There was a story the Left used to tell in the early 2010s that everyone took for granted. The era, they said, of big labour strikes was over. The Soviet Union had fallen, Thatcher had crushed the miners, the biggest union organisations were in decline. Like a cooling volcano, the capacity for the sort of large eruptions we read about in the history books didn’t exist anymore. Or so we thought.
Ten years on, the West is undergoing a furious period of labour militancy. Farmers are protesting in the Netherlands, in Germany, and in France. Rail workers are threatening the US economy with shutdowns over pay increases and a lack of paid sick leave. In Canada, truckers shut down several border crossings and occupied Ottawa for the better part of a month. British nurses and Canadian teachers are on the verge of mass walk-outs. In France, nuclear industry workers threaten strike action, while a strike among refinery workers earlier this year led to acute fuel shortages, with hour-long queues and rationing at petrol stations.
This wave of militancy displays no signs of cresting soon. If anything, given the general economic situation, things are likely to get worse: inflation is exploding, energy is in short supply, and the cost of living is rising. Workers will get angrier, and they have the ability to make their anger felt in painful ways.
Intriguingly, this revival of labour militancy has done nothing to alter the fortunes of the radical or populist Left. It has only revealed that the rift between them and the working class across the West has become more or less permanent. Six years after Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn saw their stock soar, legitimate worker anger often finds itself being dismissed as a tool of the “far-Right”, and labour militancy is feared and despised.
It’s easy to laugh at the Left in this situation — but its arc from enthusiasm to horror in the face of actual protests and labour struggles out in the street is fairly rational. The Left’s fear speaks to one of our era’s central political conflicts: a growing consciousness among working people that the biggest dividing line runs between the people employed in the “real” economy and those working in the “virtual” one.
Over the last decade, a number of terms have been invented to describe this divide, from “Professional Managerial Class” to “the email caste”. None of these labels are perfect, but their growing popularity speaks to the fact that more and more people can now see that there really is a conflict at play here. The man driving a truck or a tractor and the revolutionary working for a billionaire-backed NGO are not only not natural allies, but their different roles in the economy increasingly make them real enemies.
It is no surprise that farmers end up on this struggle’s frontline. One absurd illustration of the deep contradictions in our debt-laden, de-industrialised Western economies can be seen — where else? — on Twitter and TikTok, where you can watch clips of young, radical climate protesters who want to “abolish farming”. Farming, as it turns out, is so very damaging to the planet in terms of CO2 pollution that we must do away with the industry altogether.
Put aside the ludicrousness of this wish, which if implemented would doom us all to starvation. Rather, consider the fact that we live in a society where having this position — fighting against farming for the sake of climate change — is not only possible but also admired. For young people in college towns, the question of where the food comes from is completely abstract; and as they plod along their chosen life path, from university radicalism to an NGO to government service and then back again, they need not encounter anything to make them change their opinion of the world. Their disconnect from material reality — from the farmers working hard to grow their crops, and from the truckers who make sure the food shows up on the shelves — is nearly complete. Student climate protestors do not seem to realise that food does not grow inside the supermarket.
More perniciously, a growing crisis of over-regulation created, then driven, by “the email caste” is also taking shape. This ever-growing body of ordinances only creates frustration and anger among the material workers who have to live by them. It is not that these rules are necessarily malicious. To take one example, the idea that we should make the internal combustion engine redundant by the mid-2030s is probably motivated by genuine concerns for the environment. The problem is that these laws are completely disconnected from reality.
Last year, the Canadian trucker Gord Magill asked a simple, radical question: “How essential are the ’email job’ caste?” Magill’s essay was one early example of a new class consciousness, slowly brewing in the West. It was an open acknowledgement that there is an “us vs them” divide that refuses to fit into the Left’s conception of the “99% vs the 1%”. For Magill, it is the farmers, the truckers, and the aeroplane mechanics who comprise the “us”. And it is the NGO employees, the activist regulators, and the managers who make up the more immediate foe.
Whether you’re watching a farmer protest in the Netherlands or a trucker occupation in Canada, or even a wildcat airline pilot strike in Florida, there are growing echoes of this analysis everywhere. The figure of the enemy today is increasingly no longer the capitalist in the top hat. It is Klaus Schwab; it is the manager and the regulator. They hope to close down your farm, digitise your currency, and abolish private ownership. At one point during the 20th century, the figure of the “social engineer” was popular inside the worker-dominated social democratic parties of the West. In 2022, that same social engineer has now become a hated enemy. He is no longer seen as having any good intentions towards ordinary working people, nor can he even be trusted to understand how the real world works.
The 2020s, then, promise to be a decade filled with discontent and increasingly dramatic shows of worker militancy. Beyond inflation, beyond anger at the rising cost of fuel, heating and food, there is now a simmering political rage motivating people to take to the streets and the pickets. Like Gord Magill, workers are deciding that they’ve had enough of being ruled by an “email caste”. If email workers no longer care about the real economy they’ve left behind, why should workers care about them?
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SubscribeI think its a fair understatement to suggest that the author might just be onto something.
Its a theme that various opinion writers at The Guardian have opportunistically leaped upon in recent months, though always keeping the analysis (if one could even call it that) vague enough to conceal their total complicity in the war against the very people that they now feign interest about. To them the ‘class war’ angle is nothing more than a convienient cudgel to be used against the Tories; a battle cry shouted to inflame the readership and to allow them to pretend – if only for a few munutes – that the newspaper doesn’t completely epitomise the ‘progressive’ assault on the working class.
If you want a historical record of how this shift occured – how the left abandoned the working class – one is readily availble in the archived opinion peices & attached comments churned out by The Guardian.
From Brexit, to the pandemic, to the red wall shift, to the issue of climate change, to the coverage of trucker protests, to the hysterically cried ‘threat to democracy’ whenever there’s a domestic or international development not in line with faux left middle class sensibilities, the tone is immediately hostile and dismissive. Any objection to the editoral line in the comments are crushed by the laptop class attack dogs who leap to smear and discredit any dissent or concerns – concerns that without fail later reveal themselves to entirely justified and shouldered more often than not entirely by working people who have been insulted and dismissed as cranks or extremists for daring to ask questions.
Nothing is clearer to me today today than the fact that when it comes to the ‘progressive’ omelette, we, the working people are the eggs.
There’s a reckoning coming.
Nothing much has really changed, you know. 100 years ago the middle class left thought the solution to the problem of the working class was sterilisation (the Webbs) or just plain murder (GBS). Guardian style leftism ha always been more about control freakery and OCD than about compassion.
There is a difference between the working class and the under class. Many working class people would agree with the Webbs about people who won’t work. Someone who went down a hole in the ground at 16, and is now working in a distribution centre on the site of his old colliery, or coughing his guts up in an abandoned pit village while his wife works as a carer because her pension has been delayed to 66, doesn’t have room for compassion for ‘them as won’t work’. Neither do I.
