Prophet of Doom, Aris? The cup is either half empty OR half full, but your cup is half empty. Yes, we have problems. No, all is not lost. Some look at the ocean as a barrier, some see it as a bridge. The ‘hard times’ will call forth strong men, the fat will be trimmed from our public discourse, and the necessary work to create a world that is more good then before will be well begun.
The danger will be great, but the rewards correspondingly so.
Ironically it misses the real danger. Starmer promises to decarbonise the UK grid next parliament. Even Greens know that isn’t possible, so he is about to risk the Grid on an impossibility. NO modern economy can survive without a functioning power grid (note what Russia targets in Ukraine) The UK Grid is under threat already. https://davidturver.substack.com/p/wait-for-the-blackout
or if you are sufficiently left wing to demand that it facts are only provided by the left (there are such people) https://www.euronews.com/business/2024/02/28/britain-could-see-lights-out-in-perfect-storm-power-cuts
The economy will fail, AND so will society if blackouts become regular and prolonged AND they will!
Here’s the experience of the US, you don’t hear much about. https://newsletter.doomberg.com/p/inverted-priorities
So, one vote only to stop the destruction of the grid and hence the economy. We won’t be fighting any wars with no grid.
Only Reform promise to scrap Net Zero.
That was a indeed a very fatalistic read. The UK was in a parlous state in the 70s, then something changed, and that was enacted through change in one of the established parties.
The blackouts in the 1970’s were because the supply of fuel to the generators was interrupted. When the generators AREN’T there, that’s a whole new ball game. No half-a-day of trucking in coal to put it right. You have only this next GE to save the UK, as Labour has promised to decarbonise the grid by 2030. So ONE vote to save the UK sometime in the next 7 months. Vote Reform, the only party not committed to Net Zero insanity.
Just caught up with this…it’s impossible with AR to know if his cup is half full or half empty, as every time he starts a piece it’s as if somebody has just knocked it over.
R Wright
5 months ago
“it is hard to see such luxury beliefs long surviving a world where British voters, already poor and angry, will be poorer and angrier than we have known in many decades”
Even as the entire country falls into penury and there are running street battles between blackshirts and blackblocs, the elites will still insist on chemically castrating children, policing speech, importing the world and empowering NGOs to attack ordinary people. They are just that out of touch – inured against the effects of the chaos they unleash, living as they do in gated developments and homogeneous enclaves.
Even as they are devoured by furious, hungry white working class the elite will preach their doctrines of egalitarianism while continuing to enrich themselves. I would have preferred to have been ruled by inbred aristocrats, quite honestly. At least they had some skin in the game.
I would have preferred to have been ruled by inbred aristocrats, quite honestly. At least they had some skin in the game
… and understood that their privileges came with responsibilities
Absolutely. The elites think that because they have passed a few exams they understand the world better than everyone else.
Even if this is true, the world is still far, far more difficult to understand than a degree in PPE affords.
Those of us with less elite educations understand that we understand little.
I remember the comment that though the eloquent may pass a written exam on how to drive a car, they might not be able to drive a car safely. The same is true for conducting Physics experiments, or being in charge of the national Energy policy.
Which one? Elite or privilege? Hugh is quite right that the aristocracy of old understood that their status and responsibility go hand in hand.
However, I firmly believe that even the current crop of so-called elites will eventually reap what they have sown. Their gated enclaves and ideologies will not protect them forever; all revolutions eventually eat their children.
Quite, the House of Lords was a far better place with hereditary peers; they took their good stewardship duties seriously, unlike the large numbers of clapped out, virtue signalling has beens that inhabit the place now.
If Macron was serious about the possibility of civilization dying he would hold a press conference in Tours and announce a total ban on Muslim immigration and a range of coercive, illiberal measures for integrating the existing population. Shared values are the a priori of liberalism. Unrestrained liberalism is corrosive of shared values.
And also define ‘saving Britain’? If Reform achieved the former, that would create a path dependent future more in line with the past and head off at least one more disjunctural future in the form of the emergence of a whole series of urban caliphate fiefdoms in the heart of Albion. That would qualify as a ‘save’
Unrestrained liberalism is corrosive of shared values – That’s why all these LGBTQIA+ letters and their prophets must be removed from public space and gay marriage should be abolished as a concept, since it has nothing to do with marriage
I would have thought a simple change in the law prioritizing heterosexual marriage as a vehicle for child conception, birth and socialization and societal reproduction would suffice. You’re always so extreme Liam. Calm down
Our “Civilisation” such as it is, is allegedly based on fundamental Christian values.. but Islam is based on exactly the same values! as indeed is true Judaism.. Tolerance and respect for difference was the hallmark of hundreds of years of Ottoman rule at a time when Christianity preferred Inquisition and torture!
Christian Civilisation was at best practiced by the working class and a few notable elites but the powerful, then as now are closer to Satanism where the motivators were and are Fear, Greed and Hatred.. For those unfamiliar with Christ’s teachings His “civilised” approach was based on Love, Generosity and Respect, ie the diametric opposite of elitist behaviour. Western Civilisation my ass!
Islam is based on a rejection of Christianity since it fundamentally denied the identity of Christ. It considers Him a prophet and a Muslim one superseded by Muhammad. Not the Son of God, not crucified and did not rise from the Dead. It is monotheistic and derives some ideas from Judaism but there the similarities end.
That’s fantasy Islam.
Islam is not based on “exactly the same values!” That’s wishful thinking. It is also typical leftist, self-hating, western, woke rubbish (even if that does not apply to you).
Islam is a totalitarian system, it’s not just a religion, but a system of law, politics, social and economic relations.
‘Ideally’ muslim countries are meant to be governed by Islamic law–not other people’s legal ideas. Jesus said, “my kingdom is not of this world..” That’s not islam. For centuries, the Caliph was the “shadow of god on Earth.” A political ruler with vastly more power than any Christian Pope. The Caliph had huge armies at his disposal (see fall of Constantinople, 1453, siege of Vienna, 1683).
Jews and Christians were only tolerated on sufferance in the Islamic Arab and later Ottoman lands, as second class citizens. They had to pay the special tax for non-muslims, the Jizya, including ritually humiliation while paying it (beard pulling, spitting etc) because they had not done the ‘right’ thing and converted to the supreme religion.
Egypt was mainly Christian at the time of the Muslim conquests.. now? Less than 10% Why? Because it was hard to resist the pressure, over centuries, of being treated like a 2nd class citizen, and ritually humiliated, even as you were being fleeced by your “superior” oppressors.
Look up “devshirme” if you want to see how “tolerant” to Christians the Ottomans were… and “janissary”… too
Before anyone says the Crusades were uniquely awful, why do we not hear more about the vast Muslim conquests not that much earlier: the “Crescades?” including most of the original Christian heartlands… Syria, Iraq, Israel-Palestine, Lebanon, Anatolia, Egypt, across North Africa to Morocco, into Spain, onto France.. and East, across Iran (Zoroastrianism gone), onto Afghanistan, including the Hindu Kush, and (what is modern) Pakistan and northern India.
Look up “Hindu Kush” (clue… “Kushtan” means to kill in Persian), mostly Buddhist and Hindu before the Islamic conquests. Mahmoud of Ghazni is another name to look up… 2m hindus killed…
Starting in the 18th C. some European thinkers who disliked aspects of the west, especially Christianity, started the fashion, continuing to this day, especially on the left, to use Islam as a (fake) stick with which to beat the ‘decadent’ Christian west..
Yes, Christianity was horribly distorted, but, regrettably it is not so clear that Islam was… there’s a sad saying: “If only more Christians were more like Jesus and thank goodness most muslims are not more like [fill in the blank].
Christianity started as a religion of courageous martyrs (lions, human candles, crucifixions). Islam did not start that way, but as the state religion of a triumphantly conquering tribe…. As Khomeini said: “Islam was never a religion of peace… ” and worse that cannot be said here.
Note: christians, muslims, atheists, hindus are just people. Christianity, Atheism, Judaism, Islam, Islamism are ideologies (good points and bad). Unfortunately, many good, kind muslims do not know much about their own tradition, let alone classical Islamic doctrine, let alone Islamic Jurisprudence. They are just ordinary, good people, trying to live ordinary good lives. Rational concerns about Islam as a religious, legal, and political ideology (Islamorealism (not a phobia)) never justify generalized discrimination against people of that challenging (to us) heritage.
I think we might agree that many civilizations committed atrocities and this certainly didn’t exclude Western Christianity. Of course when you make this point there’s a sleight of hand is immediately invoked by which apologists redefine who Christians actually were. The crusaders were blessed by the Pope and certainly considered themselves Christian. I’m not sure anybody has ever claimed they were uniquely evil but the contrast between massacring all the inhabitants of Jerusalem in 1099 (for example) and the idea of a supposedly peace loving religion is rather stark.
Yes Islam was spread by military conquest but then that’s exactly what happened in northern Europe, the Baltic states the Americas and others. Actually the Islamic conquest of the Near East was carried out rather easily with a few fairly minor military battles; there was huge discord already between the population and the Byzantine imperial centre over issues of religious orthodoxy. And later on of course with the conquest of Constantinople many byzantines much preferred living the Turkish turban to the papal tiara!
99% of Christians who have ever lived were not liberals! What was it about judging people by what they do and not what they say?
The Islamic conquest of the Near East might have been carried out ‘rather easily’, but their conquest of the Indian sub-continent was anything but. It’s been described as the ‘greatest tragedy in human history’, and for very good reasons. ‘Timur the Great’, the ‘Sword of Islam’, slaughtered an estimated 17 million people, laying waste to numerous cities, in his march across NW India. His legacy there? Piles of skulls hundreds of feet high. The Mughal emperors couldn’t match that, though the last Aurangzeb tried.
Really? ..are you sure you’re not confusing Christianity with rip-off (so-called Christian) religions and sects? ..and Islam with Islamist doctrine? I do admit ti knowing far less about Jewish Talmudic law being familiar with the OT only.. but I’m reliably informed by devoid Jews that the fundamentals of Judaism are very close to fundamental Christian (ala Christ’s) teaching. Jesus and Mary are helping the highest regard in Islam. As for the Trinity, 99% of Christians,yself included don’t understand how it can sit alongside ‘one true God’ ..who believes in 3 gods? ..besides, this nitpicking is off point.
That’s a slightly absurd caricature of Western civilisation Liam! The paradox of western Christian civilisation is that it was indeed often remarkably intolerant as imposed by the Church or indeed churches. However for complex reasons, including the church / state split that Tom Holland and others have gone into, it ultimately led to the concepts of individual human individualism and the liberal order (which of course now seems to itself to be shifting radically). This did not happen in China, India or the Muslim world.
Much as I admire aspects of Islamic civilization the reality is that it went into a long period of stagnation obscurantism and decadence. Christian Europe had thousands of printing presses when Ottoman Turkey had a handful. There was already a huge difference.
You also omit the classical inheritance to European culture. I have not heard of any significant republican tradition emerging in other parts of the world.
What makes you think the elites of today are any different than the inbred aristocrats who ruled Europe for hundreds of years? They’re not. The problems inherent with aristocrat/elite classes, however they’re defined, rationalized, or justified are consistent throughout history. Over and over again, when they become too powerful, they lose touch with the real problems and make mistakes that lead them to be conquered by stronger, more effective neighbors, overthrown by a new ruling class, or preside over the wholesale collapse of their civilization. Our modern aristocrat class is no different. Their days are already numbered and a few of them have some idea what’s coming, hence their panicking over populist movements. Like this author, I can almost feel the tide turning. We will all suffer for their failure, but in the final fall, they will not be spared. In the end, they will lose more simply because they have the most to lose. Like the decadent courtiers of Vienna in the 1780’s, modern aristocrats will, if they are fortunate and foresighted, flee to foreign nations who will use them for their own purposes, or if they are less fortunate, they’ll be marched right to the guillotine with their heads high and their noses in the air, convinced to the last that they are the rightful rulers, unfairly usurped by unruly, uneducated, dirty peasants. They may not have the Habsburg chin, but they’re just as myopic and detached as any feudal noble. They’re also just as doomed. Give it time.
Paradoxically, they may have to flee to Muslim countries who, if we’re talking about historical civilisation, were consistently the most tolerant of difference and seem to like elitism as well!
LOL- so who blew up young girls in Manchester, who abused them in many a town and city across the UK. Which will you nip to first? Pakistan or Gaza, or perhaps Iran?
Oh, I’m aware. By the standards of the medieval world, Islamic civilization was fairly tolerant, particularly by the time of the Ottomans, who were pointedly not Arabs nor originally Muslims, but Turkic people from Central Asia who fled the Mongol hordes and adopted Islam when they overthrew for the Mamluks, who were another such Turkic people, both groups being far more tolerant than the Caliphates which immediately preceded them. They then proceeded to finally finish the conquest of the ailing Byzantine Empire, which put them in the position of having large religious minorities to rule, which they managed quite effectively for many centuries. On the whole, the Ottomans were one of the least oppressive empires in history and deserve more respect than they generally receive, probably because of their ignominious end at the close of WWI.
All that has no bearing whatsoever on whether modern Islam still qualifies as ‘tolerant’ by modern standards, particularly towards blue haired protesters waving pride flags and demanding other people respect their preferred gender pronouns. The image of Macron and his ilk fleeing from a populist mob alongside the millions of people they imported is pretty amusing I grant, but they’ll have other options. I don’t expect the global aristocrat class to collapse entirely everywhere at once. More likely they’ll be outright evicted through revolution in some places and see their power and authority slowly decay in others, much like their feudal predecessors. History is a process.
I don’t think there is any basis for saying that Arab ruled states were any more or less religiously tolerant than Turkish ones.
I don’t think we can simply read history from as continuous story of islamic intolerance and brutality. What you are talking about today is Islamism, a modern political ideology, perhaps the last 150 years itself a response to Western domination, and not Islam itself. That movement is certainly very intolerant as far as I can see with few exceptions.
However it is true that Islam has much more prestige and importance as a source of law and authority then canon law (say) does does in the West, because there was there was no fundamental church / state split in Islamic history. (Well obviously there is today but modern Muslim states are precisely that, largely modern creations, constructed both by and in opposition to the dominant Western powers)
He’s wrong on 2 counts. a) Russia will NOT start a kinetic/actual war with Europe. It has no need to. They will probably camp on the East bank of the Dnieper and say – “Come and get us if you think you are hard enough.” AND we won’t be.
b) The West is committing economic suicide with Net Zero, little else matters IF we stick with that, particularly the UK.
To expand on the above.
The US is about to hit serious financial issues at home and their reserve currency status of the $ and ‘safe Treasury assets’ are both under threat because the morons in Washington ‘weaponised’ them against Russia and frightened off the rest of the planet. The biggest of whom, by the way, meet in Moscow just before US elections AND are reputed to be looking at a gold backed trade replacement for the $ – In Go(l)d they trust! 😉
Ironically only a surfeit of gas/oil is holding off the US recession. After all how can you have a recession when gas is $2 – $4 a Million BTU AND your greens won’t let you export it? That more than -ve interest rates is keeping Biden’s economy alive. Will it work? I’m sure the Fed and the insane idea of letting Freddie Mac enter the ‘equity release’ market with a $1 – 2 Trillion war chest is just what they need! That’s not even considering Taiwan & the South China Sea.
Then to Europe. No one in Europe will be because they’ll all be too busy with the enemies within.
Then finally, Russia is NOT that keen on wars believe it or not. They spent years telling NATO ‘keep doing this and it will be war’ – Then the only hit Ukraine.
They are happy to occupy Russian speaking enclaves isolated from Russia by Soviet borders in a post Soviet world but that’s about it. They also help out their friends in say Syria, but they didn’t back up Christian Armenia when Islamic Azerbaijan took over Ngorno Karabakh. Nor is Chechynya a stable place and Russia is more interested in that than Western Ukraine. If anything Western Ukraine might be more wary of it’s ‘Western’ neighbours. They owned chunks of it through history and Poland and Slovakia aren’t exactly chucking weapons or Euros their way.
Slovakia’s recent events show up the tensions in that area. Who did what and why isn’t in the mainstream, but then, it wasn’t Russia who blew up the Nordstreams either.
