Time to take back our civilization from the parasites and pests, Part Five: Cure

(July 23^rd, 2023)

“We shall this day light such a candle by God’s grace in England as shall never be put out.”

–       Attributed to Hugh Latimer, burned at the stake in 1555

This is the final essay of a set of five. It represents the culmination of a process of hard (and unpaid) mental toil, in which I have been engaged for fully three years.

In the fourth essay, which you can find at [[1]], I diagnosed the root cause of the problems, to which we are subjected by today’s political system. That essay also summarized, and linked to, the first three essays in the set.

Today, I will address the question: how to go about curing these problems? My arguments will, necessarily, be a lot more speculative than my norm. More radical, too; and, on occasions, a little bit uncharitable. Not to mention sounding, in a few places, as if I have something just a tad too strong in my bubble-bath. But I will begin gently, by reviewing some things that have happened in the last month or so, and summarizing those parts of the earlier essays in this set, whose ideas are required to make this one as stand-alone as possible.

The essay will also, unavoidably, be long. In fact, it is my longest yet! 29,000 words, begad. And the most wide-ranging, too. For all this, I can only ask my readers’ forbearance, and offer the hope that they may find some of the ideas, which I put forward here, worth far more than the trouble it was to read them.

Updates

But before I start on my main theme, I will give a brief update on a few things which have happened in the UK since I published the fourth essay in this set.

Nigel Farage’s bank accounts

A strange and most concerning event happened very recently. Nigel Farage, “Mr Brexit” no less, complained in late June that his bank told him that they were about to close the accounts which he had had with them for more than 40 years: [[2]]. As the saga has rolled on, it has become plain that Mr Farage is only one among many prominent individuals to have been treated by banks or other financial service providers in this high-handed way. Several members of the House of Lords have also had accounts cancelled. And even the current Chancellor of the Exchequer (“my” MP) has been refused an account with an on-line bank.

As I wrote in the second essay of this set, “an international élite, spearheaded by the United Nations among others, and including multi-national corporations, dishonest politicians, and activist fellow-travellers, seeks to ‘unite the world’ under the tyranny of a global ruling class, unelected and unaccountable.” The recent Nigel Farage incident has made it, more than ever before, clear that the international banking and financial industry is a key player in this process. And that the “cancel culture” is a part of their modus operandi. Leading to the thought: “if they can’t de-bunk your ideas, they will probably try to de-bank you.”

ULEZ, “pay per mile” and fines

Then there is the on-going saga of the London Ultra Low Emissions Zone (ULEZ) proposed expansion, and related issues.

A High Court judge has heard the objections from several outer London councils. As of July 20^th, the judgement had not been handed down yet. But London mayor Sadiq Khan looks now to be trying to cover the possibility that the ULEZ expansion due next month could be stopped in its tracks. He, and others, are now proposing a “pay per mile” system, or even a “pay per minute” one: [[3]]. This would not only give them an opportunity to price poor people, and those with older cars, out of motoring altogether. But it would also entail the collection, using cameras, of details of when and where every journey by car in London was made. In other words, government (and, by implication, the police) would keep detailed records of every movement of every car anywhere in London. In a Daily Express poll, 77% of people polled were against this scheme. Hardly surprising.

Even if it was not going to be used for charging purposes, this scheme would be an obvious, and very serious, violation of our right to privacy. “No-one may be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy,” says article 12 of the UN Declaration of Human Rights. And you can’t get more arbitrary or privacy-killing than snapping every car wherever it goes!

Beyond this, motoring fines for even minor offences have risen into the thousands of pounds. It is becoming obvious that all this isn’t really about safety, air pollution, or any other perceived problem, real or not. It seems to me to be a combination of two separate strands. One is a giant money grab. More and more over this issue, I hear people saying it’s all about the money. The other is a moral panic against drivers, designed by Sadiq Khan and his ilk to force people, who can’t afford to buy new cars, out of personal transport altogether.

The Uxbridge by-election

On July 21^st, there was a by-election in Uxbridge and South Ruislip to replace the disgraced Boris Johnson. It showed, to me, just how rigged in favour of the two big parties the UK political system is. 21% of the electorate voted Tory, 20% Labour, 5% for one of a slew of 15 other candidates. This compares with 36%, 26% and 7% at the previous general election. Turn-out was 46%, quite a bit lower than the by-election average. The silent majority, 54%, showed their contempt for the whole charade by staying home.

It’s hard to understand how anyone could possibly vote for the Tories, after all that Johnson did. So, most of those Tory votes, I guess, must have been votes against Labour, and specifically against the ULEZ expansion, because Uxbridge is right on the edge of London. As to how anyone could see fit to vote Labour at all, your guess is as good as mine. As virtually always these days, there was no-one worth voting for who had any real chance of winning. “Democracy” of such a kind is simply not fit for purpose.

How I became an ethical and political philosopher

To return to my main theme. I never intended to become a philosopher. I had been prospering as a one-man software consultant into my mid-40s, until New Labour brought in a bad tax law called IR35, which has all but destroyed my career. I will never forgive them for that. Nor will I ever forgive the Tories. Not only for failing to repeal it as they initially promised, but more recently for strengthening it, and extending it to people like lorry drivers.

While I did manage to find some partial work-arounds, IR35 meant that I was effectively banned from the general market, and could only work with people who already knew what I could do and how I operated, and fully trusted me. This cut my earning power, for more than 20 years, to only a third or a quarter of what it should have been. Meaning that, having recently reached 70, I now face undeserved poverty for what remains of my life.

But there has been a silver lining, of a kind. For I have had enough time to undertake programmes of study, to think deeply, and to write. I described how I got where I am today in a section titled “My liberty journey,” in the second essay of this set.

I have long had a strong interest in ethics. And I take the view that ethics should drive politics, not the other way round. I had written about this viewpoint in a short book, “Honest Common Sense,” which I self-published in 2014. I spent much of 2020 and the first half of 2021 reviewing, updating and making clearer my philosophical thinking as a whole. My work since then has focused on two main areas. First, on the green and “net zero” agenda, and the back-story behind it. And second, on political philosophy. And, in particular, how we got into the parlous situation we are now in, where we need to go from here, just what it is that has gone wrong, and how we might go about curing the problems.

The green agenda

On the green issues, I wrote two stand-alone essays, followed by a set of five. The first essay was about the “Green Industrial Revolution” proposals, made by Boris Johnson and co in late 2020. Most of the ideas put forward there were either not properly costed or thought through, impractical, already tried and failed, unaffordable and disruptive, or dangerous pipe-dreams. Or some combination of several of these.

As to the politics behind them, it’s clear that those that favour such schemes don’t want the world economy to grow. They don’t want ordinary people to be prosperous, or to have freedom of choice in how we live our lives. And they are so dishonest, that they try to sell the dreary, depressing nightmare world they want to subject us to as if it was a benefit to us.

The second stand-alone essay addressed the United Nations’ “Sustainable Development Goals.” I looked at the agenda, to which those that think of themselves as our betters signed us up in 2015 without ever bothering to consult us. And I found it to be nothing less than a blueprint for the complete destruction of human industrial civilization as we know it today, and for tyranny by a self-appointed global ruling class over every human being alive. I came to the conclusion that the world-view of those peddling this agenda is a globalist form of fascism. And that the sustainable development agenda, wherever implemented, will produce results that are quite the opposite of sustainable.

My more recent set of five essays addressed the accusations made against our human civilization under the banner of “catastrophic anthropogenic global warming.” They, too, are linked from the fourth essay in this set.

I looked for evidence for the “climate crisis” that is claimed by the alarmists, and found no objective evidence of any such thing. Nor did I find any hard evidence that emissions of CO₂ from human civilization have caused or are causing any climate problems at all. Or that any amount of reduction in CO₂ emissions would achieve any improvement in the climate.

Moreover, I documented in some detail the history and back-story of this part of the green agenda. I found a long trail of arrogant, dishonest, corrupt, reckless behaviours by governments towards us ordinary people. I told of their corruption of science, their moving of the goalposts, their lies and scares, their whitewashing of real wrongdoings, their suppression of dissenting views. I told of their perversion of the precautionary principle, which has completely side-lined any possibility of objective risk analysis. And I told of the “long train of abuses, prevarications and artifices, all tending the same way” (words of John Locke, [[4]]), by which they have prevented any attempt at objective, rigorous cost-benefit analysis on issues involving carbon dioxide emissions.

As an aside, Locke’s Two Treatises of Government are available, for free, on the Internet here: [[5]]. Both are very much worth a read. But in my view, the Second Treatise is nothing less than the most important work of human political philosophy to date.

Time to take back our civilization from the parasites and pests

To my current set of essays. In the first four, I have looked on several different timescales at the history, which has led to the situation we human beings are in today. I have set out the main points of my political philosophy, outlined the major principles on which a new and better system of governance could be built, and sketched how such a system might work. And I have made my diagnosis of the root cause of the problems we are facing today.

A species split

I will now summarize what I see as the root cause of our problems today, as I diagnosed that cause in the fourth essay. It turns out to be, that the human species has split into two very different, and completely incompatible, sub-species.

Human beings

On one side, we have a species I call just human beings, or sometimes human beings worth the name. Our natural means of getting our needs satisfied is what German Jewish philosopher Franz Oppenheimer, in his book The State (1908, English translation 1922), called the economic means. He described this as “the equivalent exchange of one’s own labour for the labour of others.”

The habitat, in which our species can best flourish, is a free market economy, underpinned by systems which maintain peace and objective justice, and which allow maximum freedom for all human individuals. In such a habitat, we can build civilizations, and take control over our surroundings. Because of this, I name us the economic species or economic animal.

Politicals

On the other side, we have a species, to which I have given the name politicals. Their natural means of getting their needs satisfied is what Oppenheimer called the political means: “the unrequited appropriation of the labour of others.”

The habitat, in which this species best flourishes, is in positions of power in top-down systems. Such as: Governments. Religious, military or big-company hierarchies. Organized criminal or terrorist gangs. Or political activist groups. Such a habitat enables them to pervert the natural human urge to take control over our surroundings, into an un-natural and destructive urge to control us human beings. Thus, I dub them the political species or, in Aristotle’s words, political animal.

Parasites and pests

I identified, among users of Oppenheimer’s political means, two overlapping tendencies. Which I labelled parasites and pests. Parasites use the resources they appropriate to enrich themselves and their cronies, or to rake in money in order to implement their pet schemes. They are bad enough. But pests go further. Pests (or, otherwise put, vermin) want power for the sake of what they can do with it. Pests want to control people, to persecute, and to screw up people’s lives. I gave an overview of the characteristics of parasites and pests near the end of the third essay of this set.

The natures of the two species

I looked at the behaviours, which typify members of these two opposed species, and tried to infer the natures of each.

Each of us reflects the characteristics needed to survive and prosper in the habitat which is natural to us. We human beings are naturally peaceful and honest. We are fit to be lived with in a civilization of peace, progress and prosperity, driven by Franz Oppenheimer’s economic means. We are born on this planet with the right to use its resources wisely, in order to build our civilizations. And our long-term mission is to make our planet into a beautiful, peaceful, comfortable home and garden for our species, humanity.

Our enemies the politicals, on the other hand, are Machiavellian in their characters. They survive and prosper best in conditions that enable them to use the political means to take our resources from us. In order to survive and flourish, they need to drain us, or to persecute us and screw up our lives, or both. And they persistently indulge in lies, dishonesty, deception, arrogance, hypocrisy, irresponsibility, evasion of accountability, aggression, recklessness towards others, intolerance, bad faith, and violations of human rights and freedoms.

The timing of the split

A view maintained by many scientists is that the process of species change is driven only by random genetic mutations, and must, therefore, be very slow. However, the research on Darwin’s finches, which I referenced in the fourth essay, indicates that behavioural changes, at least, can take place within just a couple of generations. Indeed, a recent article about the separation of polar bears from grizzly bears [[6]] suggests that even physical speciation may act faster than previously thought.

Given both these examples, the idea that human beings and politicals have had enough time to diverge since the first states appeared (by my best guess, around 5,200 years ago) looks quite plausible.

The current political system

Next, I will look at the current political system. I shall begin by defining in my own terms, and giving some of my views on, the major ideas which underlie the it.

Politics

In ancient Greece, politics could mean the rights of citizens in a city-state, or those citizens considered as a community. More recently, it has been used to mean a form of government, or the activities carried out by a government.

I myself find “politics” to be an entirely pejorative word. Politics is a top-down system, in which “laws,” driven by the agendas of a powerful élite, make some things “legal” and others “illegal.” And what is ethically right and wrong for human beings to do becomes irrelevant.

The state

The state is a top-down political structure, that enables an élite forcibly to rule over a, potentially large, group of people. It has been in existence for more than five thousand years.

The state arose out of wars, and the coercive measures taken by the winners of those wars against the losers. Positions of state power have long provided, and still do provide, a perfect environment for parasites and pests to flourish, and to carry out their Machiavellian schemes.

Sovereignty

Sovereignty is a theoretical basis for political states, which was first articulated in the 16^th century by French monarchist Jean Bodin. It produced, among others, the French “Sun King,” Louis XIV. And despite constitutions, bills of rights, parliaments, sham “democracy” and other bags on the side, it still forms the intellectual basis for political nation-states today. Including the “United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.”

In Bodin’s scheme, the sovereign – the king or ruling élite of a territory – is fundamentally different from, and superior to, the rest of the population in its territory, the “subjects.” It has moral privileges over the subjects, whom it can make laws to bind. It can 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 has a monopoly on issuing a currency in its area. 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.”)

Government

The conventional definition of government is something like “a group of people with the authority to govern a country or state.” Where they get that authority from, is not spelled out. But today, at the national level, it is usually through a claim to Bodin’s sovereignty. At the international level, agendas are often legitimized by claiming that some consortium of sovereign nations have agreed to them.

Since I reject this idea of sovereignty in favour of the moral equality of all individuals, I regard government, like politics, as a pejorative. That is why I use a different word, “governance,” to describe my proposed replacement for it.

The public good

The public good is often defined as something like “the benefit or well-being of the public.” But what, exactly, constitutes the well-being of this “public?” Political policies, which some consider desirable and even necessary for the public good, may well be anathema to others. Green policies are a case in point, as is any form of re-distributory or confiscatory taxation.

Myself, I follow John Locke’s definition of the public good: “the good of every particular member of that society, as far as by common rules it can be provided for.” [[7]]. I also interpret it to mean “the good of every individual in that group of people, real wrongdoers excepted.”

The social contract

The “social contract” is a fiction, invented by Thomas Hobbes in the 17^th century, and developed and given its name by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in the 18^th. The nub of the idea is that, 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 committed to each other, that they authorized and approved 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.

Myself, I find this social contract narrative simply absurd. Even if my ancestors might have subscribed to such a thing (and, as far as I know, they didn’t), I as an individual have never agreed to any social contract! Where is my signature on any such damn thing? Moreover, where are the statements of the benefits I am supposed to get from it, and the procedures for me to get justice and redress if the government party fails to deliver?

“Society” and the implied social contract

The social contract fiction has led to an idea that there is something called “Society” in the singular, to which everyone in a particular area – such as the territory claimed by a state – belongs, whether they want to or not. According to this narrative, all of us have agreed to an implied contract, that makes us part of this “Society,” and thus subjects of a Hobbesian sovereign. This, in turn, makes us subject to a political government, and to the decrees of its leaders and officials for the time being.

Myself, I reject this idea of “Society” in the singular. This is because, for me, all societies must be voluntary, and this thing they call “Society” is not voluntary. My position is supported by the UN Declaration of Human Rights, Article 20(2): “No one may be compelled to belong to an association.” A succinct way to put my position is: There is no such thing as “society” in the singular. There are only societies.