No able bodied person has the right not to work and feed off the state. It’s called laziness.
This a good point. The progressive left increasingly does not represent the issues of anyone who actually has to get out of bed in the morning and go to work. So in my city there is endless advocacy for subsidized housing, needles, legalized drugs, etc, for our drug addicted underclass – but no one advocates for the working family that has both parents working two crappy jobs to make ends meet.
Be fascinated what city you lie in. In the UK and Europe the Left do little but advocate for working families …
Caroline, It is a necessity in the scheme of things to make some people unnecessary, not needed, and to be sure that as few as is possible work with as many jobs as can be wrung out of them to keep things running well for the virtual classes. So don’t attack those you believe to be lazy as they are doing their very important bit in this scheme, i.e. not working. It’s just that it is too embarrassing to eliminate them entirely after what Germany did [blush]. So, we have to have them hanging around looking lazy for the time being. There will come a time when your anger is sufficiently charged and a tidy scheme, not too vulgar, will emerge and they can be mercifully and nicely dispatched.
T.B. Shaw and T. Roosevelt were both big on such eugenics also.
George Bernard Shaw was a pacifist!
Sarcasm, right?
I have just found out that the BBC world service has been funded for over thirty years by Qatar. Who would have imagined it.
OMG!
There has to be a Reckoning. But I fear it will firstly take shape as a economic one – the inflation + debt + recession nightmare triggered by THEIR Lockdown madness. But the perpetrators are protected by their allies the BBC and MSM who never ever will make the connection between THEIR hysteria and lockdown support and the pain felt by the unprotected private sector. They will say – oh its Brexit! Or call It a Cost of Living Crisis. The State Virtual Class & acolytes are INSULATED from the repercussions of their lockdown tyranny & economic incompetence. We Londoners homeowners secured a million pounds profit 1995-2010 in unearned and un windfall taxed profit. The Midas Machine has entrenched the ruling technocratic NMI class – the propetocracy – and I cannot see how they will ever lose their absolute grip on the levers of power. Nothing short of a total Minsky meltdown – a super crash – will end their grip on the Blairite EU State that has ruled us from the 90s…and does so to this day, swatting away the tiny Brexit Executives like flies.
The Grauniad has a lot to answer for.
I feel like we need to come up with or start using news terms because “left” and “right” have lost almost all meaning in modern politics.
Feudalism is a pretty good place to start.
“ … a global return to a feudal system—one ruled by tech giants, justified and bolstered by a clerisy of professionals in the academy and the media, and featuring a massive and growing underclass of workers who cannot compete in the modern meritocracy.” Joel Kotkin.
Sounds almost like the Script for Rollerball in the 70’s
“The game was created to demonstrate the futility of individual effort. And the game must do its work. The Energy Corporation has done all it can, and if a champion defeats the meaning for which the game was designed, then he must lose. I hope you agree with my reasoning.”
And now let us go torch a tree.
Technofeudalism?
The tories seem to be planning it that way. Small businesses are the way forward but they cain them. The conglomerates will bring in foreign views and are likely to have a high level of WEF infuluence. Our enemies now are the transglobal corporations who answer to nobody.
It’s not exclusively tech giants. Tech enables the neo-feudal oligopoly, for sure, but tech giants are at best co-stars in the neoliberal elite, no different to plutocrats at the commanding heights of any core industry. At the apex of our ruling class power pyramid it’s the familiar ol’ banker, back with a vengeance: the financier fund trillionaires, the lineages of sovereign land, etc. In other words, the RENTIERS.
The “clerisy of professionals” are the rentier flunkeys, so spineless or so brainless or so ambitious of moving up the class ladder they’re happy to be well-paid bureaucrats for the imposition of predatory debt peonage – HR professionals, gatekeepers for UHNW institutions, house trained academics, media manufacturers of consent, think tank and NGO money launderers, bullshit spigot virtue horders, yadda yadda yadda.
I thought the ‘managerial / email’ class HAD come up with a ‘new’, or fashionable, term, it’s called ‘White supremacy’. Obviously, it’s not really new, it’s just that ‘fash-is t’, or ‘race-is t’ have lost something of their ‘piquancy’ through over use. Don’t worry though, it won’t last long, there’ll be a new term coming along anytime soon I’m sure, probably something along the lines of ‘Enemy of the state’. It’ll make arresting, and sending people off to ‘re-education’ camps, all that bit easier.
They are the sort of people whom Guards and Cavalry officers describe as ” Wash the car on Sunday dross”!!!
I wish I’d read that before I washed the car yesterday.
Is that car worship on sunday?
What we have today is the goodies and the crooks or cheaters. If we can sort them out life will be a lot simpler and happier. The vax ended up with lots of cheaters feeding from the trough containing vax money and denying any wrongdoing. These days you can have a degree and still be a crook. Things have changed.
We need to recognise that left/right no longer fully categorise many of the debates we’re having, but that does not mean that the huge ideological gulf doesn’t still exist between those who possess a religious conviction in a large powerful State, and those who understand that it is impossible to have such a thing without draconian measures that destroy personal liberty.
Excellent article. I think Left and Right should be replaced by deLuded and Realist given that anyone who opposes leftist ideology is considered right wing by its proponents. Those who want to ‘decolonise the curriculum’ by removing any reference to or work of those identified as offenders by leftist ideologues seem to be oblivious to the extent they themselves have benefitted from the fruits of western civilisation. Currently, there are attempts to decolonise maths, to remove parts of it; anyone who has any real understanding of maths knows how ludicrous the idea is: it would lose internal consistency and coherence, it would become useless like an engine with parts removed, it is a truly mad idea and demonstrates how profoundly ignorant are its perpetrators and adherents. The history of maths either reflects the rise of the great civilisations: Babylonian, Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Muslim, European, or is the direct product of colonisation: depending on your point of view.
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-sinister-attempts-to-decolonise-mathematics/
Nothing is more irritating and hypocritical than watching these woke Warriors crying foul over past slavery via their iPhones. They are made in China via a form of slavery which is the most inexcusable of all, given how far civilisation should’ve come since ‘we whites’ engaged in slave trading, before fighting for its end, so long ago.
And their absolute conviction of their moral superiority.
Not to mention the child labour used in the mining of resources for batteries.
I was actually looking for a link to a cartoon about that. It featured Greta Thunberg and a Tesla but couldn’t find it.
Here’s a Greta Thunberg thermostat that scowls at you when you turn it up – to hold you over until you find it.
https://babylonbee.com/news/new-greta-thunberg-thermostat-scowls-at-you-when-turning-the-heat-up
The idea that you increase social cohesion by promoting race based prejudice through diversity is obviously absurd but it does help to maintain control by dividing and ruling. Much of the civil service produces nothing useful but their control on the levers of regulatory approval gives them great power. Much of the shortage of heavy goods drivers was down the DVLA ‘s failure to issue new licences in a timely fashion which, of course, helped to fuel the idea that the problem was Brexit a message the bureaucratic class was happy to foster.