So Russia has enough problems of its own. NATO was the biggest, but assuming we can stop our insane leaders sending NATO into the Ukraine, then it will hollow out and Russia will simply gradually extend the warm hand of gas, oil etc to say, Slovakia, Hungary and maybe others. You’d be amazed how welcoming the gas man is during a bitter East European winter. At the end of this year the current Ukraine/Russia pipeline agreement comes up for renewal.
What? I hear you ask? The agreement that currently transports Russia gas, across the Ukraine and into the EU. How many on here knew that I wonder?
“Against all odds, Russian pipeline gas is still flowing through Ukraine—mainly to Austria, Slovakia, Italy, and Hungary. But for how long?”
From this link https://www.energypolicy.columbia.edu/will-the-ukrainian-gas-transit-contract-continue-beyond-2024/
As for the UK – oh dear. Like the US re finance, BUT not like them re floating in oil/gas , our Net Zero means decarbonising the grid by 2030 – ie next parliament as Starmer promised. That means we will be fighting nobody for very long. Not foreigners (except those already in this country) anyway.
The collapse of an electricity grid kills modernity AND leads to hunger in big Urban areas – as we’ll discover IF the morons actually try it.
Decarbonising ? As I post the Grid demand of 33.8Gw (that can be well over 40Gw in winter) is being supplied, by ALL the decarbonised renewables, – a total of 4.61Gw of wind, 1.37Gw of Solar & falling, 0.37Gw of hydro and 1.78Gw of US Forests burning in Drax. A grand total of say 8Gw. So only a shortfall of 27Gw. Decarbonise in 5 years? ROFL – Euronews has it right, as has David Turver https://davidturver.substack.com/p/wait-for-the-blackout
The West is about to become the new 3rd world, BUT we MAY have a slight chance of avoiding total collapse IF we vote Reform who are NOT committed to Net Zero insanity. Open coal mines, frack and DO NOT join any wars, AND we may come out of this in one piece, but VERY battered. But one piece is good! https://www.energydashboard.co.uk/live
The Global economy that we have depended on for the past 70 years is rapidly declining. The US is reshoring the industries they exported to China, Taiwan, Korea and Japan and planning to trade extensively with its two neighbours, Canada and Mexico.
China and Russia have teamed up. China provides the manufacturing and Russia provides the raw materials and energy,
The Europe has food but is poor in terms of energy and raw materials. It’s also set to become overrun by African and middle Eastern refugees and social welfare migrants.
The best advice for any young man with an education or skill is to emigrate and start a new life elsewhere. If he doesn’t have an education or skill I strongly recommend he get one.
Talking of the British political class, somehow all of them are organised to attend a course on transhumanism at the University of Berkeley, California, as well as the standard classes in neoconservatism in Washington. And perhaps that same gospel is being pumped into their bedrooms every night in the style of Telly Savalas’ ‘girl ambassadors’ in “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service”?
Christopher Chantrill
5 months ago
First of all, Monty’s two rules:
Don’t invade Russia. Don’t invade China.
The problem is that Russia doesn’t have any natural boundaries. But it really, really does want a warm-water sea port.
China? I don’t know when China last did any invading. It basically thinks that everyone outside China is a barbarian.
And by the way, military experts agree, Taiwan would be very difficult to invade.
The question is what to do about the dumb-as-rocks welfare state. I suspect it will have to break utterly first.
I also don’t think many people realize how much support there is for China in Taiwan. The Premier is a strong opponent, but lots of elected politicians are very pro China.
A right-wing London based think tank carried out a study on perceptions in the US and China.. 47% of US citizens believe the US was truly democratic; 70% of Chinese think it is truely democratic.. There a different kinds of democracy.. none is ala ancient Greece!
I agree with you, which isn’t often. In fact this is why Russia won’t bother crossing the Dnieper for West Ukraine. https://www.energypolicy.columbia.edu/will-the-ukrainian-gas-transit-contract-continue-beyond-2024/
Ukraine’s allies in the rear may desire Russia’s gas. Probably why the US blew up Nordstream. Europe is now on the US leash until the Nordstreams are repaired, and why should they bother? The BRICS are proving a good market AND they won’t walk off with your assets. (Which by the way isn’t that smart – Russia has under its control equivalent amounts of western assets, we already flogged off gas/oil interests at a discount of billions to Putin’s mates too!
More intriguing is go back to WW1 http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/4797vh06x16KYYpsLyh7SPx/nine-unexpected-facts-about-world-war-i
and why the Brits have hope, get rid of our incompetents and we can thrive BUT we have to do it next GE or Starmer will wreck the grid! http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-25776836
It made sense in that very narrow context (namely the defeat of an even greater enemy). There were those in the west who though that with Germany defeated, the armies of the Western allies should continue on into Russia. Personally, I think they had a point, although I appreciate that it would have been a “hard sell” after six years of war.
Wrong, Russia was actually a good business partner. China is the one you should never deal with. BUT too late now. They’ve stolen and learnt virtually all they need to know. China won’t need to invade Taiwan soon, they’ll have their own Chip industry. They already own windmills, solar panels, electric cars, steel then start addding up all the commodities that are in short supply and are needed for high tech stuff -Magnesium, rare-earths? Still, Temu does bloody amazing offers on virtually everything AND I didn’t give them all that expertise, the morons who rule us did that.
China’s last invasion: Vietnam in the late 1970s. Didn’t go very well for China. Tibet before that. China is an empire posing as a unitary nation state – just as the Soviet Union was, though the colonised minorities are a smaller percentage of the population in China.
They’re also trying to stealthily expand into India and Bhutan.
The question is what to do about the dumb-as-rocks welfare state.
The answers are simple:
Stop taxing productive activity in order to reward the rent-seeking of the middle class. There is no reason at all why metropolitan multi-millionaires whose wealth is entirely gifted to them by fiscal and monetary policy should not pay for their own social care or winter fuel.Recover a portion of the c£7 trillion so gifted by shifting a larger portion of the tax burden onto council tax.Cut both regulation and taxes on the small businesses that employ 60%+ of the working population. A healthy economy is one in which small businesses can grow to become large ones – yet the barriers to such growth now are insuperably higher than they were in the 1990s and, thanks to the slavish devotion of our Establishment to Brussels, will continue to become more burdensome, especially if Labour win this year.Adopt the Swiss cantonal system – or at least institute a constitutional rule requiring that no decision that can be taken by the Parish Council should be taken by the Borough Council and so on right up to Westminster. Cummings is dead right that over-centralisation is a huge part of the problem.Finally, close half the universities and convert the campuses to affordable housing for young families.
and accept that fossil fuels will be around for at least the next 50 years and1-promote the North Sea Industry rather than trying to shut it down and 2-promote fracking which will transform the North west of England,expand our skill bases and help our balance of payments.These 2 alone will be transformational.
From when the trade unions wanted to keep their restrictive working practices, for extra pay, in the 60s, to Major converting the Technical Colleges to mush spreading, intelligence reducing, 4th rate universities, and the catastrophe of the 2008 Climate Change Act, and the BBC’s ill-informed enthusiastic support of it, it still isn’t obvious to the Arts, Humanities and Social Science ‘educated’ majority, that modern skillsets, manufacturing, food production, and wealth creation, are needed to keep us in the manner to which we are accustomed.
That is the most important thing now. So far the west is about to commit social and economic suicide. ironically the US oil industry is keeping the US alive BUT thanks to the Greens banning the export of the excess gas the US is awash with, Europe is going to be stuffed because the US blew up the Nordstreams. Smart move that. Ukraine’s gas pipeline is only supplying 4 EU countries, and NOT Germany. So they helped the German Greens stuff German industry. Brexit was never so well timed. ALL we need to do now is kick out any party that adheres to Net Zero or even worse, Absolute Zero. We may then save ourselves (PS convert Drax back to coal and start importing from Oz or mining it here) AND invite BASF and other German energy intensive industries to come to the UK – oh ,and get blast furnaces back into Port Talbot – the pig iron from ore ones ASAP.
I have always thought that the centralization of power in London has been hugely detrimental to the rest of the country and was the legacy of 2 world wars and the Attlee Government
I remember, in the 60s, that I never wanted to be an Engineer: they were ALWAYS on strike, or so it seemed from watching the BBC. There was also that mob rule cloud across much of the industrial Midlands and North. Yes, not a very accurate view, but one one that was broadcast across the country, to me, so I avoided Engineering, until I found Computers and IT.
Maybe, that is why Finance, and London, became so prosperous.
UK industry had until possibly COVID grown every year since 1948. The myth that Thatcher killed it off was just that. There was more manufacturing when she left office than when she took it. It just wasn’t crappy red BL cars.
Far simpler solution: tax wealth! UK wealth estimated at £12tn.. on a sliding scale from 0.1% on owner occupied homes up to £¼m, peaking at 5% pa.. that will bring in a min. of £100bn a year. Problem solved, overnight!
OMG genius. No-one ever thought of that before. I wonder has it ever been tried? I wonder if there might be unintended consequences? Who cares….let’s go for it eh Liam
Unintended consequences for whom? The 1% who bribe the govt? If you’re part of the 1% then of course you will object due to your greed and narcissism so you’ll make sure the media scares you with it’s propaganda as will the bribed govt. 8f not I guessyour oneifthe many scared, gullible easy to pick off 50%..
No. Tax unearned wealth. Taxing productive people in order to reward rent-seekers is what got us into this mess in the first place.
If you want everyone to be rich you have to allow some people to become very rich. The problem in the UK is not that people get rich, but that the wrong people get rich.
“.Finally, close half the universities and convert the campuses to affordable housing for young families.”
I regularly cycle through a university estate and notice its low utilisation. With more of a “hot desking” approach we could surely achieve the same throughput with half the number of universities. The infrastructure released could be put to useful purpose.
And that’s because Russia’s neighbours chose voluntarily to join NATO because they know from their own history just how dangerous it is being a neighbour of Russia. Pretty much every single one has been a colony of Russia/the Soviet Union within living memory. I’ll give you Norway as an exception. And the US (Alaska).
It would be surprising if they weren’t in NATO.
Just ask yourself who you’d trust if you lived in Poland. Or Romania. Or the Baltic States …
Since Nato is just a fatter version of the US and since Trump will renege on Nato commitments I’d say Nato is finished. Europe will have to build its own unified army in a defensive structure.. happily, modern Russia is not the warmonger the US is.
All the former USSR independent states are being destabilised through USUK attempted coups: that is what is causing the problems.. When they see that Nato minus the US is a paper tiger they’ll all look to Moscow again..
Rubbish. The US went ballistic over a Monster Raving Loony Party Fancy dress day out in the Capitol. They piled in, took selfies and a few souvenirs, then went home. What do you think Victoria Nuland telling the crowds in Maidan square to revolt, kick out the Russian favouring president, validly elected, shortly before all the shooting started, appeared like to Russia?
You need to read more widely.
..and that while Moscow and Beijing are geographically very distant, The RF and PRC share a huge border? Add in India and you’re looking at nearly half the World! ..the bRICs are building and the West is collapsing..
They should do, Putin and Russia have been telling them for decades, AND that any nearer and it might be war. Oops it was. Curiously I now hear that Russia is winning? But they told me Russia was useless, their army dead, their economy trashed. Don’t tell me they lied about that as well as COVID, experimental vaccines and face masks?
Can one “invade” part of its own terrotory? Isn’t Taiwan a part of China? The UN, US and UK say it is.. and I think the rest of the world does too? Can England invade Yorkshire? They’re a very different lot up there aren’t they? More Viking than Anglo Norman. Will the Scots come to their rescue? Should we Irish get involved? It’s tricky Isn’t it?
It’s called Civil war Liam – you should know, you Irish had one. Ironically my Grandad and Grandma smuggled guns to Ireland for it, well the uprising before it. Thank heavens I won the lottery of life and was born English.
Like you we have our Farrages and Foxes and Murrays and our version of the BNP but they are a small minority, their ranks swelled by the ignorant, the xenophobic, the racist , the propaganda ridden and the scared.. By and large our immigrants have done great things for Ireland. Our national identity is more or less indestructible so, in general we don’t have the fears less self confident nations have.. and we assimilate much better because we celebrate difference.
I recommend watching Netflix A Thousand Goodnights. The Taiwan landscape is marvellous – but you wouldn’t want to try and fight your way into, and over it. Even the Chinese mightn’t have enough men to come out of that unscathed.
Don’t see how much use a warm water port in the Black Sea is, as far as projecting naval power is concerned.. when a relatively powerful country controls the Dardanelles..
China might not do much “invading”, but it does do a bit of “deciding other places are really part of China”.
Martin M
5 months ago
A bleak article. However, it cannot disguise the fact that Russia is the enemy of the Free World, and probably will be for the remainder of the Century at least.
Nah, Luxury beliefs are the woke/green ones. They think that the UK can become a pre-industrial society and they still live the life they’ve become accustomed to. Luxury and insane beliefs.
And you think Russia and China are not funding those who shame you for being white? These ideas were produced by our own idiotic culture but as any good enemy does they are both throwing fuel on the fire through social media and funding to the green/woke/other idiots.
So we nuke Russia to silence the Greens/Woke? How about we just ditch them and let Russia/China keep funding them? BUT we keep them off the streets and out of parliament and any other organisation.
Sure, no Russian has done that. They are however ruled by a war-mongering tyrant, and they commit war crimes hand over fist in every conflict they participate in.
No it won’t. It will occupy up to the East bank of the Dnieper, maybe fortify it, then let Europe rot. OR it may gradually pick up more friends in Europe IF Ukraine agrees to extend the pipeline deal so that Hungary, Slovakia, Austria and Italy keep getting Russian gas AND maybe offer it to others. As i said earlier, there’s probably nothing more welcoming in the depth of an Eastern European winter than a gas man with a pipeline full of gas. https://www.energypolicy.columbia.edu/will-the-ukrainian-gas-transit-contract-continue-beyond-2024/
Also Italy, Austria and Hungary may not like Ukraine shutting off their gas pipe.
j watson
5 months ago
Largely twaddle from yet another UnHerd Putin apologist. Despite all the West’s challengers the fact it is holding back Autocrats and Theocrats in Ukraine, the Middle East and the S China sea, having dealt with a disabling pandemic and where remarkable developments in science and technology continue at pace most in the free world all seems forgotten by this young Author who lacks perspective and thinks somehow the time in which he lives is unique.
However he does nail it that the re-emergence of Mr Barnard Castle is essentially an elitist project. It’s like the student phase you can remember of the most ridiculous SWP types who thought it was all about a Dictatorship of the Proletariat and they were it. Barnard Castle suffers from the same inflated self-importance.
Now if Barnard Castle started to talk more about how despite the stagnation of the last 15 years the v rich have still got richer at the expense of the vast majority and he has a plan to correct that one might sit up and listen. But he’s not about to chop off the hand that feeds him is he.
Pointing out western incompetence makes you a Putin apologist, does it JW? Don’t worry Starmer’s got that last paragraph all covered… hasn’t he. Will it be more of the same failed policies though: mass immigration, handing more power to NGOs and continuing to follow Net-Zero policies as the country is heading off threats from Russia and China.
Interesting, isn’t it, that none of us have any idea what Starmer’s policies will actually be, yet we’re going to vote him into power anyway?
One thing is fairly certain: they won’t include any remedy for the fundamental issues that face us. Labour is much too dependent on the votes of the unproductive middle class for them to do anything about the bad incentives in the tax system that are pauperising productive people whilst enriching the freeloaders.
Not really. Put in the Tories and they’ll wreck the grid in 10 years, put in Starmer and he promises to do it next parliament. So you won’t get a second chance to save the grid OR the economy. Assuming Starmer is so stupid as to try and push Net Zero.
All middle classes are unproductive now HB? Your chippiness occasionally seems performative.
More broadly I suspect Labour won’t immediately do a ‘Mad Liz’ and spook the markets, but that if Starmer gets his 10 years needed for renewal we will see a marked shift in taxes from income to wealth and esp unearned wealth.
“Now if Barnard Castle started to talk more about how despite the stagnation of the last 15 years the v rich have still got richer at the expense of the vast majority and he has a plan to correct that one might sit up and listen. But he’s not about to chop off the hand that feeds him is he.”
That’s a very difficult question to answer though. We’ve been giving the v wealthy more and more for several decades (and it’s not just the UK though we’re possibly the worst), not just the last 15 years, and we now have little capacity to act as they hold all the power.