I reject derived ideas like “social justice” and “social security,” too. And I reject all political ideologies that depend on the idea. Such as socialism, where “society” is supposed to own the means of economic production. Communism, where “society” owns everything, and all resources are controlled and allocated by the political state. And fascism, which subordinates the interests of individuals to “society” and to the nation.

I also reject any implication that I have ever agreed to be part of a political society (other than political parties I joined voluntarily.) Having not voted in a UK general or local election since 1987, I have never signed up to be governed by any cabal of politicians now in existence. Let alone the current bunch of evil, corrupt Tory parasites and pests. Therefore, no bunch of politicians has, or ever has had, any right to tell me how to live, to drain me, or to harm or inconvenience me.

Where we are today

Next, I will provide a brief summary of some of the evidence I put forward in the fourth essay.

Failure of the political system

The political system, under which we suffer today, has failed. The system and the political governments it spawns are no longer legitimate.

At the same time, other ties that have bound people together in the past have also weakened. Blood ties, linguistic and cultural ties, religious ties, ties of geographical proximity, have all lost power in recent decades. Right now, there is virtually nothing left that can bind people with different sets of interests and desires together into any common political cause.

Failure of government

Government as an institution, too, has failed at all levels. Instead of defending us, as they ought to, against the parasites that seek to drain us and the pests that seek to harm us, governments have been taken over by those same criminal parasites and pests.

Governments, whether local, national, regional or wannabe global, have turned into rapacious machines, that exploit and impoverish us, rule over us against our interests, harass us, and routinely violate our human rights and freedoms. They are even going so far as to seek to destroy our human industrial civilization, on the excuse of a non-existent climate crisis. And they are increasingly denying us one of the most fundamental human rights of all, freedom of speech, by “cancelling” anyone whose views go against politically correct orthodoxy.

The Partygate scandal, and its aftermath, have shown us that those in government in the UK today have absolutely zero respect for the rule of law, or for equality before the law. They want one law for themselves, and another, far more restrictive, law for the rest of us.

Governments also seem to have awarded themselves a “meddler’s charter,” that allows them to stalk us and film us wherever we go, and to interfere in our lives on even the tiniest excuse. Government is coming to feel, more and more, like a hostile occupying force among us. And trust and respect between people and the governments that are supposed to serve them have been lost, in both directions.

Failure of democracy

The sham called democracy, which is supposed to enable ordinary people to set the direction and tone of government, and to have a full and fair say in what policies it will adopt, has failed, too.

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 great majority of politicians are dishonest and duplicitous, if not also selfish and hypocritical. Yet, too many – far too many – people continue to vote for them. As shown in Uxbridge. So, far from binding people together, democracy has become a divisive force, and the chasms between people of differing political views grow ever wider and deeper.

Meanwhile, the supposedly democratic “mother of parliaments” has turned into a “uniparty.” In effect, a one-party state. Which, far from serving the governed, spends its time creating problems for ordinary people, while feathering the nests of its members and their cronies.

Failure of representation

Our so-called “representatives,” for the most part, fail even to try to represent us, to fight on our behalf our corner among all the vested interests that scrap for power and control over us. And many of them actively support pernicious policies, such as the green agenda, heavy taxation, meddling in our lives, and violations of our rights and freedoms.

“My” MP, for example, is a high-tax-and-spend, pro-IR35, pro-green-agenda, establishment Tory. He usually ignores my views altogether. And none of my local “representatives” shares anything like my views on environmental matters – views which are based, not on a political position, but on many years of study of the evidence. Nor have I seen anything to suggest that any of them agree even slightly with my individualist views on human rights and freedoms.

A moral panic

I am coming to see that what we are suffering under today has many of the characteristics of what is known as a “moral panic.” People the panic-mongers don’t like are – quite arbitrarily – treated as if we were a “threat to society.” We are attacked if we don’t follow the political correctness of the day – as Nigel Farage recently found out. We are attacked if we want to be independent – as with the witch-hunts against car drivers and one-man businesses. We are attacked if we disbelieve the party line, and we use our reason to search honestly for the facts. We are attacked if we try to speak the truth as we see it – as with those who dispute the green or COVID narratives. We are attacked if we try to protest against bad and unjust laws.

Meanwhile, the mainstream media fan the flames of panic as hard as they can. And the establishment and their “experts” pontificate over what to do about the problems, real or imagined, and rush to put forward “solutions” that will do the maximum damage to those they hate. All this is uncomfortably reminiscent of the Inquisitions and witch-hunts of the 16^th and 17^th centuries.

Globalism and internationalism

On top of all this, corporate, globalist and internationalist élites, unelected and unaccountable, have been expanding their powers. They are seeking, with the active co-operation of many national politicians, to transform the world’s political and financial systems into a top-down tyranny, with themselves and their cronies at the top, and us human beings at the bottom. As part of their vision, they want to “transform societies” into something that is quite the opposite of any civilization worth the name. And they want to “nudge” and “transform” us human beings into something quite foreign to humanity.

Meanwhile, advisors and influencers, technocrats and “experts,” green, religious or “woke” (in the sense used by political conservatives) maniacs, financial and big-business élites, academics and activists, and some that are several of the above fall over each other to take as much as they can from us, and to do us as much harm as they can. And the mainstream media generally either ignore, or savage, anyone whose point of view is other than the politically correct orthodoxy of the day.

How our enemies are behaving towards us

Our enemies, the politicals, the parasites and pests, are seeking today to trash our human industrial civilization. They seek to suppress our economy, our prosperity, our rights and our freedoms. They seek to suppress our human spirit, and to lower our confidence in ourselves. They seek to suppress our rational thinking, to silence truth, and to swamp us with their narratives of lies, spin and hype. And they seek to suppress and belittle our core humanity.

They behave towards us like arrogant psychopaths. Far from respecting our human rights and dignity, they treat us as if we were mere animals, or unfeeling objects, or even just numbers in a database. In my most cynical moments, I think they just want to reduce us to numbers (and perhaps ID scans) in a database, and have done with us. They are working, both at the level of individual governments and of global organizations, to establish themselves as dictatorial rulers over us, to reduce us to poverty and impotence, and to trash the quality (and maybe even the quantity!) our lives.

Neither parasites nor pests are fit to be invited into any community of human beings worth the name. They are traitors to human civilization, and to the human species. They deserve to be kicked out of human civilization, and denied all its benefits.

Where we want to aim for

Before putting forward my ideas for solutions to our problems, I feel the need to summarize here some key ideas of my ethical and political philosophy.

These will include my best proposals so far for the destinations, towards which we should be steering. I see these objectives as twofold. First, a new code of law, based on human nature and independent of culture. I dub this the Convivial Code. And second, a new system of governance, which I call “just governance.”

Bottom-up thinking and construction

Bottom-up thinking is a way of building ideas from what is already known, or is reasonably hypothesized as being consistent with the evidence. And something which is constructed bottom-up is created from components which are already in existence, and themselves supported from below.

The ideas of my philosophy are put together in a bottom-up way. For example, we use our experience of reality to find out facts. We use our faculty of reason to assemble them into percepts and concepts, and thence into knowledge. We use our ethical sense, based on our knowledge, to judge what is right and wrong for us to do. On top of these judgements, we build our ideas of how best to organize groups of human beings, from the individual up, for maximum benefit to all. And on top of all those, we go about our business of living!

Bottom-up versus top-down organization

I make a strong contrast between bottom-up and top-down organization. A top-down organization is a system in which those at the bottom or periphery are commanded and controlled by those at the top or centre. All today’s political systems, even democracies, are built on top-down lines.

In a top-down system, a vision or agenda, held by those in power, dictates social and political organization. (Probably the largest single element in this vision, is that those in power want to remain in power.) This enables the making of policies and laws, that often override ethics, and go against human nature. Moreover, top-down politics requires narratives and propaganda to hold it together. And at the lowest level, the system can only be maintained by a combination of faith held by believers, and force against unbelievers.

Turning our world the right way up

It is fair, I think, to say that we human beings, the economic species, flourish and prosper best in a world built on bottom-up principles. Whereas the political species flourish in top-down systems, such as we suffer under today.

In order to vanquish the political species and fulfil our potential, therefore, we must move the organizations of human communities on our planet from top-down oriented to bottom-up oriented. As I like to put it, we need to turn our world the right way up.

Identity determines morality principle

What I call the “identity determines morality” principle is the idea that right and wrong behaviours for a species of sentient beings are determined by the nature of the species. I fully subscribe to this principle. It applies both to human beings and to animals.

Thus, any species of sentient beings has its own “natural law,” which determines what is right and wrong for any member of the species to do. Right and wrong for a giraffe, for example, are different from right and wrong for a lion. A giraffe naturally picks fruit and leaves off the tops of tall trees. Whereas a lion naturally chases, kills and eats animals like zebra. If they tried to swap behaviours, both would go hungry, and many lions would die through falling out of trees.

This principle lies at the root of my diagnosis that human beings and politicals have become separate species. For, as I indicated above, our behaviours are very different. Far more so than you usually find between honest, ordinary human beings from different cultures. And the fact that the behaviours are so different, tells us that the species are different.

Ethical equality principle

The ethical equality principle is a direct consequence of identity determining morality. For what is right and wrong for any human being to do is determined by the nature of humanity; what John Locke called the “law of Nature,” and many others have called natural law.

I put the principle as follows: What is right for one to do, is right for another to do under similar circumstances, and vice versa. Thus, what is naturally right (or wrong) for each human individual to do, is the same for all human individuals.

Honesty and integrity

The word “honesty” has many meanings. For example, seeking and telling truth, straightforwardness, trustworthiness. But my own definition is all of the above, and more. Honesty is being true to your nature. Honesty is behaving as is natural for a human being.

Integrity, as well as meaning “the attribute of being undivided,” is often seen as “a quality of being honest and having strong moral principles.” In my take, integrity is the product of honesty. Integrity constitutes the observable behaviours, which come from being true to your nature, and behaving as a human being.

Rights and obligations

Rights, often called human rights, are benefits which accrue to human individuals by virtue of being human. That is, by behaving as is natural for human beings.

Lists of rights have been put forward in many documents over the centuries. Such as Magna Carta of 1215, the 1689 English Bill of Rights, the 1791 US Bill of Rights and the 1948 United Nations Declaration of Human Rights. None of these lists is anywhere near perfect, and all of them are incomplete.

Rights, such as property or privacy, back-to-back with obligations, such as not to steal, or not to intrude into people’s lives without good reason. You enjoy rights, when those around you keep to their side of the deal, the corresponding obligations.

In my take, rights divide into three types. First, fundamental rights. These result from moral prohibitions – obligations to refrain from doing something, which apply to everyone – of the form “Do not...” followed by something bad. Second, rights of non-impedance. These rights are often also called freedoms. These result from more nuanced moral prohibitions, of the form: “Do not put any obstacle in the way of...” followed by something good. And third, procedural rights, such as the presumption of innocence until proven guilty, which must guide the procedures used in confrontational situations. And, most of all, must be fully respected by everyone in governance at any level.

There are also putative rights, such as “social security,” which are not really rights. I refer to these as “misguided rights.” But often, they can be validly replaced by rights of non-impedance. For example, social security can be replaced by a right not to be impeded from insuring against, or associating with others for mutual protection against, economic hardship.

Rights are earned and respect for rights principles

In my view, rights are not granted by some government, deity or other external party. For me, human rights are earned. You earn your own rights, by respecting the equal rights of others around you. And this respect for others’ rights is built into the nature of any human being worth the name.

Of course, when you were born, you had already “earned” these rights in principle, because you had not harmed, or tried to harm, any other individual. But you must continue to respect others’ rights, in order to retain and to expand your own rights.

The flip side of rights being earned is that by acting as is natural for a human being, and respecting others’ rights, you acquire the reasonable expectation that others will respect your equal rights. If you respect others’ rights, your own rights ought to be sacrosanct. I put these two principles together as: Human beings have human rights, and human rights are for human beings.

Conviviality

A human individual, who behaves as is natural for a human being, makes himself or herself convivial. (I have borrowed this word from Belgian natural law philosopher Frank van Dun.)

“Convivial” means “living together,” and often means living together well. In my take, convivial also means “fit to be lived with.” And the quality of conviviality is shared by those who behave convivially. Conviviality is achieved by behaving honestly and with integrity.

I have re-stated Aristotle’s infamous “Man is by nature a political animal” as: Humans are by nature convivial animals. It is our nature, not just to live together, but to live together for mutual benefit.

The Convivial Code

It follows from the ethical equality principle that for any species of sentient beings there must exist an ethical code of conduct, encapsulating the behaviours which are right (and, implicitly or explicitly, the behaviours which are wrong) for members of that species. In particular, such a code must exist for human beings. I call this code the Convivial Code.

The Code encapsulates (or more accurately, will encapsulate) a minimum set of standards of behaviour for human beings worth the name. It will be a touchstone for humanity.

Respect for the equal rights of other human beings will be a very significant part of the Code. But it will also include other elements. I gave an account of how the Code might be constructed in the third essay of this set.

To give a flavour of what the Code is likely to contain, I will repeat here John Locke’s description of the natural law for human beings: “Being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty or possessions.” [[8]]. And my best shot to date at an outline of the Code: “Be peaceful. Seek the facts, and tell the truth. Be honest. Strive always to behave with justice, integrity and good faith. Be tolerant of those who are tolerant towards you. Respect the rights and freedoms of those who respect your equal rights and freedoms. Don’t interfere in other people’s business without a very good, objective reason. And take responsibility for the effects of your voluntary actions on others.” To which, I will now add: Practise what you preach.

The Code will be flexible enough to allow individuals and voluntary societies, by mutual agreement, to add to, vary or set aside some of its provisions in regard to their dealings with each other. But it will apply in full, and unmodified, to dealings between those who have not entered into any such agreement. It will also allow that, in certain exceptional circumstances such as acting in self-defence or in defence of others, it may be permissible to break some of its provisions.

One way in which the Code will differ from systems of political laws, is that the Code will be essentially timeless. Once set up, it needs no legislative. Changes only become necessary when circumstances occur which have not been envisaged before, or human nature itself changes, or new knowledge becomes available about what it is. And these events are rare. Because of this, absent such events, the Code will be applicable retrospectively.

The convivial community

The convivial community is the community of all those who choose to behave up to the standards which are natural for human beings. What binds this community together is a shared willingness to behave convivially.

I equate this with the community, of which John Locke said [[9]]: “by which law [the law of Nature], common to them all, he and all the rest of mankind are one community, make up one society distinct from all other creatures. And were it not for the corruption and viciousness of degenerate men, there would be no need of any other, no necessity that men should separate from this great and natural community, and associate into lesser combinations.”

Disconviviality

Those that fail to keep to the Convivial Code, particularly if their failures are gross or persistent, I call disconvivial individuals. Disconviviality is the quality of being disconvivial.

Disconvivial individuals are equivalent, in the realm of conviviality, to criminals today. And, as John Locke identified, to the degenerates (literally meaning “no longer of their kind”), whose “corruption and viciousness” broke apart the convivial community in the first place.

Judgement by behaviour principle

Judgement by behaviour is an important adjunct to the principles of ethical equality, honesty and respect for rights. It represents a practice of judging individuals by examining how they behave, rather than by things outside the individual’s control, such as race, birthplace, skin colour, social class or received religion. Thus, you should judge people by their actions. And, of course, their motivations for doing what they do, as far as you can work them out.

I put this as: It isn’t who someone is that matters, only what they do. Or, more succinctly: Human is as human does.

