation we face has come about. This will require a different
approach, with more emphasis on the so called “humanities.” In particular, I
shall be looking at history, seeking to put today’s state of affairs into its
large-scale context. I shall be looking at the grand sweep of the centuries, at
the last 80 years in more detail, and at the last year or so (since the end of
CoP26 in November 2021) in more detail yet.
My liberty journey
But first, I will look at history on the smallest scale
possible. That is, at my own history as an individual. And, in particular, at
how I came to be writing this missive. This is as near to an autobiography as
you’re ever going to get; but it won’t be either very long or very prettified.
My upbringing and education
I was born in Surrey in 1953; in the same week as Tony
Blair, begad. I was an only child. My father, assistant headmaster of a boys’
prep school, belonged to the middle-class poor. He was very good at his job,
and well respected in the world of private schooling. But he wasn’t very well
paid.
Due to an unfortunate incident involving the headmaster and
a boy, the school could not continue as it was. It fell to my father, over the
course of a term and a half, to wind up the school and to find alternative
schools for all the boys. He ended up taking more than 30 boys to a school in
Hampshire, out in the countryside and just over the border from Berkshire,
which – despite the impeccable morals of this school’s headmaster – had started
to reduce in pupil numbers, because the teaching wasn’t good enough. My father
fixed that problem, in the French and German department at least.
Once our accommodation situation had been straightened out,
we lived in the lodge at the school gates. It was a lovely place to grow up. In
the holidays, I had the entire school grounds to myself! But it was a bit
remote; a mile from the village shop, and more than three miles from the
nearest town and proper shopping. And we couldn’t afford a car.
A few days before my fifth birthday, I started at the
village school. It was a small primary school, with just over 100 pupils in the
whole age range of 5 to 11. The headmistress, Mrs White, had made the school
exemplary among its kind. And when I was 7, she contrived a major step change in
my schooling. As my mother (who later became the school secretary) related, an
inspector from the head office in Winchester had come to examine a particularly
problematic boy. Noting his frustration after spending just an hour with this
child, Mrs White played a practical joke on him, and sent me in to see him. I
remember him giving me an IQ test, which I considered absurdly easy. I did the
first page of the test in under 15 seconds!
One thing led to another. About a year later, I found myself
packed off to a private boarding school, Twyford near Winchester, on a special
scholarship paid for by the county council. The scholarship was planned to last
10 years, all the way up to university entrance level.
I found Twyford a bit of a curate’s egg of a school. It was
fairly spartan. There were masters (classics, maths, science) I liked, and
other masters (geography, history) I couldn’t stand (and with the history
master, the feeling was mutual). There was also a very heavy atmosphere of
Christianity – chapel twice a day on weekdays, and an hour-long service on
Sunday. I found this a bit mentally oppressive. Still, Twyford in 1961 was a far
more civilized place than it had been when its most famous son, Freeman Dyson,
had arrived there in 1932.
There was a school maths prize, of which Freeman had been
the first winner in 1936. Douglas Hurd, who later became foreign secretary,
also won the prize in 1942. But in 1965 and 1966, I became the first person to
win that prize twice!
I won a scholarship to Marlborough College, where I went in
autumn 1966. It was a school in transition. “Fagging” and the like were things
of the past. But still, not all the pupils were as civilized as I would have
liked! There was still compulsory chapel, although this was abolished in 1968.
And the school was still single-sex. Girls arrived for the first time in 1968,
but there were far too few of them to make any difference, to me at least. But
the teaching was, almost without exception, absolutely excellent. I was taught
the “new maths” by the people who wrote the syllabus! And the chemistry and
physics teaching weren’t far behind. Nor, indeed, were the French, Russian and
English, which I took as far as O level standard.
But there were things I didn’t like, as well. I didn’t enjoy
having to play rugby. Contact sports weren’t for me; though I could play cricket
and hockey adequately enough. I absolutely hated the year of Wednesday
afternoons in the Corps Cadet Force; I am the least military person you could
ever imagine. And I learned, the first time I tried to shoot a rifle, that I
was right-handed and left-eyed – not a good combination for accurate shooting!
And so, in autumn 1971 I arrived, with a scholarship, at
Trinity College, Cambridge to study mathematics. I had been in no doubt about
which subject I wanted to study and where, since my best friend’s father had
been Rouse Ball professor and a fellow of Trinity. It proved to be a lot of
hard work, but I kept up with the pace, and ended up scraping a First by 20
marks (one alpha). I was a perfect example of what Peter Swinnerton-Dyer liked
to call “a run-of-the-mill First.” I was offered a place on the Cambridge maths
institution called “Part III,” a fourth-year course which takes its students to
the frontiers of research. But I was already aware I wasn’t going to be a
world-beater as a mathematician, so I turned it down. (If I had accepted, I
would have had Andrew Wiles as a fellow student!)
I had, as well, a deep sense that something was badly out
of kilter somewhere. Trinity was a lovely place to be, but academe just didn’t
feel right for me. I didn’t, at the time, understand why I felt that way. Now,
with hindsight, I can say that my entire education, from the ages of 4 to 21,
was not done with me as an individual primarily in mind. It was done with
infinite gentleness, compared to what today’s youngsters suffer; but
underneath, the purpose of the exercise had been to make me into what the
system, and the state in particular, wanted. At that juncture, they wanted
boffins; particularly those with the potential to become technocrats in the
future. But I wasn’t naturally a boffin or technocrat. By my nature, I am a
creative artist; as shown, for example, by the music I arrange and compose for
the brass band I play in. And subconsciously, I deeply resented being “made
into” anything I didn’t want to be.
My career and my induction into the liberty movement
So, I cleared my head by spending three months doing the
old-fashioned grand tour of Europe on a bicycle. (A Raleigh 3-speed!) I rode from
Calais as far as Paestum in southern Italy, and back as far as Marseille. The
entire trip cost £280! Then, I started looking for work.
The job that I had tentatively agreed with IBM didn’t
materialize; late 1974 was a time of recruitment freezes all around the world. What
did come up was a job with Ferranti, programming on-board computer systems for
the Royal Navy. I got quick promotions, but Ferranti wasn’t a very good payer,
and some of the people weren’t very nice, either. After two and a half years,
it was time to move on.
I took a job in the Netherlands, with Logica BV based in
Rotterdam. I doubled my pay! I like to say, now, that by going there I was
taking a leaf out of the book of my hero and almost-namesake, John Locke. At
the time, though, it just seemed like a natural progression in my career. And I
enjoyed exploring Holland, Belgium, and occasionally France or Germany.
But after three years, the Netherlands had ceased to
excite. By then, Old Labour were gone, and Margaret Thatcher was in power. It
seemed a sensible time to return to Blighty. Which I did, by transferring back
to Logica in London. In total, I spent eight years with Logica.
During the 1980s, my work took me further afield. I spent
periods of months at a time in Indonesia, the USA, Italy and Australia. And July
17th, 1988, was a red-letter day for me. I was on a business trip to
Atlanta, and was there over the week-end. On the Sunday morning, I was
wandering around down-town Atlanta. The Democratic party convention happened to
be starting on the Monday, so there was a lot of political activity. As I
walked through a park, someone pressed a little blue card into my hand. It was called
the World’s Smallest Political Quiz. I took the test, and discovered that I was
what they called a “libertarian”. From there, as with my education, one thing
led to another. And, as I will recount below, I eventually became a writer and
teacher in the cause of individual liberty.
In early 1989, I experienced a crisis. I had been promoted
into a group management job. I could do it effectively enough; but only at the
expense of my sanity. So, I took a sabbatical. Again, the bicycle was my weapon
of choice for clearing my head. This time, I flew to Nova Scotia, Canada. I bought
a touring bike in Halifax, and pedalled it to the Pacific about half-way
between LA and San Diego. It was a great experience, if at times a daunting
one. And the long days on the road gave me time to think. I started to put
together, in my mind, the jig-saw puzzle of pieces which, when assembled, would
constitute my personal philosophy.
Late that year, an opportunity came to work in the USA. I
had the right visa to get a green card, if I had wanted to stay. I liked many
things about the USA: the good pay, the go-getting attitude of many business
people, the cheapness and quality of eating out, the “Have a nice day!” service
mentality, the American Dream of a chicken in every pot and two big,
comfortable cars in every garage. I thought about settling there. But there
were also things I did not like; most of all, the attitude of the police. I had
more brushes with police in my time in the USA than in the whole of the rest of
my life put together! The “land of the free,” I discovered, was not free at
all; it was an incipient police state. So, I returned to the UK, which at that
point was about seven years behind the USA on the road to serfdom.
During this time, my attitude to governments and politics
had hardened. I didn't buy any of the crap talked by politicians any more.
(Not, indeed, that I had ever really believed them). I didn't buy ideas such
as, for example, that what governments do is right just because they are
governments. Instead, I looked at people as individuals. I asked questions
like, what does this individual do for my benefit? How does he or she serve me,
or otherwise make my life better? And what does this individual do for the
benefit of human beings in general? How does he or she add to human
capabilities and to the general jollity of life? I applied these questions to
the politicians and their hangers-on – and didn't like what I saw. So, I
became, albeit slowly, more and more involved in the liberty movement, in both
the USA and UK.
The job I had taken on my return to the UK lasted just two
years. The company was doing poorly, and shedding staff – including my boss,
who took early retirement. I could see that if I stayed, I was likely to get a
half-promotion, into another group management job; not at all what I wanted. I
decided to jump ship, and go independent. Fortunately, a project came up with
the NHS in Edinburgh, which I was uniquely qualified to do; so, I did it on
sub-contract.
I went independent at the start of 1993. The next six
years were the most lucrative of my career. Notably, I did three and a half
years’ work (increasingly part-time towards the end) on a major software system
for Eurostar, which enabled them to sell their train tickets through all manner
of networks throughout the UK.
But then, in 2000, New Labour brought in a bad tax law
called IR35. At first, they simply tried to declare my livelihood as a one-man
software consultant to be “illegal.” They couldn’t quite get away with that,
but they made things very difficult for me. I managed to find ways around the
problems, but I could only use them with people who already knew me, and what I
could do, very well. I have been, in effect, barred from the general market for
more than 20 years. And my income has been declining since 2013. To the extent,
that I am now living primarily off savings; and those will not last for too
much longer. I will never forgive Blair, or Brown, or any of their hangers-on,
for what they did to my career and life.