One man, one vote. That’s power enough. The only bad news is that the power that is going to wreck us, is electricity, and the lack of it if Starmer does as claimed re the grid in the next parliament.
With the Earth’s magnetic field reducing in strength, there’s a greater likelihood of solar flares & CMEs causing electrical disruption. We had some only in the last week or so.
The Carrington Event, in 1859, showed that the consequences can be great and that was when the Earth’s magnetic field strength was much greater, and electrical grids almost nonexistent.
So aiming to have all domestic Energy delivered to homes by Electricity does appear to be careless, or worse.
Yes and no DR – I think the trend in the v rich getting richer was sustained by sufficient trickle down for a while, but once that trickle becomes a dribble the unsustainability of the situation mounts. Even the v rich don’t want a society that completely fractures.
Trickle down was always a partial story that could be got away with whilst the economy was growing well. As in ‘don’t worry about your share of the pie getting smaller, the pie overall is getting bigger and so is your slice.’ How many times were we told that one back in the 2000s?
Then the pie stopped growing as fast and the slice got actually smaller. But even without that, if your share of the pie is getting smaller and smaller you still end up with nothing eventually.
The v rich don’t want a society that fractures. Buy they can take an awful lot more yet before that happens. People will tolerate a lot.
This is such a shallow, tired analysis JW. Stop deflecting.
The root of our problem is that we tax productive activity in order to reward the rent-seeking of the middle class. The consequence is that (mostly) boomer property owners are now sitting on somewhere between £3 and £7 trillion in completely unearned wealth. Anyone who ignores the conventional narrative and just looks around them can see this.
That’s why our public infrastructure is collapsing: too many middle class freeloaders spending unearned wealth gifted to them by the state on imported luxury goods. Not enough producers creating the wealth to pay for it.
The remedy is simple. Tax the houses, not the grafters.
Wrong. They are sitting on property whose value probably remains much the same as when they bought it, but is now measured in printed £’s which have lost value so much they appear to have made homeowners very wealthy. The real cheek is that having devalued the £ , so apparently ‘inflated’ the value of assets. Govt then have the cheek to charge Capital Gains tax to punish you for their inflation. Then when they’ve driven you to your grave, they’ll rob that too.
You can’t weasel out of it like that, I’m afraid.
Any way you look at this, it represents an upward transfer of wealth. Over the past 20 years the wealth gap between property owners and rent payers and wage earners has massively widened.
You know occasionally I think we’ll make a socialist of you yet HB. Marx could have almost written sections of your post above – chapeau.
On a practical point – yes we agree far too much wealth tied up in bricks and mortar, but how do we fairly tax the elderly widower who’s Home has ended up worth £1m etc simply because of location and asset price inflation, and how do they release equity to pay it? Now there are ways and means, and perhaps most important is what we do when they require social care and/or when they die and their kids look to minimise taxes on their potential inheritance. If you are extolling we must tax harder on both of these as the asset wealth was unearned I’m with you. If you are not I’m worried your generally good point only thought through so far.
Oh dear. Here it comes: the poor elderly widow(er) opt-out so beloved of the Guardian. Unearned wealth is unearned wealth. Give it back to the people you took it from. They earned it and they need it more than you do.
If you can’t pay now you can pay when the house is sold.
Not too sure of the Guardian reference, but I know that’s a trigger point for your chippiness (although I didn’t bring it up). As it turns out though I suspect alot of Guardian types would be in alignment with you on your last point – which essentially is potential increase in inheritance tax on unearned asset price wealth. As I suggested I do feel you are showing some v sensible and reasonable socialist tendencies.
You mean fighting to the last Ukrainian to keep Biden Jnrs promises for all that cash that came his way and was recorded on the ‘mythical’ hard drive that was invisible to all anti-Trumpers?
Christopher Barclay
5 months ago
‘ … the unexpected Soviet collapse and the unipolar empire America won by default … ‘ Hardly the US won the Cold War by confronting the USSR around the globe and by raising military expenditure to a level at which the USSR sued for peace.
Britain may be finished but the US is not. The failings of US politics hides the industrial and military strength that remains in the US.
Agreed-writers over here consistently fail to grasp the sheer economic and military heft of the USA and whilst currently being run by incompetents has consistently shown itself to be able to grow and develop in a way that Russia & China can only dream about.
As an American I applaud your belief in our nation, not currently shared by enough of our citizens today. The US has always risen to the challenge in whatever national or international issue needed to be addressed; WWI, WWII, the Cold War, expansion of commerce and democracy, technology, etc. Sadly, I think those days may be behind us and I’m not sure how to get them back. The destruction of American exceptionalism and the erosion of a national identity to rally ’round for the past few decades has resulted in a situation where, as in the UK, few persons under the age of 30 or so are willing to say they would fight for their country or their life’s advantages. I feel we have become a nation of takers across all the socio-economic spectrum with few willing to do for their country. While we may be able to field the most advanced and capable military in the history of civilization, do we have the wherewithal and stewardship to use it appropriately to maintain the West. The thought of our current leadership, on both sides of the aisle, and at all levels of of government and industry, doesn’t help me sleep better..
It’s not what people say today when some PR person asks their opinion that matters. It’s what they actually do if and when the crisis hits.
I’m far more optimistic than you that the instincts of the Americans and British are still sound.
Of course people are lazy and taking things for granted after so many relatively easy, peaceful decades.
I’m wondering if you have a lot of contact with *typical* people of younger generations, or if you are from an older generation and still form your model of the nation based on your past?
I say “typical” because of course there are many exceptional and wonderful people in all generations – but is the proportion of them high enough to carry the rest?
I’d like to believe you are right (ie: I’ll be pleased if you turn out to be). But I’m immersed in so much reality denial where I live, that I am developing somewhat of an allergy to wishful thinking, or to delusional thinking. I’m not saying you are part of that, just explaining why I am wary of confusing what I’d like to believe true with actual reality.
The industrial strength depends of fossil fuels, which, curiously enough, are swamping the US at present. Doomberg substack covers such stuff BUT, if you really want to worry. The US may be building factories, and may be awash with hydrocarbons, BUT the politicians can still stuff the US.
Here’s Doomberg – try Metals and Miners – in 2 parts on the damage the politicians could manage. https://newsletter.doomberg.com/p/doomcasts
Katharine Eyre
5 months ago
“We are in a situation where everything around us is rapidly changing, to our detriment, and yet our leaders act as if at the end of it, everything will somehow stay the same.”
It’s because we can’t – or don’t want to – imagine what’s on the other side.
I went to Auschwitz a few weeks ago. As we stood next to the blasted remains of the gas chambers there, being told about this conveyor-belt human destruction – one of the group asked: “But didn’t anyone ever struggle? Didn’t they rebel or resist? There were so many of them.”
The guide said that the only time they had any resistance there was from a group of women who had been brought in from Bergen-Belsen and therefore knew more about the nature of these places than the people who had just arrived on cattle trucks from elsewhere.
Most of the people just thought they were going for a shower – unable to comprehend how a civilised people like the Germans could be capable of such things. Off they went willingly like lambs to the slaughter.
It was hard enough to chew over the facts of the Holocaust again at one of its main focal points. At the same time, it struck me that Europe is currently collectively suffering from this exact kind of imagination limitation and that we could – again – sleepwalk into catastrophe.
Then I thought about our leaders and wondered whether they have a specific idea of what’s coming at us down the pike. With most of them, I’d say no – they seem far too dim and pedestrian. But others, maybe.
Then the question is whether sharing your suppositions or knowledge about the future is smart – as the Nazis found out back in the early 40s, the masses are much more malleable when you leave them in their own bubble of naivety.
Yes, the feeling that we are in the back of a car revving up before the edge of a cliff is a very good way of describing the current moment.
In the film ‘Son of Saul’ you also see the story of a group of Sonderkommando (they operated the gas chambers and crematoria for a few months and were then liquidated themselves) who left diaries about their situation and managed to actually escape briefly, before being caught and shot.
Politicians know more than they let on. They just don’t want to scare the horses.
Saul D
5 months ago
The challenge is to break out of the administration trap that has captured the Western world. The arrival of first computers, and then the web, and then mobile phones means administrators find themselves with more and more data, and so more and more things to do. Because they have the data they believe they have to tell us what to do, for our own good. Benevolent dictators where another piece of data, another form, another regulation will make lives better.
When there was little data, administrators had to rely on the scraps and good sense of the citizens and to do what citizens said was best. Now there is so much data they rely on that they now don’t trust citizens to come to their own conclusions – disinformation and misinformation means different from the administrative consensus.
As a result children who used to freewheel around on bikes (see The Commitments film) are now only permitted to cycle with stabilizers, helmets, knee-pads, in fenced in cycle parks and segregated cycle lanes.
It makes ‘data sense’ but we have also lost something in the process – courage and the ability to take and judge risks. And it front-loads all activities with administration first, making administrators feel like they are in charge of ‘their’ citizens like teachers controlling children, instead of citizens controlling their government.
The conventional political parties are too embedded and fearful of disruption to even start to unpick the administrative state, but we see from Brexit, Podemos, Five Star, Trump, Zelinski, Milei that voters are craving for something or someone – even comedians – to create the chaos to change things. Voters are looking out for someone with courage, who will take their side, and perhaps need more radical solutions like more direct democracy to keep the tendency to administration in check.
I disagree with very little here – but I think it has to be said that Cummings himself is the personification of many of the bad trends you talk about.
Perhaps it is hard for politicians in a social media world to just calm down, and take things at a slower pace. The Conservative Party post 2010 has been hyperactive and the result has been government by initiative rather than policy (which is not to say that all initiatives have been bad), half-baked and rushed ideas and indeed just plain bad ideas. It is telling that the ultimate hyperactive, Liz Truss, made it to the PM job in this hyperactive party.
Cummings himself as I said can’t I think disassociate himself from this hyperactivity. Though his strong point about Ukraine is a good example of something where Western governments, not just the UK, charged in head first having spent two decades making bad decisions on Russia.
Will Keir Starmer do any better? Hard to say, but there’s no shortage of hyperactives in the Labour Party. My own feeling is that the best course now would be for a new government to pick a low number of policy areas, maybe even as low as 3 or 4, and really focus on those and leave the rest for another day. That’s not easy to defend on twitter though. And Starmer is going to have to pick up the pieces in Ukraine.
children who used to freewheel around on bikes (see The Commitments film)
Luckily I don’t have to watch The Commitments because I am old enough to have spent my own childhood roaming the neighbourhood with friends on bikes, only returning home for an early tea of fishfingers and Smash. There were massively lower levels of cars, higher levels of ‘social trust’ in the monoculture of our provincial town, and no sense of shame for getting a scraped knee. Above all, there was no legal liability and compensation culture, which seemed to emerge during the early Blair years and was never there before.
The Great Homogeniser is the BBC, with over 50% of the market, a guaranteed income, influencing as much by what they don’t say as what they do, they swap jobs within the rest of the Legacy Media, QUANGOs, Climate Activist Groups, Academia and EU connected pressure groups, to form the nation’s culture, and destiny, and reach into the homes of the unthinking, with the reputation earned from decades earlier.
The planet is. Though why is beyond me it couldn’t give a toss and it will be here until the sun expands and engulfs it. Even the Greeks Gods meddled with human lives, so had SOME interest in us.
Nigel Farrage? Laurence Fox? ..why not George Galloway? He has the experience, the humanity and the commonsense, doesn’t he? I feel sure you have someone in mind? I know: Jeremy Corbyn! ..am I right? Nah, it’s Suella Braverman isn’t it?
That’s almost 100% of the problem. It’s very hard to think of anyone in Britain who has the skills, courage and character to weather the political storms needed to set a course for change.
They wouldn’t know how to interpret data if it jumped up and bit them on the @r5e.
Here’s some simple data anyone can look at. https://www.energydashboard.co.uk/live
As I post
Demand:31.5Gw
Supply
Windmills: 4.12Gw
Solar: 0.11Gw (Some roofs must be under street lamps)
US Forests (aka Drax): 1.48Gw
Hm that’s almost a whopping 5.7Gw – only another 25Gw or so to find to keep the lights on on a mildish evening. I wonder where that comes from now!
Decarbonise by 2030 anyone?
Even if they could interpret the data, they would still have to be tall enough, have the right colour skin, the right accent, the right footwear (we had a recent plimsoll headline), in fact, nothing that can be ruled out. Even wanting what is best for the nation, like fraccing, is a reason to ditch a potential leader.
alan bennett
5 months ago
There is a sizeable known unknown in the room, millions of third-world aliens who cleave to a violent ideology. This ideology is against every cultural facet of the lives of the indigenous peoples.
The poor and very angry will not only have to fight against external threats, but they will also have a more dangerous threat within, can we survive, not if we put Labour in charge?
Richard Calhoun
5 months ago
There is little doubt the Tories will be routed at ge2024, but that will only set the scene for 5 years of political turmoil.
Expect 3 general elections by 2030 before this political shenanigans is resolved.
Welfarism has destroyed our economy and our values and only by returning to the “Small State” will we bring about the revolution that is so desperately needed.
Peter B
5 months ago
” the unexpected Soviet collapse and the unipolar empire America won by default”
The US and the West won because they stuck at the task for 40 year. It’s wasn’t an accident or “by default”. Mr. Roussinos is too young to have lived through that period and is lazily parroting a false narrative here.
Accusing Dominic Cummings of “luxury beliefs” and implying that Macron is realistic really is stretching credulity.
The entire article is yet more specious catastrophism.
Paul MacDonnell
5 months ago
Excellent article — despite my needing to drink a stiff gin every time Dominic Cummings is cited as an authority. Cummings represents a highly left-brain, and doomed, technocratic response to the decline, not a remedy. (we live in a country where sex education for teenagers includes putting condoms on banannas—but, for heaven’s sake, don’t teach ‘morality’). The idea that we should emulate the governance of California is scary. That state is rich, true, but it shares the UK’s dysfunction — just at a higher income level.
That a civillisation can die suddenly is well attested in history. See this excellent interview with Victor-Davis Hanson where, in the spirit of Roussinos’ excellent piece, he recounts some particularly brutal examples, beginning with the story of the destruction of Thebes and ALL of its inhabitants.
It is, perhaps, the pundits’ error to confuse the political weather (changeable and currently cool with showers) with political climate.
Yes, the two main Parties are making heavy weather of politics, but in the longer term political climate they will reform or be replaced.
But the takeaway message is that political weather provided no great predictive power for the political climate. If history is one damn thing after another, politics is one damn event after another – many of which cannot be predicted.
I can tell you what can be predicted. That no modern economy can run on an electric grid powered by windmills and solar panels. Then I can tell you another thing. Destroy the modern grid and hence its economy and you put Britain back to a pre-industrial society. Such a society could not support more than about 10 Million. That leaves (depending upon who you believe) 60- 80 Million who are going to eventually starve or die in the insurrection. Starmer is committed to trying to run the grid without carbon in the next parliament. Even as I post concerns have been raised that the current Grid will start to fail about 2028. Nowhere does that seem to have registered. Even Euronews reporting on it had little effect.
Well, better hope you are one of the 10 million OR use your ONE vote before it happens very wisely and vote for the only party NOT committed to Net Zero – Reform. I find it amusing a doomsday article misses the most obvious disaster facing us.
Santiago Excilio
5 months ago
A rather bleak article. I’m not sure that the tattered raiment of some old testament doom-monger sits very comfortably on Aris’s shoulders, and his beard is far too trim and tidy.
Having said that there is no doubt that the current political settlement is failing people, throughout the West as a whole and not just in the UK. I would argue that this decline has in fact been in motion since the end of WWII and the establishment of the rules based international order which saw the creation of the UN, WHO, WB, NATO, The Council of Europe (eventually to become the EU) – a collection of supranational organisations that placed power and influence beyond normal democratic reach. In conjunction with this, politicians discovered that was easy and convenient to pass responsibility (and therefore accountability) to an ever increasing number of Quangos, NGO’s and regulators, thereby absolving themselves from having to answer tough questions and again putting huge budgets and accountability beyond democratic reach.
Which brings us to the present day, where people complain about the ineffectiveness of the political classes, the fact they all basically look the same, and that nothing ever changes.