Strikes for more pay etc are fundamentally conservative nowadays since the aim is to restore the standard of living that has been eroded by inflation. The fact that they are promoted by Union bosses for allegedly left wing motives is simply part of their push to entrench the bureaucratic class further.
WRT the civil service, not fit for purpose springs to mind.
I am amazed how the civil services resists being sorted out all these years. They are a law unto themselves and government doesn’t know how to control them.
Been saying that for years.Moreover, to all intents and purposes, they switched places.
This is BIG. We are stumbling toward a profound understanding of the New World Order and the all out culture war ahead. Virtuals v Materials is the foundation stone. A violent disconnect or chasm has opened up in our society between these two. We must learn fast who is with and who is against not just materials as defined but those sympathisers who believe a traditional order is being erased by the Virtual and State clerisy. We must see how malign and destructive the Virtual assault on our values is. The new liberal graduate class post 1980s and ruling elite that has become dominant in the UK’s non industrial welfarist state (and wealthy via the rigged property market and state pay & pensions) are waging an all out on long treasured values. That is the freedom they enjoy having cut away from the rest of us. From their bubble they attack; our History & patriotism. Nation sovereignty. Our private SME sector & the idea of Enterprise. Farming. Hydrocarbons and cheap energy. Women and biological sex. Border controls. All these warped identitarian credos are promoted by our State and its Virtual clerisy via its equality laws – meaning they are detached both economically AND socially/culturally. There is no political party independent of them who will stand up for us. Labour is their core base. The meek wet Tories their lazy accomplices.
Lockdown revealed the ugly authoritarian hatreds lurking within this now wholly detached class with their mitts on all the levers of power. Sadly, not all materials are natural allies either. NHS nurses, leftie lawyers, RMT thugs and public sector strikers are NOT allies of farmers or truckers in this conflict. They side with the corrupted ever growing State under whose branches the Virtuals thrive. But to know and to see a hostile enemy through the fog is a first and important step.
It certainly appears that way. The tories have been tried and found wanting. I am fed up with their woke. It’s all image and no substance.
You are getting the wrong end of the stick and coming out all fucked up. This virtuals vs physicals bollax needs to stop, its not a good description. This website loves a class war headline at the moment. Agree with much of the article upto the point of this description of virtual vs physical. If its gunna pitch people vs klaus swabb and the ngos/ corporations that is the divide! Do not seek to divide normal people along class lines, or by occupation. This is a handful of crazy billionaires and old guys that have far too much money and a fucked up agenda. If you’re a for real beleiver in the great reset you should be able to see that is exactly what they want! Divide and conquer, these movements, blm, extinction rebellion, just stop oil are receiving millions of pounds from ‘American philanthropists’ to do just that, radical nutters at either extreme are a product of spending to much time in weird corners of the Internet funded by these people, look how Cambridge analytica was able to manipulate the content people see on their phone. They are not mass movements they are funded shit shows. We need to keep trying to reach these people and talk them out of it, using facts and reasoned arguments not alienate them completely, come up with a better idea, a better movement. Some are trying. We are all so busy bashing each other we are not tackling the real issue! Nurses and public sector workers are not the enemy in the fog mate. Neither are people that work on their laptops, or vote labour. They are perfectly hard working, normal members of British society. The wef is a body that represents multi national corporate interests, not ‘virtual workers’ or necessarily even the left. They represent people that have pushed an agenda to divide us. If we want to change anything any movement to dethrone these enormous multi billion dollar companies and take on the elites that run them will take us being united, together. It would have to be enormous, cohesive, we would have to put aside every other difference to achieve this, these corporations and the institutions they wield their power through are enormous, better funded than any grassroots political movement could hope to be – how would you even go about it? They’d come after you with everything they had. Look what happened when ‘the market’ didn’t like the budget! We can’t even start until we can all clearly comprehend and agree what the problem is. Its national democratic interests vs corporate do as we tell you or we will tank you interests, if anything. Seen people bashing the ‘underclass’ again too, sad to see guys, this really isn’t what this is about. If multinational corporate interests hadn’t offshored everything in the interest of greater profits, these people might have more opportunities. If the corporations paid their bloody taxes as they should we would much better off too.
Just wait for Zuckerberg’s Metaverse to join forces with armed Boston Dynamics robots. Could get real ugly fast.
“NHS nurses, leftie lawyers, RMT thugs and public sector strikers are NOT allies of farmers or truckers in this conflict. They side with the corrupted ever growing State” Sure they do Walter! 😀 😀 😀 NHS nurses who were on the front line through a decade of cuts and then through the nightmare of Covid into a cost of living crisis?!? Sure they are MASSIVE fans of ‘the state! 😀
“Open” -V- “Closed” societies after Karl Popper?
Not really. The Right still stands for funnelling money to the rich and the Left stills stands for redistribution. Right wing states across the Western world have presided over decades of the former.
Sometimes I think the world would be better off if a bunch of farmers ran the show. They are connected not only to the land, but the means of production as well. They embrace technology and are driven to improve productivity.
No so much for the technocratic and ruling elite. They are so far removed from the mechanics of the economy, they simply can’t grasp the implications of their policies. They live in a bubble – politicians, bureaucrats, academics, finance, NGOs, educators, media – and continually reinforce their shared belief systems.
The leader of the NDP in Canada, the party that is supposed to represent the working class, is a trust-fund baby who went to private school in the States and entered politics almost as soon as he completed university. He’s never had a real job. He has likely never associated with working class people outside the few remaining within the political party. It’s no wonder he condemned the truckers protest in Ottawa – the very people he is supposed to represent.
That’s why we end up getting lockdowns and vax mandates. Some health bureaucrat suggests the best way to beat Covid is by locking everyone inside their homes. Sure, they’re vaguely aware that shutting down the economy will have consequences, but they don’t know anyone personally who will be impacted by the draconian measures. So they throw a few bucks at the working class and think the problem is solved.
Same thing with net zero. It doesn’t take a rocket surgeon to figure out that an economy fueled solely by renewables is an economic disaster waiting to happen. But everyone in the technocratic and ruling elite think the world will become some Mad Max hellscape if we don’t eliminate CO2 emissions. They live in a bubble. They all share the same beliefs. They don’t grasp that half the world will burn every last piece of coal they can dig up.
I don’t think the working class is opposed to a technocratic and ruling elite. Afterall, someone has to do it. What they detest are people so disconnected from reality they can’t see the looming crisis their solutions will create. A political confrontation is almost inevitable.
Spot on. Thanks.
I was driving home at about 10pm las week. It had long since gone dark and there was a farmer out ploughing a field under headlights
Bless him trying to make a living.
Absolutely. I’ve worked with farmers for years. Their perception of things is always refreshing.