Community versus society

Before I go further, I must explain the distinction I make between a community and a society. A community is a group of people, bound together by some shared characteristic; but not necessarily by anything more. A society, on the other hand, is a group of people who have agreed to join together in a common cause.

A society has what Jean-Jacques Rousseau called a “general will,” the will of the members as a whole. Provided, of course, that those, who cease to agree with the objectives or the conduct of the society, can freely leave the society. A community, on the other hand, has no such thing. And thus, it does not exist as a collective, only as a group of individuals.

The people who reside in a particular geographical area, for example, are bound together into a community by their common place of residence. But they are not a society, because there is no common cause, in which they have all agreed to join.

Voluntary society principle

The voluntary society principle is the first principle of organizing a civilization, as opposed to a political government. I state it as: All societies must be voluntary.

A major consequence of this is that because those who live in a particular geographical area are only a community, they cannot be assumed to support or to accept any particular political ideology. Therefore, they ought not to be subjected to any political government. This principle is the root of my disagreement with the ideas of the social contract and “Society” in the singular.

Common-sense justice principle

The second principle of organizing a civilization is common-sense justice. I state it as follows: Every individual deserves to be treated, over the long run, in the round and as far as practicable, as he or she treats others. Thus, common-sense justice is individual justice.

What this means, from the individual’s point of view, is that you deserve to be treated as you treat others. If you treat others well, you deserve to be treated correspondingly well by others. And if you treat others badly, you deserve to be treated correspondingly badly. What could be more common-sense than that?

Maximum freedom principle

Maximum freedom is the third principle of civilization. It allows maximum freedom of choice and action for everyone, consistent with living in a civilized community. I have expressed this as: Except where countermanded by justice, the Convivial Code or respect for rights, every individual is free to choose and act as he or she wishes.

Just governance

Just governance is my design for a new form of governance to supersede the political state. I see its remit as to enable people to live together in an environment of peace and tranquillity, common-sense justice, and maximum rights and freedom for every individual. In particular, it will implement the primary purpose of government, as it was described by John Locke [[10]]: “The great and chief end, therefore, of men uniting into commonwealths, and putting themselves under government, is the preservation of their property.”

Just governance will govern communities of individuals, in much the same way as a referee governs a football match. It will also adjudicate as needed on the relationships between those individuals, the voluntary societies to which they belong, and other individuals and societies they interact with.

It will be bottom-up and de-politicized. Its structure will be like a network, not a hierarchy. And its authority will come from the common-sense nature of its principles, and its objectivity, impartiality, honesty and good faith.

In the third essay of this set, I gave in a few thousand words an outline of just governance, and of a possible structure for implementing it.

Civilization

Civilization is bottom-up social organization. As opposed to politics, which is a means of top-down social organization.

Civilization is the natural product of de-politicized systems of governance, such as my “just governance.” It is the environment, in which we human beings worth the name can best do what is natural for us to do: live our lives well and fulfil ourselves. And, in the process, make ourselves prosperous and happy.

How to make a start on fixing the problems

With the background set, I will now take a turn towards a more radical direction.

Consider a situation, in which many human beings in a particular geographical territory feel the need to, in John Locke’s words [²]: “rouse themselves, and endeavour to put the rule into such hands which may secure to them the ends for which government was at first erected.”  We are certainly in that situation right now! Almost everyone I talk to is completely fed up with what is being done to them. And they see no prospect of any improvement, regardless of what political party is in power.

In what follows, I shall give some ideas on how the problems we human beings suffer under today might be fixed, once we have the power to do that. Because the ideas here are provisional, I shall write much of these sections using the conditional tense, “would.”

The first step

First, a question. What kind of rule would people, who have been suffering for decades under the kind of bad politics that has been rife in the UK and other Western countries, choose to replace all the bad politics by, as a first step towards a better system?

A big problem with getting rid of a corrupt governmental system, like a political state, is that if you try to replace the system immediately by an as yet untried new way, the teething troubles would likely be very serious, and could damage the credibility of the new way. But if you simply abolish the system, you are left, in essence, with anarchy. And you have lost the authority you need to make the parasites and pests, that mis-used government power either directly or indirectly, compensate the victims of their predations and their bad politics. Yet, if you leave the system in place without changing its power basis and removing its former establishment, you will face a vicious backlash from that establishment.

Many prospective solutions to our ills, therefore, are “dead in the water” before even being tried. Simply to replace in power one mainstream political party by another is, even at best, to change the label on government without significantly changing its substance or style. And it would not get rid of those parts of the establishment, such as the “civil service” bureaucracy, whose power does not depend on which party is in charge for the moment.

Moreover, the problems with the sham “democracy,” under which we suffer, run far deeper than just which political faction is in power. Those who want, not one kind of politics rather than another, but less politics or none at all, are completely unrepresented.

Further, even when run completely fairly and honestly, democracy is a majoritarian system. But, as Mahatma Gandhi told us: “In matters of conscience, the law of the majority has no place.” And a lot of political decisions come down, ultimately, to matters of conscience: to deciding, in a particular instance, what is right and what is wrong.

Beyond this, any new system in a geographical territory would have to have, at the very least, self-determination for the people there. It could not allow any interference by parties outside the area, such as the European Union (EU), United Nations (UN), World Economic Forum (WEF) or World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD). Such interference is completely incompatible with the Enlightenment ideal of government for the benefit of, with the consent of, and accountable to, the people who inhabit the territory.

There is one solution, which I think could be ultimately successful, and yet would wind down the state gently enough to allow time to bring people to confidence in the system which will replace it. That solution is… a temporary, enlightened monarchy. Or, otherwise put, a return to Plato’s ideal of a philosopher-king. Someone with enough philosophical nous to understand the issues which need to be addressed, and yet enough ability to get things done to lay plans for, and set in motion, the actions which need to be taken.

Such a solution would, of course, require strong support from the ordinary people in the territory; those who have “roused themselves” to pick a new pair of hands to govern them. In return, the incumbent (who, for the sake of grammatical simplicity, I will assume to be male) would have to undertake to use his temporary state powers only for the benefit of the people who put him there. He would be, at the same time, both an absolute monarch and a populist!

If I ruled the land…

Philosopher-kings are, like unicorns and honest politicians, very rare and hard-to-find beasts, usually only seen on pub signs. But in the real world, you can try to create them in two ways. One, by picking a king and teaching him the philosophy appropriate to the job he is needed to do. The other, by finding a philosopher with the right kind of ideas, and making him king.

History shows that the first approach does not work. Even the most enlightened (and even Enlightened) despots, like Catherine the Great, still took part in all kinds of political shenanigans, many of which went against the interests of their people. As to Charlie the current “king” of the “Disunited Wasteland” as I will dub it, he is a UN and WEF henchman. The second approach seems more promising. But the only historical example I could find was Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius, and even he wasn’t anywhere near perfect.

How such a candidate might be picked is an interesting question, and one I prefer to skip over. I would certainly not want to put myself forward as a candidate, however “uniquely qualified” for the job I might be. For to become a public figure really isn’t my style. However, if needs were to must, and there was no-one else suitable, I suppose I would feel obliged to hold my nose and get the job done.

Day One

So, what would I do if, perchance, I was installed with absolute, if temporary, monarchical power over the people in some territory? Which might (or might not) be all, or some part of, the area currently claimed by the “United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland?” Again, for simplicity, I will assume that my “realm” would consist of all of this area.

Right from day one, I’d make it absolutely clear what I saw myself as being there to do. My job would be to run down the political state, to the point where it would be safe to abolish it, and to replace it by a new, honest system of governance, which acts for the benefit of all human beings worth the name in the territory. That system might, perhaps, be based on my “just governance” proposals. But I would always be open to suggestions from others, to see if they might work better in practice than my own ideas.

My objectives

My objectives, in a nutshell, would be: To get rid of politics, bad policies and bad politicians. Hugely to reduce the size of government, and the scope of what it does. To withdraw from all international organizations and agreements, that go against the interests of the human beings in the territory. To repeal all bad laws, that are a drain on or a disbenefit to human beings. To end the practises that have enabled parasites and pests to make gains at the expense of human beings, and to hold those parasites and pests accountable for what they have done. To move the laws of the territory closer and closer to the natural law for human beings, as I paraphrased it in the section on natural law above. And to move more and more towards a system of governance, whose functions are restricted, as far as possible, to delivering peace and justice. And in which everyone is treated, as far as practicable, as he or she treats others.

In terms of day-to-day governance, I would see myself primarily as like a referee in a football match. I would see my main jobs in that role as being to keep the “game of life” within the territory flowing, and to prevent those that do, or seek to do, real harms to others from getting away with their crimes.

My focus

My primary focus at the outset would be to undo all bad political policies, and to hugely improve the honesty, impartiality, objectivity and justice of everything my governance does.

As part of this, I would aim to get rid of all restrictions on the economy. I would establish sane and sensible policies on energy and the environment. I would get rid of re-distributory and confiscatory taxation. I would aim to move closer and closer to the ideal that what each individual pays for governance should be in direct proportion to the benefit that he or she gets from it. And I would set in motion programmes to eliminate all dishonesty and corruption from governance, and to make the parasites and pests provide full compensation to the human beings they drained, or harmed, or both.

How I would begin

Here is how I would start on my quest for a new and better world for all human beings.

I would publicly assert the self-determination and independence of the territory and its governance from all parties outside the territory. I would affirm by oath that my governance will act for the public good, and only for the public good, of the people it governs. That is, the good of every individual among the governed, real wrongdoers excepted. I would affirm that my governance will seek, with all its might, to identify the political parasites and pests, to make them compensate their victims, and to punish them as appropriate; all in accord with the ideal of common-sense justice. And I would affirm that my governance will not attack, or intentionally harm, anyone, either inside or outside the territory, unless they seek to attack or to harm it or the people it serves.

I would also publicly assert that the interests of human beings must always come ahead of the interests of other species, if they are in conflict. I would assert that for a human being, to live in harmony with nature is to live in harmony with human nature. And that is: To build civilizations, to conduct honest business and trade, and to take control of our surroundings. As I put it three decades ago: “Man must conquer nature, not let nature conker Man.”

My approach to politics and religion

I would never seek to impose any political policy, or political or religious orthodoxy, for its own sake. I would never seek to impose any particular lifestyle on anyone. I would not put obstacles in the way of those who want to live different lifestyles from others, unless what they are doing objectively and provably harms someone else. I would let socialists live in socialist communes if they wish, greens in green communes, Christians in Christian communes, atheists in atheist communes, capitalists in capitalist communes, and so forth.

That said, I would ban all political parties in the territory, with immediate effect, on the grounds that no-one has any right to enforce any political policies or ideology on anyone. I would be an apolitical king. Or, even, an anti-political one.

I would also disestablish the Church of England, and disengage all links between governance and religion. But I would not put restrictions on any religious community, unless they try to foist their religion on others, or try by force or threats to stop those who wish to leave them.

Immediate institutional reforms

I would retain the House of Commons as an elected body, but would mandate a fresh general election, in which all candidates must be Independents.

The role of MPs would no longer be to debate or set policies, but to be truly representatives of the people who live in their areas. They would sample opinion in their constituencies, and report to me and my advisors what their people think about what is happening, and how it could be improved. They could also act as an advisory body on the repeal programmes.

I would also mandate fresh local elections, with all candidates required to be Independents. These would be held a few months after the Commons election. County and local councillors would perform a similar function to MPs, but restricted to matters local to their areas. I would demand that all councils, and all councillors, leave and publicly reject political pressure groups such as C40 and UK 100.

I would encourage judges to continue using common-law precedents in cases they judge. I would also encourage them to consider the rights and wrongs in all cases, and not to enforce any political “law” that is inconsistent with the natural law for human beings. As John Locke told us, man-made laws are “only so far right as they are founded on the law of Nature.” [[11]].

I would abolish the House of Lords, and annul the titles of all its members with political backgrounds. But I would allow honest judges and other non-politicized peers to retain their titles. And I would appoint some of the most honest, capable, apolitical peers to senior positions in a new Ethical Audit Office, to become responsible for quality control and auditing on governance at all levels.

I would also set in motion a plan to review all honoured titles, and annul all knighthoods and other titles that had been awarded for political “service.” I would never create any new honours myself.

I would abolish the politicized “supreme court,” a creation of Tony Blair, and would replace it by a court (which might include some of the same judges) operating according to the rules used prior to 2009, with due allowance for the House of Lords no longer existing.

I would promulgate my objectives (as above) and my proposed programmes (as I will describe below), and solicit feedback from the people via their MPs and local representatives.

My approach to the job

I would pick my own team of trusted advisers. The team would be small enough to be manageable, but large enough to provide a variety of different skills and points of view. Within this, there would be a core of my closest aides, covering at least home affairs and justice, foreign affairs and defence, economic affairs and quality control.

The team would not include anyone with a background in politics. Many of my advisors, I expect, would be current or former business people. A few would be specialists in relevant academic or scientific areas. Or even, perhaps, economists of a low-tax, free-market bent. But I would first need to make myself certain of their honesty before appointing any of these.

My own lifestyle would be comfortable, cosseted and serviced, but not opulent or at all showy. Certainly not royal in any way. Comparable, perhaps, with the lifestyles of the fellows of an Oxford or Cambridge college. For both business and leisure, I would travel by chauffeured car, choosing not to drive because of my age. I’d fly on scheduled airlines, but not by private jet or the Royal Air Force. I would not travel often outside the territory. And when I did, it would be mostly for friendly conferences with other leaders in similar situations to my own.

I would work whatever hours I felt were both necessary to get the job done and healthy for me. I would eat and drink as I find best for my health and sanity. I would take as remuneration an amount sufficient to live in enough ease and comfort to do the job to the best of my abilities, and to secure my financial future for the rest of my life. But no more.

I would recruit trusted intermediaries to do those parts of the work that are outside my skill set, such as dealing with the press, and reacting to emergencies in the short term.

I would rarely appear in public, and never so in my official capacity. I would not throw lavish parties. Though I surely would party from time to time with my friends and advisors! And I might choose to invite anyone, whose ideas I find interesting, to fill me in on their thinking, over a few glasses of whatever takes our respective fancies.

To keep people informed, I would issue a progress report each month for everyone in the territory. It would be available on-line, in both document and video formats.

The first round of reforms

Having made such a start, I would then unleash my first round of reforms.

Cultural changes in governance

I would quickly set in motion several significant cultural and philosophical changes in the way my governance works.

I would make it plain that governance does not exist for its own sake. It exists only for the benefit of those who pay for it. And of all those who pay for it, real wrongdoers excepted. If it fails to deliver a nett benefit to the human beings it governs – to every single one of them – then it is failing in its task. And any of its employees, who fail to do their part in delivering a nett benefit to the governed, are failing in their own tasks, and so liable to disciplinary action.

I would mandate equality before the law. I would make it plain that no-one in governance has any kind of ethical privileges over the people they are supposed to be serving. What is right for one to do in a situation, is right for another to do in a similar situation, and vice versa.

I would require that everyone in my governance must always be totally honest towards the people for whose benefit they are supposed to be acting. Any intentional dishonesty towards those people would be a dismissal offence, with cancellation of pension. Such dishonesties would include lying to or misleading the people, or behaving arrogantly or unreasonably towards them, or knowingly acting – in whatever way – against their interests.

Further, everyone in governance must always respect the human rights and dignity of those they are supposed to be serving. The perpetrators of dishonesty or violations of rights would also be required to compensate those they wronged. This rule could – and would – be applied to actions in the past, just as much as those in the present and the future.

The Ethical Audit Office would be responsible for investigating and dealing with all such cases, as part of their remit to build a system of formal Honesty Audits for the future.