From that perspective Cummings analysis that “everything is rotten” is essentially correct. His contention that it cannot be fixed and should be ripped up is open to debate. However, the idea that we should turn to tech philosopher kings for a solution makes little sense; companies are not democratic institutions, and many of these tech types subscribe to some odd anti-human beliefs such as effective altruism, which if enacted in earnest would create a very bleak world indeed.
Goodwins ideas about popular sovereignty stem from his continuous polling of focus groups and his findings that the bulk of voters lean to the left on the economy and the right on culture. The problem with this is that it like Boris’s views on cake: I like having it and eating it. If popular sovereignty is supposed to look like Aristotle’s Polity then maybe that would work, but one would have to surmount the basic flaw in democracy which is that whilst it provides for equality of voice it makes no provision for equality of contribution. This is the cake problem from another angle: I like cake providing someone else pays for it.
I don’t discount the possibility that a new political force could emerge, make headway and gain power with the sort of prospectus necessary to break the current paradigm and effect change. However, such a movement will require a leader who combines the three critical elements for success: vision, charisma and confidence. I can see only one person like this on the global landscape at present and that is Milei in Argentina, and whether he succeeds or not is still very much in the balance. But it could be done.
I’m not sure that the tattered raiment of some old testament doom-monger sits very comfortably on Aris’s shoulders, and his beard is far too trim and tidy.
Excellent analogy. He does have a tendency to hyperbole. In this article he’s touching on something that, rather than lending itself to prophecy, requires a degree of courage and hard-headedness that his words don’t quite capture. For all that, a useful addition to the dialogue as we approach perhaps the most moribund general election in British political history.
Actually it isn’t. This article misses the most dangerous event possible – Net Zero and the destruction of the UK grid. AND that in the next parliament IF Starmer doesn’t drop his commitment to decarbonising the grid by 2030.
There is a reason Russia occupies the Zaporizhzhia nuke plant in Ukraine and why it targets thermal power plants. Modern economies cannot run without power. Starmer & the Greens with Net Zero insanity will ensure that outcome in the UK. Better not be a city dweller if the grid fails for very long. You have only ONE vote to stop that.
Matt M
5 months ago
I am starting to think that the idea that the British are “already poor and angry, will be poorer and angrier than we have known in many decades” is itself a luxury belief held by depressed Millennial journalists.
We are richer and happier than ever and I see no reason for that to stop. Our wage growth has outpaced inflation ever since the pandemic and GDP growth is currently the second highest in the G7 (double the EU figure). The recently published World Happiness Report 2024 put the UK as the happiest of the large countries ahead of the USA, France and Germany. This also tallies with my experience of living here for 50 years.
Our problems are minimal and our advantages huge: temperate climate, no dangerous animals, no guns and low crime rates, high-trust, law abiding culture, low unemployment and easy business formation, taxpayer funded health service and welfare state, reasonable taxes, cheap and abundant food, easily defensible homeland etc.
We could do more: reduce immigration numbers to bring them in line with housing availability and infrastructure capacity, frack our own natural gas, rein in the wokerati in our public institutions, select fewer wrong-uns as MPs.
But to suggest that we are in some period of steep decline is nonsensical.
All these benefits are a legacy from the past. The heat emitted by a garden wall as the sun is setting.
The Romano-British might have had such an optimism.
The claim that taxes are reasonable is strange given we are the most highly taxed people who have ever lived in the British Isles.
Surely everything is a legacy from the past.
Taxes were higher in 1948 and 1949. The high taxes were caused by the massive public spending on the war just as the current higher tax take is due to the massive public spending on the pandemic. By 1958 the tax take had fallen from 37.2% of GDP in 1948 to 28.9%. The same thing will happen now.
The same is true of NHS waiting lists – they spiked due to lockdowns and will fall back to pre-pandemic numbers in due course.
I don’t believe that there is anything fundamentally wrong with the economy. I see full pubs and restaurants. I was at Badminton last weekend and it was heaving. I went to the Isle of Wight the weekend before and the ferry and all the bars and cafes were packed. The FTSE 100 is at all time highs. Inflation is falling, the banks are cutting mortgage rates, unemployment is almost non-existent.
I don’t think this doom and gloom story is accurate. Personally I don’t lose sleep about border wars between the Ukraine and Russia, Jews and Arabs going at it hammer-and-tongs in the middle east or China imposing itself on Taiwan. All of these things have been going on since I was a boy and none of them really affect England.
I find the global warming hysteria very unconvincing (it has rained non-stop since mid-September). I think wokery is dying a death due to being complete nonsense (and the attention of the activists moving from trannies to Palestine). I don’t believe national pride, patriotism or love of British history and culture has ever diminished among normal people and will assert itself whenever the need arises (as seen at the Queen’s funeral and the Coronation)
I think eventually the government will get control of immigration numbers. I think all western governments will eventually stamp out illegal immigration. I think the Net Zero commitments will end up being quietly shelved. I don’t think the Muslims will take over Britain or grow as a % of the population. I think AI will be a boon. I marvel that scientists in the 1970s were able to increase harvests to be able to make food abundant and cheap and scientists in the 2020s seem to be able to fix the major downside of cheap food – obesity with this new set of Ozempic drugs.
All in all, I think things are pretty good and getting better.
The one big problem you seem to have overlooked is the UK public debt, standing at £2.6 Trillion and rising and the public deficit at £131 Billion.
The deficit not such a problem, but with sky high taxes and rising debt of over 100% of GDP we are in a precarious position going forward.
The level of welfarism is unsustainable
Did you know that Starmer is committed (so far) to ‘decarbonising’ the grid in the next parliament? That means you have ONE vote to stop it. Do you know what destroying the grid by that insanity will do to a modern economy and society?
Here’s Doomberg on what has happened in the Texas and in the US so far. https://newsletter.doomberg.com/p/inverted-priorities
We in the UK will close another coal & a nuke generator this autumn. Here’s data – IF it doesn’t frighten you, it should. https://davidturver.substack.com/p/wait-for-the-blackout
Only Reform is NOT committed to Net Zero.
The one big problem you seem to have overlooked is the UK public debt, standing at £2.6 Trillion and rising and the public deficit at £131 Billion.
The deficit not such a problem, but with sky high taxes and rising debt of over 100% of GDP we are in a precarious position going forward.
Try being rich and happy IF the lights go out for any length of time. OR the Greens just stop oil. The first is a distinct possibility.
Paul T
5 months ago
How is it that when I get an article like this and read all the way down I find that loads of posts have been recommended apparently by me? I KNOW I have not recommended any comments under this article before taking the time to read it.
sal b dyer
5 months ago
Although I don’t know much about anything, except perhaps which antibiotics to use for which bacteria and a few other moderate level medical snippets; I do wonder about the number of writers who seem to know so much about everything that they can foretell the future so confidently. Even the much hyped “superbugs resistant to antibiotics will take over the world” has largely been just that- hype. Antibiotics and improved medical technologies in general, still save far more lives than not. Mr Roussinos may be right, we may have an impoverishing economic contraction ahead, or more unwinnable military battles, but equally some combination of new technologies and a resilient human spirit may still shine through in pockets at least. And again, all these prophets of doom seem to know what the problems are but not very willing to come up with workable solutions. They just keep criticising everything without proposing anything. Being responsible to your editor to write eloquent prose is a bit different to being responsible to your voters to improve their lives.
Try creating any of them without energy. And that is what the Greens are promoting. Ironically I didn’t see a single reference to that in the article. Doomberg is better for reality, go to its Doomcasts and listen to the Doomcasts with Metals and Miners parts1 and 2 to understand the US Politicians’ death march. Then try this https://newsletter.doomberg.com/p/cooking-the-books
Drax in focus.
I’m with you on the antibiotics. We’ve been waiting for Superbug-ageddon since about 1999 and nothing’s happened.
We don’t fight antibiotics in **anything like** the same way we did in the 1970s or 80s, yet it’s an assumption that we do fight them like that, that is at the heart of the Superbug fear.
I certainly sympathize with your desire for workable solutions.
They are going to be hard to find. But unless the alarm about the current course is sounded, will anybody search? In other words, I don’t dismiss “the prophets of doom” just because they don’t already offer solutions; it’s still a valuable first step.
How frequent has it been in medicine for reliable diagnosis to precede the development of effective treatments, sometimes by quite a time? Were the first diagnoses worthless unless they came with a working treatment from the start?
General Store
5 months ago
If Macron was serious about the possibility of civilization dying he would hold a press conference in Tours and announce a total ban on Muslim immigration and a range of coercive, illiberal measures for integrating the existing population. Shared values are the a priori of liberalism. Unrestrained liberalism is corrosive of shared values.
And also define ‘saving Britain’? If Reform achieved the former, that would create a path dependent future more in line with the past and head off at least one more disjunctural future in the form of the emergence of a whole series of urban caliphate fiefdoms in the heart of Albion. That would qualify as a ‘save’
The French love Moroccan food; true Christianity is very close to Islam; but yes, Muslims will.mot drink the wine.. oh wait, they will if it’s non alcoholic.. a few will sneak in a glass of the real stuff. My friend Aziz sneaks in a pint of larger occasionally!
Look up the word stereotype will you?
Dougie Undersub
5 months ago
I fear that the blob will still be clinging on to its luxury beliefs as the new Russian Commissar/Iranian Ayatollah/Chinese Panjandrum (choose any one from three) is installed at Westminster Abbey/Mosque/ Temple.
The Right’s new parties? If only the “Right” had a party.
Something to conserve what is good for society; what made Britain great.
Some sort of a conserve-ative party.
David Harris
5 months ago
“A cynic would suggest that Europe’s actual strategy in Ukraine is to buy time, at Ukraine’s expense, for our continent’s own rearmament”
Which is what Chamberlain did for Britain in 1938…
Well, if anything. Chamberlain hoped only to buy a specific period of time.
He was worried that by 1940, Germany might well be capable of fighting on a Western and an Eastern Front.
So after March 1939, he seems to have resisted even at the cost of war (and even hoping for it) whereas prior to Munich he’d pursued resistance short of war.
It’s not an entirely analogous situation. In 1938 Germany got what it wanted at little cost. The cost for Russia in Ukraine is much bigger, which may be enough to prevent Russia progressing further with its plans.
Why? Russia hit back at NATO expansion AND the Nazi Azov brigade’s assaults on Russian speakers in the Donbass. Ukraine backed by US (ironically Dems – Victoria Nulands speaking in Maidan Square – imagine Putin at the Capitol Fancy Dress day out the US thinks was an insurrection!) Russia will occupy the Donbas and iF Ukraine doesn’t sue for peace, may just take ALL of Eastern Ukraine. IT will NOT invade Europe. It may even agree an extension to the deal with the West of Ukraine that lets them currently pipe gas across the Ukraine to Hungary, Slovakia, Austria and Italy.
Alex Lekas
5 months ago
Yet there is at least one modest victory we can console ourselves with before we crash the barriers: the destruction of the Conservative Party, at whose door half the blame for our current state of crisis can be laid.
So, who is responsible for the other half of the blame? It appears that the UK is suffering from the same two changes that afflict the American political system, both of which have emerged in my lifetime: 1) far too many people in govt, elected and appointed, believe we work for them instead of the other way around. The concept of the civil servant is a quaint relic of a bygone era, replaced by a self-serving blob, or Deep State, beholden mostly to its donors and its own enrichment.
2) Far too many citizens believe that every single issue, problem, question, or concern that arises demands govt action. No, it does not. Govt struggles as it is to handle its basic obligations. Attempting to assign it responsibility for climate management or child care or things well outside of its purview is a disservice to the public sector and the taxpayer. No one expects Apple to start making furniture and no one expects Ford to enter the semi-conductor space. The same dynamic applies to govt. It is built to do specific things, not ALL things.
IF you don’t recognise them, you are probably one of them. 😉
Matt F
5 months ago
“Living standards in Britain have been battered by the war in Ukraine” This is an all too common scapegoat. It certainly hasn’t helped, but it’s easy to forget the steady rise of oil prices before war broke out. I suspect the crippling (and more concealed) cost of Britain’s unbridled rush to “Net Zero” is a much greater culprit, not to mention the devastating legacy of Covid lock downs, or the seeming inability to manage immigration levels to match the supply of affordable housing.
Similar alarmism exists in the US – the war is costing too much. However the war effort monies constitute less than 1% of our budget. The problem with the Ukraine war is that Europe’s will to win it seems to be absent. What are they afraid of ? Being bombed ? I have news – Israel’s Iron Dome is a game changer. Rather than hammer Israel for it’s war in Gaza, which is unlike any other war fought in history, Europe should be supporting them 100% and collaborating with them in the interest of proliferating defensive weapons. Why does no one see the brilliance in the shield which protected Israel from Hamas and Iranian rockets ?
You mean the shield that consisted of US, UK, French and Jordanian arms, in addition to Israel’s own, and was conducted over the countries between Israel and Iran (a luxury Europe doesn’t have)?
I also get the distinct impression that Iran wasn’t really trying and a surprise attack might have had a very different outcome.
No it isn’t. Israel’s Nukes were. BUT I agree, we should be supporting Israel to the hilt. They win, and the West has a chance, they lose, and the Islamists will be bombing more innocent young girls in another city in the west. There is no such thing as a phobia re Islam. The fear is rational and real.
Correct AND Net Zero isn’t done yet. Unless Starmer recants, you have only ONE vote to save the UK from grid meltdown.
richard jones
5 months ago
Have a look at the photo of Cummings under the headline…according to Aris, the country’s very best hope .
Anyone remember Alfred E. Newman from MAD magazine?
You do realise you are being played? They put that picture there to elicit precisely that reaction from people. So good job for doing exactly as expected and judging by appearances. It’s attitudes like this that have got us into the mess we are in. Instead of being concernd with how people look in a picture why don’t you instead be more concerned by the quality of their ideas, ability to execute and leadership?
And before you accuse me of defending Cummings, I don’t give a shit about the guy. More important is that we get away from how people look and be more concerned with what they can do.
Cummings’ own words and actions are enough to condemn him as unfit. Who needs a picture. Anyway, it isn’t going to matter IF Starmer gets in AND does what he says, the Labour party will sink as the grid/economy does. BUT it won’t be pretty. AND we won’t be fighting any foreign war. We may be fighting in the supermarkets for food mind you.
Citizen Diversity
5 months ago
There is a fabulous Great War memorial in Worthing. It’s hundreds of names and its declaration of duty nobly done is itself a memorial to a dead civilisation. It’s worthies and ordinary people themselves summed up in its words and pathos. Our diminution an offence to the glorious dead.
It is a mercy that those who saw it unveiled did not know the folly at the highest levels in British government that was to cause its erection, vividly described by Douglas Newton in The Darkest Days.
Who today will wrap up their sins in one package and have them expiated in one noble act of battlefield sacrifice? Who will, like those men who are now only embodied in the jaunty figure atop the stone column, get out their Bibles and hold them while dying for God, King and Country? Who will die for the American Empire? And will Washington exchange Atlantic City for Clacton-on-Sea?
For ordinary people, the world has always been dangerous. Cholera, childbirth, the lack of food security. The globalism of the past thirty years was the danger, but no-one perceived it. Mr Sunak promises more security, but more liberty?
If the Russians ever look from Ukraine to the UK and from the UK to Ukraine and can only see UKraine – beware! Will Mr Sunak’s security amount to an Anderson shelter?
UnHerd Reader
5 months ago
Destroy the World Wide Web
Steve Jolly
5 months ago
This author is quite correct. The USA may or may not prevail in its confrontation with China but whatever form the conflict takes, it will not be over quickly. The likeliest outcome is a stalemate much like the first Cold War, which will be fought through technology, economics, and proxy conflicts. Both sides have some advantages. The USA with its allies in Asia and North America have comparable mineral and energy resources to a Russia/China bloc, a disadvantage in manufacturing but not such a decisive one as the USA had over the Axis powers or the Soviets in the 1940’s. China has the same looming demographic problems that Europe does. Leaders can be replaced. Policies can change quickly. Luxury beliefs can and will fail in the face of real adversity. I suspect that we are in for a long slog, because both sides have the resources to sustain a low level conflict for a very long time.