Making a farm work is an education in itself. It would make you a very no nonsence type of person I would think. You cannot dwell on crackpot theories in that line.
The various excellent tv documentaries in recent years about farmers and farming (Not Clarkson!) have shown them to work very hard and to care deeply about their animals.
It must really annoy those eco warriors who hate farmers.
Well said Jim. It is certainly true these days. A down to earth person with wisdom is worth a dozen of these educated idiots. A wise farmer would be very good in government. It’s hard to get more down to earth than that.
They are huge lobbyists for bio fuels though, which have dramatically larger carbon footprints than fossil fuels when you take fuel, fertilizer and fermentation energy costs into account.
Problem with the Dutch farmers for example is they are not connected with the land. Sure their farmers sit on land but they are indoor meat factories with massive pollution. That was the issue.
In the affluent part of North London where I live it is striking how quickly it has become acceptable to express extreme and quite visceral class hatred, particularly among the Guardian reading ‘progressives’.
Essentially the conflict arises from the simple fact that you can’t have the open borders that so massively enrich the asset owners at the same time as democracy and good social provision.
Progressives tolerated and even promoted these things so long as they needed a healthy drone class to meet their material needs. Now that all those things are imported – including the drones themselves – social solidarity is no longer required. Once their children inherit their trillions in unearned property wealth we will be firmly back in the eighteenth century.
Oil the guillotines! Invest in baskets!
Now Now.
The “Rente Seekers” as Fukuyama calls them in ‘The origins of Political Order”. Just started reading this. Very interesting.
Correct. Absolute terror at the possible loss of their massive property wealth posed by Brex and an end to the Midas machine triggered a full scale mental derangement in the London and urban class. This morphed with groupthink into a vile form of hatred. Remember how groupthink roiled their febered panicked brains into a demented loathing of pasty oiky gammon thick raycists northeners. All should have been denied the vote. This class were and are still driven by naked selfish greed. If you do not believe me, map the areas which saw the most obscene property bubbles in the UK to the Remainer vote. A total fit.
While I agree with the analysis, I find it depressing, because I’m a free-market libertarian who believes in small government and that a vibrant small/medium business economy is the best way for the private sector to create wealth and drive growth.
The problem is that this idea is regarded as the enemy by both camps described in the article: organised labour regards the entrepreneur as the other side of a zero-sum-game in which workers prospects compete directly with the profit motive, while the managerialist class sees the entrepreneur as a thorn in the side of the agenda to destroy stakeholder capitalism completely in favour of whatever hare-brained scheme they wrongly believe will be a superior replacement.
One thing in the artlcle I thought was slightly mistaken was the inclusion of farmers within the “real economy” class as being the same as the truck driver: I say that the farmer is closer to the entrepreneur than he is to the labourer, because he is running a business, not working for one. Very often the waged worker is as ignorant of what the farmer does in business terms as the political activist is of how the farmer provides everyone’s food.
Either way though, how on earth did we all become so collectively ignorant?
Truck drivers (especially in the UK and North America) are often self-employed or part of a small transport business. So can legitimately be compared to land-owning or tenanted farmers.
The transport I have dealt with were all pretty large companies, not to rule out the few truck owners, but I wouldn’t compare them to farmers. Good at driving though.
I agree. The point has been made above as well.
There are extreme liberals who seem to be a larger number than the extreme right wingers
That aside the bigger fight is the private sector v the state/public sector – not just on some financial issues but more importantly on mind set and culture – far from being public servants they behave arrogantly with entitlement and do things “in their own time ” with many still wfh.
The public sector who largely retained their defined benefit pension, even if they are now career average not final salary linked, seem to be uneducated as to the vast financial benefit these confer and the cost to the taxpayer; in the UK the NHS liabilities increase by £120bn a year whilst NHS management says their employee contributions of c8%-10% are in excess of current pensions in payment – – the NHS contributions go up with salaries and net hires and there is a huge wave of baby boomers about to retire that means these spiralling liabilities are about to come crash through as cash costs.
Local Councils are pushing up council tax – for salaries and pensions
Civil servants still get 30% contributions from the taxpayer on top of their 8%, on their alpha pension for new entrants
The total public sector pension liability is £2.3 trillion, larger than the national debt
Its time the MPs led by example, switched all their pensions to DC going forward – accrued benefits protected- as the private sector did 20 years ago
They could then do the same across the public sector…
The private sector cannot go on being tax slaves to so called “public sector servants” who waste our money and show no respect for our hard earned taxes
That is the new class war
Same thing is happening in the USA in ‘blue states’. In my state of Connecticut, its 3.5 million residents are beholden to the 45,000 public pension holders which in turn is controlled by the Democrat Party. Republicans, ie the workers, the ‘little people’ have NO representation in Congress. The Democrats and public unions have a lock on power. CT didn’t have an income tax until 1981 when it was established to cover pension costs but given the ‘public purse’, pension benefits & costs only increased and in turn taxes and regulations. The high costs are slowly draining the state. In the past 30 years, the state has had a net decrease in population of 500,000, businesses are leaving (Aetna insurance, GE,etc) resulting in fewer well-paying jobs – so young people move elsewhere, usually down South to ‘freer economies’. It’s an insidious cycle which remains because of complicit leadership.
Just like our MP’s who periodically vote themselves a rise. The rest of us have to play the risk game.
Sounds like the state workers will be sucking off a large amount from our taxes to support their lavish non risk inflation proof pensions. This has been the case for decades.
Brilliant. Yes. If only the meek Tories had the courage to end this massive distortion. It would combat the State debt problem better than anything. I am so sick of the failure to recognise also how the Public Sector and Technocracy is home to thousands of ‘The Rich’!! The no show wfh GPs are all payed over 100k. Today the papers screamed at Hunt for not allowing super rich consultants to take home 2m pensions!!!! We have allowed this pernicious idea of Public Sector Good Private Sector Evil Greed to take hold (thanks BBC). But there are only 400,000 top rate rax payers in the whole country. Council leaders MPs, top Civil Servants, NHS managers and armies of dodgy charity and Quango bosses must surely constitute a huge proportion of our greedy evil RICH (tax them they chant!!!!). But no one would believe it given the incessant class war propagsnda of BBC and Left.
Brilliant, thank you for a succinct description of the HORROR that is Public Sector Pensions.
These mostly parasites should be reduced to ‘Half Pay’ as it was it the fabled “Good Old Days”.
Other
Otherwise there will be war:- “Sine Missione”.
Working people who belong to unions and take industrial action for higher wages are refusing to be victims. In Britain, they voted for Brexit to end cheap labour and they are now in the strong position of labour shortages that they knew would happen as a result. They are returning to the old days of the ‘aristocracy of labour’; heavily unionised industries like the railway workers achieving their aims through collective action and bargaining.