I would order an immediate, ethically based review of the surveillance, to which we are subjected. This would cover surveillance of people, of vehicles, and of communications of all kinds, by both government and non-government actors. In the meantime, I would require government to cease all routine surveillance of people going about their daily lives, unless there is reasonable suspicion that they have done, are doing or are planning to do some real crime.

I would ditch the perverted form of the precautionary principle, that has encouraged governments to act against a perceived risk even if that risk is not quantified. Thus, I would end the culture of over-caution and over-safety, that has resulted from this perversion. I would revert to the precautionary principle in its true form: “Look before you leap,” or even “First, do no harm.” If the effectiveness or cost-benefit of taking action against a perceived risk is unclear, governance must not take precipitate action. Rather, it must work to quantify costs versus benefits more accurately.

I would mandate that objective risk-benefit analysis must be done on all governance projects which either are intended to mitigate risks, or might cause risks due to their effects or side-effects. This would include all projects in progress, that have not already had such an analysis done. All analyses must be objective, unbiased and quantitative. It will not be acceptable to use a “post-normal” approach, or finger-in-the-air methods such as “expert elicitation.”

I would mandate that objective cost versus benefit analysis must be done on all governance projects of any significant size. The analysis should be done from the point of view of the people who are expected to pay for it, or are or will be affected by it either positively or negatively. As with risk analyses, these must be objective, unbiased and quantitative.

Further, projects in progress must be regularly audited for costs versus benefits, and curative action taken if necessary. And as required by the “First, do no harm” principle, no project may proceed if it causes unjust harms to any particular kinds of individuals or groups of people.

I would require that governance must always allow maximum freedom of choice for everyone. In particular, it must never force on to people decisions of a “crossing the Rubicon” nature; it must never mandate the removal of backwards compatibility. Those who wish to continue to employ tried and trusted ways, such as using cash or cheques, or refusing to have a mobile phone, must be allowed to do so, for life if they wish. And neither governance nor anyone else may discriminate against them because of this. Further, governance must always allow people the option to back out of any new technology they feel is not working in their interests, and to return to using older methods.

Where so recommended by my Ethical Audit Office, I would disband any unit of government whose behaviour is incompatible with the culture I have outlined above, and dismiss its staff.

Withdrawing from international bodies and agreements

I would swiftly withdraw the territory from the United Nations. This would be on the grounds that the UN has been failing in, and in some instances is now failing even to pursue, its missions. As I documented in the second essay of this set, the UN has failed, and is still failing, to “save succeeding generations from the scourge of war.” And since the 1970s at least, it has done little if anything to help us to “regain faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person.”

Moreover, as to promoting “better standards of life in larger freedom,” in recent decades our freedoms and standard of living have been trashed. And much of this has resulted from green policies that have been, and still are being, driven by the UN. These are very serious breaches of the UN’s stated purposes. And those breaches ought to provide to any leader in any territory the unquestioned right to remove his territory from the UN.

I would close down any UN agencies operating in the territory, and expel all their employees that are foreign nationals. I would withdraw from all UN organizations and projects, other than pre-existing peacekeeping operations such as in Cyprus, and perhaps the work of the High Commissioner for Refugees. I would withdraw from the “2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.” I would withdraw from the 2015 Paris agreement, the 1992 Rio agreements, the IPCC and all other environmental projects in which the UN is or has been involved.

I would withdraw from the WHO and all its projects. The WHO, despite its good-sounding name of World Health Organization, is one of the most actively destructive of the UN’s agencies. Its insatiable, ongoing drive to force air pollution down to levels so low that they cannot be met in a free economy, has been a significant cause of some of the problems we currently face. It has recently gone over the top on “climate change,” claiming it causes 1.4 million excess deaths per year in Europe; a claim not supported by any evidence at all. Its performance over the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly in its early stages, was atrocious. Yet it is demanding total, global control over the handling of any future pandemics! All this said, however, my governance would continue to share relevant health data with other countries as and when they need it.

I would sever all remaining links with the European Union. I would respect fair and just agreements which have already been made with the EU, but not any one-sided “agreements” that were made without reference to the views of the persons in the territory.

I would be happy to meet leaders of individual European countries, to see how the interests of our people could best be advanced on both sides. These countries would include Ireland.

I would not withdraw the territory from the Council of Europe. I would consider decisions of the European Court of Human Rights to be advisory only. But I would not in practice go against them, as long as they are made with full, proper regard to human rights and freedoms.

In the longer term, I would seek to incorporate the best of the European Convention and the UN Declaration, together with earlier lists of rights and obligations, into a new, wider Bill of Human Rights. Such a list of rights, back-to-backed by obligations, could form the basis for a first draft of the Convivial Code, to be put forward for public debate.

I would continue membership, for the time being, of non-UN international organizations such as the World Trade Organization (WTO). We would continue to trade under existing WTO rules with those countries with whom there are no other agreements. I would, however, institute reviews of the benefits, costs and risks of membership of this and other such organizations.

I would bring in a ban on companies affiliated to the WEF or WBCSD. I would give them one year, either to leave those organizations and publicly repudiate them, or to cease all their operations in my territory. All companies still affiliated to these organizations at the end of that year would be permanently banned from any operations in the territory, and their assets within the territory seized.

I would also ban green activist organizations, such as Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, the WWF, C40, Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil, from operating in the territory.

Foreign and military policies

I would continue for the moment with treaties previously made with individual countries, including trade treaties. But I would institute thorough and objective reviews of them all. This would include a review of military defence treaties, and in particular of the future of NATO.

My foreign policies, broadly, would be to “live and let live” with other countries willing to do the same. With the longer-term intention of bringing about a world in which there are no standing armies, I would increasingly restrict military activity to defensive and reactive roles, and retaliation in case of need. For the latter reason, I would retain a nuclear deterrent.

I would not take part in any new war, unless the interests of those in my territory were directly threatened. But I would continue defensive military assistance to the Ukrainians, on the grounds that they are the innocent party in the current war, and it is in the interests of all human beings worth the name to prevent “Rash Putin” getting away with his aggressions.

Migration policies

I would close the borders to all officials, employees and associates of the UN, the WEF, C40 and other organizations that have been peddling the green and globalist agendas. But I would not immediately change the rules for admission of ordinary people from other countries.

My policies on longer term immigration would be moderate, and always based on respect for human rights and on the particular situation of each individual. If they behave as human beings worth the name, and they either have skills we can use, or a strong enough case that they would face persecution if we didn’t let them in, we’ll let them come in to live. If not, we won’t; and we’ll send them back to the last place they came from.

I would not set any “targets” or “quotas” for particular types of migrants. However, I would seek to avoid any continuation or repeat of the all-but-runaway population growth the UK went through between 1995 and 2020.

Suspending green policies

I would immediately suspend all green agenda policies for a period of 25 years, and end all government funding, levies and other taxes, and subsidies for them. These would include: Expansion of off-shore or on-shore wind. Any use of hydrogen as a fuel, beyond small-scale trials carried out with volunteers. The proposed ban on vehicles with internal combustion engines. All pushes to force people into “green transport.” All limits and targets on emissions from aircraft and ships. All pushes for “greener buildings,” except for fully cost-justified projects carried out by voluntary participants for the purpose of saving energy. All subsidies for carbon capture and storage. All policies made in the name of “biodiversity” or the like. And, in particular, any measures that interfere with farmers’ ability to produce the food they consider appropriate to their markets in the way they consider best.

I would suspend all these policies pending thorough, honest and objective reviews of all aspects of the policies. I would also include air pollution limits and targets in the list of policies to be reviewed, and would suspend these for the same 25-year period.

Environmental policies

My environmental policies would aim to maximize the quality of the human environment. That is, the rights and freedoms, justice and honesty that we human beings need in order to survive, flourish and prosper. I would assert that we don’t need to “save the planet” from humanity. Instead, we need to save it for humanity.

All issues concerning the physical environment would be dealt with by adapting to problems as and when they arise. All analyses of future risks would be objective. There will be no pie-in-the-sky schemes to “mitigate” unproven problems that may not even happen. Still less for “problems” whose probability cannot even be calculated.

The approach to any problem found in the physical environment would always be one of “polluter pays compensation.” That is, those who cause a negative externality to others should be required to pay the proportion of the aggregate cost (also known as “social cost”) of the nuisance, for which they are responsible. And these payments should be routed to the victims of the nuisance, each in proportion to the harms they have suffered.

This would first require the size of the externality, the identities and shares of responsibility of the perpetrators, and the identities and shares of the damage caused to the victims, to be objectively and accurately estimated. In these matters, governance would act only as an assessor and a router, and would not itself take out any more than it needs to run the scheme. As the estimates become more and more accurate, the rates of compensation would be adjusted accordingly.

Energy policies

As to short-term energy policies, I would immediately permit fracking for gas, in any place in the territory where it is justified by the expected nett benefits. And I would retain or restore permit schemes for new oil and gas projects in the North Sea where they are appropriate.

After consulting with my specialist advisors, I would set plans to retain coal-powered plants – with scrubbers – for as long as they are cost-effective.

I would abolish all subsidies for “renewable” energy sources, and require that their owners must remove them at the end of their useful lives, and either replace them or clean up the site altogether.

I would also lay out plans to secure access for the people in the territory to abundant, affordable, reliable energy for the medium and longer terms. I would expect to continue moves towards expanding the use of nuclear power, including small modular reactors once they have been proven. And I would seek to make it easier and cheaper to get nuclear power projects approved.

Taxation

I would move very quickly towards a low-tax, high-growth economy. I would not only reduce tax rates, but also hugely reduce the complexity of the tax system. I would end all predatory or confiscatory taxation, and all taxation that re-distributes wealth unjustly. I would end “sin taxes” on alcohol, smoking and other pleasures, and all regulations intended to make it harder to sell these pleasures. And I would end all fines for indiscretions that do not impose harm or unreasonable risk on anyone.

All this would be paid for, not only by the natural rise in tax receipts when an economy is doing well, but through the on-going savings from progressively sacking more and more of the parasites and pests from government positions. The “civil service,” in particular, would be decimated, and far more. For they have persistently worked, over many decades, not for the benefit of the governed as they should have done, but for the benefit of the state. And today, the good of the people and the good of the state are not only incompatible, but diametrically opposed.

I would repeal IR35, and all other laws that have put individuals and small businesses at an unjust disadvantage. I would ditch “Making Tax Digital,” and all other government schemes that cause unnecessary costs or hassles to small businesses. Looking to a future in which the “public sector” will be greatly down-sized and eventually abolished, I would create an economic climate friendly to new and small businesses.

I would have all those companies that have lobbied for government subsidies, or for exemption from burdens to which their competitors were subject, or for policies to disadvantage their competitors, investigated. Where they have made ill-gotten gains, I would require them to re-pay those gains, and to compensate those they stole from. In extreme cases, such as where companies used politics to enrich themselves unjustly, I would ban these companies from operating in the territory altogether.

In the longer term, I would seek to move the tax system towards one in which what individuals pay for governance is determined, not by their income or by what transactions they carry out, but in proportion to the benefit they receive from the function of governance that protects their property. That is, in proportion to their total wealth.

Welfare and health

I would not make any immediate changes to welfare policies. In particular, old age pensions and disability payments already qualified for would be continued for the indefinite future, since the recipients have already paid for these benefits. However, all new pension and insurance schemes would have to be private.

In the longer term, I would seek to move welfare out of the remit of governance. In time, welfare should be covered by a combination of insurance, mutual aid societies, and charity as a final back-stop. All this will need careful planning, and just and honest management.

My health policy would be similar to my welfare policy. I would recognize that the NHS must eventually be dismantled, and its functions turned over outside governance to the people who provide the services. But as with welfare, the change needs careful planning.

Education

As with welfare and health, I would not make immediate changes to education policy, apart from de-funding those university departments that behaved dishonestly towards the people over the green scams or the COVID epidemic.

However, I would set in motion a long-term process of de-politicizing education, with the eventual aim of transferring control over individual schools to educators outside governance. Where appropriate, teams of teachers would have the chance to take over their own schools.

The BBC

I would close down the BBC. I would sell off those parts, such as sports, which are capable of making quality and unbiased programmes. The news and current affairs departments, and others that have shown political bias, would simply be closed down.

Ditching other bad laws

I would repeal all laws such as the “spy cops” bill, that permit police, or other officials, legal privileges to do things that ordinary people may not.

I would cancel all laws “in the pipeline” that would have an adverse effect on human rights and freedoms. This would include, but not be limited to: The “on-line safety” bill. Digital ID. Central bank digital currency. And “smart road user charging,” otherwise known as “pay per mile.” Any planned further restrictions on smoking, gambling, school attendance, sugar intake, or anything else affecting the daily lives of ordinary people, would also be dropped. If any of these bad laws had already been made, I would order them repealed immediately.

I would order post hoc cost-benefit reviews on all laws that were imposed as a result of EU directives, which were not already covered by the green policy reviews. I would repeal all those that fail the cost-benefit test.

I would also repeal all collective limits and targets on anything. Such laws are unfree, unjust and anti-human, and have never been agreed to by the people they were imposed on.

I would repeal all “safety” laws made since 1992, that were based on the perverted form of the precautionary principle and the culture of over-caution it led to. Not just in the environmental area, but in things like building codes too.

I would repeal all smoking bans. The right to set rules for smoking on a property would return to the property owner or proprietor.

I would end all anti-car policies. I would scrap the London ULEZ, and its equivalents in other cities. I would order removed all low traffic neighbourhoods, traffic filters, 15- and 20-minute cities, chicanes and speed bumps. I would return the procedures to be used to set speed limits to the rules in use prior to the Rio agreements of 1992. And I would re-assess and re-set all speed limits, which had been reduced since 1992, using those rules. I would also progressively reduce subsidies for public transport, with an aim eventually to phase them out entirely.

Further, I would order a general review of all other laws made since 1992, that have had, or may have had, an adverse effect on human rights and freedoms. Laws that show a proven or likely adverse effect would be subjected to a fuller review, and repealed if appropriate.

Surveillance

I would take full account of the ethics-based review of surveillance, which I had commissioned at the start.

With regard to surveillance of communications, including phone and Internet, I would ban all routine surveillance, except where there is reasonable suspicion of real wrongdoing. These bans would apply to both government and non-government surveillance. And the sale, or use by third parties, of data obtained through such surveillance would be prohibited.

I would mandate that physical surveillance in the public space, as opposed to on private property, should be the exception rather than the rule. Only places with significant risks of crime or other dangers, and schemes to collect tolls on new infrastructure, should be allowed to use camera surveillance at all. Sequences of cameras or other sensors that can track the movements of people or vehicles, and all use of cameras with facial recognition ability, would be forbidden in the public space. As would all routine drone surveillance. Automatic number plate recognition would also be forbidden, except for collecting tolls on new infrastructure. All existing camera installations, that do not meet the new criteria, would be required to be taken down permanently.

I would also review what surveillance measures may be ethically appropriate on private property, particularly in shops, workplaces and public transport (including aeroplanes). This would distinguish clearly between denial of access to those whose conduct does not allow them the right to that access, and surveillance of those already accepted on to the property. I expect this would lead to the majority of CCTV systems in shops and public transport being taken down. And no surveillance would be allowed inside workplaces, except for the purpose of controlling access to different parts of the property.

In general, individuals who are not trespassing on others’ property should only be subjected to surveillance of any kind if there is reasonable suspicion that they have carried out, are carrying out, or are planning to carry out, a real wrongdoing.

Wider debates

I would also seek to open up public debate on some wider matters.