The author has the score right. The US/China conflict is the bell that will truly sound the death knell of globalism. When, not if, China makes its move on Taiwan, the US will sanction it in a similar manner they did Russia and demand NATO do the same, and it won’t matter a lick whether Biden, Trump, or anybody else, is President. As much as Biden railed against Trump as a ‘threat to democracy’, he changed none of Trump’s anti-china measures. They didn’t actually come from Trump. They came from the Pentagon. Obama was an idealist and a pacifist and didn’t listen to the military. Trump was more easily manipulated than he and did, though he turned it into a trade war. Biden has consistently supported the military establishment his entire career. This will happen. Both sides are preparing for it in a totally obvious way. You’d have to be blind to not see it. China is firing missiles at targets designed to replicate American carriers. The US is using Ukraine and Israel to test the effectiveness of their missile defense systems and other weapons. We had all better prepare as best we can because the writing is on the wall for whoever isn’t too blind to see it. This is gonna happen and it’s going to change everything when it does.
The US will very likely endure in some form, and while all Americans will feel the shock from the fall of the globalist regime, the US is in a far better strategic position than others, doomsayers here and elsewhere notwithstanding. I feel bad for the UK and Europe. Europe will be caught in the middle of another superpower conflict with a weak military, little manufacturing capacity, a resource base depleted by earlier industrial eras, and widespread social problems from the importation of millions of Muslim immigrants. Their people are accustomed to ignoring defense budgets while spending extravagantly on luxury beliefs and social programs. Further, unlike the first Cold War, Europe won’t be the primary theater of conflict or be prioritized as such. There will be no Marshall Plan this go round. In a reversal of WWII, the real fight will be in Asia, while whatever happens in Europe is put on the back burner. In a hypothetical conflict with Russia/China, Europe can expect to get about what Ukraine is getting, whatever weapons the Pentagon thinks we can spare and/or we need to test in real combat.
Roussinos seems to be the one author on here who really sees the geopolitical strategic situation and understands the implications of what’s coming down the pipe. Whether the European people decide to keep riding whatever space is left for them on the USA’s coattails, accept the domination of Putin and Xi, or try to find some middle ground between the two, it’s going to require a lot of change and a lot of hard choices. It’s telling that even Macron is obliquely implying the end of the globalized era. For whatever his faults, and they are many, at least he isn’t a complete idiot or an insane zealot for globalist ideologies. I don’t envy his position, nor you folks across the ocean in general.
Yes I mainly agree, although I think the USA will become isolationist rather than confront China.
The USA is perfectly capable of doing very nicely alone… without having to be the world policeman.
Europe is effectively finished. The EU will linger on for some time causing much grief for its member countries but will eventually break up even more than it is already doing.
Liam O'Mahony
5 months ago
He says: “The United States, on whose military power our political settlement ultimately depends” …is a sad truth, especially if that power is to be exercised by a nutjob like Trump. The only reason Trump seems “not too bad” is that the Biden Administration is so appallingly bad. The UK is now firmly aligned with a Zionist dominated US: a derranged genocidal state now sets the agenda! The world will remember that I+USUK (pronounced, aptly I and You Suck) aided and abetted the genocide of a defenceless* population and as such will be pariah states for a generation.
If I+USUK were to be economically viable and militarily powerful going forward (they’re not) that might not matter so much but when you throw in the clear financial disaster looming on the Horizon for the dead and dying empires the future looks bleak indeed, not as bleak as the writer portrayed it.. no, far bleaker than that!
Given a choice between Zionists and Hamas, give me Zionists every time. So far I don’t remember any Zionists bombing young girls in Manchester, or abusing them in many UK cities, or bombing the tube. Then maybe Zionists have a better understanding of Geography and realise Manchester isn’t in Gaza or a suburb of Tel Aviv – and Hamas/Islamists don’t.
Hamas could have surrendered and left Gaza at any time in order to save their population. They are like AH in 45 in his Berlin bunker determined as much to have his own population pay. We often forget Hamas could stop all this today.
Not that I agree with all the approach of the IDF or many of the right wing settlers.
(I+USUK) will be pariah states for a generation.
That’s just wishful thinking, I’m afraid. Everybody wants the Hamas death cult gone. Especially the other Arab states in the region. Do you really think Israel would be doing what it is without the tacit endorsement of their neighbours? Of course not.
c donnellan
5 months ago
Halting and reversing mass immigration along with ending vassalage to The United States, getting out of NATO, etc would be a good starting point.
How do you think the exiting from NATO would help the UK? Would your economy support funding your own modern defense system on your own, or would you advocate that the UK not bother?
chris sullivan
5 months ago
Excellent summary thanks Aris !
Davy Humerme
5 months ago
Whatever the problem the answer is never Cummings. A screaming zealot for regime science who was a driving mind for lockdown’s. A hypocrite who ignored the advice he encouraged on others, and despite histrionic posturing about the blob and centralisation wants to replace our sorry democracy with a surveillance tech state. No thanks.
Andrew Armitage
5 months ago
Political leaders have very little power. It’s an illusion. Part of the problem is that the population believes the illusion. It has created unrealistic expectations of what a government can do.
I predict (and maybe hope for) a future where government abandons any involvement in major aspects of life: care for the elderly, education, health, planning, housing, broadcasting. Leaves people and communities to sort themselves out. It’s doing such a terrible job at such high cost, a fully private self-reliant, self-managed system could quite plausibly be better.
Leaving only defence, police and justice run centrally
It might be traumatic, if towns have to go back to organising their own power stations, hospitals or municipal waterworks, but would it be so bad for us to re-learn how to be self reliant?
James Kumara-Lloyd
5 months ago
Sadly, most UK political parties are authoritarian, favouring petty rules to govern our lives over personal responsibility. They believe the government should run or heavily regulate half the economy despite poor results over the last 80 years. Everything will be fine if we put someone more competent in charge or make minor changes.
The fallout of the pandemic on the economy and public services has again shown this approach’s deficiencies.
As a voter, this gives one little choice. As Dominic Cummings very much falls into this view, his party is unlikely to appeal.
M To the Tea
5 months ago
Over the past 500 or 600 years, the West has expended significant energy dominating various continents through force and financial means. Historically, populations in regions like Africa and the Americas were vulnerable to Western technological advancements. This dominance was often accompanied by a sense of cruelty and pleasure in oppressing these groups, despite their historical non-interference and helplessness towards the West. Cruelty is sweet poison and we have been drinking for a long time! But there is no fear coming from Africa or Americas today (asking for equality is not hostility). That psychological enjoyment of being dominant over those helpless already is the Achilles heels of the west!
Currently, the West is encountering a formidable competitor in China, who ironically created by the same thinking of the west (we can also manipulate and dominate the Chinese ideas), whose technological and industrial advancements are challenging Western dominance. The West’s ignorance and underestimation of China’s potential have led to a situation where China is surpassing Western intelligence in tech and efficiency in industrialization (i.e. green energy). This fear of China’s rise is compounded by Russia’s quest for revenge following the collapse of its empire—a situation the West mishandled by ignoring/laughing rather than fostering stronger relations. Consequently, the rules of engagement have been completely redrawn, with China now holding the upper hand in this new phase of global power dynamics. As the Chinese calls us now, we have become Decadent!
The only way forward is to make a sincere effort to achieve peace with the populations we have overruled and oppressed at home, even if acknowledging this is icky factor. We must understand that the “divide and conquer” strategies we have practiced will no longer work for groups among us.
Where we lost power of machines of today, we may as well perfect our human relations and the amount of innovation and creativity sitting latent in us. Imagine, if we change the course of narrative to one of unity than division! Ask yourself, who benefits from the division? Not the average person.
Instead, we need to find ways to unify the fractured groups among us, offer reparations and reconciliation, and then come to the table to devise a strategy to withstand the impending economic catastrophe from China and Russia axis. What will not work is the notion that we can dominate our overseas with a divided home.
I do not see any articles taking this tone so that is the problem…China and Russia have been watching us for a long time and they can just sit back a tad longer as we eat our own tails.
Andrew Fisher
5 months ago
Aris Roussinos appears to have a kind of sniffy disdain for culture war issues, which he thinks are far less important than issues of state capacity and a correct analysis and implementation of foreign policy, which are “his” issues. I think he’s fundamentally wrong on this. Both can be important. Ideology certainly is; the Christian takeover of the Roman Empire was not a minor matter of little importance to the world.
Eventually if you keep talking about your society as white supremacist, gammon, toxic, even male over and over again – consistently praising outsider groups over your own population, then people might actually absorb this message. Perhaps they will be more likely to think that British society is intrinsically rotten, or at least view it in a completely cynical way. Are those people going to champion or fight for their state or society in on any level? This is not a mistake the Chinese are making!
Tyler Durden
5 months ago
The Conservative Party is a winning machine so the task is to wrest back control for the Right. No populism will be affected directly in British electoral policy unless there is (a) another referendum (b) the voting system is changed.
And in the name of compromise, rather have some still slightly soft centre-right Tory government back than a Labour government playing lip-service to identity politics and, worse again, pro-China Net Zero policies that will impoverish the people.
Peter Hall
5 months ago
At the core of the UK’s problems is a parasitic welfare state that has 6 million clients and 6 million employees. It is inexorably bankrupting the country, has created a culture which is conformist and anti/enterprise and which supports uncontrolled immigration)which creates more customers and solidifies labours control of the cities. Two interesting facts – Australia has three times as many stock exchange listed companies per capita as the United Kingdom and through the mandatory portable pension scheme has substantial retirement savings, receives dividends and is interested in enterprise and the economy. Is the result is a bias to fiscal conservatism and creativity. Second, 17.6% of British people live in social housing as compared with about 4% in other Anglo Saxon countries. The result is multi generational ghettos, hideous buildings and dependency. All these problems could have been fixed if the Conservatives had carried on with the progressive thatcher programme but they preferred the complacency and incompetence of macmillan and heath. Now it is too late to save the country unless lurking within labour are some courageous progressives who understand what is at stake. The Conservative Party must die.
Living on a diet of baloney is bad for your health. Eat fresh vegetables and plenty of them to remove the blockage. Your friends, if any, will be grateful.
Jerry Carroll
5 months ago
A brilliant analysis. It is no wonder Nigel Farage hovers on the sidelines, content to make good money on TV and play some role in the Trump administration rather than sink beneath the waves in the hulk that is the Conservative Party. It might be time to encourage people to plant backyard gardens and raise rabbits for food as in WW2.
Dark Horse
4 months ago
So glad I have my nitrogen cannister and exit bag!
Main Edition
US
FR
Prophet of Doom, Aris? The cup is either half empty OR half full, but your cup is half empty. Yes, we have problems. No, all is not lost. Some look at the ocean as a barrier, some see it as a bridge. The ‘hard times’ will call forth strong men, the fat will be trimmed from our public discourse, and the necessary work to create a world that is more good then before will be well begun.
The danger will be great, but the rewards correspondingly so.
Interesting essay for sure, but definitely nihilistic.
Ironically it misses the real danger. Starmer promises to decarbonise the UK grid next parliament. Even Greens know that isn’t possible, so he is about to risk the Grid on an impossibility. NO modern economy can survive without a functioning power grid (note what Russia targets in Ukraine) The UK Grid is under threat already.
https://davidturver.substack.com/p/wait-for-the-blackout
or if you are sufficiently left wing to demand that it facts are only provided by the left (there are such people)
https://www.euronews.com/business/2024/02/28/britain-could-see-lights-out-in-perfect-storm-power-cuts
The economy will fail, AND so will society if blackouts become regular and prolonged AND they will!
Here’s the experience of the US, you don’t hear much about.
https://newsletter.doomberg.com/p/inverted-priorities
So, one vote only to stop the destruction of the grid and hence the economy. We won’t be fighting any wars with no grid.
Only Reform promise to scrap Net Zero.
That was a indeed a very fatalistic read. The UK was in a parlous state in the 70s, then something changed, and that was enacted through change in one of the established parties.
The blackouts in the 1970’s were because the supply of fuel to the generators was interrupted. When the generators AREN’T there, that’s a whole new ball game. No half-a-day of trucking in coal to put it right. You have only this next GE to save the UK, as Labour has promised to decarbonise the grid by 2030. So ONE vote to save the UK sometime in the next 7 months. Vote Reform, the only party not committed to Net Zero insanity.
Or Panglossian
Stout words that would have been understood by the people of 1914.
Quite right.. nothing good old socialist revolition can’t fix, eh?
As we say in Vork: I hope it stays fine for ye boy!
Just caught up with this…it’s impossible with AR to know if his cup is half full or half empty, as every time he starts a piece it’s as if somebody has just knocked it over.
“it is hard to see such luxury beliefs long surviving a world where British voters, already poor and angry, will be poorer and angrier than we have known in many decades”
Even as the entire country falls into penury and there are running street battles between blackshirts and blackblocs, the elites will still insist on chemically castrating children, policing speech, importing the world and empowering NGOs to attack ordinary people. They are just that out of touch – inured against the effects of the chaos they unleash, living as they do in gated developments and homogeneous enclaves.
Even as they are devoured by furious, hungry white working class the elite will preach their doctrines of egalitarianism while continuing to enrich themselves. I would have preferred to have been ruled by inbred aristocrats, quite honestly. At least they had some skin in the game.
I would have preferred to have been ruled by inbred aristocrats, quite honestly. At least they had some skin in the game
… and understood that their privileges came with responsibilities
That is part of the problem. The current elite believe they’ve actually earned their privilege. Although I do hate that word these days.
Mee too.. the “Predatory Class” is more apt I feel.
Absolutely. The elites think that because they have passed a few exams they understand the world better than everyone else.
Even if this is true, the world is still far, far more difficult to understand than a degree in PPE affords.
Those of us with less elite educations understand that we understand little.
I remember the comment that though the eloquent may pass a written exam on how to drive a car, they might not be able to drive a car safely. The same is true for conducting Physics experiments, or being in charge of the national Energy policy.
Which one? Elite or privilege? Hugh is quite right that the aristocracy of old understood that their status and responsibility go hand in hand.
However, I firmly believe that even the current crop of so-called elites will eventually reap what they have sown. Their gated enclaves and ideologies will not protect them forever; all revolutions eventually eat their children.
Quite, the House of Lords was a far better place with hereditary peers; they took their good stewardship duties seriously, unlike the large numbers of clapped out, virtue signalling has beens that inhabit the place now.
I’d rather have some old soak of a Lord selected randomly than some smartypants who’s done the politicians a few favours.
A Labour peer once sneered at the Duke of Buccleuch: “What have you ever done for the country?”
“I’ve employed about 10,000 people. What have you done?” the Duke replied.
That applied only to the previous generation.. this one prefers to burn £50 notes in front of homeless beggars; jolly good fun though as Boris said!
Because of inflation it would take a £100 note today to achieve the same effect.
If Macron was serious about the possibility of civilization dying he would hold a press conference in Tours and announce a total ban on Muslim immigration and a range of coercive, illiberal measures for integrating the existing population. Shared values are the a priori of liberalism. Unrestrained liberalism is corrosive of shared values.
And also define ‘saving Britain’? If Reform achieved the former, that would create a path dependent future more in line with the past and head off at least one more disjunctural future in the form of the emergence of a whole series of urban caliphate fiefdoms in the heart of Albion. That would qualify as a ‘save’
Unrestrained liberalism is corrosive of shared values – That’s why all these LGBTQIA+ letters and their prophets must be removed from public space and gay marriage should be abolished as a concept, since it has nothing to do with marriage
I agree. Liberalism unbound ends-up in authoritarianism and some variant of Maoism
What do you propose to achieve that? The wrack or burning ar the stake?
I would have thought a simple change in the law prioritizing heterosexual marriage as a vehicle for child conception, birth and socialization and societal reproduction would suffice. You’re always so extreme Liam. Calm down
Changing definitions has consequences.
Just think of the redefinitions of vaccine, safe (meaning no risk, at all), marriage.
“Safe” is always a relative term: no risk at all is not possible.
Our “Civilisation” such as it is, is allegedly based on fundamental Christian values.. but Islam is based on exactly the same values! as indeed is true Judaism.. Tolerance and respect for difference was the hallmark of hundreds of years of Ottoman rule at a time when Christianity preferred Inquisition and torture!