The laptop, Remainer class hate this because they want the working class to be victims. They hate the largely white, working class men who take pride in their skills and labour and want to be able to earn enough to keep their families without government handouts. They support UBI because it creates low aspiration and dependency, and they are horrified by the traditional working class’s frustrations with benefit dependent neighbours and the apparent inability to prevent illegal immigration, as well as their contempt for identity politics.
The working class just isn’t grateful!
Right so, Remainers have laptops and Brexiteers
are working class and don’t have laptops.
God help us.
I don’t know. Pratically everyone has a laptop, a smartphone or a computer.
This made me laugh, totally agree, this debate down here in the comments is descending into insanity, seen someone call nurses ‘enemies in the fog’……… What can you say, really.
Strange how they cannot turn off the tap of continual illegal immigration. Do they actually want it? What is going on? One wonders what their aim is.
Are you saying that those who voted Remain are against unions and strikes?
I suppose it is a proof of God’s existence that the chaps that were all about justice for the oppressed — the educated, the evolved, darling! — would turn into the world’s foremost unjust oppressors.
False prophets and the anti-Christ come to mind.
Who knows. Maybe the ten kings who rule with him might turn out to be the trillionaire globalists.
Ten kings without a kingdom – stateless maybe or globalists?
It appears that way starting with Soros, Gates and Schwab.
The ‘battle lines’ are blurred and confused.
There is also a rift between public and private sector workers.
The climate alarmist kids have been indoctrinated by their teachers at both state schools and at universities (both essentially public sectors – supported by the taxpayer).
Public sector workers have very generous benefits with Flexi-time, maternity leave, generous annual leave (60 days in some cases) and little or no control over ‘sick leave’ – thanks to the gift of COVID. They can’t be fired and can abuse the ‘system’ whilst the pay check keeps coming.
Private sector workers, such as farmers, truck drivers and businessmen have to work for a living. If they don’t work, they don’t earn and they starve or lose their homes.
If the private sector fails – where is the money coming from to pay for the public sector?
And the public sector is growing. In post-pandemic Canada, 90% of the new employment hires have been public sector employees. This is not hyperbole. It’s the actual number. Coupled with 20 years of deindustrialization, the unproductive laptop class has become a dominant political force. This is why we see such damaging economic policies.
It figures with the president you have. Lefties will always increase the size of the public sector and grab the money to support it. Maybe they can add another department to create busts and statues of Trudeau all over the country like Stalin and others did.
This is a more accurate analysis than the UnHerd piece.
It’s quite amazing how the publicly-funded classes go to such lengths to thwart the efforts of the private sector businesses who basically pay their wages, benefits and pensions.
“pay” used that way is an active verb that implies agency to some extent. Might be more accurate to use something like “are robbed and extorted”.
Spot on! Thank you.
Yes. But remember in their heads lockdown unveiled a new freedom and joy. They tasted the magic money tree. Anything it takes. It was a revolutionary moment. They did not need a private sector. They can just print the money. And they did…
except they don’t. Traitors that they are they offshore 100s of billions of pounds.
Quite so. It appears very cushy. Kind of cradle to grave no risk benefits every way which way, but maybe our risks develop in us good character? If by chance we do do well our prosperity will fill their coffers as well. I don’t mind contributing my share but at the rate of growth in the public sector it is becoming unfeasable.
By and large, leaving aside the NHS on your side of the pond, public sector “workers” aren’t workers. Even teachers are firmly on the Virtual side of the divide, as we saw them working remotely all through the pandemic school closures.
I guess I’m very much part of the “e-mail caste” in that I work in an office and manage a somewhat small team. However, I have far more sympathy for my compatriots who go out and do the jobs that are physically demanding, potentially dangerous and can result in them being away from home or sometime than with most of my fellow e-mailers. These guys have been sold a very raw deal the last decade at least and any attempt to assert themselves is met with some of the most outrageous allegations one could read. For what it’s worth, I salute you guys.
You sound like you are doing a good job. It’s hard to sit all day and then have to exercise an hour or two just to stay in trim, so physical work has it’s benefits.
One thing that strikes me is how the debate is framed around Western democracies. I suppose there’s an easy rationale in terms of evolved dialogue where there’s at least some semblance still of free speech. But what about the rest of the industrialised world? What about BRIC? Does this debate have anything to say about class tensions – new or old – in these economies?
The reason this should be a matter of concern is that if what’s emerging as a new paradigm (Real v Virtual) affects only Western economies, it confers a further dimension to the disadvantage we seem to be wishing upon ourselves in the battle against authoritarianism. This may well be deliberate, in terms of Western elites taking a stance that wouldn’t look out of place in the Kremlin or the CCP. It’s almost as if those regimes are admired for their abilities to manipulate and control. The Western elites then, might be reframed as the Left whilst the Real working classes might be framed as the Right.
But as emerging economies grow in strength, will a similar type of consciousness emerge within them? If Virtual dominance relies on the stepladder of education, why wouldn’t the same tensions become a factor in those huge populations? If it’s a matter of the traditions of free speech not having been established, one can also see why there’s a concerted effort by the Virtuals to undermine free speech in the West. A new paradigm indeed, but one which must be resisted at all costs.
I have a Chinese friend, living in china. I can tell you, their rebelliousness is alive and growing.
They clamp down hard there though. A very brutal regime.
It’s called corruption Steve. We have to name it before we can deal with it.
Very interesting comment. Fits in with arguments in Jonah Goldberg’s “Suicide of the West”.
Another Unherd article – there seem to be more of them by the day – which completely misses the point.
“… the capacity for the sort of large eruptions we read about in the history books didn’t exist anymore …”
The *capacity* never went away, but the *conditions* weren’t right, following a benign period of steady economic growth, full employment, peace in the West etc. So the radical left loonies created the conditions (lockdowns, cLiMaTe EmErGeNcY, ‘trans rights’, ‘white privilege’, ‘colonial guilt’, etc. And, bingo, here we are.
This is not “real economy” workers versus some imagined “email caste”. It’s a small minority of neo-Marxist globalist nutters versus humanity; the result of the Long March and oligarchical greed, greatly assisted by a huge dose of organised propaganda and censorship.
It’s Orwellian.
How very interesting! For some years now, and I first became aware of the phenomenon when my daughters were at prep school, via parents there, that there is a new, essentially petit bourgeois ” caste” of people one or ‘ one and a half’ generations from working class, for whom IT and technology, plus its invasion of the middle management, has provided well paid jobs/ careers for people whom In my unfortunate experience are utterly devoid of any redeeming character traits and combine an odious form of below peering snobbery with a glistening green upwards facing envy- fury. They are devoid of so much as a scintilla of moral courage, will do anything within what they would call ” peower” to keep their jobs/cars/ holidays and peer group approval. Upon brief reflection, they do provide one service, and that is to be laughed at and derided.
Unfortunately many of them are Tory MPs or Party Members!