One of these matters would be the most desirable level of air pollution. The approach of recent decades, driven by the UN and WHO, has been to cut, and cut, and cut air pollution without regard for the costs, inconveniences or loss of freedoms caused to the people. This goes against the civilized tolerance, and spirit of “live and let live,” which are necessities for free, happy, comfortable and prosperous living. In light of the new “polluter pays compensation” policies as above, I would order a review to answer the question: “How should we determine the acceptable levels for particular kinds of air pollution?”

Some more subjects, which I would like to bring up for open public debate, are the old chestnuts of abortion and euthanasia, and the new threat of artificial intelligence (AI).

On the first two, my view is that those of different but ethically reasonable persuasions on these matters should have maximum freedom to follow their own persuasions.

On AI, one of my concerns is its use, more or less subtly, to bias what people are “allowed” to say and to see. Another is its mis-use to depict data in a database as if it was a “single source of truth.” Whereas in reality, the only source of truth is evidence from the real world. But perhaps my main concern over AI is that decisions which affect people could be made using, or with the assistance of, AI. How could you possibly hold an AI accountable, if it made or influenced a decision that unjustly harmed someone?

Reviewing the bad policies

I see three types of reviews that will be necessary in order to find out the full facts, and make the best decision as to how to proceed, on each of the bad policies that have been imposed on us against our wills. These include (at least) the suspended green policies, and the handling of COVID-19. The reviews needed are risk reviews, cost-benefit reviews, and historical audits.

Risk reviews

The risk reviews will assess, for example: The difficulties with large-scale roll-outs, for example of car charging points. Possible de-stabilization of the electricity grid. The potential for high-profile accidents, particularly with hydrogen. Financial and budgetary risks. And, most important of all, the risk that the policies would make life worse for people who don’t deserve it – for example, by pricing older or poorer people out of their cars.

“Known unknown” risks, where the possibility of risk is known but the magnitude is not, will be dealt with by undertaking more work to quantify the risk better. “Unknown unknown” risks, being impossible to quantify objectively, will not be considered. This is because, under the true precautionary principle, the risks of making a bad decision outweigh the risks of doing nothing unless and until a quantifiable problem arises. I say again that “post-normal” approaches, or finger-in-the-air methods such as “expert elicitation,” will not be tolerated.

Cost-benefit reviews

As per the new culture I described above, the cost-benefit reviews will be objective, unbiased and quantitative. And they will be based entirely on the costs and benefits to the people whom governance serves, not on any political considerations. They will also be accurate, to a degree well beyond what has been normal for “government work.” Every effort will be made to quantify the costs and benefits within minimum levels of error. And projects will only be allowed to go ahead if the nett benefits to the people are clear and major.

Historical audits

The third kind of review would be the historical audit. It will assess the full story of how, in a supposed democracy, policies came to be imposed on everyone against the wills of many; and with little or no hard evidence that the claimed problems were real, or that the measures taken would actually solve the problem, or both. Again, these audits will be in the remit of the Ethical Audit Office, the new quality arm of my governance.

These reviews will cover all aspects, including: Validity and honesty of the science. Interactions with third parties such as the IPCC. The conduct of government and its advisors over the matter, with particular regard to truthfulness, objectiveness and honesty. How the matters were presented to the public. Openness (or not) to non-establishment views. And the conduct (or not) of public debates over the matter.

Historical audits of “net zero” and related projects

The “net zero” audit, for example, would look in detail at how those in power have treated the people they are supposed to serve over this matter. Including, but not limited to: How and why the precautionary principle was perverted. How unbiased the Stern review was. Why the climate change act was allowed to go forward without any objective cost-benefit justification. Why and how the “social cost of carbon” approach was dropped, and replaced by an approach in which the political commitments that had been made drove the “cost” numbers. The conduct of those involved in Climategate, and of the inquiries which whitewashed it. The conduct of other university departments involved. Why “strategic” projects were excluded from cost-benefit analysis altogether. And the kicker: why did they set “climate goals” in the first place, without consulting the people they planned to force to meet them, and without allowing those opposed to the whole idea any chance to put forward their views?

I have no doubt that whole truth about these matters would finally come out. If only because I would be in the perfect position to make absolutely sure that happened! Now, what would be the result, when many millions of people found out that the scares had been deliberately exaggerated or even fabricated? And that the whole “climate change” alarum has been no more than a storm in a teacup? What would happen, once people discover how badly they had been lied to and manipulated over several decades, and the level of the bad faith with which the alarmist side have acted all along? I think there would be hell to pay.

With that in mind, I would mandate a program which would impose, with extreme severity, justice – objective, common-sense justice – on the perpetrators of these wrongs. Those government officials or government-funded contractors, that failed to behave with full honesty and transparency towards, and in the interests of, the people they were supposed to be serving, should be dismissed from office, required to pay their share of the compensation to those they harmed, and suitably punished. In the process, I expect many tens of thousands at least of government careers to be terminated, and perhaps orders of magnitude more than this. Neither parasites nor pests will ever be allowed back into government.

In addition, companies that have sought to pressure people into “environmental, social and governance” practices based on false green alarmism, will be permanently banned from operating in the territory, and all their assets in the territory confiscated.

Furthermore, I expect that the reviews on air pollution and interference with farming, at least, will also lead to a significant number of dismissals and punishments. A little later, I shall give some more on how the compensation and punishment processes might work.

Reviewing COVID policies

I would also order a full historical audit of the government’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic. This could use, where appropriate, evidence collected by the inquiry chaired by Baroness Hallett. Where people were unjustly harmed by government actions, those responsible would be required to compensate the victims. This would apply particularly in cases of “contracts for cronies,” or government overreach, or suppression of the truth, or suppression of debate, or vaccine harms to people who were forced to take the vaccines.

The quality of the advice given by experts, including SAGE, should also be investigated in detail. And overreaches by government – like ordering the sacking of tens of thousands of care home workers who refused vaccination – would be treated as the crimes they were.

I would assert the fundamental right of an adult and compos mentis human being to refuse unwanted medical treatment, including vaccinations. As the feminists say, your body, your choice.

I would also mandate that no-one may ever have any of their human rights violated for reasons of “public health,” beyond being held (comfortably) apart from others for a limited period if they are proven to constitute an objective risk to the health of others.

On-going actions

My on-going reforms would be based around four main themes. First, relentlessly driving down the size of government, and the scope of what it does, at territorial, devolved and local levels. Second, bringing the parasites and pests to justice for their crimes, and making them provide compensation to their victims. Third, laying the foundations for the new way of governance in the territory. And fourth, doing what I can to help move those elsewhere in the world towards better ways of governance.

Slimming down government

I would order that, over a period of some years, every government department, employee, contract, project, and funding stream must be reviewed. The review would ask: Have the people, who have been made to pay for this, received benefits commensurate with what they have paid? Are they now receiving such a commensurate benefit? And does objective cost-benefit analysis suggest that they will continue to receive such a benefit in the future? This would apply to government at the national level, the devolved level, and the local level.

These reviews would, in the first instance, be aimed at reducing or eliminating wasteful or toxic functions and individuals from government. In the process, the reviews would identify those in government, that have failed to do their best to deliver value to the people who paid for them. If there has been misconduct or mistreatment, they would also identify individuals that have behaved dishonestly towards those they were supposed to be serving, those that have unjustly violated human rights, and those that have behaved, or are behaving, as parasites or pests. Such individuals would be dismissed with loss of pension, required to compensate those they drained or wronged, and punished if appropriate.

Another aspect the reviews cover would be non-government organizations, which have been awarded funds by government for particular projects. The reviews would evaluate these projects from the point of view of costs versus benefits to the people who paid for them. All funding that has failed to produce nett benefits would be discontinued. The reviews would also look at these organizations from the ethical point of view. Any organizations which received funding for political activities, that were not for the benefit of the people who paid the taxes, would be investigated, and action taken if necessary.

In this way, I would expect that government as a whole, and in particular its most overpaid and most dishonest officials and bureaucrats, would be slimmed down by at least an order of magnitude. Those that, while in government, acted against the interests of the people, or failed to deliver value to the people who paid for them, would be brought to justice.  And the removal of so many parasites and pests from government would improve the quality of government staff, and so the quality of what it does.

Those who work in core functions of governance, such as courts, police and the military, and in areas such as welfare, health and education where the changes would be longer term, would initially be less affected than those in more politicized areas. However, each individual in government would over time be evaluated as to suitability to transfer across into the new governance.

There would also be skills in demand in my new governance, which were not possessed by enough people in the old government. I envisage there being many new openings in governance for people like accountants, statisticians, honest scientists, and evidence-based investigators. I would also expect there to be a demand for new local magistrates, in order to free up the time of judges for the more difficult cases. Many of these magistrates might be retired business people, who are willing to be trained in a new career.

Honesty Audits

As part of the functions of the Ethical Audit Office, I would implement a scheme of Honesty Audits. These audits will assess the degree of honesty and good faith, which has been displayed by individuals in positions of power, or paid by governance for work done. If an audit finds serious failings, the matter can be sent to a court for review, which may result in the dismissal of those responsible. And, if the failings are serious enough, in their permanent exclusion from all jobs in governance.

Bringing parasites and pests to justice

But not all the parasites, and not all the pests, are part of, or directly funded by, government. There are companies, that use dubious business practices in order to rip off their customers. There are bankers and other “money men,” that engage in reckless speculation and other dubious practices, that can risk de-stabilizing the whole economy. There are Big Tech companies, and banks too, that deny service, often seemingly arbitrarily, to people they decide they don’t like.

There are also non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and so-called “civil society organizations” (CSOs). These are a mixed bag. Some do genuinely good work, while others seem like no more than propaganda mills for bad political policies. Many of these organizations also have close connections with the United Nations.

There would be three main prongs to my reforms in this area. First, as I have already outlined, I would order the removal of parasites and pests from government positions, compensation to those they wronged, and punishment where appropriate. The general culture would be one of “politicker pays compensation.”

Second, I would order investigations into those organizations nominally independent of government, which have or may have violated human rights, or used politics for their own gain or for their political goals. Again, the politickers would be made to pay. Similar investigations would be carried out on all super-rich individuals, to check whether or not any of their gains have been ill-gotten, or they have used their money for anti-human purposes.

Third, I would invite everyone in the territory to report any injustices or violations of rights, to which they have been subjected, either by government itself or by politically oriented third parties. These might range, for example from, unjust denial of financial or other services, to being singled out unjustly by bad laws such as IR35, to unjust harassment by police, immigration or other government officials, to rip-off or unjust harassment by companies that were acting politically.

Each individual who considers they have been harmed will be encouraged to submit a claim for restitution from the former government and its cronies. Many of these claims, I expect, will be for unjust acts that caused damage, pain or inconvenience. Or for taxation or fines that were re-distributory, confiscatory, or based on false accusations or unjust schemes. Or for violations of rights, such as exclusion or restriction from the free market as a result of bad laws or political favouritism. The claims will be objectively assessed, and appropriate compensation orders made. To include substantial damages, interest and allowance for inflation, too; and punishment where appropriate. Moreover, those that profited from taking or re-distributing others’ earned wealth will find themselves hoist on their own petard.

Through these three sets of programs, anyone that has used politics for personal gain or for the gain of their cronies, or to unjustly harm anyone, will be subjected to justice. That is, to common-sense justice; being treated as they have treated others.

Treatment of warmongers

Among the first to be singled out for punishment would be those that have been responsible for warlike aggressions by the political state. Each military action that the state took part in since the 1980s would be reviewed, and evaluated for both its intentions, and its effectiveness in minimizing bloodshed among innocents. Such actions might include wars in, for example: Afghanistan, Bosnia, Iraq, Kosovo, Libya, Sierra Leone, Syria or Ukraine.

Decision makers, both military and political, responsible for ordering any violations of the rights of innocent people that would not otherwise have happened, will be suitably punished. This might extend to extradition to the countries in which the violations took place, for punishment according to local justice systems. These punishments will be over and above those resulting from these individuals’ behaviours as parasites or pests towards the people they were supposed to be serving.

The Great Restitution

The Great Restitution is the name I give to the program of reparations for political crimes. It will assess the compensation payments owed to each individual who has been harmed by political parasites or pests. It will apportion the payments owed by each perpetrator, whether parasite, pest or both. This process will also identify what, if any, criminal punishments are appropriate for each of the perpetrators. Account will be taken of mitigating circumstances, such as where an individual has also stood up staunchly and honestly for the rights of ordinary people in other spheres. The program will take in the compensation payments from the perpetrators, and route them to the victims in appropriate proportions.

The Great Restitution will look well beyond politicians and government employees as potential perpetrators. Company bosses (and key employees) that violated people’s rights, or took subsidies, lobbied for advantages or otherwise used politics to enrich themselves. Pressure groups that lobbied for bad laws. Media that lied or hyped. All these, too, will be assessed for the damages they caused to innocent people. Moreover, the Great Restitution will provide those, that have created or spread moral panics and false scares, with a real reason to be scared. That is, their share of the bill for compensation to the victims of the bad policies their panics and scares spawned.

Where the violators are companies, company assets in the territory may be confiscated if appropriate. Companies such as domestic banks, whose closure would cause hardship to innocent people, would be nationalized, the responsible managers harshly punished, and honest managements put in to save and re-structure them. The wrongdoers, individual or corporate, would have to sell assets to pay off their share of the debt.

The Great Restitution would be, in essence, an enormous “loss and damage fund,” with its management funded by a proportion of the restitution. And in view of how long the process would be likely to take, I expect older victims would get priority over younger ones.

Parasite pens

Not all of the parasites, that have lived by draining innocent people, will have sufficient assets to be able to pay the compensation they owe. My governance would have powers to confiscate and sell their assets for the purpose of reparation to their victims. This could include homes, cars, bank accounts, financial instruments such as shares, and anything else. Individuals, who have acted as parasites but have not been pests, and are unable to meet their reparation debts, would be required to move into what I will name “parasite pens.”

In these pens, the individuals would have the opportunity to work off their debts, while subsisting at a rock-bottom standard of living. They would be, in a sense, successors to the Victorian workhouses. I envisage that most of the pens would house a few hundred people only; although a few might be considerably larger. Many of the pens, I expect, could be sited on royal owned land, that already has buildings on it.

Spouses, who do not themselves have outstanding reparations to pay, would be allowed the option to move to the pen or not. Dependent children would either be adopted or fostered by family or volunteers, or if that was not possible, raised in children’s homes. The costs for the housing and upkeep of the children would be added to the parasite’s debt to be worked off.

Parasite pens would not be prisons as such. I expect they would have a nightly curfew, but during the day the inhabitants would be allowed to leave the pen for the purposes of work or trade. They would be made to wear prison-style uniforms, both inside and outside the pen.

Once an individual’s reparation debt is worked off, they would be allowed to leave the pen, and return to the free market.

Some may think these punishments over the top, for individuals that only did what was accepted by many people at the time as normal. But, putting on my ethical philosopher hat for a few moments, I will disagree. I take the view that the innocent should never suffer for the sake of the guilty. The victims of political parasites, having themselves done nothing wrong, have nothing to be forgiven for. And therefore, they have no reason to forgive, or to feel any compassion or concern for, those that drained them.

If a parasite dies before the debt is completely repaid, at one level this is a tragedy. For it means that the victims will never get full compensation for what was done to them. But at another level, we have won second prize: a dead parasite won’t be able to rob anyone ever again. So, the death of a political parasite reduces both the number of parasites on humanity, and the quantity of politics in the world. It is, thus, a good thing for human beings.