Christian Civilisation was at best practiced by the working class and a few notable elites but the powerful, then as now are closer to Satanism where the motivators were and are Fear, Greed and Hatred.. For those unfamiliar with Christ’s teachings His “civilised” approach was based on Love, Generosity and Respect, ie the diametric opposite of elitist behaviour. Western Civilisation my ass!
Islam is based on a rejection of Christianity since it fundamentally denied the identity of Christ. It considers Him a prophet and a Muslim one superseded by Muhammad. Not the Son of God, not crucified and did not rise from the Dead. It is monotheistic and derives some ideas from Judaism but there the similarities end.
Quite a lot of similarities then!
Curiously the ‘Islamic’ rulers who were ‘enlightened’ were none of them Ayatollahs or from any priestly class IIRC. As for Mustafa Kamal Ataturk …
That’s fantasy Islam.
Islam is not based on “exactly the same values!” That’s wishful thinking. It is also typical leftist, self-hating, western, woke rubbish (even if that does not apply to you).
Islam is a totalitarian system, it’s not just a religion, but a system of law, politics, social and economic relations.
‘Ideally’ muslim countries are meant to be governed by Islamic law–not other people’s legal ideas. Jesus said, “my kingdom is not of this world..” That’s not islam. For centuries, the Caliph was the “shadow of god on Earth.” A political ruler with vastly more power than any Christian Pope. The Caliph had huge armies at his disposal (see fall of Constantinople, 1453, siege of Vienna, 1683).
Jews and Christians were only tolerated on sufferance in the Islamic Arab and later Ottoman lands, as second class citizens. They had to pay the special tax for non-muslims, the Jizya, including ritually humiliation while paying it (beard pulling, spitting etc) because they had not done the ‘right’ thing and converted to the supreme religion.
Egypt was mainly Christian at the time of the Muslim conquests.. now? Less than 10% Why? Because it was hard to resist the pressure, over centuries, of being treated like a 2nd class citizen, and ritually humiliated, even as you were being fleeced by your “superior” oppressors.
Look up “devshirme” if you want to see how “tolerant” to Christians the Ottomans were… and “janissary”… too
Before anyone says the Crusades were uniquely awful, why do we not hear more about the vast Muslim conquests not that much earlier: the “Crescades?” including most of the original Christian heartlands… Syria, Iraq, Israel-Palestine, Lebanon, Anatolia, Egypt, across North Africa to Morocco, into Spain, onto France.. and East, across Iran (Zoroastrianism gone), onto Afghanistan, including the Hindu Kush, and (what is modern) Pakistan and northern India.
Look up “Hindu Kush” (clue… “Kushtan” means to kill in Persian), mostly Buddhist and Hindu before the Islamic conquests. Mahmoud of Ghazni is another name to look up… 2m hindus killed…
Starting in the 18th C. some European thinkers who disliked aspects of the west, especially Christianity, started the fashion, continuing to this day, especially on the left, to use Islam as a (fake) stick with which to beat the ‘decadent’ Christian west..
Yes, Christianity was horribly distorted, but, regrettably it is not so clear that Islam was… there’s a sad saying: “If only more Christians were more like Jesus and thank goodness most muslims are not more like [fill in the blank].
Christianity started as a religion of courageous martyrs (lions, human candles, crucifixions). Islam did not start that way, but as the state religion of a triumphantly conquering tribe…. As Khomeini said: “Islam was never a religion of peace… ” and worse that cannot be said here.
Note: christians, muslims, atheists, hindus are just people. Christianity, Atheism, Judaism, Islam, Islamism are ideologies (good points and bad). Unfortunately, many good, kind muslims do not know much about their own tradition, let alone classical Islamic doctrine, let alone Islamic Jurisprudence. They are just ordinary, good people, trying to live ordinary good lives. Rational concerns about Islam as a religious, legal, and political ideology (Islamorealism (not a phobia)) never justify generalized discrimination against people of that challenging (to us) heritage.
Thank you! Perfectly stated.
It’s just a shame Liam won’t read it.
How do you know he won’t?
I think we might agree that many civilizations committed atrocities and this certainly didn’t exclude Western Christianity. Of course when you make this point there’s a sleight of hand is immediately invoked by which apologists redefine who Christians actually were. The crusaders were blessed by the Pope and certainly considered themselves Christian. I’m not sure anybody has ever claimed they were uniquely evil but the contrast between massacring all the inhabitants of Jerusalem in 1099 (for example) and the idea of a supposedly peace loving religion is rather stark.
Yes Islam was spread by military conquest but then that’s exactly what happened in northern Europe, the Baltic states the Americas and others. Actually the Islamic conquest of the Near East was carried out rather easily with a few fairly minor military battles; there was huge discord already between the population and the Byzantine imperial centre over issues of religious orthodoxy. And later on of course with the conquest of Constantinople many byzantines much preferred living the Turkish turban to the papal tiara!
99% of Christians who have ever lived were not liberals! What was it about judging people by what they do and not what they say?
The Islamic conquest of the Near East might have been carried out ‘rather easily’, but their conquest of the Indian sub-continent was anything but. It’s been described as the ‘greatest tragedy in human history’, and for very good reasons. ‘Timur the Great’, the ‘Sword of Islam’, slaughtered an estimated 17 million people, laying waste to numerous cities, in his march across NW India. His legacy there? Piles of skulls hundreds of feet high. The Mughal emperors couldn’t match that, though the last Aurangzeb tried.
It’s fantastic how little you know of Christianity, Judaism or Islam.
Really? ..are you sure you’re not confusing Christianity with rip-off (so-called Christian) religions and sects? ..and Islam with Islamist doctrine? I do admit ti knowing far less about Jewish Talmudic law being familiar with the OT only.. but I’m reliably informed by devoid Jews that the fundamentals of Judaism are very close to fundamental Christian (ala Christ’s) teaching. Jesus and Mary are helping the highest regard in Islam. As for the Trinity, 99% of Christians,yself included don’t understand how it can sit alongside ‘one true God’ ..who believes in 3 gods? ..besides, this nitpicking is off point.
That’s a slightly absurd caricature of Western civilisation Liam! The paradox of western Christian civilisation is that it was indeed often remarkably intolerant as imposed by the Church or indeed churches. However for complex reasons, including the church / state split that Tom Holland and others have gone into, it ultimately led to the concepts of individual human individualism and the liberal order (which of course now seems to itself to be shifting radically). This did not happen in China, India or the Muslim world.
Much as I admire aspects of Islamic civilization the reality is that it went into a long period of stagnation obscurantism and decadence. Christian Europe had thousands of printing presses when Ottoman Turkey had a handful. There was already a huge difference.
You also omit the classical inheritance to European culture. I have not heard of any significant republican tradition emerging in other parts of the world.
What makes you think the elites of today are any different than the inbred aristocrats who ruled Europe for hundreds of years? They’re not. The problems inherent with aristocrat/elite classes, however they’re defined, rationalized, or justified are consistent throughout history. Over and over again, when they become too powerful, they lose touch with the real problems and make mistakes that lead them to be conquered by stronger, more effective neighbors, overthrown by a new ruling class, or preside over the wholesale collapse of their civilization. Our modern aristocrat class is no different. Their days are already numbered and a few of them have some idea what’s coming, hence their panicking over populist movements. Like this author, I can almost feel the tide turning. We will all suffer for their failure, but in the final fall, they will not be spared. In the end, they will lose more simply because they have the most to lose. Like the decadent courtiers of Vienna in the 1780’s, modern aristocrats will, if they are fortunate and foresighted, flee to foreign nations who will use them for their own purposes, or if they are less fortunate, they’ll be marched right to the guillotine with their heads high and their noses in the air, convinced to the last that they are the rightful rulers, unfairly usurped by unruly, uneducated, dirty peasants. They may not have the Habsburg chin, but they’re just as myopic and detached as any feudal noble. They’re also just as doomed. Give it time.
Paradoxically, they may have to flee to Muslim countries who, if we’re talking about historical civilisation, were consistently the most tolerant of difference and seem to like elitism as well!
LOL- so who blew up young girls in Manchester, who abused them in many a town and city across the UK. Which will you nip to first? Pakistan or Gaza, or perhaps Iran?
Oh, I’m aware. By the standards of the medieval world, Islamic civilization was fairly tolerant, particularly by the time of the Ottomans, who were pointedly not Arabs nor originally Muslims, but Turkic people from Central Asia who fled the Mongol hordes and adopted Islam when they overthrew for the Mamluks, who were another such Turkic people, both groups being far more tolerant than the Caliphates which immediately preceded them. They then proceeded to finally finish the conquest of the ailing Byzantine Empire, which put them in the position of having large religious minorities to rule, which they managed quite effectively for many centuries. On the whole, the Ottomans were one of the least oppressive empires in history and deserve more respect than they generally receive, probably because of their ignominious end at the close of WWI.
All that has no bearing whatsoever on whether modern Islam still qualifies as ‘tolerant’ by modern standards, particularly towards blue haired protesters waving pride flags and demanding other people respect their preferred gender pronouns. The image of Macron and his ilk fleeing from a populist mob alongside the millions of people they imported is pretty amusing I grant, but they’ll have other options. I don’t expect the global aristocrat class to collapse entirely everywhere at once. More likely they’ll be outright evicted through revolution in some places and see their power and authority slowly decay in others, much like their feudal predecessors. History is a process.
I don’t think there is any basis for saying that Arab ruled states were any more or less religiously tolerant than Turkish ones.
I don’t think we can simply read history from as continuous story of islamic intolerance and brutality. What you are talking about today is Islamism, a modern political ideology, perhaps the last 150 years itself a response to Western domination, and not Islam itself. That movement is certainly very intolerant as far as I can see with few exceptions.
However it is true that Islam has much more prestige and importance as a source of law and authority then canon law (say) does does in the West, because there was there was no fundamental church / state split in Islamic history. (Well obviously there is today but modern Muslim states are precisely that, largely modern creations, constructed both by and in opposition to the dominant Western powers)
So they would flee to one of the historical eras of Muslim countries? If they can flee across time, they would probably have better choices.
The answer lies in our democracy, the British electorate will hopefully vote against these elites who rule us.
#DisruptLibLabConGrn
#DisruptGE2024
If this had been submitted a year ago the scores would have been opposite! How times have changed..
He’s wrong on 2 counts. a) Russia will NOT start a kinetic/actual war with Europe. It has no need to. They will probably camp on the East bank of the Dnieper and say – “Come and get us if you think you are hard enough.” AND we won’t be.
b) The West is committing economic suicide with Net Zero, little else matters IF we stick with that, particularly the UK.
To expand on the above.
The US is about to hit serious financial issues at home and their reserve currency status of the $ and ‘safe Treasury assets’ are both under threat because the morons in Washington ‘weaponised’ them against Russia and frightened off the rest of the planet. The biggest of whom, by the way, meet in Moscow just before US elections AND are reputed to be looking at a gold backed trade replacement for the $ – In Go(l)d they trust! 😉
Ironically only a surfeit of gas/oil is holding off the US recession. After all how can you have a recession when gas is $2 – $4 a Million BTU AND your greens won’t let you export it? That more than -ve interest rates is keeping Biden’s economy alive. Will it work? I’m sure the Fed and the insane idea of letting Freddie Mac enter the ‘equity release’ market with a $1 – 2 Trillion war chest is just what they need! That’s not even considering Taiwan & the South China Sea.
Then to Europe. No one in Europe will be because they’ll all be too busy with the enemies within.
Then finally, Russia is NOT that keen on wars believe it or not. They spent years telling NATO ‘keep doing this and it will be war’ – Then the only hit Ukraine.
They are happy to occupy Russian speaking enclaves isolated from Russia by Soviet borders in a post Soviet world but that’s about it. They also help out their friends in say Syria, but they didn’t back up Christian Armenia when Islamic Azerbaijan took over Ngorno Karabakh. Nor is Chechynya a stable place and Russia is more interested in that than Western Ukraine. If anything Western Ukraine might be more wary of it’s ‘Western’ neighbours. They owned chunks of it through history and Poland and Slovakia aren’t exactly chucking weapons or Euros their way.
Slovakia’s recent events show up the tensions in that area. Who did what and why isn’t in the mainstream, but then, it wasn’t Russia who blew up the Nordstreams either.
So Russia has enough problems of its own. NATO was the biggest, but assuming we can stop our insane leaders sending NATO into the Ukraine, then it will hollow out and Russia will simply gradually extend the warm hand of gas, oil etc to say, Slovakia, Hungary and maybe others. You’d be amazed how welcoming the gas man is during a bitter East European winter. At the end of this year the current Ukraine/Russia pipeline agreement comes up for renewal.
What? I hear you ask? The agreement that currently transports Russia gas, across the Ukraine and into the EU. How many on here knew that I wonder?
“Against all odds, Russian pipeline gas is still flowing through Ukraine—mainly to Austria, Slovakia, Italy, and Hungary. But for how long?”
From this link
https://www.energypolicy.columbia.edu/will-the-ukrainian-gas-transit-contract-continue-beyond-2024/
As for the UK – oh dear. Like the US re finance, BUT not like them re floating in oil/gas , our Net Zero means decarbonising the grid by 2030 – ie next parliament as Starmer promised. That means we will be fighting nobody for very long. Not foreigners (except those already in this country) anyway.
The collapse of an electricity grid kills modernity AND leads to hunger in big Urban areas – as we’ll discover IF the morons actually try it.
Decarbonising ? As I post the Grid demand of 33.8Gw (that can be well over 40Gw in winter) is being supplied, by ALL the decarbonised renewables, – a total of 4.61Gw of wind, 1.37Gw of Solar & falling, 0.37Gw of hydro and 1.78Gw of US Forests burning in Drax. A grand total of say 8Gw. So only a shortfall of 27Gw. Decarbonise in 5 years? ROFL – Euronews has it right, as has David Turver
https://davidturver.substack.com/p/wait-for-the-blackout
The West is about to become the new 3rd world, BUT we MAY have a slight chance of avoiding total collapse IF we vote Reform who are NOT committed to Net Zero insanity. Open coal mines, frack and DO NOT join any wars, AND we may come out of this in one piece, but VERY battered. But one piece is good!
https://www.energydashboard.co.uk/live
The speed with which Truss was removed, because she wanted test fraccing to start, shows the mountain that needs to be climbed.
The Conservative Party has become like an iceberg, with most of its influencers hidden from view, which is why it needs to be more than defeated.
The Global economy that we have depended on for the past 70 years is rapidly declining. The US is reshoring the industries they exported to China, Taiwan, Korea and Japan and planning to trade extensively with its two neighbours, Canada and Mexico.
China and Russia have teamed up. China provides the manufacturing and Russia provides the raw materials and energy,
The Europe has food but is poor in terms of energy and raw materials. It’s also set to become overrun by African and middle Eastern refugees and social welfare migrants.
The best advice for any young man with an education or skill is to emigrate and start a new life elsewhere. If he doesn’t have an education or skill I strongly recommend he get one.
Agreed. They have neither noblesse nor do they oblige
Talking of the British political class, somehow all of them are organised to attend a course on transhumanism at the University of Berkeley, California, as well as the standard classes in neoconservatism in Washington. And perhaps that same gospel is being pumped into their bedrooms every night in the style of Telly Savalas’ ‘girl ambassadors’ in “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service”?
First of all, Monty’s two rules:
Don’t invade Russia. Don’t invade China.
The problem is that Russia doesn’t have any natural boundaries. But it really, really does want a warm-water sea port.
China? I don’t know when China last did any invading. It basically thinks that everyone outside China is a barbarian.
And by the way, military experts agree, Taiwan would be very difficult to invade.
The question is what to do about the dumb-as-rocks welfare state. I suspect it will have to break utterly first.
I also don’t think many people realize how much support there is for China in Taiwan. The Premier is a strong opponent, but lots of elected politicians are very pro China.
It seem curious that there are people in Taiwan who are happy to be ruled by Communists, but each to their own.
They generally live on the eastern side of the island and therefore don’t get to see on a daily basis what’s going on across the strait.
Haha.. very funny!
Not only funny but also true:
https://focustaiwan.tw/politics/202401090007
Blue is KMT who want closer ties with China, and DPP is green who want to remain independent.
Enjoy.
A right-wing London based think tank carried out a study on perceptions in the US and China.. 47% of US citizens believe the US was truly democratic; 70% of Chinese think it is truely democratic.. There a different kinds of democracy.. none is ala ancient Greece!