I’d say ALL are ” ToileTories”!!!
Besides you and I, are there any real Tories left?
That is true. Why are they never terfed out in exchange for a better candidate? You try and get a better candidate? The local party don’t answer your communication. Just silence and so we carry on with the woke MP because it is a safe seat.
Couldn’t agree more, what a terrible tragedy, and I very much doubt our children and grandchildren will forgive us for not doing something about it.
In short the most appalling DERELICTION of duty!
Mea culpa!
An arrogant woke lot they are.
The “Three Estates” in which “Those Who Pray” have become “Those Who Administer”, “Those Who Fight” are “Those Who Steal and Betray” and “Those Who Work”….. Well, plus ca change….
On the contrary, the bourgeoisie need the left to prevent a revolt. From the role of the early unions in keeping the struggle within acceptable bounds, to the socialist parties’ support for the first world war, to various things I was involved in, where the left-wing parties always undermined the struggle, such as the summer 1993 strike at University College Hospital, London, the various parts of the left have always been instruments of the ruling class against the workers.
Modern American leftism is cruder, as obviously anti-proletarian as the Ku Klux Klan, and just as racist.
The workers need to reject the left.
Since Hobbes and with the subsequent example of the sans-culottes dancing through the streets of Paris with heads on sticks, the property classes have always feared the sleeping leviathan of the mob. However, even now the Police would admit they only retain control through perception and consent. It’s a bluff.
The police when they are police are essential. Unfortunately they seem to be hidden away like the doctors and appear to not be doing their job mostly. In some of these old films they appear to be fighting crime.
Dockson of d**k Green for example.
Hobbes’ Leviathan was the Government which was supposed to protect people from lawlessness and the mob.
A good angle. Never seen that before.
You think the bourgeoisie actually have any power any more? Certainly not as usually defined in Marxist terms. Actual capitalists only control (mostly small) privately held companies. The rest are controlled by professional managers — on my side of the pond 80% of the controlling shares in publicly traded companies are voted by the managers at BlackRock. State Street, Vanguard and Berkshire Hathaway, not by their beneficial owners, the actual bourgeois capitalists (or members of the working class who have a pension fund or 401(k)).
“Bourgeoisie” is a more abstract concept than simply “a bunch of rich blokes that own factories”. If the means of production is now controlled by a different class, they are the bourgeoisie. The classic example is the Soviet Union. Those who controlled its production were the bourgeoisie.
What’s the point of dividing workers with these useless terms. Just because I sent emails for my job doesn’t mean I’m somehow opposed to striking rail workers and nurses who are paid more than me.
Absolutely. One issue which will get in the way of an alliance of the producers and libertarians is cretinous categorisation of striking workers from the RMT for example, as “thugs” as below. The fact is that many relatively low paid public sector workers are becoming the target for disdain and recommended for slashing reductions. It’s their bosses in the bureaucracy and government stupid! Most ordinary people have been gaslighted, terrified and trolled by a combination of pandemic politics, eco-doom-casting and crazed identity politics. People need understanding and persuasion. That won’t be easy but, as we are seeing in China, with workers protesting against the Stalinist Biosecurity state, there will be overreach, outrage and resistance. We need to be ready for that and adopting Thatcherite attitudes working class struggle will get in the way of that.
I agree. These faux-libertarians love to talk about small-state and limited government until it comes to crushing worker dissent.
The image we have of Left and Right is often a straight line with opposing sides – the extremes. The late Antony C Sutton however identified the line being horseshoe-shaped with the extremes of Capitalism (Wall Street etc.) and Socialism/Communism being far closer than anyone realises. One funding the other for the same aim.
I recommend Sutton’s book but also Creature of Jekyll Island (Federal Reserve)… a top secret meeting in 1910 that changed everything.
It all starts there…
It’s actually a horse-shoe with a third dimension – the composite axis of which is (a) scale (big/Small) and (b) space v. attachment to place …and the political principle subsidiarity. The State(left, collectivist aggregation)-Market(Right, consumer-aggregation) versus Livelihood(Family/community/communitarian-place-based solidarity).
Interesting! Think Global, Act Local springs to mind.
There’s a big difference between protesting farmers and truckers, most of whom are small business owners, and public sector unions, which the author has lumped together.
Everybody’s facing cost increases and are chasing pay rises at the moment. The challenge for PS union leaders is to try and place themselves at the vanguard and be seen as leaders, instead of playing catch-up. I didn’t hear them warning about the inflationary effects of the furlough scheme at any time in the last 2.5 years, though.
Agreed. I think there is a profound disconnect between public-sector and private-sector unions. The former have become a tool of the ruling elite. They get great salaries, full benefits and their membership has grown exponentially. The growth of public-sector unions is a big piece of the puzzle when it comes to the decline of the west. They are disconnected from the economy and their jobs don’t depend on growth. They have become a much bigger voting block and play an outsized role in the policy process.
He has lumped a small number of examples of labour action by spreading his geographic reach to cover vast swathes of lands and peoples. The bigger you need your population smaple to drum up a few examples the weaker your arguement
The farmers protests in the Netherlands are nothing to do with leftwing militancy. They all own their farms so they are entrepreneurs. We need to back them all the way as this is to do with WEF politics and zero carbon deception trying to ban the food the farmers produce to build immigrant house all over their land. I’m not sure what their game is but you can be absolutely certain that it is not good and something to do with a global takeover of everything. Sunak and Macron are in on the game that is why they were hugging each other the other day. As it happens Jeremy Hunt is as well. The Tories have lost their way and the sooner they go the better. They have had many chances but have failed. We would have been better off with Truss. At least we knew where we stood with her.
I’ve abandoned descriptive labels such as ‘class’, ‘Left’ or ‘Right’ because they no longer have a clear meaning although they are still used as vague terms.
If you assume a social layering such as the Elite, the Dependables, and the Deplorables you can map most of the social organisation for the last couple of millennia onto these layers (at least in the Western world).
The Dependables are the interface layer between the Elite and the Deplorables. As the nature of the Elites change the nature of the Dependables changes. The Deplorables soldier on ( see Shakespeares Rude Mechanicals) .
So yes, you can argue that the Elites are the Upper Class(es), the Dependables are the Middle Class(es), and the Deplorables are the Working Class(es). But this is a temporary distinction of the last century or so, and is probably changing as the nature of the Elites is changing.
Perhaps the coming layering might be described as the Regulators, the Virtual Caste and the Real Caste – but this will eventually change.