My liberty work
If there has been a silver lining to my situation, it is
that I have been able to devote far more time to my liberty work than I would
have had if I had been earning for more of the time.
In 1990, I encountered an American thinker who calls
himself Jason Alexander. He had been originally a follower of Ayn Rand, who is
something of a cult figure among many US libertarians. Though in the 1960s, he
had been expelled from the “Church of Objectivism.” I read Alexander’s books, notably
one called “Philoscience” (which in 1992 had to be removed from the
bookshelves!), and incorporated some of his ideas and terminology into my own
philosophical framework.
In the mid-1990s, I started developing my philosophy further.
I read up on history, without any preconceptions. Perhaps it was a good thing I
didn’t learn any history at school! I started to write down my ideas on ethics,
political philosophy, and even a little bit of economics.
Around 2000, I embarked on a major phase of study. I
studied the major works of John Locke, including his Two Treatises of
Government. (By 2015, I was well enough up on Locke to give a talk on his life,
times and works at a liberty conference in Bali!) I started writing liberty
papers, intended for publication. Hubert Jongen, my “liberty uncle,” published
many of them on his Libertarian International website. My first publication by
the Libertarian Alliance, the primary libertarian organization in the UK, took
place in 2002.
In 2005, I took over the Libertarian International site as
webmaster. I was now able to publish my own ideas, without having to wait for
Hubert! I ran that site until 2016, when it had to be discontinued for
technical reasons.
In 2007, I won the Chris Tame Memorial Prize in its second
year, with an essay titled: “Does Britain Need a Libertarian Party?” My answer,
as you might expect, was No. This was also the general wisdom within the
liberty movement at the time. And I, for one, haven’t changed my view on this
matter since!
2007 was also the year, in which I began to study the
“global warming” or “climate change” issue, about which I now feel I have considerable
knowledge. (I have also done some work in a side branch, that of air pollution
and toxicology). My years of study in these areas have borne fruit. So much so,
that between 2017 and 2020, I had several papers accepted for re-publication by
WattsUpWithThat.com, whose website describes itself as “the world’s most viewed
site on global warming and climate change.” I will give links to some of these
papers in the References section below.
At various times between 2008 and 2018, I have also been a
teacher or visiting lecturer at Glenn Cripe’s “Language of Liberty Institute”
Liberty Camps. I have tended to specialize in Eastern Europe, notably Poland
and Ukraine.
Starting in late 2007, I tried my hand at writing a
science fiction novel (with a very libertarian bent) called “Going Galactic.” I
finished it in early 2010. It was accepted by a small publishing house, but
they went bankrupt before they could publish it. So, I had to self-publish it
in 2012. It wasn’t a commercial success; but I learned a lot about writing!
I never intended to become a philosopher. (Or, as I like
to put it, Fillosopher, with a capital F.) But starting around 2011, I found
myself more and more studying the works of great thinkers of the past. I read
Aristotle’s Ethics and Politics, though in the former case I suffered from
using an inferior translation. I read Franz Oppenheimer’s “The State.” I
re-read John Locke’s Two Treatises. I put together the first version of my system,
which I called “Honest Common Sense,” and published it as a short book in 2014.
I suspect the copies I gave away may have had more effect on people’s thinking
than the few I sold! But again, I learned a lot from the exercise.
I continued my studies. I found a seminal paper called
“Concepts of Order,” written in 2006 by Belgian philosopher Frank van Dun, whom
I have known since 1995. I read Aristotle’s Ethics again, this time using W.D.
Ross’s excellent translation. I gained a good outline, at least, of Ayn Rand’s
thought, through an Objectivist website not controlled by “church central.” I
also read, though at rather more of a skim level, the works of some of the worst
enemies of individual liberty: Plato (Republic), Niccolò Machiavelli (The Prince), Jean Bodin (Six Books of
the Commonwealth), Thomas Hobbes (Leviathan), Jean-Jacques Rousseau (The Social
Contract), G.W.F. Hegel (Philosophy of Right).
In August 2020, I set myself plans to bring my Honest
Common Sense up to date, and to align it better with Jason Alexander’s system.
The result was ten – almost eleven – months of hard mental slog, culminating in
the publication of six papers, totalling 60,000 words, in June and July 2021. I
will give the links in the References section below.
When I lay out my liberty journey in this way, it looks as
if I have, for the most part unwittingly, spent my whole life moving towards
where I am now. It has been a lot of hard work! But time and energy well spent,
I like to think. At 69, my body and my finances are both now starting to fail.
But my mind is as clear as ever. And I like to think that today we are coming
up to a crux point, where finally we honest, naturally economically productive human
beings can discredit, remove from power, and bring to justice all the enemies
of human liberty and prosperity.
I am now seeking to move forward the ideas that I published
in those six papers last year. I originally planned three essays in this series:
Indictments, Diagnosis and Cure. But I realized that this was a far larger task
than I had originally thought, and I had to re-structure the essays. On current
plans, the next essay will discuss some of my philosophical ideas, which can
help us to move forward into a better world. It will also sketch out a better
governmental system than the one we suffer under today. The fourth will
diagnose the problems we face, and the fifth will address strategy and tactics
in order to bring about a cure for our ills.
History in the
large
To wider matters. I will here give a brief summary of my
view of human history on the large scale, and thus of the context in which
today’s events are taking place. I treated this subject at some length in the
second essay of my set of six. Here, I will repeat some summary points from
that essay, and add some brief notes.
I view human history on the large scale as a series of
forward-moving revolutions, in each of which we human beings open up, and start
to explore, new levels or dimensions of our humanity. And we explore, and
develop further, those dimensions which we had previously opened up. But each
of these revolutions is followed by a regressive, anti-human counter-revolution
from those that are hostile to our progress. In these views, I have been
substantially influenced by the ideas of Jason Alexander.
To outline my view of history, I will give you the
following diagram:
Figure 1 – Historical Timeline
It is as if there are two opposite tendencies at war with
each other. On one side are we true human beings – the revolutionaries. We are
naturally progressive, and we want to move forward into a better future. We
want only the minimum of government, to enable us to live together peacefully
and under justice. And we favour individual freedom and economic progress for
all. On the other side are our reactionary enemies. They like “authority,”
orthodoxy and oppressive government, and hate freedom, independence and earned
prosperity. They seek to hold back the progress which is natural to us, and
even to haul us back down towards where we started from.
The Neolithic revolution and the political state
From the starting point of the Neanderthal extinction,
I see the Neolithic revolution in agriculture, about 12,500 years ago, as our
first revolution, a revolution which turned us from mere predator animals into
human beings capable of civilization. Its paradigm was Humanity. It made us
human.
We learned to cultivate crops, and to domesticate animals.
And we developed new ideas of how to relate to each other, such as the concept
of private property. In my view, this was the point at which we differentiated
from, and became superior to, other animals. And it started us on our journey
towards taking control of, and leaving our mark on, our surroundings. Since
then, we have continued to be the most developed species on our planet.
In contrast, the rise of the political state was our
enemies’ first counter-revolution. And the state itself – a top-down system
that enables an élite forcibly to rule over a, potentially large, group of
people – was its counter-paradigm. The counter-revolution probably started with
the first pharaohs in Egypt, around 3,200 BC; but it may have been a little
earlier.
There are many theories on how the first states came about.
One I find reasonably believable is Robert Carneiro’s. In bad times, groups
that were short of food might seek to use force to take for themselves the
product of the labours of other villages. Or, even in time of plenty, groups
might plan attacks on other villages to secure valuable resources, such as more
fertile land. This led to wars. Often, the losers could not flee. Or, they
realized that they would be better off joining the winners, even as conquered
subordinates, than if they tried to flee. In such cases, the conquerors
subjected the conquered to taxation in the form of their produce. From there,
it was not a huge step further to subject them to slavery, in whatever form.
Thus, the state arose out of wars, and out of the coercive
measures taken by the winners of those wars against the losers. And the leaders
of such a state were its most successful military leaders, along with a coterie
of warriors personally loyal to them.
Ancient Greece,
Rome, the dark ages and the church
Our second revolution was seeded in ancient Greece,
beginning with Thales, who was born in 624 BC. Its paradigm was Reason, and the
work of Aristotle was its high point. It taught us to think rationally and abstractly;
for example, to do mathematics and philosophy. And it enabled us to build new
and better kinds of civilization. Athenian democracy, for example, was a great
advance on what had preceded it. And among the civilizations which grew out of
our second revolution was Rome, which managed to incorporate, and to build on,
some of the best of the Greek culture.
Our enemies’ second counter-revolution was initiated in 380
AD, when the emperor Theodosius declared Nicene Christianity to be the official
religion of the Roman empire. It produced the dark ages, and a powerful church,
to go with the state which had been the product of the first counter-revolution.
Its counter-paradigm, I think, was institutional religion, and the church that
embodied it. This church, a hierarchical system of institutionalized mental
control and mumbo-jumbo, enabled an élite to control people mentally, just as
the state empowered its élite to control them physically.
The Renaissance, sovereignty, the social contract and Machiavellian
behaviours
Our third revolution began at the Renaissance, which I
consider to have been triggered by the fall of Constantinople in 1453. Its
paradigm was Discovery. Of ideas both old and new, of new places, of ourselves.
The Renaissance did not just revive the ancient learning
from Greece and Rome. It brought about changes for the better in many aspects
of human life in Europe. People began to emerge from the mind-numbing tyranny
of the church and the top-down feudal political system. They felt renewed
confidence in their own faculties. They felt a new sense of freedom for the
human spirit, that had been for so long suppressed by orthodoxy. Inquiry,
discovery and criticism became new norms; if not also satire. And the
Renaissance laid the groundwork for the later development of science.
In response to our third revolution, our enemies made a
counter-revolution with two components: a religious and a secular. The
religious part produced a series of destructive wars. It also led to moral
panics, including Inquisitions and witch-hunts. Even so, the power of the
church, or at least of the papacy, was significantly reduced.