What do the Irish think?
Are you saying that 70% of Chinese think the US is truly democratic? Presumably even they don’t contend that China is truly democratic.
..now you’re trying to introduce reality and commonsense.. such nonsense has no part to play in this modern age!
I certainly wouldn’t suggest invading Russia, but it is incumbent on us to do everything we can to weaken it. Trading with it is insanity.
What utter rubbish.. in 1941-45 you thought fighting alongside it made sense!! Trading with opposing states is as old as humanity!
I agree with you, which isn’t often. In fact this is why Russia won’t bother crossing the Dnieper for West Ukraine.
https://www.energypolicy.columbia.edu/will-the-ukrainian-gas-transit-contract-continue-beyond-2024/
Ukraine’s allies in the rear may desire Russia’s gas. Probably why the US blew up Nordstream. Europe is now on the US leash until the Nordstreams are repaired, and why should they bother? The BRICS are proving a good market AND they won’t walk off with your assets. (Which by the way isn’t that smart – Russia has under its control equivalent amounts of western assets, we already flogged off gas/oil interests at a discount of billions to Putin’s mates too!
More intriguing is go back to WW1
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/4797vh06x16KYYpsLyh7SPx/nine-unexpected-facts-about-world-war-i
and why the Brits have hope, get rid of our incompetents and we can thrive BUT we have to do it next GE or Starmer will wreck the grid!
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-25776836
Oh, it was the USA that blew up Nordstream. I’m glad you have put that beyond doubt.
It made sense in that very narrow context (namely the defeat of an even greater enemy). There were those in the west who though that with Germany defeated, the armies of the Western allies should continue on into Russia. Personally, I think they had a point, although I appreciate that it would have been a “hard sell” after six years of war.
Wrong, Russia was actually a good business partner. China is the one you should never deal with. BUT too late now. They’ve stolen and learnt virtually all they need to know. China won’t need to invade Taiwan soon, they’ll have their own Chip industry. They already own windmills, solar panels, electric cars, steel then start addding up all the commodities that are in short supply and are needed for high tech stuff -Magnesium, rare-earths? Still, Temu does bloody amazing offers on virtually everything AND I didn’t give them all that expertise, the morons who rule us did that.
Make it three. Don’t invade Russia, don’t invade China, don’t invade Afghanistan.
Don’t invade Vietnam… don’t invade Turkey…
I can see a pattern forming.
If only I had a degree in an ology, I would be able to avoid coming to any satisfactory conclusion.
China’s last invasion: Vietnam in the late 1970s. Didn’t go very well for China. Tibet before that. China is an empire posing as a unitary nation state – just as the Soviet Union was, though the colonised minorities are a smaller percentage of the population in China.
They’re also trying to stealthily expand into India and Bhutan.
Plus the Chinese minority in Malaysia, Chinese Communists defeated by Britain in a forgotten colonial war.
You’re delusional!
Evidence?
..now you’re just being silly!
In fairness, the Chinese don’t have a monopoly on failed military adventures in Vietnam.
The question is what to do about the dumb-as-rocks welfare state.
The answers are simple:
Stop taxing productive activity in order to reward the rent-seeking of the middle class. There is no reason at all why metropolitan multi-millionaires whose wealth is entirely gifted to them by fiscal and monetary policy should not pay for their own social care or winter fuel.Recover a portion of the c£7 trillion so gifted by shifting a larger portion of the tax burden onto council tax.Cut both regulation and taxes on the small businesses that employ 60%+ of the working population. A healthy economy is one in which small businesses can grow to become large ones – yet the barriers to such growth now are insuperably higher than they were in the 1990s and, thanks to the slavish devotion of our Establishment to Brussels, will continue to become more burdensome, especially if Labour win this year.Adopt the Swiss cantonal system – or at least institute a constitutional rule requiring that no decision that can be taken by the Parish Council should be taken by the Borough Council and so on right up to Westminster. Cummings is dead right that over-centralisation is a huge part of the problem.Finally, close half the universities and convert the campuses to affordable housing for young families.
Apologies – didn’t realise that the bullet points in the editor don’t transfer to the page!
Use the angle brackets
Testing the editor
and accept that fossil fuels will be around for at least the next 50 years and1-promote the North Sea Industry rather than trying to shut it down and 2-promote fracking which will transform the North west of England,expand our skill bases and help our balance of payments.These 2 alone will be transformational.
From when the trade unions wanted to keep their restrictive working practices, for extra pay, in the 60s, to Major converting the Technical Colleges to mush spreading, intelligence reducing, 4th rate universities, and the catastrophe of the 2008 Climate Change Act, and the BBC’s ill-informed enthusiastic support of it, it still isn’t obvious to the Arts, Humanities and Social Science ‘educated’ majority, that modern skillsets, manufacturing, food production, and wealth creation, are needed to keep us in the manner to which we are accustomed.
If you want it, just outsource it! 🙂
Franking will indeed transform NW England.
It will turn it into a wasteland! Do you know what franking does???
Dont?The you mean “fracking”? I’m which case I entirely agree, though Lancashire County Council might not.
Don’t they have enough stamps?
don’t you hate when predictive text does that!
Fracking of course.. predictive text eh! Grrh
Yep. It’s an automated process for paying for postage.
That is the most important thing now. So far the west is about to commit social and economic suicide. ironically the US oil industry is keeping the US alive BUT thanks to the Greens banning the export of the excess gas the US is awash with, Europe is going to be stuffed because the US blew up the Nordstreams. Smart move that. Ukraine’s gas pipeline is only supplying 4 EU countries, and NOT Germany. So they helped the German Greens stuff German industry. Brexit was never so well timed. ALL we need to do now is kick out any party that adheres to Net Zero or even worse, Absolute Zero. We may then save ourselves (PS convert Drax back to coal and start importing from Oz or mining it here) AND invite BASF and other German energy intensive industries to come to the UK – oh ,and get blast furnaces back into Port Talbot – the pig iron from ore ones ASAP.
I have always thought that the centralization of power in London has been hugely detrimental to the rest of the country and was the legacy of 2 world wars and the Attlee Government
I remember, in the 60s, that I never wanted to be an Engineer: they were ALWAYS on strike, or so it seemed from watching the BBC. There was also that mob rule cloud across much of the industrial Midlands and North. Yes, not a very accurate view, but one one that was broadcast across the country, to me, so I avoided Engineering, until I found Computers and IT.
Maybe, that is why Finance, and London, became so prosperous.
UK industry had until possibly COVID grown every year since 1948. The myth that Thatcher killed it off was just that. There was more manufacturing when she left office than when she took it. It just wasn’t crappy red BL cars.
The EU has the Principle of Subsidiarity whereby decisions are supposed to be taken at the lowest viable level.. never practiced of course! Pity..
I am aware. It depends on those who have the power releasing it. So that was never going to work
Far simpler solution: tax wealth! UK wealth estimated at £12tn.. on a sliding scale from 0.1% on owner occupied homes up to £¼m, peaking at 5% pa.. that will bring in a min. of £100bn a year. Problem solved, overnight!
OMG genius. No-one ever thought of that before. I wonder has it ever been tried? I wonder if there might be unintended consequences? Who cares….let’s go for it eh Liam
Unintended consequences for whom? The 1% who bribe the govt? If you’re part of the 1% then of course you will object due to your greed and narcissism so you’ll make sure the media scares you with it’s propaganda as will the bribed govt. 8f not I guessyour oneifthe many scared, gullible easy to pick off 50%..
Another 100 billion for vacuous politicians to spend on short-term vanity projects, and p*** up the welfare wall.
No. Tax unearned wealth. Taxing productive people in order to reward rent-seekers is what got us into this mess in the first place.
If you want everyone to be rich you have to allow some people to become very rich. The problem in the UK is not that people get rich, but that the wrong people get rich.
“.Finally, close half the universities and convert the campuses to affordable housing for young families.”
I regularly cycle through a university estate and notice its low utilisation. With more of a “hot desking” approach we could surely achieve the same throughput with half the number of universities. The infrastructure released could be put to useful purpose.
Itdid send 50 million people to Uigher country, which it now rules. Then there’s forgotten Tibet.
Does Macron, Sunak and Lord Cameron realise that NATO is closer to Moscow than the Russians are to Paris?
And that’s because Russia’s neighbours chose voluntarily to join NATO because they know from their own history just how dangerous it is being a neighbour of Russia. Pretty much every single one has been a colony of Russia/the Soviet Union within living memory. I’ll give you Norway as an exception. And the US (Alaska).
It would be surprising if they weren’t in NATO.
Just ask yourself who you’d trust if you lived in Poland. Or Romania. Or the Baltic States …
Since Nato is just a fatter version of the US and since Trump will renege on Nato commitments I’d say Nato is finished. Europe will have to build its own unified army in a defensive structure.. happily, modern Russia is not the warmonger the US is.
All the former USSR independent states are being destabilised through USUK attempted coups: that is what is causing the problems.. When they see that Nato minus the US is a paper tiger they’ll all look to Moscow again..
Rubbish. The US went ballistic over a Monster Raving Loony Party Fancy dress day out in the Capitol. They piled in, took selfies and a few souvenirs, then went home. What do you think Victoria Nuland telling the crowds in Maidan square to revolt, kick out the Russian favouring president, validly elected, shortly before all the shooting started, appeared like to Russia?
You need to read more widely.
..and that while Moscow and Beijing are geographically very distant, The RF and PRC share a huge border? Add in India and you’re looking at nearly half the World! ..the bRICs are building and the West is collapsing..
They should do, Putin and Russia have been telling them for decades, AND that any nearer and it might be war. Oops it was. Curiously I now hear that Russia is winning? But they told me Russia was useless, their army dead, their economy trashed. Don’t tell me they lied about that as well as COVID, experimental vaccines and face masks?
Can one “invade” part of its own terrotory? Isn’t Taiwan a part of China? The UN, US and UK say it is.. and I think the rest of the world does too? Can England invade Yorkshire? They’re a very different lot up there aren’t they? More Viking than Anglo Norman. Will the Scots come to their rescue? Should we Irish get involved? It’s tricky Isn’t it?
It’s called Civil war Liam – you should know, you Irish had one. Ironically my Grandad and Grandma smuggled guns to Ireland for it, well the uprising before it. Thank heavens I won the lottery of life and was born English.
‘we’ and Irish is looking a little strained is it not. How do ‘you’ (plural) feel about immigration right now?
Like you we have our Farrages and Foxes and Murrays and our version of the BNP but they are a small minority, their ranks swelled by the ignorant, the xenophobic, the racist , the propaganda ridden and the scared.. By and large our immigrants have done great things for Ireland. Our national identity is more or less indestructible so, in general we don’t have the fears less self confident nations have.. and we assimilate much better because we celebrate difference.
Blimey, not even slightly smug. Well done!
I recommend watching Netflix A Thousand Goodnights. The Taiwan landscape is marvellous – but you wouldn’t want to try and fight your way into, and over it. Even the Chinese mightn’t have enough men to come out of that unscathed.
Don’t see how much use a warm water port in the Black Sea is, as far as projecting naval power is concerned.. when a relatively powerful country controls the Dardanelles..
China might not do much “invading”, but it does do a bit of “deciding other places are really part of China”.
A bleak article. However, it cannot disguise the fact that Russia is the enemy of the Free World, and probably will be for the remainder of the Century at least.
Is it? No Russian ever called me a gammon, or tried to shame me for being white and working class.
No. My enemies are closer to home.
It’s possible that is one of the luxury beliefs the article is talking about.
Nah, Luxury beliefs are the woke/green ones. They think that the UK can become a pre-industrial society and they still live the life they’ve become accustomed to. Luxury and insane beliefs.
Oh, don’t worry. They’ll still be leading the life they’re accustomed to when you and I are eating grass.
And you think Russia and China are not funding those who shame you for being white? These ideas were produced by our own idiotic culture but as any good enemy does they are both throwing fuel on the fire through social media and funding to the green/woke/other idiots.
So we nuke Russia to silence the Greens/Woke? How about we just ditch them and let Russia/China keep funding them? BUT we keep them off the streets and out of parliament and any other organisation.
Britain is a democracy. It is the British people who decide who is in Parliament, and who isn’t.
Sure, no Russian has done that. They are however ruled by a war-mongering tyrant, and they commit war crimes hand over fist in every conflict they participate in.
No it won’t. It will occupy up to the East bank of the Dnieper, maybe fortify it, then let Europe rot. OR it may gradually pick up more friends in Europe IF Ukraine agrees to extend the pipeline deal so that Hungary, Slovakia, Austria and Italy keep getting Russian gas AND maybe offer it to others. As i said earlier, there’s probably nothing more welcoming in the depth of an Eastern European winter than a gas man with a pipeline full of gas.
https://www.energypolicy.columbia.edu/will-the-ukrainian-gas-transit-contract-continue-beyond-2024/
Also Italy, Austria and Hungary may not like Ukraine shutting off their gas pipe.
Largely twaddle from yet another UnHerd Putin apologist. Despite all the West’s challengers the fact it is holding back Autocrats and Theocrats in Ukraine, the Middle East and the S China sea, having dealt with a disabling pandemic and where remarkable developments in science and technology continue at pace most in the free world all seems forgotten by this young Author who lacks perspective and thinks somehow the time in which he lives is unique.
However he does nail it that the re-emergence of Mr Barnard Castle is essentially an elitist project. It’s like the student phase you can remember of the most ridiculous SWP types who thought it was all about a Dictatorship of the Proletariat and they were it. Barnard Castle suffers from the same inflated self-importance.
Now if Barnard Castle started to talk more about how despite the stagnation of the last 15 years the v rich have still got richer at the expense of the vast majority and he has a plan to correct that one might sit up and listen. But he’s not about to chop off the hand that feeds him is he.
Pointing out western incompetence makes you a Putin apologist, does it JW? Don’t worry Starmer’s got that last paragraph all covered… hasn’t he. Will it be more of the same failed policies though: mass immigration, handing more power to NGOs and continuing to follow Net-Zero policies as the country is heading off threats from Russia and China.
Interesting, isn’t it, that none of us have any idea what Starmer’s policies will actually be, yet we’re going to vote him into power anyway?
One thing is fairly certain: they won’t include any remedy for the fundamental issues that face us. Labour is much too dependent on the votes of the unproductive middle class for them to do anything about the bad incentives in the tax system that are pauperising productive people whilst enriching the freeloaders.
Starmer won’t be ‘voted in’ so much as the Tories ‘voted out’. I suppose the outcome is the same. The rest, as they say, is semantics.
Not really. Put in the Tories and they’ll wreck the grid in 10 years, put in Starmer and he promises to do it next parliament. So you won’t get a second chance to save the grid OR the economy. Assuming Starmer is so stupid as to try and push Net Zero.
Implement his Net Zero grid policies and there will be no ‘productive people’ – modern economies don’t have grids run on windmills and solar panels.
All middle classes are unproductive now HB? Your chippiness occasionally seems performative.
More broadly I suspect Labour won’t immediately do a ‘Mad Liz’ and spook the markets, but that if Starmer gets his 10 years needed for renewal we will see a marked shift in taxes from income to wealth and esp unearned wealth.
All middle classes are unproductive now HB?
Not what I said.
“Now if Barnard Castle started to talk more about how despite the stagnation of the last 15 years the v rich have still got richer at the expense of the vast majority and he has a plan to correct that one might sit up and listen. But he’s not about to chop off the hand that feeds him is he.”
That’s a very difficult question to answer though. We’ve been giving the v wealthy more and more for several decades (and it’s not just the UK though we’re possibly the worst), not just the last 15 years, and we now have little capacity to act as they hold all the power.
One man, one vote. That’s power enough. The only bad news is that the power that is going to wreck us, is electricity, and the lack of it if Starmer does as claimed re the grid in the next parliament.
With the Earth’s magnetic field reducing in strength, there’s a greater likelihood of solar flares & CMEs causing electrical disruption. We had some only in the last week or so.
The Carrington Event, in 1859, showed that the consequences can be great and that was when the Earth’s magnetic field strength was much greater, and electrical grids almost nonexistent.
So aiming to have all domestic Energy delivered to homes by Electricity does appear to be careless, or worse.