This dynamic came to a head in my own personal life. I was a bar tender in Denver who discovered Airbnb. I became a host and rented out two spare bedrooms. I made so much money I bought a second condo. Then I became friends with a woman who owned the entire block behind where I bar tended. I made a deal with her and took 45,000 from my savings and did a 50/50 deal where I managed 12 studio apartments as Airbnb but I had to furnish and run it and we split profits and I also had to be a property manager to her traditional commercial and residential customers. I ended up making about 1,000 dollars a day and I went from bar tending and working long hours making 50k a year to making 300k. It was a dream come true. An American dream. I worked hard. I invested. I used personal connection and it was a win win for all involved. All of my Airbnb customers where from the email caste. They all were tech yuppies who showed up in Uber or rented teslas from Turo. They all worked from my Airbnb then went downstairs to cold press juice and hot yoga. It was great they loved it. I loved it. And Barbara got to live in Thailand half the year and have her properties run by me. Then came the liberal democrats who decided Airbnb was bad. They decided that Airbnb was to blame for rising rent prices. The same people who staid in the airbnbs the yuppies voted in leftist city council in Denver who overnight decided to combat high rental costs they changed the law to allow only 1 Airbnb per host in your primary residence. They created an enforcement arm and went after hosts. Fining 500 dollars a day and even giving people felonies. They forced hosts to sell properties that they bought to do Airbnb. Mike Snow was in charge of it in Denver. This convergence also happened with all the Covid protests and lock downs while the dems went after Airbnb hosts giving literally felonies and fines they allowed people to destroy local businesses many minority owned. They had bail funds for people who destroyed our neighborhoods. But I don’t want to get too off track Back to Airbnb. I finally after years of hard work found my ability to leave the middle class. Dems are always saying they support the little guy they support the middle class. Until it actually happens then the regulate you out of existence. I ended up having my Airbnbs shut down. I had these same liberal technocrats who staid there in comments online supporting reigning in Airbnb. Rents in Denver never came down. They created the bogey man when in reality it is all the regulations from
Dems that don’t allow developers to make middle class homes. I had my business ripped away from me. I enjoyed making that money for two years and I worked 12 hours a day. I loved it. The hypocrisy turned me from ever voting dem again. I started seeing what other people talked about. All their rules and regulations favored one type of worker Government and technocrats. And the people who stay at Airbnb are the exact people who vote these dems in. The dems who make laws and rules in Airbnb like not being able to see the persons picture before you host them. Rules against Uber eats drivers where they have to upload their face picture but the people having the food don’t. Rules to fight racism that actually have nothing to do with racism. You can tell a lot by a picture not about race but about other things. You can get a vibe. And these apps want it both ways they want to say they don’t run anything they are just the connector but then they want ti force a bunch of strict Back ground checks and force training and what type of car and it is all one sided against the worker against the business owner. The Dems are the biggest reason more people haven’t gotten out of the middle class or working class. They have so many regulations and rules and taxes and lobbyists they design everything in their favor. It is amazing an Uber eats driver has to take all this forced training and upload their picture all the time and be reported by some yuppie for looking at them too long. There is no way to even have a fair trail the apps keep it all hidden. No one to speak with. They just deplatform you. The essential workers what a joke: Denver ruined Airbnb. And then they tell hosts that they have created a fair solution you can rent one listing out. You can’t make money running one listing. And in the United States when did city councils get to decide what is a fair amount of money to make? This is no longer about left vs right. It is about worker and business owner vs elites.
loved reading your post – thanks!
I entirely agree that a reckoning in favour of material realism is long overdue – but I see no political party capable of delivering it. The Labour, Conservative and Lib Dems are all lost to Wokery.
Maybe, after the next General Election, when the Conservative Party has been made largely irrelevant (as it surely will be), it might be possible to reconnect it to the real world in time for it to take over after Labour’s next failure. If not, the future could be very dark indeed.
What about UKIP or the other similar party which Nigel is in? I wish they would co-operate with each other.
Bizarre article. Makes it sound like all these militant workers are striking against climate activism! Don’t think so. They are striking because greedy corporations and ‘austerity’ governments aren’t prepared to give them pay rises that keep up with inflation, exacerbating further the levels of inequality that have grown considerably over the last decade or so. Not complicated. Classical example of desperately trying to fit your own narrative to a reality that doesn’t quite match it.
Malcolm, this analysis certainly rings true and I think your basic premise is generally correct.
But the other side of this coin is that the comparison you present here seems a little oversimplified, perhaps exaggerated.
As time goes by we shall see how these interest respond to–or conflict–with each other.
I am a person whose life experience seems to be squarely in the middle between these two groups. Having a useless English degree in 1973, I now spend 95% of my productive time writing blogs, comments and novels. So I suppose that puts me in the “email” group.
However, I spent 30+ years banging nails while building houses and then doing apartment maintenance for 5 years before retiring, after failing (too late, it seems) to break into the teaching profession.
I made a living for my family and myself by using my hands; but the greatest satisfaction in my active life, at 71 years old, is banging on this little fancy keyboard and sending messages to the world.
Here in the southern US, the real mystery, it seems to me, is how all those working stiffs allowed a manipulative multi-millionaire with a loud mouth to take control of our .gov, then losing that control and convincing the malcontents to destroy the Republic in which we stand, which we have kept together with duct tape and baling wire since 1776.
When the maga magician has been escorted back to his criminal place in history. . . then maybe we can figure this mess out.
What Klaus Schwab is not a capitalist but a lefty enabler? Wow. It seems an odd way of looking at things but seems to fit these weird times.
His aim is a one world government with a control on all money using digital. If they get that it will be the road to the end. You will own nothing as they will control everything that you have through a central world bank. Then it will turn really nasty. They are not nice people. Sunak has unbelievably talked about this already but not the nasty bits. They have to move by stealth and deception.
yep – astonishing isn’t it that the class of the 80s “WEF Young Global Leaders” all happen to be in place… Trudeau, Jacinda, Macron, etc… It stinks.
Re-watch “Metropolis”.
This is a very good piece with cogent points, I offer just one haggle…
“Their disconnect from material reality — from the farmers working hard to grow their crops”
The hard-working small farmers are all but gone in many places thanks to corporate farming, to which most protesters are actually objecting, due primarily to the environmental damages perpetrated by such operations.
Remember it was the unions who brought down the Polish soviet socialist dictatorship – with some help from Pope John Paul 2, Reagan & Thatcher. This was the first serious economic domino in the collapse of the USSR. The proxy wars in Central America, Southern Africa and SEAsia were fought in econmic wastelands, not the case there nowadays. Schwab, Gates and the other neo-feudalists need lackeys like Trudeau or Biden to keep them and their money safe. No tyrant lasts forever and though whoever vanquishes them may well drift into tyranny they too are only feudal lord for lilfe.
“You can kill everyone BUT your successor”.
(Seneca the Younger, 4BC-65 AD, ‘Advisor’ to Nero.)
Let the managers and innovators who are always on call and don’t get paid overtime go on strike and then see how quickly everything grinds to a halt.
Tech is enabling neo-feudal oligopoly, but tech billionaires are at best co-stars in the neoliberal ruling class, no different to plutocrats at the commanding heights of any core industry.