But the secular part was far more damaging to us. Jean Bodin
(1530-1596) articulated a new theoretical basis for political states,
sovereignty. This not only greatly increased the power of the state, but made
it more tyrannical, too. His system, which was later to produce rulers like the
“Sun King” Louis XIV, was rolled out across Europe as the Westphalian nation
state. Since then, it has spread all over the world. And despite the “bags on
the side” we have tried since then – like constitutions, bills of rights and
democracy – we still suffer under it today.
I’ll summarize the basic principles of Bodin’s system, which
you can find in Book I, Chapter X of his Six Books of the Commonwealth:
[[2]].
In Bodin’s scheme, the “sovereign” – the king or ruling élite – is
fundamentally different from, and superior to, the rest of the population in
its territory, the “subjects.” The sovereign is, in Bodin’s words, “in the
image of God.” It has a divine right to rule. And the only laws which can bind
it are “the laws of God and of nature.” If it even recognizes the existence of
such laws, of course.
In particular, the sovereign has moral privileges. That is,
it has rights to do certain things, which others don’t share. It can make laws
to bind the subjects, and give privileges to those it chooses to. It can make
war and peace. It appoints the top officials of the state. It is the final
court of appeal. It can pardon guilty individuals if it so wishes. It can issue
a currency. It can levy taxes and impositions, and exempt at will certain
individuals or groups from payment. Furthermore, the sovereign isn’t bound by
the laws it makes. And it isn’t responsible for the consequences to anyone of
what it does (also known as “the king can do no wrong.”)
In the 17th century, there arose also the fiction
of a “social contract,” seemingly invented by Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679). According
to this fiction, at some time in the past, a group of people (or, at least, a
majority of them) consented to be ruled over despotically by an absolute
sovereign. They made a contract, in which they committed to each other, that
they would authorize and approve whatever the sovereign chose to do. Moreover,
once the system has been set up, there is no possibility of changing it, or of
escape from it. This extremely dangerous fiction was, unfortunately, taken on
board even by later revolutionary thinkers of the Enlightenment, including John
Locke. And it still persists today.
Furthermore, the advice of Niccolò Machiavelli (1469-1527)
that rulers should be sly, deceitful and unscrupulous – not to mention cruel,
oppressive and heartless – has been followed by the majority of the political
class and their cronies ever since. Leading to the psychopathic behaviours,
that seem to have become endemic in today’s political class.
The main thrusts of the third counter-revolution, then, were
a push for religious orthodoxy, new “justifications” for the state, and
encouragement of political dishonesty and the Machiavellian, tyrannical
behaviours that go with it.
The Enlightenment and political -isms
Our fourth revolution was the Enlightenment. I date its
start to John Locke’s writing of his Two Treatises of Government in the early
1680s. Its paradigm was Freedom. From it have flowed all the (relative)
freedoms we have enjoyed in the West over the last three centuries.
In that second essay, I listed some Enlightenment values. “The
use and celebration of human reason. Rational inquiry, and the pursuit of
science. Greater tolerance in religion. Individual liberty and independence;
freedom of thought and action. The pursuit of happiness. Natural rights,
natural equality of all human beings, and human dignity. The idea that society
exists for the individual, not the individual for society. Constitutional
government, for the benefit of, and with the consent of, the governed. The rule
of law; that is, the idea that those with government power, such as lawmakers,
officials and judges, should have to obey the same rules as everyone else. An
ideal of justice which, per Immanuel Kant, allows that ‘the freedom of
the will of each can coexist together with the freedom of everyone in
accordance with a universal law.’ A desire for human progress, and a rational
optimism for the future.”
But our enemies responded with a counter-revolution of many
strands. They brought the Enlightenment to a halt with the failure of the
French Revolution. They promoted nationalism, with the state-worship and the wars
that it brings. They promoted a slew of bad political ideologies: socialism,
communism and fascism, to name but three. All these ideologies are
collectivist. None of them shows any regard for the human individual. And all
these ideologies inexorably increased the power of the state, and the scope of
what it did. At its root, their counter-paradigm was collectivism.
Moreover, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, at heart a collectivist and
not at all the Enlightenment thinker some like to make him out to be, posited that
the population of an area has a “general will,” which makes them into a unity.
“Each of us puts his person and all his power in common under the supreme
direction of the general will, and, in our corporate capacity, we receive each
member as an indivisible part of the whole.” And he demanded “the total
alienation of each associate, together with all his rights, to the whole
community.”
At a stroke, this ruse takes away our rights and our freedom
to be ourselves, and makes us no more than cogs in a political machine. A
machine which, like any purported “unity,” can only be driven and steered by a
centralized ruling class. And such a centralized power will, inevitably, end up
ruling without regard to the needs or desires of the ruled. Moreover, rather than
lessen the power of the political state, Rousseau’s scam actually increased it,
because it led to the (false) idea that the state is in some sense “us.” In
reality, though, the political state as it is today is a creation of 16th-century
monarchists. And it is the tool of preference that their modern successors use
to drain us and oppress us.
The sham of “democracy”
Beyond this, the fourth counter-revolutionaries perverted
“democracy” – the idea that ordinary people should have a full and fair say in
how they are governed – into a system that delivers nothing of the kind. For
first, it gives a false legitimacy to the policies of whatever faction is in
power, even when those policies are objectively harmful or unjust. Second,
democracy inexorably tends towards a situation as we have today, in which all
the supposedly competing factions favour the same, bad policies, such as high
taxes and green pipedreams. And third, a vote is completely useless, unless
there is someone who both is worth voting for and has a decent chance of being
elected into power. But almost no-one in any of the mainstream political
parties is worth voting for. The main reason for this is that political power
tends to attract exactly the kind of devious psychopaths that want to rule
over others, and to evade accountability for the consequences. Far from
democracy giving us our say, the current political party system produces kakistocracy
– the rule of the worst.
At this point, I think it’s time to identify explicitly four
major reasons why democracy as it is today doesn’t work, and never can work. I
myself have only recently come to understand the full significance of these problems.
First, democracy is only a veneer on top of, or a “bag on
the side” of, the state. Underneath, the state and the political government it
supports are as vicious, as violent, as unjust, as corrupt as they ever were.
Trying to build democracy on top of a state is akin to trying to put lipstick
on a tyrannosaurus.
Second, the fact that state power attracts the worst means
that, in time, all the political parties (or, at least, all those with any
chance of power) will be filled with the worst kind of psychopathic, criminal
scum. And the main thrust of the policies favoured by such scum will always be
inclined to increase the power of the state. In the UK, the bunch of psychopaths
currently in power call themselves Conservatives. They are more than bad
enough. But the most obvious alternative, Labour, looks even worse. For
example, they are shaping up to ban both private education and private health
care! Not content with destroying my career, they now want to destroy the
career of anyone who has followed in my father’s footsteps. Not to mention the
careers of all those fine people, who want to use their medical skills to heal others,
but are not comfortable about working for the NHS. Such policies are seeking to
increase the power of the state, for the sake of increasing the power of the
state.
Third, the idea of “one man one vote,” however well it may
work within a voluntary society, is not appropriate when applied to the people
who live in a particular geographical territory. For these people, in reality,
have not voluntarily agreed to form a society, but are only a community. Thus,
they cannot reasonably be expected to have common interests or desires, beyond
wanting the community to be as good as possible a place to live for everyone in
it. Rousseau’s idea that such a group of people has a “general will” is false.
And since they are not all members of one voluntary society, the people in an
area cannot reasonably be expected to keep to rules or policies imposed by any
particular political tendency.
Fourth, the idea that those elected into power “represent”
us ordinary people is not true in practice. In the UK system, “your” MP (the
one who happens to have been elected where you live) is the only one you are
allowed to talk to. If “your” MP is completely incapable of representing your
views and wishes, or even supports policies actively hostile to you, you have
no redress. This became very apparent to me two months ago, when “my” MP,
Jeremy Hunt, became chancellor of the exchequer, or in my parlance “Chief
Thief.” Far from freeing up the economy as Kwasi Kwarteng had tried to, Hunt has
returned everything to Tory “business as usual,” where the state takes more and
more, and ordinary people have less and less. Hunt even cancelled a minor
relaxation of IR35, which Kwarteng had proposed!
The Industrial Revolution and the suppression of humanity
Our fifth revolution was the Industrial Revolution. From it
has flowed the (relative) prosperity we have enjoyed in the West for much of
the last three generations. Its paradigm was, and is, Creativity. And the
environment it nurtured is the free market. In which everyone is free to ply
their own particular industries, trades or professions for mutual benefit.
The Industrial Revolution has enabled us honest, productive human
beings, at last, to start to take control over our surroundings. Moreover, it has
enabled us to open up our creative abilities. And the technical progress it
began has continued. We have had the “green revolution” in agriculture, which
has brought greatly increased crop yields. We have had nuclear energy. We have
had television. We in the West have had affordable travel, both by air and on
land. We have had computers, and in recent decades the personal computer. We
have had the Internet and the mobile phone. Artificial intelligence is,
perhaps, on the horizon.
But our enemies, as always, have responded with a
counter-revolution. It began in the 1940s and 1950s. The main thrust of our
enemies’ fifth counter-revolution is a push to suppress our industrial
civilization, to shut down the free market and to regulate economies, and to
destroy prosperity and freedom for everyone but a clique of élites. Their
primary tools today are the deep green and globalization agendas. But they have
many other tools as well. Such as: Violating our human rights. Making bad,
oppressive and restrictive laws. And arbitrary, unjust and ever-increasing taxation.
As to deep green environmentalism, I find myself thinking of
it as a religion. An extremely intolerant one, at that; like the Catholic
church from the late 15th century through the Counter-Reformation.
And its leaders and acolytes behave like those that sought to subject innocent
people to the Inquisitions. But it isn’t only in environmental matters that we
are under attack. Enlightenment ideas, like government for the sake of the
governed, the rule of law and justice, and the dignity and worth of the
individual human being, are being trashed. Our human rights and freedoms are
being trashed, too.
Meanwhile, the media keep up a torrent of hype, with lies,
misrepresentations and “fake news” everywhere. They call those, who oppose
their narratives, nasty names like “denier” or “far-right,” and seek to
“cancel” their opponents’ views. Truth and justice become submerged in an ocean
of propaganda and collectivist dogma, through which the political élites seek to force
their particular view of the world on to ordinary people. And they accuse us
of being the ones peddling fake news! Further, they seek to indoctrinate people
with falsehoods and emotional manipulation, to create a mental atmosphere of unreasoning
fear, and to silence all contrarian viewpoints.