Pest pits

Pests would have to pay reparations to their victims, in the same way as parasites. Pests include those that have promoted, actively supported, made or enforced political policies to damage the lives of innocent people; as well as those that have deliberately set out to control, to violate the rights of, or to persecute innocent people. Beyond paying reparations, each pest will be required to move into an enclave, which I will dub a “pest pit.” This will be somewhat like a parasite pen, but a far more unpleasant experience. And pit inmates would be made to wear extremely conspicuous prison-style uniforms, all the time.

I envisage that pest pits will usually be larger than parasite pens, since the inmates of each will have to show that their collective lifestyle is economically sustainable without outside help. I envisage that many pits would be on royal owned land, but usually in a rural area not already built up. Thus, the pests would have to start by building a community for themselves.

Each pest pit would have a trade area, in which the inmates can show wares they wish to sell, and visitors may purchase these wares. Pests will be allowed to sell services only if those services can be delivered from inside the pit (for example, over an on-line connection).

Pests would be confined to their pit until the whole pit, as a collective, has achieved economic sustainability without outside aid, and all inhabitants have paid off their reparation debt. Once this is achieved (if ever), the inmates would be free to leave if they wish.

The punishments meted out to the inmates in a particular pest pit would, in the famous phrase, fit the crimes. Each pit would provide a combination of suitable punishments. Common-sense justice is a hard taskmaster! For example, some may require the inmates to live a “net zero” lifestyle. Others may prohibit the use of modern fertilizers. Others may ban cars. Others may prohibit fossil fuels, and products made using them, altogether.

Those, that wanted to force others to live net zero, will have to practise what they preach, and damn well live net zero themselves. Those that wanted to take away our modern fertilizers from us, will damn well have to live without them. We shall see whether or not policies made in the name of “sustainability” would have been sustainable! Moreover, if these policies could not have been sustainable without technological progress that simply was never going to happen fast enough, the results will be gory. As I’ve said before, what happens in that event will both prove the pests wrong, and serve them right.

Beyond all this, some pest pits may be panopticons, allowing no privacy. Some may allow no freedom of speech whatsoever. Some may disadvantage their inmates with burdensome rules on what they may do economically. And all are likely to enforce strict regimentation in every aspect of life.

Again, some may think these punishments over-harsh. But those that behave as pests, however much they may look like human beings, are not us. To use politics to damage the lives of innocent people is not something that any human being worth the name would ever do. So, those that have done such things are not human. They are vermin.

And we mustn’t let even one of them get away with anything. Unless and until the pests have fully compensated their victims, and taken the full punishment that is due to them, we human beings should not feel or show any more compassion or concern for them than they have shown for us. You might as well expect Jews to feel compassion or concern for nazis!

From the point of view of human beings, the death of a pest means one less pest. And that is a boon to humanity. For that pest will never again be able to rob anyone, or to promote, support, make or enforce any bad political policy, or to commit or support any violation of anyone’s human rights or freedoms.

The prospect of ignominious, unpleasant death for many pests, and particularly for those that pushed the green agendas, accords with history, too. For those that promoted, actively supported, made or enforced bad political agendas have committed treason against human civilization, and against the human race. And the traditional penalty for treason is death.

Laying the foundations for the new way

Another prong of my work would be to build the foundations for the new way of governance.

I would set up a special commission, to review in detail ideas of human rights from the past and the present, and produce a new, comprehensive Bill of Human Rights for all human beings worth the name. This would be back-to-backed by a list of obligations, following which will bring about an environment in which all these human rights are properly respected. This would form the basis of a first draft of the Convivial Code. I would take a strong personal interest in this process, and would chair the commission myself.

I would have the results disseminated, and encourage public debate on the matters. The commission would review and take account of all constructive comments received. The result would be an initial issue of the Convivial Code, ready to “go live.” Other aspects to be hammered out would include the procedures for determining when a change is necessary to the Code, for specifying the changes, and for introducing a new version of the Code.

I would also encourage the construction of prototypes, in which groups of volunteers can try out the new way of governance. I envisage this happening, at first, on the neighbourhood scale. These might be based on my ideas from the third essay for the “neighbourhood of just governance”, as expanded and re-worked (if necessary) with my advisors and with the commission. It is conceivable that even some of the more successful parasite pens might be willing to try out the new way at this level. There will be many opportunities to review progress, and to find out what works well and what less so.

As a second phase, I expect that larger communities would be formed, comprising these new kinds of neighbourhoods. These might be existing towns or parts of towns, where enough people are willing to take part in the experiment. Or some of them might be new build, somewhat like the “new towns” of the 1940s to 1960s. These would serve as prototypes for the communities, which I envisage as the primary units of governance in the new way. Again, progress will be reviewed, good ideas maintained and strengthened, and bad ones dropped.

In parallel with this, I would begin to organize the core functions of governance – such as courts, police and military defence – into structures compatible with the distributed, networked system of just governance for which we will be aiming. These would include the functions which co-ordinate with other governances, for example on infrastructure development (which would include energy policies). I’d also try out different methods of raising the money required to support the functions of governance, as long as all are just.

I would also set in motion the moving of control over welfare, health care, education and other non-core functions, that have been controlled by the state, to the people who actually deliver the services. In this process, I would expect to see tried out many different business structures, both old and new, to facilitate providing these services.

Spreading the new way

I would make efforts to persuade people in other parts of the world that reforms like mine would be beneficial to them as well. I and my advisors would be happy to show leaders and advisors from other countries around, and to answer their questions. I would also encourage inbound tourism, in the hope that many people will experience and appreciate how much better our new way of governance is than the old ways – even while it is not yet fully mature.

Dismantling the state

At some point, it will become plain that the new way of governance has been tried and tested enough, that we can dismantle the shell of the old. It is hard to know just how long this might take. But based on the closest past example I know of, the West German Wirtschaftswunder of the late 1940s and 1950s, I would hope it should be achievable inside 15 to 20 years.

So: How to dismantle the state? That one’s easy. An absolute monarch can do absolutely anything he likes with his realm, as long as the ordinary people will let him get away with it. And in the situation I envisage, those people would be clamouring for me to do it sooner rather than later! So, I expect I’d simply declare the state to be “abolished, together with all its laws.” I wouldn’t need to abdicate, since the monarchy itself would have ceased to exist at that moment. I could retire. At last.

Gone would be the state called the “United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.” Gone, within the territory, would be the idea of “sovereignty,” and the ruling classes that used it against the ordinary people. Gone would be politics, political government and political parties. Gone would be the systems that enabled psychopaths to get government power. Gone would be all moral privileges for state functionaries over others, and everyone would now be accountable for their voluntary actions; most of all, those in governance. Gone would be all bad or arbitrary “laws.” Gone would be exceptions and exemptions for favourites. Gone would be unrequited taxation. Gone would be barriers to trade, such as tariffs. Gone would be all warlike activity, that is not defensive or retaliatory. And the only former parasites or pests who remained would be those who had managed to reform themselves, to learn to behave as human beings, and to fully compensate those they wronged.

The “law of the land” would be the Convivial Code, an ethical code based on ethical equality, honesty and respect for human rights. And government will have been replaced by a system which is more or less like my “just governance” proposals, built on the foundations which the prototype communities had found to be most workable. It will be bottom-up and de-centralized. And, being based on the principles of voluntary society and common-sense justice, it will uphold human rights, while allowing maximum freedom for all, consistent with living in a civilized community.

The authority of this governance will come, first, from the common-sense nature of its principles. Second, from its objectivity, impartiality, honesty and good faith. And third, from its emphasis on common-sense justice. Thanks to the Ethical Audit Office, there will be strict quality control on everything it does.

In terms of implementation in the former UK, I expect we would start with four “Alliances for Just Governance,” each of which contains many communities. One Alliance in England, one in Wales, one in Scotland, one in Northern Ireland. The four would continue to share a common currency. The former state’s assets would be divided among the communities, apportioned according to a fair formula. And an individual’s payment for governance in a given year would be, as near as possible, in direct proportion to the individual’s wealth.

Borders would be retained at the boundaries of the territory, for as long as there are potentially hostile political states left in the world. But incoming migration and settlement would be controlled entirely at the neighbourhood level. It would be for local people to decide who they want to admit to live in their particular area.

Wider still and wider…

I like to think that, even during the transition period, there will be pressures in other countries for them to try a new way of governance, more or less like mine. The pressures will mount, until even the most stable among oppressive régimes will be in danger of being toppled by popular revolt of one kind or another.

Some countries will go to the new way, and end all political oppression, faster than others. But I expect that most, if not all, will get there in the end. Federal countries like the USA will, probably, lose their cohesion through secession state by state, each state going its own way at its own pace. If the EU is still in existence by then (unlikely), individual European countries will leave it, one by one, each to move in their own direction.

Probably the last hold-outs of the political state will be small countries, like Liechtenstein and Brunei, which are already monarchies. In such places, the monarch may feel that he can achieve the changes his people demand, without having to give up his titular power; Perhaps he might achieve this by making himself into a purely ceremonial ruler.

Key centres for the globalists, such as the USA (New York in particular) and Switzerland, will also move to the new way. I expect that the globalist and internationalist organizations, that had plotted their global power-grab, will be outlawed and dismantled by those in charge of the new governances in those places. International political organizations will also haemorrhage members, as the people in countries round the world see the benefits of moving towards the new way, and set in motion their progress towards it.

Multi-national companies, that have co-operated in the globalist schemes, will likely find themselves dismantled bit by bit, as the new governance in each country they operate in investigates them, and closes them down in their territory if that is warranted.

By some time into these processes – I cannot predict just how long – sufficiently many countries will have gone to the new way, that war will have become all but impossible.

Then shall we be able to open the borders between the different former states. Then shall we be able to abolish standing militaries, replacing them by volunteer militias, alert for any disasters or other emergencies that might arise. Then shall we be able to get rid of the missiles. Then shall humanity world-wide be free from war and oppression at last.

And, with the parasites and pests having been purged from every land, fixing poverty among human beings will become easy. Let’s use our natural creativity, and let’s trade freely with our fellows, to bring prosperity, happiness and fulfilment to every human being worth the name. Let’s take control of our planet, as is our nature. And let’s race away into a peaceful, free, dynamic, prosperous, truly sustainable future.

Building the desire for sea-change

All this may be fine and dandy. But we still face a basic problem: How can we get into a position even to start on curing the ills we suffer today? To do that, we must rouse ordinary people to action. Ultimately, very many ordinary people.

There are several components to this process. First, I think, we – the human beings who are already aware of, and thinking about how to fix, these issues – need to put our situation today into its context. We need to understand the war we’re in. Second, we need to formulate a reasonably clear picture of where we want to get to, and the help we will need from others. A picture, which we can communicate to potential allies. Third, we need to identify the kind of mind-set, which we will require in order to get done what we need to do. Fourth, we need to identify how best to spread this mind-set to as many people as we can.

Comparisons with the Renaissance

I am struck by parallels between the situation we face today and the conditions under which the Renaissance was seeded. Like the Catholic church and the Machiavellian political forces of that time, our enemies want to deny us the rights to think and to act for ourselves. They do not tolerate skepticism, inquiry or criticism. And they want to confine our minds inside narrow shackles of orthodoxy and political correctness. Our lives are being invaded, too, by external and hostile interests, such as corporate parasites and globalist and green activists; not, perhaps, unlike the Ottoman invaders of Renaissance times.

And yet, the Renaissance eventually produced a sea-change in human thought. Not only did it re-discover and revive the ancient learning from Greece and Rome. But it also brought about change for the better in many aspects of human life in Europe. People began to emerge from the mind-numbing tyranny of the church and from the top-down feudal political system. They felt renewed confidence in their own faculties. And they felt a new sense of freedom for the human spirit, that had been for so long suppressed by orthodoxy.

Today’s establishment, of course, go even further than their Renaissance precursors did. Far from making our planet a fit place for civilized humans to live and thrive, they want to force us to drastically cut, or even halt, our use of the Earth’s resources. And they don’t want any change at all in the climate! Or in the political system, that enables them and their ilk to oppress us human beings.

Could we human beings, just perhaps, be due, or even overdue, for an updated version of the Renaissance? Could what we are going through today perhaps be, like the early stages of the Renaissance in the 15^th century, a prelude to a better world?

The war we’re in

I will say here something about the war, in which we find ourselves embroiled today. It is, in essence, a war between Franz Oppenheimer’s political means and economic means. On one side, we have the users of the economic means, we human beings. On the other, the parasites and pests, the users of the political means, that aggressively rob us and screw up our lives.

This war is an existential struggle for, if I may use a religious word, the soul of humanity. At a philosophical level, the crux of the matter may be put as: Are we as a species an “economic animal?” Or are we, as Aristotle would have had us believe, a “political animal?”

My answer to this question is that, right now, neither of these answers is correct. For, over thousands of years, the human species has diverged into two opposite tendencies: one political, one economic. The political structures, which have been in place during those times, have persistently allowed the politicals an unfair advantage. But those structures are nearing, indeed many of them have already reached or passed, their last-use-by date.

The time is ripe, I think, not for revolution, but for evolution. For far too long, the political animals have used their unfair advantages to rule over and to drain us economic animals. It is time we human beings worth the name got up and simply said: “No!”

We must fight for humanity, for reality and rationality, for our rights and freedoms, for justice. We human beings must join together in resisting the parasites and pests. And when we have fought off their aggressions and forced them on the back foot, we must strike back at them with all the might we can muster.

Thus shall the economic species, we human beings worth the name, be seen for what we are: the legitimate heirs to our planet Earth. And thus shall the politicals, the parasites and pests, be consigned to the scrap-heap of history where they belong. Nature, so a wise man calling himself Jason Alexander wrote, extinguishes its mistakes.

The Re-discovery

The paradigm of the Renaissance was Discovery. Discovery of ideas old and new, of new places, of ourselves. The paradigm for what we must do today, I think, must be Re-discovery. We need to re-discover ourselves. As Aristotle put it: “Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom.” As was the case with the Renaissance, we need to undergo a spiritual revolution: a change for the better in the human spirit. Then, we can take things from there.

We need to re-discover our Humanity, our nature as human beings. We need to re-discover that this is our planet. We need to re-discover that we are the most developed species on our planet. We need to re-discover that it is in our nature to build civilizations. We need to re-discover that it is in our nature to take control over our surroundings. We need to re-discover our mission to make our planet into a comfortable, peaceful, home and garden for humanity.

We need to re-discover our Reason and our rationality. We need to re-discover our “bullshit meters,” which enable us to reject media and political lies, hype and unfounded scares. We need to re-discover our objectivity. In our rational thinking, we need to focus on the facts, the full facts, and nothing but the facts. And we need to re-discover how to build up as accurate a picture of reality as we possibly can.

We need to re-discover our human spirit, just as our forebears discovered it at the Renaissance. We need to re-discover our confidence in ourselves. We need to re-discover that each human being is, in the words of Victorian scholar John Addington Symonds: “a rational, volitional and sentient being, born upon this earth with a right to use it and enjoy it.” We need to re-discover that we are a part of nature, and not in any way foreign to it as our enemies would have us believe. And that, as long as we live according to our nature, then we are playing our full part in wider “nature.”

We need to re-discover our consciences. We need to re-discover the built-in weather-vane or barometer, that gives us a sense of what are right and wrong actions for us human beings to do. We need to re-discover the natural law of humanity, which must guide us in all our actions. We need to re-discover our zeal to establish this law, which is natural to us, as the basis for future human civilizations. We need to re-discover our honesty and our integrity.

We need to re-discover, and re-illuminate, the crucial idea of human rights. We need to re-discover that we are not merely social animals, but that each of us is an individual as well. We need to re-discover that others are individuals too, and that as long as they are tolerant towards us, we should be tolerant towards them. But those that are intolerant towards us, or harm or seek to harm us, deserve no better from us than they have behaved towards us.