Atop the ‘Western’ power pyramid – surprise surprise – is the banking elite, the financier fund trillionaires, the lineages of sovereign land, etc.
In other words, the RENTIERS.
The “professional managerial class” are rentier flunkeys, so spineless or brainless or ambitious of moving up the class ladder they’re happy to be well-paid bureaucrats for the imposition of predatory debt peonage. They follow the same supine short-term self interest whatever the job – because it’s always fundamentally the same role: HR professionals, gatekeepers for UHNW institutions, house trained academics, media manufacturers of consent, think tank and NGO money launderers, bullshit spigot virtue horders, yadda yadda yadda.
Will the professional managerial class ever rebel? Will they wake up before the rentier oligarchy – ever more brazenly – funds construction of a permanent carceral state around not only the precariat and the untermensch but themselves in the middle class too.
Don’t hold your breath.
Tech is enabling neo-feudal oligopoly, but tech billionaires are at best co-stars in the neoliberal ruling class, no different to plutocrats at the commanding heights of any core industry.
Atop the ‘Western’ power pyramid – surprise surprise – is the banking elite, the financier fund trillionaires, the lineages of sovereign land, etc.
In other words, the RENTIERS.
The “professional managerial class” are rentier flunkeys, so spineless or brainless or ambitious of moving up the class ladder they’re happy to be well-paid bureaucrats for the imposition of predatory debt peonage. They follow the same supine short-term self interest whatever the job – because it’s always fundamentally the same role: HR professionals, gatekeepers for UHNW institutions, house trained academics, media manufacturers of consent, think tank and NGO money launderers, bullshit spigot virtue horders, yadda yadda yadda.
Will the professional managerial class ever rebel? Will they wake up before the rentier oligarchy – ever more brazenly – funds construction of a permanent carceral state around not only the precariat and the untermensch but themselves in the middle class too.
Don’t hold your breath.
What Elon Musk is building is not a Starship for Mars, but actually a ‘B Ark’ – think Golgafrinchans.
Time to launch the ‘B’ ark I think.
Just be careful with those unsanitized telephones …
How about “the New Class” as a name? They are essentially the same class as the commissars in the old Soviet bloc, whom Djilas named “the New Class”.
The email class being the successors to the Circumlocution Office.
Utterly delusional. Weeks of train strikes were led by a union that is pretty Far Left, and attempts to smear the workers by the elite failed as they had support from a public tried of Right Wing media bullshit. All the other strikes in the UK are also from unions on the centre-Left to Left and have covered truckers ( we call them lorry drivers ), dock workers, nurses transports workers, etc etc etc.
You attempt to somehow force this mass movement of workers into some Right Wing fantasy is hilarious! 😀
The writer has nailed the issues from the every-person perspective. It’s a race between the ordinary citizens and the elites. If the latter wins we will find ourselves embedded in a new fascist feudalism that will be all but impossible in our digital age to escape.
We have to re-discover the five core Judeo-Christian principles upon which the West was built: (1) We are all made in the likeness of God. In other words we are all unique individuals. society’s institutions must be able to give each individual the opportunity to achieve their full potential. (2) Free will (3) Individual Responsibility. 2 and 3 must work in a virtuous loop to avoid the excesses of exaggerated individualism and exaggerated egalitarianism. Freedom cannot be a licence for anything. (4) Love your neighbour as yourself. Treat others as you would have them treat you. (5) Love God by obeying his commands – translation: Secular application: Maintain the rule of just and proven law applied equally to all. A properly popularist response cannot just lament what is happening but craft a culture-restoring response
Word.
The thing with farming in The Netherlands is not that we hate farmers and want to abolish farming everywhere. It’s just that it’s ludicrous that so much food is produced in such a small country. The Netherlands feeds the world but our own nature will disappear because of nitrogen emissions. So producing food is good, but not all in our small country.
When the Cow stops laughing You’ll be sorry and so will I.
Why is it ludicrous that the Netherlands has a thriving agricultural export sector? Do you suppose that if the production moved abroad, the emissions in question would somwhow disappear? Your argument seems a lot like the demented view proposed in the UK that our deindustrialisation is globally beneficial, when in fact our continuous consumption has merely offshored CO2 emissions – and the associated wealth creation – elsewhere.
Correct. The UK is sleepwalking into yet another fundamental crisis – after energy, food. The usual globalist faith mixed with eco nuttery sees our own government preferring wild wolves and weeds to agricultural produce. Madness!!! All ready for 2024 or so….
CO2 from cows has always been there an didn’t do any harm and still doesn’t. Nobody has proved that. It’s all part of the WEF deception narrative, a way of controlling the world.
Are you kidding? Growing as much food as possible in the smallest possible space is the best thing of all for the planet. The alternative is to plow under vastly more wildlife habitat, rain forests, savannahs and jungles. Or murder billions of people. There are problems involved – sure. But the problems with the alternatives are manifestly worse.
You are part of a massive deception John and don’t realise it. We are heading for famine and you talk about producing too much food for the world as if it is a problem.
I think the writer is missing the point. The division is between those who went on to higher education and those who at best got a ‘technical’ education. It’s pure supply and demand – if you can be easily replaced by the capitalists your reward will be commensurate, that is if your job isn’t automated.
It doesn’t have to be that way. Sure, not everyone wants to become a member of the emailing classes, but I don’t subscribe to the belief that some people are ineducable. Western society has paid lip service to the idea of universal education with 30+ class sizes in state schools, with teachers who are poorly paid, demotivated, stressed. The elites have always been nervous about educating the individual to be the best he/she can be – they might, God forbid, develop critical thinking!
Strike action works after a fashion but it’s a rearguard action. If education expenditure was tripled to attract the best and brightest to the teaching profession and the curriculum was extended to allow more choice to kids – music, art, crafts, carpentry, building, self employment – then there might not be so many truck drivers, nurses etc around, thus driving up their perceived value.
Also, the ’emailing classes’ have it right about the farmers. Those stuck in the production of meat are flying in the face of data. It’s an inefficient use of land for food production and they need to catch up before the inevitable planned economies end up treating them like Stalin’s Kulaks.
So, the options for farmers are (1) stop farming, or (2) suffer the fate of a Kulak. No wonder they’re miffed.
It’s all part of WEF policy to take over the world. They use the carbon thing as a deception just to achieve their aims of controlling everybody.
You do know, don’t you, that driving a tractor up and down a field is far easier, warmer, more comfortable and infinitely more profitable than getting up at 4am to milk cows or lamb sheep? Farmers who can grow crops on their land do so. Livestock is kept on land that is uncultivatable. In Britain, that is at least half of it.
They just eat grass and give us milk, cream, cheese etc. etc. as well as meat. Why would that be bad? These people who believe in WEF are crazy.
Meat is good. Very high in the vitamins we need. I read in the bible that in the last days men will be forbidden to eat meat and forbidden to marry. Both are recipes for disaster.