And even our core humanity is under attack. The “humans are
bad” brigade are having a field day, as shown by those that think the COVID
virus has been a good thing, and by refrains like “we are trashing nature” and
“there are too many of us human beings on the planet.” They hate and castigate
us human beings. And yet, they consider themselves to be above reproach.
In summary, the counter-paradigm of our enemies’ fifth
counter-revolution is suppression. Suppression of truth, suppression of rights,
suppression of freedom, suppression of prosperity. Suppression of our humanity
and our creativity. Suppression of us.
The last eight decades
I shall now look at history over the last 80 years or
so. That is, the period during which our enemies have been pushing their fifth
counter-revolution. Aspects of particular interest are: The rise and subsequent
corruption of the United Nations. The network of élite, globalist organizations that go with it. The
rise of the European project, which eventually became the European Union. And
the welfare state, which has since evolved into the nanny state. These
institutions mostly had their origins during, or shortly after, the second
world war.
The United Nations
The United Nations is generally held to have been instituted
in 1945. But its roots lie several years earlier. An “Atlantic Charter,” a 1941
joint statement between US president Franklin Roosevelt and UK prime minister
Winston Churchill, set out a plan for policies to be implemented once the nazis
had been defeated. These included “the fullest collaboration in the economic
field between all nations,” “economic advancement and social security,” and
that everyone “may live out their lives in freedom from fear and want.”
This was all good-sounding stuff. Recall how people in 1941
must have felt about the world political system. Twice in 25 years, an
aggressive German state, backed up by powerful allies, had spread violent
conflict over much of the world. People must have felt fed up and angry with the
nation-state system, to say the least. So, it made sense for forward-thinking
politicians to think about plans for a more peaceful future.
At the beginning of 1942, 26 governments, all of which had
declared war on the nazis and their Axis allies, signed up to a “Declaration of
United Nations,” affirming their support for the Atlantic Charter. The USA and
the UK were joined by the Chinese, who had been fighting against Japanese
invaders since 1937. They were joined also by the Russians, as soon as Hitler had
reneged on the Ribbentrop non-aggression pact. These were the “Big Four”
countries, to which France was added after its liberation in 1944.
The United Nations formally began in 1945, after the UN
Charter was agreed. The Preamble to the Charter stated its three main goals
affecting ordinary people as: “To save succeeding generations from the scourge
of war.” “To regain faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth
of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large
and small.” And “To promote social progress and better standards of life in
larger freedom.” And one of the ways it was to achieve those goals was “to
employ international machinery for the promotion of the economic and social
advancement of all peoples.”
The four stated Purposes of the United Nations can be
summarized as follows: To maintain international peace and security. To develop
friendly relations among nations based on respect for the principle of equal
rights and self-determination of peoples. To achieve international co-operation
in solving international problems of an economic, social, cultural, or
humanitarian character, and in promoting and encouraging respect for human
rights and for fundamental freedoms for all. And to be a centre for harmonizing
the actions of nations in the attainment of these common ends.
The UN has taken for itself many of the moral privileges of
a sovereign political state. Its property is immune from search or confiscation
by any of its member states. It is exempt from taxes, customs duties and
import/export restrictions. Its employees, in effect, pay what taxes they pay
to the UN itself. It has diplomatic immunity, and its officials also have
“functional immunity” from prosecution when carrying out their duties. It even
issues its own passports. It seems to me to be a state, and yet outside all
other states.
What about the UN’s record? As a peacekeeper, it has been
mixed. There is a basic problem; how can the UN be an effective peacekeeper,
when so often individual member states have their own agendas on one side of a
conflict or another? This was a particular issue during the cold war. Beyond
this, the UN has been able to do very little about political de-stabilization
caused in other countries by powerful world states, such as US meddling in
Iran, Guatemala, Cuba or Panama. And one condemnatory resolution apart, it has
been able to do nothing to halt or to cut short the Russian invasion of
Ukraine.
The UN’s record on human rights began reasonably well, with
the 1948 Universal Declaration on Human Rights, billed as “a common standard of
achievement for all peoples and all nations.” Though, particularly from article
22 onwards, some of the claimed rights seem to reflect a rather collectivist
view of the world, and a few are simply misguided. Within the UN framework, the
Declaration has been carried forward into the International Covenant on Civil
and Political Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and
Cultural Rights. Both came into force in 1976. Since then, progress in this
area seems to have been limited to the advancement of groups to whom the UN is
over-sympathetic, notably women and “indigenous” people. Indeed, the UN
Commission on Human Rights, after years of internal squabbles and lack of
effectiveness, had to be replaced in 2006.
Then there is the UN’s alphabet soup of agencies. Some of
these have certainly done useful work in the past. For example, the ICAO did
some good work on aviation standards, particularly in its early days. And I
myself worked, in the 1980s, on a technology transfer project in Indonesia
funded by the ITU. But for many of them, the more recent record has been, as
for the peacekeepers, rather mixed.
The World Health Organization (WHO), in particular, was late
to recognize human-to-human transmissibility of COVID-19, and wrongly deferred
to the Chinese political stance of “lockdown at any cost.” And it seems
over-keen to get countries to commit to a common pandemic strategy, regardless
of individual countries’ cultures and situations.
But UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and
Cultural Organization, is even worse. Despite high-sounding ideals, it seems to
be a co-ordinating hub for most of the bad things the UN is doing to us. And it
anticipated the “sustainable development” nonsense with a “Man and the
Biosphere” project, started way back in 1971.
Moreover, to varying degrees, these organizations – and
UNESCO in particular – have been infected in the last 15 years or so by the
green agenda that is causing so many troubles today. In the first essay of this
set, and in an essay on the “global warming” backstory which I referenced from
there, I gave an overview of the history of this agenda. It’s a long and sordid
story. Something I omitted to include in that overview was the development from
“Agenda 21” in 1992, via the Millennium Development Goals (2000), into the
“Sustainable Development Goals” agreed in 2015. Recently, though, I wrote
specifically on those sustainable development goals and “targets,” and their
consequences for us and our economies: [[3]].
Here are the conclusions I drew from that exercise. They aren’t nice.
·
The United Nations’ “Sustainable Development
Goals” agenda is a blueprint for the destruction of human civilization as we
know it, and for tyranny by a self-appointed global ruling class over every
human being alive.
·
For at least 30 years, the UK government has
been a major leader in the stampede towards the “sustainable development”
agenda. They have done this without allowing us, the people they are supposed
to serve, any other choice, or any chance to object.
·
The main thrust of the agenda is a global power
grab by an international élite of the rich and powerful, at the expense of
ordinary people. The world-view of its promoters, far from being “cultural
Marxism” or anything like it, seems to be a globalist, feminist form of
fascism.
·
The promoters of this agenda use
saccharine-coated words to disguise a raging desire to use us human beings as
objects for their profit, and to hit and to hurt us if we step out of line in
any way. The agenda is a charter for government meddling and centralized
control.
·
The negative effects of the agenda are now plain
for all to see. For example, in food shortages and economic collapse in Sri
Lanka. Energy shortages in the UK and Germany. And serious political disruption
to farming in the Netherlands and in Canada.
·
It is becoming clear that the “sustainable
development” agenda, wherever implemented, will produce results that are quite
the opposite of sustainable.
·
The promoters and supporters of this agenda are
traitors to human civilization. It is high time that we human beings started to
push back against their agenda and against them.
It seems amazing that an organization, originally founded
with goals of preventing future wars and promoting human rights, can have gone
so far off the beam. Tyrannical policies rooted in the UN’s “sustainable
development” nonsense have more and more violated the human rights of ordinary
people. Such policies do nothing for economic or social advancement, or for
world peace.
How could this have happened? The answer, I think, is one
word… corruption. Factions and individuals within the UN have sought to move it
away from what it was supposedly for, towards the kind of globalist tyranny
that offers ordinary people, both in Western countries and in the third world,
no hope of a future. One such individual is Gro Harlem Brundtland, inventor of
the “sustainable development” concept. Another was Maurice Strong, the master
networker whose goal was to set in motion policies designed to kill off human
industrial civilization.
When, roughly, did the UN go wrong? If I had to put a date
on it, it would be between 1968 and 1970. In 1968, UNESCO held in Paris a
Biosphere Conference, which led to the “Man and the Biosphere” program. In
1969, the UN made the decision to hold the 1972 Stockholm Conference on the
Human Environment. And in 1970, secretary-general U Thant appointed Maurice
Strong as secretary-general of that conference. 1970 was also the year of the
first “Earth Day,” which U Thant personally approved.
One thing the United Nations has not done, though,
is take anything away from the sovereignty of its member states. Would you not
have expected that an organization, formed to prevent war, ought to have done
its very best to lessen the war-making powers of nation-states, that by their
design are empowered to make wars in the first place? Should they not have
promoted, and sought agreement on, the idea that “sovereign states may no
longer make aggressive wars?” Or at the very least, could they not have
persuaded their member states to cap military spending at, say, 1 per cent of
GDP? But no. Political states can still make wars, and can get away with them
if their military and economic strength is sufficient.
To sum up the UN’s sad story. Today, like moths around a
candle, political parasites that seek gain for themselves, and pests that want
to rule over people harshly and against their wills, seek to join together to
use UN programs to further their aims. As I listed some of them in the essay on
the sustainable development goals: Bankers and other “money men.” Big Academe
and Green Tech. National politicians. “Stakeholders,” Big Business, Big Tech.
Government bureaucracies, quangos, “public-private initiatives,” and quaintly
named “civil society organizations.” And, of course, the mainstream media,
their propaganda arm. With globalist organizations like the World Bank, World
Economic Forum and International Monetary Fund in there too. And the UN and its
agencies pulling the strings from the top.
As to its stated goals: Has the UN managed “to save
succeeding generations from the scourge of war?” Nyet; ask any
Ukrainian. Has it helped us “to regain faith in fundamental human rights, in
the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women
and of nations large and small?” Quite the opposite. Our rights and dignity are
being violated on many fronts, even in supposed democracies; and aggressive
feminists are seeking to make men into second-class citizens. And what has come
of its goal “to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger
freedom?” Our freedoms, and our standards of living, are being trashed. In large
part, by policies that have been driven by the UN.