We need to re-discover the ideas and values of the Enlightenment. We need to re-discover that governance must be for the benefit of the governed – every single one among the governed, real criminals excepted. We need to re-discover that governance must have the consent of the governed, in order to have any legitimacy. We need to re-discover that a “government” which acts other than for the benefit of the governed, or one that does not retain the consent of the governed – all the governed – has lost its legitimacy.

We need to re-discover the values of the Industrial Revolution. We need to re-discover our natural industry and productivity. We need to re-discover our ability to solve problems. We need to re-discover honest business and trade for what they are: the natural ways for human beings to relate to each other in the public sphere. And we need to re-discover that excellence and good service are to be commended, not pooh-poohed.

We need to re-discover the virtues of thinking and doing in a bottom-up way, not a top-down one. We need to contrast bottom-up thinking based on humanity, reality, facts, and right and wrong conduct, against top-down thinking based on agendas, politics, bad “laws” and political narratives. We need to be able to tell the difference between human beings and politicals. We need to understand the differences between us and them.

We need to reject the political state and its “sovereignty.” We need to reject the implied social contract, used to try to make out that we are subject to a political government. We need to reject those in government, that fail to serve the people they are supposed to be a benefit to, or that act with dishonesty or in bad faith towards any of us. We need to identify as individuals the political parasites and pests, that have been responsible for all our troubles. And we need to start treating them for what they are: criminals and enemies of humanity.

What we want for ourselves

To try to give a brief list of what we want from our new world.

We want the human rights of every human being worth the name to be respected and upheld. That is, the rights and freedoms of all those who respect others’ equal rights and freedoms.

We want self-determination and independence for everyone. Both personally as individuals, and for the voluntary societies we choose to join.

We want an end to oppression and exploitation. We want an end to war. We want an end to the culture of over-safety. We want an end to all violations of the rights or freedoms of the innocent.

We want no restrictions on the economic free market. We want maximum freedom to choose and to act as we please, consistent with living in a civilized community.

And we want objective, common-sense justice for all.

Do you want some, or all, of the same things?

What we want from our allies

Here is a brief list of what we want from those, whom we seek to persuade to join our cause, and to help us set about building our new world.

We want people to stop behaving like pawns. We want them to stop voting for the “lesser of two evils” (or more than two). We want them to reject the mainstream political parties – all those parties. We want them to reject politics, as it is practiced today, altogether.

We want people to focus on the facts in any matter. We want them to reject lies, hype, unfounded scares, and narratives that are not grounded in reality.

We want people to judge others, not on the basis of who they are, but by how they behave. We want them to tune in to the part of their minds, that tells them what is right and what wrong for human beings to do. We want them to seek, with all their might, to become economically productive, and as self-sufficient as they can be.

We want those capable of leadership to do what they can to lead others in the right directions; not by commands or by clever stratagems, but by example.

We want people to reject arrogance, dishonesty, hypocrisy and all the other psychopathic behaviours, that our enemies have displayed towards us. We need them to help us raise a tidal wave of anger, hatred and contempt against the parasites and pests that have robbed us, oppressed us and violated our human rights and freedoms. And we need them to help us get those parasites and pests off all our backs.

The new mind-set

There is beginning, I think, a change in the mind-set of human beings. Indeed, the new mind-set is starting to take root among the many people who are dissatisfied with politics today. Already, two of its visible results are a new, and greatly strengthened, pushback by ordinary people against government overreach, and a new determination to fight hard for our human rights and freedoms.

I myself am among those at the forefront of this change, for at least three reasons. First, because my upbringing as an only child, and my unusual education, combined to make me robustly individualistic and skeptical of “authority.” Second, my training as a mathematician has made me strongly objective, so I always demand proof in any contentious matter. And third, I have been, initially without knowing it, working towards this new mind-set for more than half a century. And I have been explicitly working towards it for more than 20 years now.

Based on my own experiences, I will say here how I expect the new mind-set will likely feel, to those people who find themselves moving towards it. That is why I have written the following sub-sections in the second person.

Your view of yourself

You will come to recognize that you are a human being. You are a member of the most advanced species living on planet Earth today. You have a nature, which you share with all other human beings worth the name. And, while you are not perfect – no-one is! – you are naturally good. You will come to feel more and more confidence in yourself, and you will never again let yourself feel ashamed of what you are.

Your nature leads you to use your reason to seek knowledge. It leads you to strive to behave in a convivial and civilized manner. It leads you to associate and to trade with others for mutual benefit. And it leads you to seek to take control of your surroundings, and to make them into a better place to live, both for yourself and for other human beings.

You are an individual. You have your own body and your own mind. You reserve always the right to make your own judgements, and to act according to them. You are also, by your nature, economically productive and independent. And it is wrong and unjust for anyone to put any obstacles in the way of your productivity or your independence.

You are willing to enter into and carry out voluntary agreements with others for mutual benefit. And you will join with others into societies, when and where you share their aims, and you and they benefit from doing so. But so long as you behave as a convivial human being, you do not accept that any collective, any individual or organization, or any government may unjustly usurp your rights to judge and to act as you see fit.

Your way of thinking

In your thinking, you demand, and seek to determine, the facts and the truth in any matter you address. For in a situation of dispute, whenever there is disagreement about the facts, there can never be any constructive way forward.

You use your faculties of perception, conception, logic, reason and objectivity as best you can. You are skeptical, and always on the look-out for lies, half-truths, bullshit or obfuscations. For these, along with suppression of dissenting points of view, are our enemies’ stocks-in-trade. And you always demand hard, verifiable evidence, rather than hearsay or other people’s narratives.

You trust your reason as a way of finding out the truth in any matter. And you reject woolly thinking, such as the favouring of fuzzy post-normal ideas like “quality” over objectivity.

You take responsibility for the reasonably foreseeable effects on others of your willed actions. But you accept no guilt or shame for anything, without both objective evidence of real wrongdoing, and your guilt being proved beyond reasonable doubt.

You do not accept any guilt for your earned successes. Nor do you accept guilt for wanting to earn good things for yourself to enjoy, or for favouring those who can and do deliver things you want over those that fail to deliver. You do not accept any guilt for doing or saying things that do not harm, and are not intended to harm, any human being. Nor do you accept nasty labels like “selfish,” “far right” or “denier,” slapped on you by those that want to shame you into political correctness.

Moreover, you accept no responsibility for what others do, unless you have agreed to take on such a responsibility. Common examples of this take-on of responsibility are if you choose to have a child, or if you take on a people-management role in a business. Furthermore, you do not accept any kind of communal guilt for anything.

Your view of others

You are an individual; but you recognize that others are individuals, too. You recognize that each of us is different, and has a different combination of strengths and weaknesses.

You come to use the judgement by behaviour principle. That is, you judge others not by surface characteristics such as race, received religion or social class, but by their actions. And, where appropriate, by what you can infer about their motivations.

You know that you have human rights, which arise from the nature of human beings to treat each other in a convivial and civilized manner. You also know that you must earn these rights, by respecting the equal rights of those who in their turn respect yours.

In your conduct towards your fellow human beings, you strive always to behave up to human standards. You strive to be peaceful, truthful, honest, just, tolerant of difference, and respectful of the rights and freedoms of those who respect your equal rights and freedoms. You strive to live and let live. You strive to deal with integrity, and always in good faith. And you refrain from interfering in other people’s business without a good and objective reason.

You care, very much, about your fellow human beings. These are the people, who will make up what I call the convivial community. But to qualify as your fellow human beings, they must measure up to two sets of standards. First, they must be human beings worth the name; they must strive to behave convivially towards other convivial people, just as you do. And second, they must be your fellows. They must not promote, support, make or enforce any political policy, or carry out any other voluntary act, that unjustly harms you, impoverishes you, inconveniences you, or violates any of your rights or freedoms.

But those that fail even to try to be peaceful and honest, or to respect your or others’ rights, you come to regard as criminals and worse. You feel no sense of “we” with them. Those that have failed to measure up to human standards, or have done bad things to you, obviously haven’t cared about you. So why should you care about them?

Your view of the state

You come to understand what the political state, as it exists today, actually is. You come to understand that its current incarnation was devised in the 16^th century to increase the power of the French kings. That it is a top-down system, based on extreme inequality between a “sovereign” and his “subjects.” That by its nature it has built into it: arrogance, bad laws, cronyism, wars, unbridled taxation, irresponsibility, lack of accountability, and much more. You come to see that the state is now centuries past its last-use-by-date. You understand that it has to go.

You come to feel contempt for all states, and in particular for the one commonly dubbed “the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.” You come to reject its claims of moral privilege. You come to reject its aggressions and its wars. You come to reject its politics. You come to reject its bad laws. You reject its lies and dishonesties, and its collectivist and control-freak propaganda. You reject its rapacious, unjust taxation and fines. And you reject its debt. No part of that debt, whatsoever, is your debt.

Your views on politics and politicals

You can still retain respect for the culture you have inherited. If you are English, for example, you can approve of the English breakfast, English cricket, the English language, and the English common law (before it got corrupted by politics). Though you will, of course, be well aware that English culture has deteriorated very badly over the last 40 years or so. You can also still feel an attachment to the land and the people of your particular part of England.

But you come to start thinking outside the political paradigm. You come to feel no respect at all for any kind of political “society,” or for the idea that there is some kind of political community coterminous with the state, or for political government. Indeed, you come to have contempt for politics, for all the mainstream political parties, and for almost all politicians. Instead of feeling part of some political community, you come instead to feel yourself as part of the convivial community. That is, the community of all those who choose to behave up to the standards which are natural for human beings.

You come to reject political operators of all kinds. You come to see that politicals, in contrast to human beings, are naturally bad. You come to see them as what they are: parasites, pests or both. And if they are violent, dishonest, interfering, lying or hypocritical, or if they show psychopathic tendencies such as arrogance, bad faith, corruption, deceit, recklessness towards others, or untrustworthiness, you feel contempt and loathing for them. They are neither your fellows, nor human beings. You will not excuse or forgive them for what they have done to you or others, unless and until they have fully compensated all their victims, including you. You may even come to think: The way to fix our problems is to get rid of politics. And the way to get rid of politics is to get rid of the politicals.

You come to reject all the mainstream political parties: Tories, Labour, Lib Dems, Greens. You vow never to vote for any of them again. You come to have contempt for politicians that claim to serve and to “represent” ordinary people, but do no such things.

You come to feel contempt for those that use or have used politics to enrich themselves or their cronies, or to violate people’s rights, or to try to impose their agendas on others. You come to feel contempt for those that use tax money for any purpose that fails to benefit the individuals who paid those taxes. You come to feel contempt for the cronies, whether bureaucrat, corporate, academic or otherwise, that hang on to the coat-tails of the politicians, or profit from their agendas.

You come to feel even more contempt for supranational political organizations, such as the European Union and the United Nations. And globalist non-government organizations, such as the World Economic Forum and World Business Council for Sustainable Development. For they have sought to destroy human civilization and human freedom, and to replace it by a top-down tyranny, with themselves at the top.

You come to feel contempt for those that bandy around scares and hype, without providing any evidence that the problem they trumpet is objectively real. You come to feel contempt for anyone that promotes political correctness, or takes part in virtue signalling.

You come to feel strong contempt for anyone that has promoted, supported, made or enforced any “law” that has unjustly harmed or inconvenienced you, or any other innocent person. Or that has violated your rights or freedoms, or the rights or freedoms of other innocent people. You come to think, with Edmund Burke, that bad laws are the worst sort of tyranny. And so, that bad laws should not be obeyed.

Not only do you come to feel contempt for all these individuals and organizations. But you come also to feel a very strong contempt for the psychological traits they often display. Such as: Glibness and surface charm. Arrogance. Lies, deceit or dishonesty. Hypocrisy, failing to practice what they preach. Lack of empathy. Failure to accept responsibility for the consequences of their actions. Lack of remorse. Recklessness. Impatience. Untrustworthiness. These characteristics, you come to understand, are many of the typical behaviours of psychopaths.

Your views on government and the “social contract”

As long as you behave in a convivial manner, respect the equal rights of others, and do not unjustly harm or intend to harm anyone, you are innocent of all wrongdoing. You ought not, therefore, to accept that government has any right at all unjustly to harm you, to impoverish you, to inconvenience you or to violate your rights in any way. Nor does it have any valid authority to impose any political agenda on you. If a government is not a nett benefit to the governed – to all the governed, real criminals excepted – then it is not legitimate.

You also appreciate that you have not signed, or otherwise consented to, any “social contract” that would make you subject to any such government. And even if you had, you have the right to withdraw your consent at any time, if you have a good and provable reason to do so.

Moreover, you come to recognize that, if you did not vote for a party in an election, then you did not give it any licence to make laws to bind you, or taxes to impoverish you.

Your views on the war we’re in

In time, you will come, as I have, to understand that the current political system has failed. It has reached the end of its road.

You will come to understand that governments have lost all legitimacy. They have been taken over by parasites and pests, the very criminals that government is supposed to be instituted to defend us against. These parasites and pests have no respect for the rule of law, or for equality before the law. And they are cynically trashing our rights and freedoms.

You will come to understand that the sham called democracy, far from allowing us all a fair say, has become a negative and divisive force. And that the great majority of politicians, national and local, make no attempt at all to represent us human beings or our views.

You will come to see the corporate, globalist and internationalist élites for the wannabe dictators they are. You will come to understand that they want to ride roughshod over the people of the world, in order to force on us all their own selfish, tyrannical vision of how the world should be.

You will come to understand that now is the time for us human beings worth the name to get up and say “No!” It is time to join together to defend our humanity, our reason, our rights and our freedoms. It is time to join together in first resisting the parasites and pests, then deposing them, then bringing them to justice.

You will come to understand that these problems cannot be fixed by tweaks, or by merely putting new hands in charge. What is needed is far more radical; the total demolition of the current governmental system, the political state, and its replacement by something better.

You will come to understand the nature of the war we’re in. It is a war between two species, both sprung out of the human race, that have diverged away from each other. On the one hand, an economic species, us human beings; on the other, a political species, the parasites and pests. You may even come to compare this war with the long-ago struggles between homo sapiens and the Neanderthals. But this time round, the differences between us and them are not things like stockier physiques or prognathous jaws. The differences are mental. And the area of thought, in which our enemies lack most when compared to us, is ethics and morality. So much so, that I have taken to dubbing our enemies “moral Neanderthals.”

Our enemies’ state of mind

I am coming to see that what we are suffering today has many of the characteristics of what is known as a moral panic. Our enemies, the political parasites and pests, are the instigators and spreaders of this moral panic. And we human beings, who want nothing more than freedom, justice, our human rights and our chance to earn prosperity, are the innocent victims.

I am coming to think that the lies, hype, fear and ad hominems our enemies spout may be more than just propaganda tools.  I think our enemies may be genuinely afraid of something. Deep down inside, do they perhaps feel panic and fear for their own futures? Might they have divined, for example, that the political system, on which their entire privileged, parasitic way of life depends, is not sustainable? That the state is, ethically, already bankrupt; and perilously close to financial bankruptcy, too? And that, on its present course, it will soon fail?

Such a sense of imminent bankruptcy could very easily explain why so much that political governments do today is directed towards getting in more, more, and more “revenue” for their state. Such a sense of panic and fear might also help explain why they rant so much about “safety” and “sustainability,” why they think their scares are “existential” problems, and why they keep on stridently crying, “It’s worse than we thought!” And it could help explain why, every time people lose interest in one set of scares, our enemies dream up new scares to replace them. If it isn’t air pollution, it’s global warming or plastic waste. If it isn’t Reds under the bed, it’s terrorism. If it isn’t paedophiles, it’s pornography. If it isn’t obesity, it’s COVID. If it isn’t over-population, it’s “habitat destruction.” (And yet, they want to destroy our habitat! – the rights, freedoms and justice that we need in order to fulfil ourselves.)