I call “fail” on the UN. And “foul,” too. The UN must be
abolished.
An élite network
Then there is a network of élite organizations, which seem to have two things in
common. First, they are dedicated to a globalist political system, to be
controlled by themselves and their mates. Second, UK politicians, both Tory and
Labour, have played a significant role in building and steering these
organizations. There are many such organizations, probably hundreds or
thousands. But I’ll concentrate here on just a few of the most obvious.
There
is Klaus Schwab’s World Economic Forum. Founded in 1971, it describes itself as
“the International Organization for Public-Private Cooperation.” It “engages
the foremost political, business, cultural and other leaders of society to
shape global, regional and industry agendas.” It takes extreme positions on the
“anthropogenic climate change” issue and on “gender equality.” It has thousands
of very influential members, including many high-ups in multi-national
companies and political governments.
The
WEF, as I described above, seeks a “Global Redesign” and a “Great Reset.” This
“Great Reset” is described as: “a new equilibrium among political, economic,
social and environmental systems toward common goals.” In which the future is:
“a globalized world… best managed by a coalition of multinational corporations,
governments (including through the UN system) and select civil society
organizations.” Obviously, we honest, productive human beings have no place in
such a world, except perhaps as slaves.
The WEF
seems to have no respect for the participation of ordinary individuals in
decision-making. It prefers, instead, that decisions should be taken on
people’s behalf by a self-selected group of “stakeholders.” [[4]].
It has also told the public that “by 2030, you’ll own nothing and be happy.”
And it nominates a yearly cadre of “Young Global Leaders,” who have included
Vladimir Putin.
In
recent years, the WEF has become wedded more and more to big governments. Its key-note
addresses have been given by presidents Xi of China, Modi of India, Bolsonaro
of Brazil and Zelenskiy of Ukraine. Since the turn of the century, it has also
become increasingly politically correct, and supportive of green and
“sustainable development” idiocies. Prince (now king) Charles has been a major
promoter of the “Great Reset.” Members of the board of trustees have included
Kofi Annan (former UN general secretary), Tony Blair, Mark Carney (former
governor of the Bank of England) and Ursula von der Leyen of the European
Commission. One of its “Agenda Contributors” is Mark Rutte, current prime
minister of the Netherlands and bane of their farmers. The WEF also has
tentacles into other organizations with similar kinds of views. One of its past
CEOs, former Costa Rican president Jose Maria Figueres, is the brother of
Cristiana Figueres, long-time UN climate change czarina.
Schwab
himself is a former member of the steering group of the Bilderberg meetings.
Those Bilderberg meetings, started in 1954, were designed to bring together
European and North American leaders to foster co-operation on political,
economic and military issues. Over the years, they have become an annual
talk-shop for an invited in-group of global élites. Denis Healey, Labour
politician, was a founder member, and in the steering group for 30 years.
Healey once described the group as “striving for a one-world government.”
Prince
Bernhard of the Netherlands chaired the meetings for their first 22 years.
Subsequent steering committee chairmen have included Alec Douglas-Home, former
UK prime minister; a UK economist and director of the Bank of England; and a
former Tory minister, peer and secretary general of NATO. Participants at
meetings have included: Princes Philip and Charles. Many senior politicians,
such as post-war Belgian prime minister Paul-Henri Spaak. Ursula von der Leyen,
Klaus Schwab, Mark Rutte, Mark Carney; all names I mentioned earlier. Antonio
Guterres, now secretary-general of the UN. Margaret Thatcher, Gordon Brown,
Tony Blair, David Cameron. Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates. Senior managers from Shell
and BP. Kenneth Clarke, pro-European Tory chancellor, attended many times, as
did Henry Kissinger. Hillary Clinton and John Kerry have also attended. Oh, and
Baroness Dido Harding.
More
network links. Princes Bernhard and Philip were both presidents of the World
Wildlife Fund, the organization which has probably been more strident in its
green propaganda than any other (except perhaps the BBC). And has certainly
been carrying on that propaganda for longest, first raising the spectre of
“anthropogenic global warming” as far back as 1963. Yet back in those days,
global cooling was seen as the likely problem, not warming!
The
WWF, in its turn, was set up as an offshoot of the IUCN, the International
Union for the Conservation of Nature. Itself founded in 1948 on the initiative
of UNESCO, the IUCN had from the beginning a close association with the UN. It
was heavily involved in setting up the UN’s 1972 Stockholm Conference on the
Human Environment, and it prepared the UN’s 1982 “World Charter for Nature.”
More recently, it has partnered with the “World Business Council for
Sustainable Development,” a corporate offshoot of the 1992 Rio Earth Summit.
The IUCN now describes itself as “the global authority on the status of the
natural world and the measures needed to safeguard it.”
As I
said, there is probably a whole lot more where that came from. But this should,
I hope, be enough to give people an idea of how long, and how hard, the
international élites have been pushing to impose all these destructive policies
on us.
The European project
And then, there’s Europe. In the beginning, there was the
Council of Europe. Originally the brainchild of Winston Churchill, it was
founded by the Treaty of London in 1949. The treaty eulogizes “the pursuit of
peace based upon justice and international co-operation.” And “the spiritual
and moral values which are… the true source of individual freedom, political
liberty and the rule of law, principles which form the basis of all genuine
democracy.” Fine words!
Today, the Council of Europe describes itself as “the
continent’s leading human rights organization.” And its best-known institution
is the European Court of Human Rights. Some of whose rulings, at least, the UK
government wants to allow ministers to ignore: [[5]].
The first president of the Council was Paul-Henri Spaak of
Belgium. (In 1945, he had been chairman of the first session of the General
Assembly of the United Nations.) But he eventually resigned from the Council,
after it rejected his proposals for a politically united Europe. He then helped
to found the institutions, that later became the European Union.
The Council of Europe is, formally, quite separate from the
EU. Unlike almost all other internationalist organizations, at least into the
2000s, the Council of Europe seems to have remained relatively true to its
founders’ stated intentions. However, more recently it has suffered scandals,
which have dented public confidence in it.
Then there is the European Commission (EC). The EC is the
executive of the EU. Its main architect was post-war French prime minister
Robert Schuman. It started life in 1952, as the “High Authority” of the newly
formed European Coal and Steel Community. Since at least the late 1950s, it has
been telling member governments what they must do (regardless of what their
people want). Democracy? Non. After the creation of the European
Economic Community (EEC) and atomic agency (Euratom), it was merged in 1967
into the Commission of the European Communities.
The UK became a member of the EEC at the beginning of 1973.
This was eventually confirmed by referendum in 1975. I didn’t myself vote that
day; but I liked the idea of free movement of people, goods and services across
borders. Even if I didn’t think much of the Common Agricultural Policy. And I
didn’t even know about the existence, or the power, of the European Commission.
Roy Jenkins, in 1975 UK home secretary and a supporter of the European project,
in 1977 became president of the Commission! Hmmm…
The EEC proved to be a positive for me, enabling me to live
and work in the Netherlands for three good years in the late 1970s. But in the
run up to the Maastricht treaty (1992), it became clear that the European
project was moving towards political union, not just economic
co-operation. That caused a lot of people in the UK, including me, to turn
against it. Surely, I thought, those that took the UK into the EEC must have
known back then that the eventual goal was political union? So, why did they
not tell us that at the time? Ultimately, this misleading of the UK public by
the pro-Europe side in the 1970s was my primary reason for supporting Brexit
more than thirty years later.
Further, EU officials have some state-like privileges. They
are exempt from income tax in the countries they work in. Though, rather like
UN staff, they do pay some taxes to the EU itself. Like the UN, the EU looks in
many ways like a state outside all other states. But unlike the UN, it
considers itself morally superior to its member states, and claims a right to
impose its policies on the governments and the people in those states. Even if
those people, and even the national governments, would far rather do something
else.
Since the Lisbon Treaty in 2009, the European Commission
and the EU have become steadily more and more tyrannical. “Directives” have
flowed out like bullets from machine-guns. Moreover, the EU has perverted the
precautionary principle, just as the UK government did back in 2002, to
“justify” pre-emptive regulation against perceived risks, even though there is
no proof at all that those risks pose any objectively real problem. They have
then used this perversion to impose harsh, collective “limits” and “targets” on
things like PM2.5 pollution and nitrogen emissions. And these are forever
tightened, as a target morphs into a limit and is replaced by a new, more
stringent target.
Such collective restrictions will not only inevitably
become intolerable for those subjected to them, but are also sure to fail in
the long run. That was another reason why I was desperate for Brexit. But I’m
still waiting for all those limits and targets to be scrapped!
And so, here we are, with the ECJ’s 2018 ruling on the 1992
“habitat directive” threatening to kill off a large part of the Dutch farming
industry, and to damage food security for everyone in Europe. So much for the
stated ideals of the founders of the Council of Europe: justice, individual
freedom, political liberty, the rule of law and democracy! So much, too, for “economic
and social advancement,” “freedom from fear and want,” “faith in fundamental
human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person,” and “better
standards of life in larger freedom.”
Oh, and this link might interest you: [[6]].
The European Commission’s “Circular Economy Action Plan” of 2020, to implement
the EU’s “Green New Deal.” “This Circular Economy Action Plan provides a
future-oriented agenda for achieving a cleaner and more competitive Europe in
co-creation with economic actors, consumers, citizens and civil society
organisations.” Haven’t we heard bullshit like this from the UN, and from
politicians too? Not to mention the WEF, a key supporter? It “aims at
accelerating the transformational change required by the European Green Deal.”
And it plans for “a global shift to a circular economy.” All this would be
quite funny, if it wasn’t that they want to force it on to us all. In my
opinion, there is only one place fit for such stuff: the “circular file.”
We’ve been had by the EU, as well as by the UN, haven’t we?
The EU, too, must go.
The welfare state
Then there’s welfare. In 1942, in the depths of war, William
Beveridge authored a report. There were already state schemes in Britain for
pensions, health and unemployment insurance. What Beveridge proposed to do was
bring these all together into one giant, all-encompassing combine – the welfare
state.
Most politicians, of both main parties, supported this. Many
ordinary people liked Beveridge's ideas, too. They liked the idea of a safety
net to prevent them becoming poor. They liked the idea of financial security in
their old age. They must have thought they were getting something for nothing.
But they didn't stop to think about the long-term costs. They didn't think
about the burden they would be storing up for people in the future. By 1948,
buoyed up by the interventionist economic theories of John Maynard Keynes, most
of the proposals had been implemented. Although even Beveridge himself was
already starting to worry what kind of monster he had sired.
The idea was that the state would provide a raft of services
that people found necessary, including health care, unemployment insurance and
pensions. Health care would be free of charge at the point of use, being paid
for through general taxation. A big part of the thinking, I suspect, was a
political marketing ploy, an attempt to fool people into thinking that the
state was actually on their side.
But the most likely upshot of these programmes was state
growth. Taking on these functions would vastly increase the size of the state,
and the scope of what it did. And would enable it to take over the business of
the organizations, such as friendly societies, which had previously performed
these functions in the free market. It would also tend to politicize people’s
lives, and give more and more scope for state functionaries to meddle.
All of these consequences have come about, in spades. And
worse; a substantial fraction among the population have allowed themselves to
become dependent on the state. Some of them only got into this situation by bad
luck, or because deliberate state actions knocked them down; the state “broke
their legs, then gave them crutches.” But too many took the bait, and accepted
dependence eagerly. In a sham “democracy,” if the political élites can force enough
people down into dependence on their state, they will be sitting pretty. No
anti-élite group,
goes the logic, will ever be able to muster enough support to get any kind of
power.
Worse yet, people who have become dependent on the state
tend to look to the state to solve all their problems. Even, and perhaps
especially, when the state itself is the cause of those problems. This explains
why so many are prone to clamour for government to “do something,” even when
the best thing it could do for everyone is get itself out of the way.
To the economics of welfare. The amounts of money spent on
the UK welfare state are truly eye-watering. I looked at a reasonably
representative year (2017), in which total government spending was £772
billion. This was 38% of the UK’s gross domestic product for that year, and
also amounted to £11,700 per head of the population, or just over £28,000 per
household. Of this, £270 billion (35%) was spent on welfare and pensions, and
£145 billion (19%) on health care. More than half of all UK government spending
in that year came under these two headings, which together accounted for more
than 20% of GDP! And all this excludes education, which might also be
classified as a kind of welfare, and weighed in at £102 billion (5% of GDP).
I remember, back in 2009, listening to a respected economist
bemoaning the lack of future planning for welfare spending. It seems that over
decades no-one had actually bothered to run the numbers for the long term,
taking into account the rising longevity of the population. And it was becoming
plain, to those in the know, that the numbers didn’t add up. The welfare state
was financially unsustainable. This is why both the scope and the rates of
taxes to support welfare have, in the last decade or so, “gone through the roof.”
Yet the problem still doesn’t seem to be anywhere near solved.
On top of this, the NHS health care system has been in a
state of all but permanent “crisis” for at least 15 years. It cannot recruit
enough qualified staff. And many of the staff it does have are complaining
about inflexible rosters, overwork and exhaustion. This is nothing new; junior
doctors’ long hours were a major problem as far back as the 1970s. Further,
morale is low, and sickness rates are soaring. Low pay is a part of the issue;
but there are other financial problems too, particularly with doctors’
pensions. And care homes have similar problems, particularly since the attempt
to impose a COVID vaccine mandate on their staff.
Moreover, there is now a huge backlog of treatments, which had
to be postponed because of the COVID pandemic. The proportion of accident and
emergency cases seen within four hours has gone down from about 95 per cent in
2014 to close to 70 per cent. Even before the pandemic started, hospital bed
occupancy rates were above their designed levels. That is not getting any
better. And a shortage of intensive care unit beds was one of the main drivers
that triggered COVID lockdowns.
Then there has been meddling with the education of doctors
and nurses, and with the qualifications needed to work in UK health care.
Training for doctors and nurses was reformed in the 1970s. It was reformed
again in the 1990s with “Project 2000.” With, it seems, some success. But one
of the effects was the development of an intensive culture of “achievement
targets.” A further reform was undertaken in the 2000s, but this was a failure
and led to mass protests by doctors. And now, they are meddling again with the
assessment procedure for licensing doctors.
Perhaps such things may need to change from time to time, to
reflect progress in medicine as a whole. But even so, this is not the way that
any enterprise that wants to keep its skilled staff ought to treat people! Such
meddling, and failure to take into account the views of the people impacted,
seem to be characteristic of large, centralized organizations. And most of all
of governments, where there is no, or at any rate far less, accountability when
things go wrong compared to private enterprises.
Even more extreme is what New Labour did to NHS dentists in
2006, by attempting to impose on them a new contract and a new way of working.
Previously, they had in essence been paid by piecework. This did lead to some
problems, notably a degree of over-treating. But overall, it allowed dentists
to provide the level of treatment they thought most appropriate for each
patient, while working in a way they were comfortable with. The new contract,
on the other hand, divorced the payments from the treatments done, in a way
that brought advantages to some dentists, but disadvantaged many others. It was
also described as a contract of “targets and treadmills.” The result was that
many dentists simply left the NHS. In my area, NHS dentistry disappeared
entirely for almost a decade. Here, again, is what happens when valuable people
find themselves being ordered around, against their interests, by a top-down,
command-and-control bureaucracy.
Considering the huge amounts of money already having been
and being spent on welfare of various kinds, do people really get value for
what they pay and have paid? I think not. I call “fail” on the politicized UK welfare
system.
The nanny state
Then there’s the “nanny state,” which has grown and grown
over the decades, and seeks to use every conceivable excuse to control people in
as many aspects of their lives as possible.
For example, during the summer of 2022, I learned that the
UK government had laid plans to ban smoking in public entirely in England by
2030: [[7]].
That there were more restrictions on gambling on the way: [[8]].
And that they wanted to take away the last vestiges of any right for parents to
decide when their children ought to go to school: [[9]].
“Public health” seems to be the excuse du
jour. Though what it has to do with either of the last two, I cannot divine.
And the impact of smoking on public (as opposed to individual) health has never
been proven to be major. Then there are such things as the sugar tax on soft
drinks, and meddling in where shops should be allowed to place what foods.
The on-line safety bill, too, is a power grab that
facilitates unaccountable political control by bureaucrats over ordinary
people’s lives. A maudlin obsession with “safety,” regardless of costs to the
people, has been responsible for most of the rights violations we have suffered
under the pretext of COVID-19. It has also driven the climate change fiasco.
Then there are their assaults on our financial freedoms, supposedly “to help
prevent financial crime,” and which they are requiring the banks to police.
The root of this obsession, and so of the constant and
destructive “nannying” by government, lies, as far as I can determine, in the
UK government’s perversion of the precautionary principle. I covered this
perversion in the first essay of this set. In essence, it awards government a
licence to act to control any perceived risk, even where there is no hard
evidence that the risk is a real problem. And without taking any account at all
of the costs and benefits of this government action to those affected by it.
If a child’s nanny did things like these, and her
“precautionary” actions ended up causing harm to the child, she should be
hauled up in court for cruelty, should she not? The maximum penalty for which
has recently been increased from 10 years’ jail to 14. Yet the nanny state and
its functionaries are never held accountable for the cruel, harmful things they
do to people in the name of ruses like “public health,” “safety” and
“preventing crime.” That’s because, from the point of view of those
functionaries, “the king can do no wrong.”
Nineteen Eighty-Four
I recently re-read George Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty-Four.”
There is a school of thought, which says that today’s élites, instead of seeing his master-work as the
warning against totalitarianism that he intended it to be, are using it as an
instruction manual. To evaluate this claim, I thought I would compare his
fictional world with today’s reality.
Orwell certainly got some of his predictions right. Government
is spying on our every move. Electricity off, and heating running at half
power, if at all; that’s what we could well be facing this winter, because of
decades of bad energy policies driven by green nonsense. There are three- or
perhaps five-year plans for things like carbon dioxide emissions. There are
“adjustments” and “corrections” to the past, like temperature records. They
want to punish us for crimethink, and make us into unpersons (at
least, on the Internet or financially), if government bureaucrats think
something we say on-line is “false communication,” or if we do something they
don’t like with our own money. Doublethink is rife; for example, the
notion that “sustainable development” policies can ever be sustainable, or the
hypocrisy of those that fly by jet (and, most of all, by private jet) to or
from conferences that seek to limit carbon dioxide emissions. And their
philosophical outlook seeks to deny the existence of objective reality.
Moreover, Orwell, or at least Emmanuel Goldstein the author
of his book-within-a-book, “The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical
Collectivism,” made a decent shot at identifying some of the groups that would
combine to form the new aristocracy. “Bureaucrats, scientists, technicians,
trade-union organizers, publicity experts, sociologists, teachers, journalists,
and professional politicians.”
On most of these, except perhaps for the trade unionists, he
wasn’t so far off. One thing he failed to predict, though, was that the élitist big business
bosses – the crony capitalists, or as I call them “the money men” – would join,
and become a key part of, the new ruling class. But he was spot on about the
political results they all wanted: oligarchy (theirs!) and collectivism. That
they had “The conscious aim of perpetuating unfreedom and inequality.” And that
they sought to “arrest progress and freeze history at a certain moment.”
Today’s élites
treat us as if they were a superior species, and we an inferior. And just
about everything they do to us reduces our freedoms yet further. Moreover,
green extremists seek to arrest our progress, by demanding a halt to the use of
the fossil fuels, that in the current state of technology are vitally necessary
to human civilization. And to freeze history completely, by demanding that we
humans should have no effect or “footprint” on our surroundings. They want a
world, on which humans leave no mark.
Was Orwell really trying to predict the future? If so, he
didn’t get all the details right. I have already mentioned the capitalists.
Further, the élites have
not managed to find a suitable Big Brother. They seem to be aiming to set up
Mother Earth in his place. And, in place of the three superstates Oceania,
Eurasia and Eastasia, we face rather three levels of tyranny; global
(the UN and its hangers-on), power blocs (like the EU) and the politicians of
individual nation-states. But overall, I’d say that George Orwell got
more right than wrong.