Such a phobia could also explain why they refuse to acknowledge, or even to look at, the facts. They don’t want anyone (least of all themselves) to find out that their apocalyptic claims are unfounded! It could explain why they like to “adjust” data, or even fake the “facts,” to fit their narrative. It could also explain why they are never prepared to debate publicly and openly on the issues, and why they fail to produce hard, objective evidence to prove their accusations. It could explain why they brook no contrarian views, and will often seek to suppress those views, for example by forcing their removal from YouTube or social media. Even though, as they ought to know, such suppressive actions merely make it plain that they cannot refute those views. Could it be, perhaps, that they have so much invested in their scams, that they feel they can’t afford to let the truth come out?

I wonder, also, if this phobia might help to explain their hatred of earned economic success. Their hatred of business actors, interacting with honesty and integrity in the free market, seems to run very, very deep. So much so, that I wonder if they are worried that they themselves, in a system where they cannot use political pull to procure unearned riches, might be unable to survive?

Such a sense of panic and fear could also account for their desire to suppress our freedom of speech, and truths that are inconvenient to them. And for why they seem to want to lock us down into stasis in as many ways as they can, including physically. It could also help to account for their mad, breathless rush to get their plans implemented right now. Oh, and why is extinction one of the things they are so worried about?

What we must not try to do

I come, at long last, to the strategic coda of my five essays. But before I look at what we human beings who love individual freedom, justice and earned prosperity might do to start things moving towards a fix to the problems we suffer today, I will briefly mention two things we must not do.

Firstly, violent revolution is not an option. To try to use initiatory violence would be a tactical error; for our enemies are far better at violence than we are. As well as having weapons we don’t, and manpower trained in their use. It would also be a strategic error; for it would risk losing the moral high ground.

Non-violent and non-disruptive protests, of course, are fine. But do you wonder why the UK government has been making draconian anti-protest laws recently? [[12]]. This looks, to me, like another area in which our enemies have let their minds get spooked. Clearly, they know that what they are doing to us is painful for us, and they expect us to protest about it. So, the cowards are aiming to block off that possibility, by making it hard for us to protest.

Secondly, to form a political party, and seek power through the ballot box, would be to commit another strategic error. It’s trying to play the enemy at his own game; a game natural to him, but not to us. Even if, through some freak occurrence, a new and radical party did manage to get some power, it would likely be swiftly taken over by establishment supporters, and wrecked. (There is a precedent for this: the Movimiento Libertario in Costa Rica). And even if we could avoid that, we would be trying to pull down the system from the inside. The last person to try that was the legendary Samson. And look what happened to him!

I am not sure, either, that political parties outside the mainstream, such as Reform UK, Reclaim or the Social Democrats, are likely to be of much if any real use to us. For my sins, I am still a member of the Reform UK party. It does have a few half way sane policies, notably encouraging fracking, and lower taxes to free up economic activity. And Howard Cox is an interesting candidate for Mayor of London.

But I am becoming less and less sanguine that the party has anything like what it will take to understand and to achieve what is required. They still seem mired inside the political paradigm, instead of recognizing that the system as a whole has to go. Further, rather than concentrating on the most important matters – energy, lowering taxes, ditching the green and “sustainability” agendas, ditching the WHO, ditching anti-car policies nationwide, torching regulations and bureaucracies, making government work for the people instead of against us – they like to bang on about side issues like asylum seekers in boats.

What we can try to do

No: whatever we do, we must retain the moral high ground, and capture more of it whenever we can. Our methods must match our philosophy. They must be peaceful, just, honest, and truthful to the best of our knowledge. They must clearly distinguish us from our enemies the parasites and pests, with their arrogant lies and dishonesties, their violations of our rights, their bad laws and injustices, and their penchant for force.

But we must not let ourselves be tempted to compromise with our enemies in any way. We must allow them no more concern or compassion than they have shown for us. We must not excuse. We must not forgive. We must not forget. We must do everything we can not to let even a single one of them get away with anything.

Engaging on topical issues

We must each of us do what we can to work with and to help those, who are bravely resisting the impositions and violations of our rights and freedoms, with which we are all battered. Each of us should engage on single issues, which are important to us. We should be willing to work with honest people who come from both the “left” and “right” of the (increasingly irrelevant) old-style political spectrum.

Each of us, obviously, should use our particular skills to best advantage in whatever we do to help these causes. And we should only do things we are personally comfortable with.

Improving government processes

Something I would like to see, but as far as I know does not yet exist, is a movement for proper, ethical quality control on government. In the third essay of this set, I very briefly sketched the remit of the quality control function in my scheme of Just Governance. And above, I mentioned the institution of Honesty Audits among my on-going reforms.

Such systems could bring about a great improvement in the way in which government treats people, even if merely tacked on to the current system. For politicians would no longer find it easy to get away with lies or deceptions, or with flouting regulations they themselves were involved in making. Bureaucrats would be held far more accountable. Election fraud would be far more difficult. And government projects, that cannot be shown objectively to be a nett benefit to the people whom government is supposed to serve, would be swiftly cancelled.

Spreading the Re-discovery mind-set

But for me, the most important single thing to do is to spread the new mind-set which I described above. I don’t expect that many will yet feel able to go quite as far as I do. For I have always been cynical about politics; and my attitudes have evolved and hardened over many decades. But ideas like re-discovering our human nature and our human spirit, restoring our confidence in ourselves, smashing the chains of political orthodoxy, reviving our rights and freedoms, and making our planet into a home and garden fit for a civilized species, have the potential to be attractive to very many people.

It will be important, I think, to identify politics, as it is today, as the source of all our woes, and the main target of our ire. Franz Oppenheimer’s famous distinction between the economic means and the political means will also play a key role. This should make it easier for people to contemplate the possibility, that we the economic species, and the political species that rules over us to our harm, have become estranged from each other. Yet the idea that many or most political operators, and by extension the establishment and its political class and cronies, do not behave like us and therefore are in a real sense not us, is one I think many people could quite easily accept, if prompted to consider it.

It will also be important to identify the two overlapping tendencies within users of the political means: the parasites and pests. I like to think these words will strike a chord, in many people’s minds, with the reality of what they feel being done to them. The word politicals to embody our enemies as a whole should also, I like to think, find resonance.

For those less far along in the process of Re-discovery, there will also be a need to raise their level of awareness of the real issues. We will need to wake up those, who have let themselves be drugged into a sleep-walking state by all the propaganda from government, the education system, the BBC and other mainstream media. And we will need to help those, who have let themselves be dragged into a state of unreasoning fear over nothing, to look at the objective facts, and so to understand that the future is not really as bad as they thought after all.

The dangers from the UN, and its IPCC and WHO in particular, must be brought out into the open, for those who are not already aware of them. We also need to keep on calling out other dangerous globalist and internationalist organizations, such as the WEF, WBCSD and C40.

The spreading of these ideas, I hope, can help to create climate change; that is, change for the better in the mental climate. Leading to a widespread and growing desire for change for the better in the system and environment under which we live.

Spreading the wider philosophy

Further, some of the more “philosophical” ideas, such as ethical equality, voluntary society and common-sense justice, may set people thinking in new and better directions. They are all easy to understand in themselves. And yet, they can spur us to think, each in our own way, more deeply about the issues we face, and possible solutions to them. If they can help people to start thinking more deeply about ethics, about what is right and what is wrong for human beings to do, that would be good too.

I will briefly summarize the 12 key ideas of my ethical and political philosophy. I covered them in a little more detail in the section “Where we want to aim for” earlier in this essay:

1.     Identity determines morality principle. Right and wrong behaviours for a species of sentient beings are determined by the nature of the species.

2.     Ethical equality principle. What is right for one to do, is right for another to do under similar circumstances, and vice versa.

3.     Honesty and integrity. In addition to the conventional meanings of the word, honesty is being true to your nature. Integrity is the product of honesty.

4.     The Convivial Code. An ethical code of conduct, encapsulating the behaviours which are right (and, implicitly or explicitly, the behaviours which are wrong) for human beings.

5.     Rights are earned principle. You earn your own rights, by respecting the equal rights of others around you.

6.     Respect for rights principle. If you respect others’ rights, your own rights ought to be sacrosanct.

7.     Judgement by behaviour principle. It isn’t who someone is that matters, only what they do.

8.     Community versus society. A community is a group of people bound together by some shared characteristic, but not necessarily by anything more. A society is a group of people who have agreed to join together in a common cause. The two are not the same.

9.     Voluntary society principle. All societies must be voluntary.

10.  Falsity of the “social contract” fiction. There is no such thing as “society” in the singular. There are only societies.

11.  Common-sense justice principle. Every individual deserves to be treated, over the long run, in the round and as far as practicable, as he or she treats others.

12.  Maximum freedom principle. Except where countermanded by justice, the Convivial Code or respect for rights, every individual is free to choose and act as he or she wishes.

Dealing with our enemies

We must aim to drive a moral wedge between ourselves and our enemies the political parasites and pests. We must aim to get those ordinary people, who have woken up to what is going on, feeling and showing contempt for them; even, perhaps, laughing scornfully at them.

I think that we should focus our attacks, not on them as individuals or as a group, but on their hateful, psychopathic characteristics. To repeat the list I gave earlier: Glibness and surface charm. Arrogance. Lies, deceit or dishonesty. Hypocrisy, failing to practice what they preach. Lack of empathy. Failure to accept responsibility for the consequences of their actions. Lack of remorse. Recklessness. Impatience. Untrustworthiness. The great majority of our enemies show at least two of these characteristics. The worst have most of them.

As far as we can, most of us should avoid even speaking directly with our enemies. As a very wise man once told me: “Don’t try to talk to your enemies. Talk about them.” And it is the same in the other direction. For, over a long time, our enemies have failed to listen with any attention to us. So, why should we bother to listen to them?

We might, though, on rare occasions allow our debating champions to compete against theirs. Just to show how bad and silly their ideas are. But our enemies would probably be too cowardly to accept the debate, anyway.

Moreover, we should make people aware of how scary the simple, natural idea of common-sense justice is likely to seem to our enemies. In the words of the Prophet Obadiah: “As thou hast done, it shall be done unto thee: thy reward shall return upon thine own head.”

The tipping point

John Locke wrote, more than three centuries ago: “But if a long train of abuses, prevarications and artifices, all tending the same way, make the design visible to the people, and they cannot but feel what they lie under, and see whither they are going, it is not to be wondered that they should then rouse themselves, and endeavour to put the rule into such hands which may secure to them the ends for which government was at first erected.”

Already, many of us have identified the “long train of abuses, prevarications and artifices.” The tipping point towards rousing ourselves, I think, will come when enough people come to realize that states and political governments, as they are constituted today, are not their friends, but their enemies. I cannot be sure of just what percentage of the population that will be. But, from what I see and hear, it may come sooner than some expect.

Then we shall be into a scenario like the one I described above, in the section titled “How to make a start on fixing the problems.” And it will be time for someone (I hope it doesn’t have to be me!) to drag our human species, no doubt kicking and screaming, into the new world.

Can our enemies reform themselves?

As to those of our enemies who are honest enough to be open to reforming themselves, we will not completely close the door on them. They can re-join humanity if they want to, as long as they are willing and able to fully meet the conditions for leaving their parasite pen or pest pit. Their fate is entirely up to them.

All they need do is: Cease all disconvivial actions, including aggressions, thefts, dishonesty and violations of rights and freedoms. Ensure they never again do such actions. Make themselves productive and independent in the free market economy. Compensate all those they wronged, in full, with interest, damages and allowance for inflation. And take whatever criminal punishment is appropriate for what they did.

This isn’t much to ask. Any human being worth the name ought to be able to do it. And each positive result will be a win-win-win situation. We get some of the compensation we are owed; they get a fresh start in life; and all of us get another human being to trade with.

There is another parallel with the Neanderthal extinction, which may be useful. We know that the Neanderthals, in the end, managed to contribute a small percentage of our genome. I can only assume that some of them managed to adapt their behaviours sufficiently, to be able to co-operate with homo sapiens. This parallel would suggest that all is not lost (quite yet) for those parasites and pests who are prepared to commit to reforming themselves.

But one thing I am quite sure of: there must be no forgiveness without compensation. And those degenerates that cannot or will not reform themselves, and fail to become convivial human beings, we will simply ostracize. We don’t need them. We don’t want them.

Where we’re going

Thus, I expect, will homo sapiens (the ape too smart for his own good) of today evolve into homo convivendus (the human being fit to be lived with) of tomorrow. And we human beings will claim at last the habitat of peace, freedom and justice, that is rightfully ours.

Quicker than you might expect, we will reduce the quantity of politics in the world to “absolute zero.” The use of Franz Oppenheimer’s political means will no longer be tolerated; all human beings will use the economic means. Our world will become free from politics, from political injustices, from wars, from bad laws, from concerted violations of human rights, from re-distributory, confiscatory or otherwise unjust taxes, and from all the other destructions that have been caused by the state. All human beings will come together into a world-wide convivial community. And our economy will become truly sustainable; in the same way in which a bush fire, or a nuclear reaction, is sustainable.

Our world will be, at last, the right way up. And we will be on our way to a free, just, prosperous, happy future for all human beings worth the name.

The future we deserve

Here is my vision of the future we deserve. The words are my own adaptation from the 15th century carol “Alleluya: A new work is come on hand.” I have also composed music to these words. The music is an edited version of my submission to the BBC Radio 3 Christmas Carol Composing competition back in 2016. I will publish that separately.

Sing loud and high,

Peace and justice for ever!

A new day is come on hand,

New light and warmth from our sun,

To wake us up in every land,

Peace and justice! Peace and justice! Peace and justice!

Now we are free who once were bound,

Now we are free who once were bound,

We may well sing,

Peace and justice for ever!

Now is fulfilled our destiny,

That all we humans must be free,

To make our home and garden,

Home and garden! Home and garden! Home and garden!

Sing we therefore both loud and high,

Sing we therefore both loud and high,

Sing loud and high,

Peace and justice for ever!

Peace and justice, this sweet song,

From human nature it has sprung,

And now it’s our task to make it long,

Peace and justice! Peace and justice! Peace and justice!

Now joy and bliss be us among,

Now joy and bliss be us among,

Who thus can sing,

Peace and justice for ever!

---

[[1]] https://libertarianism.uk/2023/06/21/time-to-take-back-our-civilization-from-the-parasites-and-pests-part-four-diagnosis/

[[2]] https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/06/30/nigel-farage-and-the-corporate-war-on-dissent/

[[3]] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12297207/Now-Sadiq-Khan-draws-plans-charge-motorists-pay-mile-scheme-Londons-roads.html

[[4]] John Locke, Second Treatise of Government, §225

[[5]] https://www.yorku.ca/comninel/courses/3025pdf/Locke.pdf

[[6]] https://polarbearscience.com/2023/06/26/no-evidence-polar-bears-survived-eemian-warmth-because-they-were-not-yet-fully-ice-dependent/

[[7]] First Treatise of Government, §92

[[8]] Second Treatise of Government, §6

[[9]] Second Treatise of Government, §128

[[10]] Second Treatise of Government, §124

[[11]] Second Treatise of Government, §12

[[12]] https://www.amnesty.org.uk/press-releases/uk-government-plan-push-more-anti-protest-legislation-through-lords-must-be-stopped