To sum up the last 80 years
For the last eight decades, the political class in the UK
have been using the power and lack of accountability of the political state to
treat us, the people government is supposed to serve, with callous disregard,
while feathering their own nests. They have inexorably expanded government
functions. They have raised existing taxes, and made new ones. They have
increased the burden and cost of red tape. They have violated our rights and
freedoms, spied on us in every way they can, and implemented disastrous
economic, environmental and energy policies. They have lied to us, “nudged” us
to comply with policies hostile to us, and evaded accountability for their
actions. They have also subjected us to unnecessarily long and harsh COVID
lockdowns, and used COVID as an excuse to put obstacles and formalities in our
way. Similar things have been happening in other countries.
Meanwhile, the UK welfare state is breaking down. It is in
crisis both financially, and in terms of delivering the services it is supposed
to provide. It started out with good-sounding ideals. But its ulterior purpose
was, I think, to try to fool people into believing that the state was on their
side. Its main effects have been to increase the size of the state, and the
scope of what it does; as well as hauling far too many people down into
dependence. And for many employees and suppliers, working with it has become a
nightmare of “targets and treadmills.”
Moreover, the welfare state has morphed into the nanny
state, which constantly seeks to control more and more of our lives. It bases its
policies on a perverted view of the precautionary principle, which it uses to “justify”
pre-emptive regulation against perceived risks, even when those risks are minor
or not even real. The result is not far away from the dystopian vision, which
George Orwell presented in his “Nineteen Eighty-Four.”
But on top of overreach by nation-states and their
politicians, we have suffered ever increasing meddling by globalist and
internationalist actors. The United Nations has been primary among these. It
was formed in the 1940s with laudable aims like maintaining peace, upholding
human rights and freedoms, and promoting better standards of life. Yet its
record, even from the start, has been mixed. It has made itself, in effect,
into a state outside all other states. And over the course of 80 years, it has
become seriously corrupted. Since around 1970, it has been the main driver of
the green and “sustainability” agenda, that goes against the well-being and
needs of ordinary people. And it has become one of the nuclei, around which a
self-appointed élite has
sought to form itself into a global ruling class.
The
European Union has been another such internationalist actor. The European
project, like the UN, started out with high-sounding ideals. But it, too,
became corrupted. What was presented as a project of economic co-operation
morphed, gradually but inexorably, into a project of political union. The EU
behaves, in many ways, like a state. But in addition, it claims a superiority
over its member states, and a right to tell them and their people what to do.
Through the same perverted view of precaution that statists in the UK have
taken, it has set out to impose on the people of Europe a régime of harsh,
collective “limits” and “targets.” And it has taken, and is now taking, the
green agenda to levels beyond the bounds of sanity.
The last year or so
Here are some of the things, that have happened to, or been
done to, us human beings in the last year or so.
CoP26
I began my year with the Conference of the Parties, CoP26,
held in Glasgow in November 2021. As I said at the end of the first essay in
this set, the green leviathan, at last, encountered a degree of resistance from
a few countries that have worked out that it isn’t in their interests to stay
on that bandwagon much longer. That was encouraging; but not nearly enough yet.
The weather in 2022
In my area, we had an unusually warm spring in 2022; and the
wildlife loved it! I knew the spring would be warm, as soon as the tits who
nest in the tree outside my bedroom window arrived in January, instead of their
usual March. The wildlife know what the weather will do! It’s built into their
natures. And for them, as for us, warmer is better. By May, there were more new
goslings around my local lake than I’ve ever seen before. It was a beautiful
summer, too. Probably the third best in my experience, behind only 1976 and 1959.
As I write this on a bitterly cold December morning with the
temperature well below freezing, I allow myself a wry smile. Yes, warmer really
is better!
(Post-script: When I went to the lake that afternoon, bread
in hand, and with the temperature still below freezing, there were swans, ducks
and pigeons, but no geese. The geese have all moved to the other side of the
canal. Nevertheless, my contributions were gratefully, and noisily, received!).
Ukraine
In February 2022, the Russians started a war in Ukraine.
This has aggravated the energy problems, and started a spiral of rising cost of
living and inflation for us all. Not to mention raising the possibility of
Europe-wide food shortages due to loss of Ukrainian grain and, further down the
line, of fertilizers. And the spectre of nuclear war if the Americans choose to
do something silly.
But Putin’s reckless war (for which, I find myself coming
to call him “Rash Putin”) has already prompted some change in the “climate” of
thought, in the UK at least. People are coming to see already unaffordable and
yet still mounting energy prices as the threat to our civilization which they
truly are. And then there’s the danger of millions of innocent people being
annihilated in a nuclear war, about which governments appear to have no qualms
at all.
Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil
Then there’s Extinction Rebellion. A group with rich
backing from the international establishment, support from the UK government
(as evidenced by Michael Gove meeting them in 2019), and tactics I can only
describe as terrorist. They claim that humans today are causing a “sixth mass
extinction.” I have asked environmentalists, several times, to name a species
to whose extinction I have contributed. And to say what, and approximately
when, I did to contribute to that extinction. I have never got even one species
name, or any factual evidence. So, I conclude that the entire extinction scare
must be a fraud.
Despite not having any objective evidence for their main
accusation, in April 2022 Extinction Rebellion and another extremist group,
Just Stop Oil, organized “mass protests” against human use of fossil fuels.
They claimed they would mobilize three and a half per cent of the UK population
(that’s more than 2 million people!), yet their actual protests were confined
to central London and a few oil depots. And only a few hundred of them were
arrested.
Since then, Just Stop Oil have continued to “protest,” by blocking
roads and bridges, disrupting public events, and carrying out acts of
vandalism.
Sri Lanka
In Sri Lanka, by early March 2022 a government-mandated
transition to organic agriculture [[10]]
had caused the production of rice (Sri Lankans’ staple food) and tea (their
main export) to plummet by more than 20% in just a few months. The failure of
the harvest in March led directly to the mass protests, that during July
unseated from power Sri Lankan president Rajapaksa and several of his family.
But this didn’t mean an end to the suffering for Sri Lankans.
As of late July, 22 per cent of Sri Lankans were in need of
food aid. And prospects for the next harvest looked to be even worse: [[11]],
[[12]].
What has happened in Sri Lanka shows that politicians’ green
meddling costs, not only prosperity, but also peace and lives. Rajapaksa and
his government committed crimes against humanity. But far from trying to
rectify the problems, the Sri Lankan ruling class doubled down, and assaulted
the protestors. Things do seem to have settled down somewhat since then. But
the spectre of a major famine in Sri Lanka is still not far away.
The Netherlands
In the Netherlands, the world’s second largest food
exporter, farmers have been protesting since 2019 against regulations aiming to
halve emissions of gaseous nitrogen compounds, particularly ammonia, by 2030.
These regulations are part of the EU’s so-called “Green Deal.” At one of the
protests on July 5th, 2022, Dutch police fired live ammunition at a
tractor driving away from them. The protests [[13]]
spread to other countries, notably Germany, Italy, Spain and Poland.
And yet, it is not at all clear that emissions of nitrogen
compounds from farming have ever caused any measurable, significant, negative
effects. This article [[14]]
gives an introduction to what is going on. The claim seems to be that there is
a loss of “biodiversity” in certain “protected areas” that are part of an EU
project called “Natura 2000.” Yet, can anyone name even one species that has
become extinct in the last 30 years, with that extinction proven beyond
reasonable doubt to have been caused by modern Dutch farming practices?
All this trouble comes from a ruling by the European Court
of Justice (ECJ) in November 2018, which made the requirements for assessing
the effects of farming “projects” much stricter, and did not allow any
mitigation measures already in place to be counted. This ruling is based on a
very harsh and, to this layman, unreasonable reading of a clause from the
European Commission’s “Habitat Directive” dating from 1992: [[15]].
But ask yourself: Which is more important? Some
ill-defined, hard to measure thing called “biodiversity?” Or food for human
beings? Shouldn’t human beings always take priority over other species? Would a
lion, for example, ever put the welfare of the zebra it hunts ahead of the
welfare of its own cubs? Surely not. And why should there ever have been such a
thing as a “Habitat Directive” in the first place, unless it was designed to
conserve the human habitat – that is, the peace, freedom and justice
that we need in order to fulfil ourselves?
It looks as if Rajapaksa and Dutch prime minister Mark
Rutte share a common goal: reducing the food supply for human beings. This has
been confirmed in December 2022 by the Dutch “nitrogen minister” Christianne
van der Wal: [[16]].
The following quote is chilling: “Export percentages are not a goal for us. Our
goal is emission reduction and to restore nature.”
This is deliberate destruction of the most productive agricultural
industry in the world. Furthermore, it will have knock-on effects on food
security all over Europe. The nearest historical parallel I can think of is Stalin’s
genocide against the kulaks, the most efficient among the peasant
farmers in Soviet Ukraine. This genocide resulted in the Holodomor
famine, causing the deaths of several million innocent people. Rutte and van
der Wal seem to be aiming to murder a lot more people than that. They must be
stopped.
The UK government
Meanwhile, the UK government have continued to act as if
they were above the rule of law, and to violate our right of equality before
the law. They have cynically broken rules they made themselves, while expecting
us to keep to those same rules. As, for example, the “Partygate” scandal, in
which government officials, and even the prime minister himself, held and
attended parties in flagrant violation of COVID lockdown rules. And they sought
to suppress publication of the details of their transgressions.
Many of the lockdown laws they made have been ethically
very dubious. For example, they tried to force meeting places like cinemas and
theatres, and organizers of events, to require vaccine passports for people
attending. And in early 2022, they tried to force out of their jobs workers,
both in the NHS and in care homes, who were unwilling to submit to vaccination.
Without ever showing evidence that the people targeted were causing any harm,
or even any unreasonable risk, to others. Around 40,000 care home workers were
actually sacked for this reason. These were symptoms of a maudlin concern for
something they call “safety,” regardless of human rights and of the costs to
the people they are supposed to be serving.
I have already mentioned further controls planned in the UK
on smoking, gambling and school attendance. During the summer, the government
also attempted to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda without their applications
even being considered. Yet these attempts do not seem to have had any effect at
all on the flow of asylum seekers: [[17]].
And their response to being ordered by the European Court of Human Rights to
stop the deportations? To seek to give themselves powers to ignore decisions
made by that court!
I also discovered a bad law they slipped in last year, the
so called “spy cops” act [[18]],
which allows undercover police and other government agents to commit real
crimes! So much for the rule of law. Moreover, the idea of requiring COVID
vaccine passports for access to events within the UK has not gone away: [[19]].
And banks are being encouraged, in order “to help prevent
financial crime,” to restrict how much money you are allowed to deposit into
your account: [[20]].
Or to close the account of someone they suspect may be using it for business
purposes or “unlawfully,” or who puts “abusive messages” in payment
instructions. Or to put a limit on the amount of money you may have in your
accounts, or to impose a charge on those accounts. It looks as if the political
élites are
limbering up to extend “financial sanctions” régimes, hitherto used primarily against such dubious
figures as Russian oligarchs, to anyone they choose to make an example of. They
are seeking to use the banks to police existing and planned assaults on our
financial freedom, just as they are seeking to use Big Tech to police their
assaults on freedom of speech. Such pre-emptive policies violate, not only the
presumption of innocence, but also the rights to a fair trial and to due
process of law.
Moreover, they continue to pursue schemes like “digital
identity” and “central bank digital currencies,” which will create a platform
to enable them to closely monitor even our smallest transactions, and so to tax
us yet more and more harshly.
The “Truss Spring”
In September 2022, following on from Partygate and other
scandals, we finally got rid of that lying, freedom-hating, economy-destroying,
rule-of-law-trashing broken reed of a prime minister, Boris Johnson. Liz Truss
took over. I confess that I didn’t expect anything from her but more of the
same; it is not for nothing that she acquired the nickname “the iron
weather-vane.” I had also predicted that she wouldn’t last six months. I
expected the “Tory Blob,” the media and the rest of the establishment to do
their best to stab her in the back. As it turned out, I was incorrect in my
first prediction, but correct in my second.
Truss actually started fairly well. She announced some half
way sane energy policies, including lifting the ban on fracking – an absolute
essential for UK energy supply in the medium term. For these, she was
castigated by the usual suspects. She announced (expensive) measures to shield
ordinary people, to an extent, from inflated energy prices caused by the
combination of Putin’s disruption of gas supply and decades of nonsensical
green policies.
But perhaps more significantly, she showed a willingness to
back-track on some of the worst of Johnson’s assaults on our rights and
freedoms. The bill to allow ministers to ignore rulings from the European Court
of Human Rights was shelved. And the on-line safety bill was to have some of
its worst abuses against our right of free speech removed. Though that, of
course, is not nearly enough. Truss even considered scrapping the sugar tax,
and reviewing proposed changes with regard to smoking and gambling.
Two days after Truss took over, the queen died. As one who
objects, on the grounds that all human beings must be ethically equal, to the
very existence of the state and sovereignty, I am no fan of monarchy. I
dismissed Lizzie as “a silly old woman, who lives in a castle and has never
done a decent day’s productive work in her life.” And she took more than £80
million a year of our money to support herself and her family. Not, I will say,
that Lizzie gave any impression of being a bad person. She certainly seemed far
more honest than any of her last six prime ministers up to Johnson!
So now, we’ve got Charlie as king. A leading promoter of the
WEF’s “Great Reset” and of the “sustainable development” fraud. And a
hypocrite, who flies in helicopters and private planes, rides in limos, and
drives nice cars; while, at the same time, telling ordinary people that we
should stop flying in planes, and should walk or cycle instead of driving.
Yeah, right.
Truss and her chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng, actually tried to
do some positive things for the people of the UK. For just a few weeks, they
looked to be trying to bring back into the lives of ordinary people some hope
of a better future. And cutting taxes is an important step on the way to getting
the economy moving again! I don’t know whether they got their numbers wrong, or
whether they were just naïve.
But both of them were out on their political ears only six weeks after taking
office. And “my” MP, one Jeremy Hunt, for whom I have no time or respect whatsoever,
was installed as chancellor (or, as I like to say, Chief Thief).
The “Truss Spring” – I call it that in analogy to Alexander
Dubcek’s Prague Spring of 1968 – is over. The Blob trussed her up, and took their
revenge. Now we’re back to the Blob’s idea of “business as usual” – no
fracking, even higher taxes, and lots more bad laws. Hope is off the menu, for
now. Instead, the emotions I – and, it seems, many other good people – now feel
most strongly are anger, contempt and hatred. At the political system, and at
all the parasites that use it for their profit, and pests that use it to
implement their agendas.
CoP27
The CoP27 climate meeting took place in an Egyptian luxury
resort. There were, as usual, many attendees arriving by private jet. Hypocrites!
They agreed to a crazy idea called a “damage and loss fund.” This is intended
to be paid into by Westerners, supposedly to compensate “vulnerable countries
hit hard by climate disasters” for the (unproven and unlikely) bad effects on
the climate, that are claimed to have been caused by industrialization in
Western countries.
This is, as should be obvious to anyone, no more than a
continuation and enlargement of the “foreign aid” scams already in place, that
force poor people in rich countries (that’s us) to pay vast sums for the
benefit of rich people in poor countries (like the Rajapaksa dynasty and their
ilk). Any Western “representative” that has even been willing to contemplate such
a scheme is a traitor to those they are supposed to “represent.”
If we in the West really want to help solve the problem of
third world poverty (and we should), the solution is obvious. Spread the values
of the Renaissance, Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution to all those who
have not received them before. Encourage people to rise up, to get rid of bad rulers
like the Rajapaksas and their kind, and to end all bad and nonsensical political
policies, including the green agenda in all its forms. Encourage them to do as
we tried to do all those years ago; to create a political climate of liberty,
human rights, the rule of law and justice, and government which acts only in
the interests of the governed, not of a ruling class. And, in that positive climate,
to free up and to industrialize their economies in whatever ways they find most
appropriate.
Where we are today
In Western countries today, if not also in places like Sri
Lanka, we are suffering under the worst governments and ruling classes in
living memory. They have, for several decades now, been making more and more political
policies that are hostile to us human beings. Our economies are sputtering at
best, and we are suffering the worst currency inflation in decades. We face
looming, deliberately contrived, shortages of energy and food. They are
treating us as lower than animals, whereas in reality we are the most developed
species on our planet. They are taxing us all but out of existence. They are,
quite deliberately, suppressing our rights and freedoms, and our chances of
prosperity. They are suppressing truth, bombarding us with propaganda, and promoting
lies and unfounded scares like the “climate change” and “species extinction”
nonsenses. They are suppressing our humanity and our creativity. They are
suppressing us, the honest, naturally productive human beings.
And these problems are not just at the level of national governments.
An international and globalist élite,
including the United Nations, the European Union, and a raft of organizations
like the World Economic Forum, are trying to transform the world’s political
systems into a single, top-down tyranny, with themselves and their élite cronies at the top,
and us human beings at the bottom.
Moreover, extremists among the political élites – such as the
Dutch nitrogen minister – are now, openly, promoting policies designed to bring
Western civilization to its knees. And the possibility of these extremists
trying to subject us honest, productive human beings to genocide is becoming
increasingly credible.
References
Here are the links I promised. To the six essays which
describe my philosophical system:
1.
https://libertarianism.uk/2021/06/19/six-thinkers/
2.
https://libertarianism.uk/2021/06/24/the-rhythms-of-history/
3.
https://libertarianism.uk/2021/06/29/two-world-systems/
4.
https://libertarianism.uk/2021/07/04/the-i-dimensions/
5.
https://libertarianism.uk/2021/07/09/the-we-dimensions/
6.
https://libertarianism.uk/2021/07/19/us-and-them/
To some of my essays at WattsUpWithThat.com:
·
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2017/08/11/the-social-costs-of-air-pollution-from-cars-in-the-uk/
·
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/01/11/on-science-and-nonscience/
·
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/01/22/on-the-precautionary-principle/
A brief post-script
This essay is about history, not about diagnosing our ills.
Nevertheless, I feel that it is time to bring out one important conclusion from
all the above. Namely, to identify the root cause of our troubles. That root cause
can be encapsulated in two words: the state.
All
these facets of the oppressions we suffer under today, at each level – global,
regional, national – have one thing in common. The parasites and pests that
oppress us think and act as if they are sovereigns over us. They claim moral
privileges over us. They make bad laws to bind us. They levy taxes and
impositions against us, most of which bring us no benefit at all. They give
privileges to their cronies and fellow-travellers. They think they aren’t bound
by the laws they make. They think they’re kings, and that “the king can do no
wrong.”
You can see the privileges, that the state grants to its
functionaries, being used by those in power to harm ordinary people. Unjust,
harmful, constraining laws; but dispensations for friends. (IR35 for me, but
£6,000 a man-day of government money for “approved” consultants.) Wars.
Dishonest officials, and burgeoning bureaucracy. Innocent people being unjustly
harmed, while buddies receive unearned titles and favours. Currency inflation.
Heavy taxes on ordinary people, but lucrative contracts and subsidies for
cronies. Disregard by those in power of rules they themselves made. (Think Johnson,
Partygate). And more.
There, ladies and gentlemen, you have the cause of all our problems: the state à la Bodin, with the false sovereignty it claims, and the bad politics it engenders. The state is the problem.
[[1]]
https://libertarianism.uk/2021/11/13/time-to-take-back-our-civilization-from-the-parasites-and-pests/
[[5]]
https://www.politico.eu/article/brexit-euro-justice-law-uk-courts-ignore-decisions-new-human-rights-plan/
[[8]]
https://www.independent.co.uk/money/government-to-publish-white-paper-on-gambling-reform-in-coming-weeks-b2111687.html
[[9]]
https://www.change.org/p/updated-attendance-guidance-encourages-prosecution-and-fines-of-families-facing-barriers-to-attendance-undiagnosed-children-with-send-are-particularly-at-risk-please-don-t-criminalise-our-families
[[11]]
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-06-17/sri-lanka-faces-food-crisis-as-farmers-abandon-fields-and-inflation-surges
[[12]]
https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/sri-lanka-faces-looming-food-crisis-with-stunted-rice-crop-2022-08-16/
[[13]]
https://www.hindustantimes.com/world-news/ukraine-war-eu-farmer-protests-will-hit-global-food-supply-chains-101657513508857.html
[[15]]
https://www.landmarkchambers.co.uk/resource-post/cjeu-gives-judgment-in-habitats-nitrogen-deposition-case/