Yes and no DR – I think the trend in the v rich getting richer was sustained by sufficient trickle down for a while, but once that trickle becomes a dribble the unsustainability of the situation mounts. Even the v rich don’t want a society that completely fractures.
Trickle down was always a partial story that could be got away with whilst the economy was growing well. As in ‘don’t worry about your share of the pie getting smaller, the pie overall is getting bigger and so is your slice.’ How many times were we told that one back in the 2000s?
Then the pie stopped growing as fast and the slice got actually smaller. But even without that, if your share of the pie is getting smaller and smaller you still end up with nothing eventually.
The v rich don’t want a society that fractures. Buy they can take an awful lot more yet before that happens. People will tolerate a lot.
Yep agree with all that DR
This is such a shallow, tired analysis JW. Stop deflecting.
The root of our problem is that we tax productive activity in order to reward the rent-seeking of the middle class. The consequence is that (mostly) boomer property owners are now sitting on somewhere between £3 and £7 trillion in completely unearned wealth. Anyone who ignores the conventional narrative and just looks around them can see this.
That’s why our public infrastructure is collapsing: too many middle class freeloaders spending unearned wealth gifted to them by the state on imported luxury goods. Not enough producers creating the wealth to pay for it.
The remedy is simple. Tax the houses, not the grafters.
Wrong. They are sitting on property whose value probably remains much the same as when they bought it, but is now measured in printed £’s which have lost value so much they appear to have made homeowners very wealthy. The real cheek is that having devalued the £ , so apparently ‘inflated’ the value of assets. Govt then have the cheek to charge Capital Gains tax to punish you for their inflation. Then when they’ve driven you to your grave, they’ll rob that too.
You can’t weasel out of it like that, I’m afraid.
Any way you look at this, it represents an upward transfer of wealth. Over the past 20 years the wealth gap between property owners and rent payers and wage earners has massively widened.
You know occasionally I think we’ll make a socialist of you yet HB. Marx could have almost written sections of your post above – chapeau.
On a practical point – yes we agree far too much wealth tied up in bricks and mortar, but how do we fairly tax the elderly widower who’s Home has ended up worth £1m etc simply because of location and asset price inflation, and how do they release equity to pay it? Now there are ways and means, and perhaps most important is what we do when they require social care and/or when they die and their kids look to minimise taxes on their potential inheritance. If you are extolling we must tax harder on both of these as the asset wealth was unearned I’m with you. If you are not I’m worried your generally good point only thought through so far.
Oh dear. Here it comes: the poor elderly widow(er) opt-out so beloved of the Guardian. Unearned wealth is unearned wealth. Give it back to the people you took it from. They earned it and they need it more than you do.
If you can’t pay now you can pay when the house is sold.
Not too sure of the Guardian reference, but I know that’s a trigger point for your chippiness (although I didn’t bring it up). As it turns out though I suspect alot of Guardian types would be in alignment with you on your last point – which essentially is potential increase in inheritance tax on unearned asset price wealth. As I suggested I do feel you are showing some v sensible and reasonable socialist tendencies.
You mean fighting to the last Ukrainian to keep Biden Jnrs promises for all that cash that came his way and was recorded on the ‘mythical’ hard drive that was invisible to all anti-Trumpers?
‘ … the unexpected Soviet collapse and the unipolar empire America won by default … ‘ Hardly the US won the Cold War by confronting the USSR around the globe and by raising military expenditure to a level at which the USSR sued for peace.
Britain may be finished but the US is not. The failings of US politics hides the industrial and military strength that remains in the US.
Agreed-writers over here consistently fail to grasp the sheer economic and military heft of the USA and whilst currently being run by incompetents has consistently shown itself to be able to grow and develop in a way that Russia & China can only dream about.
As an American I applaud your belief in our nation, not currently shared by enough of our citizens today. The US has always risen to the challenge in whatever national or international issue needed to be addressed; WWI, WWII, the Cold War, expansion of commerce and democracy, technology, etc. Sadly, I think those days may be behind us and I’m not sure how to get them back. The destruction of American exceptionalism and the erosion of a national identity to rally ’round for the past few decades has resulted in a situation where, as in the UK, few persons under the age of 30 or so are willing to say they would fight for their country or their life’s advantages. I feel we have become a nation of takers across all the socio-economic spectrum with few willing to do for their country. While we may be able to field the most advanced and capable military in the history of civilization, do we have the wherewithal and stewardship to use it appropriately to maintain the West. The thought of our current leadership, on both sides of the aisle, and at all levels of of government and industry, doesn’t help me sleep better..
It’s not what people say today when some PR person asks their opinion that matters. It’s what they actually do if and when the crisis hits.
I’m far more optimistic than you that the instincts of the Americans and British are still sound.
Of course people are lazy and taking things for granted after so many relatively easy, peaceful decades.
I’m wondering if you have a lot of contact with *typical* people of younger generations, or if you are from an older generation and still form your model of the nation based on your past?
I say “typical” because of course there are many exceptional and wonderful people in all generations – but is the proportion of them high enough to carry the rest?
I’d like to believe you are right (ie: I’ll be pleased if you turn out to be). But I’m immersed in so much reality denial where I live, that I am developing somewhat of an allergy to wishful thinking, or to delusional thinking. I’m not saying you are part of that, just explaining why I am wary of confusing what I’d like to believe true with actual reality.
The industrial strength depends of fossil fuels, which, curiously enough, are swamping the US at present. Doomberg substack covers such stuff BUT, if you really want to worry. The US may be building factories, and may be awash with hydrocarbons, BUT the politicians can still stuff the US.
Here’s Doomberg – try Metals and Miners – in 2 parts on the damage the politicians could manage.
https://newsletter.doomberg.com/p/doomcasts
“We are in a situation where everything around us is rapidly changing, to our detriment, and yet our leaders act as if at the end of it, everything will somehow stay the same.”
It’s because we can’t – or don’t want to – imagine what’s on the other side.
I went to Auschwitz a few weeks ago. As we stood next to the blasted remains of the gas chambers there, being told about this conveyor-belt human destruction – one of the group asked: “But didn’t anyone ever struggle? Didn’t they rebel or resist? There were so many of them.”
The guide said that the only time they had any resistance there was from a group of women who had been brought in from Bergen-Belsen and therefore knew more about the nature of these places than the people who had just arrived on cattle trucks from elsewhere.
Most of the people just thought they were going for a shower – unable to comprehend how a civilised people like the Germans could be capable of such things. Off they went willingly like lambs to the slaughter.
It was hard enough to chew over the facts of the Holocaust again at one of its main focal points. At the same time, it struck me that Europe is currently collectively suffering from this exact kind of imagination limitation and that we could – again – sleepwalk into catastrophe.
Then I thought about our leaders and wondered whether they have a specific idea of what’s coming at us down the pike. With most of them, I’d say no – they seem far too dim and pedestrian. But others, maybe.
Then the question is whether sharing your suppositions or knowledge about the future is smart – as the Nazis found out back in the early 40s, the masses are much more malleable when you leave them in their own bubble of naivety.
Yes, the feeling that we are in the back of a car revving up before the edge of a cliff is a very good way of describing the current moment.
In the film ‘Son of Saul’ you also see the story of a group of Sonderkommando (they operated the gas chambers and crematoria for a few months and were then liquidated themselves) who left diaries about their situation and managed to actually escape briefly, before being caught and shot.
Those diaries form the basis of the film.
I can recommend Laurence Rees’s book “Auschwitz” – an absolute must-read generally, but especially if you are thinking of going to visit the place.
Politicians know more than they let on. They just don’t want to scare the horses.
The challenge is to break out of the administration trap that has captured the Western world. The arrival of first computers, and then the web, and then mobile phones means administrators find themselves with more and more data, and so more and more things to do. Because they have the data they believe they have to tell us what to do, for our own good. Benevolent dictators where another piece of data, another form, another regulation will make lives better.
When there was little data, administrators had to rely on the scraps and good sense of the citizens and to do what citizens said was best. Now there is so much data they rely on that they now don’t trust citizens to come to their own conclusions – disinformation and misinformation means different from the administrative consensus.
As a result children who used to freewheel around on bikes (see The Commitments film) are now only permitted to cycle with stabilizers, helmets, knee-pads, in fenced in cycle parks and segregated cycle lanes.
It makes ‘data sense’ but we have also lost something in the process – courage and the ability to take and judge risks. And it front-loads all activities with administration first, making administrators feel like they are in charge of ‘their’ citizens like teachers controlling children, instead of citizens controlling their government.
The conventional political parties are too embedded and fearful of disruption to even start to unpick the administrative state, but we see from Brexit, Podemos, Five Star, Trump, Zelinski, Milei that voters are craving for something or someone – even comedians – to create the chaos to change things. Voters are looking out for someone with courage, who will take their side, and perhaps need more radical solutions like more direct democracy to keep the tendency to administration in check.
I disagree with very little here – but I think it has to be said that Cummings himself is the personification of many of the bad trends you talk about.
Perhaps it is hard for politicians in a social media world to just calm down, and take things at a slower pace. The Conservative Party post 2010 has been hyperactive and the result has been government by initiative rather than policy (which is not to say that all initiatives have been bad), half-baked and rushed ideas and indeed just plain bad ideas. It is telling that the ultimate hyperactive, Liz Truss, made it to the PM job in this hyperactive party.
Cummings himself as I said can’t I think disassociate himself from this hyperactivity. Though his strong point about Ukraine is a good example of something where Western governments, not just the UK, charged in head first having spent two decades making bad decisions on Russia.
Will Keir Starmer do any better? Hard to say, but there’s no shortage of hyperactives in the Labour Party. My own feeling is that the best course now would be for a new government to pick a low number of policy areas, maybe even as low as 3 or 4, and really focus on those and leave the rest for another day. That’s not easy to defend on twitter though. And Starmer is going to have to pick up the pieces in Ukraine.
Interesting perspective.
Luckily I don’t have to watch The Commitments because I am old enough to have spent my own childhood roaming the neighbourhood with friends on bikes, only returning home for an early tea of fishfingers and Smash. There were massively lower levels of cars, higher levels of ‘social trust’ in the monoculture of our provincial town, and no sense of shame for getting a scraped knee. Above all, there was no legal liability and compensation culture, which seemed to emerge during the early Blair years and was never there before.
The Great Homogeniser is the BBC, with over 50% of the market, a guaranteed income, influencing as much by what they don’t say as what they do, they swap jobs within the rest of the Legacy Media, QUANGOs, Climate Activist Groups, Academia and EU connected pressure groups, to form the nation’s culture, and destiny, and reach into the homes of the unthinking, with the reputation earned from decades earlier.
Oh no! Not the Beeb as well? Is nothing sacred?
The planet is. Though why is beyond me it couldn’t give a toss and it will be here until the sun expands and engulfs it. Even the Greeks Gods meddled with human lives, so had SOME interest in us.
Nigel Farrage? Laurence Fox? ..why not George Galloway? He has the experience, the humanity and the commonsense, doesn’t he? I feel sure you have someone in mind? I know: Jeremy Corbyn! ..am I right? Nah, it’s Suella Braverman isn’t it?
Only someone who is prepared to scrap Net Zero. Don’t do that and you can put anyone in power and we’ll be fighting over food in 5 years.
That’s almost 100% of the problem. It’s very hard to think of anyone in Britain who has the skills, courage and character to weather the political storms needed to set a course for change.
So glad you (alone) hot the point.
They wouldn’t know how to interpret data if it jumped up and bit them on the @r5e.
Here’s some simple data anyone can look at.
https://www.energydashboard.co.uk/live
As I post
Demand:31.5Gw
Supply
Windmills: 4.12Gw
Solar: 0.11Gw (Some roofs must be under street lamps)
US Forests (aka Drax): 1.48Gw
Hm that’s almost a whopping 5.7Gw – only another 25Gw or so to find to keep the lights on on a mildish evening. I wonder where that comes from now!
Decarbonise by 2030 anyone?
Even if they could interpret the data, they would still have to be tall enough, have the right colour skin, the right accent, the right footwear (we had a recent plimsoll headline), in fact, nothing that can be ruled out. Even wanting what is best for the nation, like fraccing, is a reason to ditch a potential leader.
There is a sizeable known unknown in the room, millions of third-world aliens who cleave to a violent ideology. This ideology is against every cultural facet of the lives of the indigenous peoples.
The poor and very angry will not only have to fight against external threats, but they will also have a more dangerous threat within, can we survive, not if we put Labour in charge?
There is little doubt the Tories will be routed at ge2024, but that will only set the scene for 5 years of political turmoil.
Expect 3 general elections by 2030 before this political shenanigans is resolved.
Welfarism has destroyed our economy and our values and only by returning to the “Small State” will we bring about the revolution that is so desperately needed.
” the unexpected Soviet collapse and the unipolar empire America won by default”
The US and the West won because they stuck at the task for 40 year. It’s wasn’t an accident or “by default”. Mr. Roussinos is too young to have lived through that period and is lazily parroting a false narrative here.
Accusing Dominic Cummings of “luxury beliefs” and implying that Macron is realistic really is stretching credulity.
The entire article is yet more specious catastrophism.
Excellent article — despite my needing to drink a stiff gin every time Dominic Cummings is cited as an authority. Cummings represents a highly left-brain, and doomed, technocratic response to the decline, not a remedy. (we live in a country where sex education for teenagers includes putting condoms on banannas—but, for heaven’s sake, don’t teach ‘morality’). The idea that we should emulate the governance of California is scary. That state is rich, true, but it shares the UK’s dysfunction — just at a higher income level.
That a civillisation can die suddenly is well attested in history. See this excellent interview with Victor-Davis Hanson where, in the spirit of Roussinos’ excellent piece, he recounts some particularly brutal examples, beginning with the story of the destruction of Thebes and ALL of its inhabitants.
The End of Everything, with Victor Davis Hanson | Uncommon knowledge: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kIkay6YiIhs
It is, perhaps, the pundits’ error to confuse the political weather (changeable and currently cool with showers) with political climate.
Yes, the two main Parties are making heavy weather of politics, but in the longer term political climate they will reform or be replaced.
But the takeaway message is that political weather provided no great predictive power for the political climate. If history is one damn thing after another, politics is one damn event after another – many of which cannot be predicted.
I can tell you what can be predicted. That no modern economy can run on an electric grid powered by windmills and solar panels. Then I can tell you another thing. Destroy the modern grid and hence its economy and you put Britain back to a pre-industrial society. Such a society could not support more than about 10 Million. That leaves (depending upon who you believe) 60- 80 Million who are going to eventually starve or die in the insurrection. Starmer is committed to trying to run the grid without carbon in the next parliament. Even as I post concerns have been raised that the current Grid will start to fail about 2028. Nowhere does that seem to have registered. Even Euronews reporting on it had little effect.
Well, better hope you are one of the 10 million OR use your ONE vote before it happens very wisely and vote for the only party NOT committed to Net Zero – Reform. I find it amusing a doomsday article misses the most obvious disaster facing us.
A rather bleak article. I’m not sure that the tattered raiment of some old testament doom-monger sits very comfortably on Aris’s shoulders, and his beard is far too trim and tidy.
Having said that there is no doubt that the current political settlement is failing people, throughout the West as a whole and not just in the UK. I would argue that this decline has in fact been in motion since the end of WWII and the establishment of the rules based international order which saw the creation of the UN, WHO, WB, NATO, The Council of Europe (eventually to become the EU) – a collection of supranational organisations that placed power and influence beyond normal democratic reach. In conjunction with this, politicians discovered that was easy and convenient to pass responsibility (and therefore accountability) to an ever increasing number of Quangos, NGO’s and regulators, thereby absolving themselves from having to answer tough questions and again putting huge budgets and accountability beyond democratic reach.
Which brings us to the present day, where people complain about the ineffectiveness of the political classes, the fact they all basically look the same, and that nothing ever changes.
From that perspective Cummings analysis that “everything is rotten” is essentially correct. His contention that it cannot be fixed and should be ripped up is open to debate. However, the idea that we should turn to tech philosopher kings for a solution makes little sense; companies are not democratic institutions, and many of these tech types subscribe to some odd anti-human beliefs such as effective altruism, which if enacted in earnest would create a very bleak world indeed.
Goodwins ideas about popular sovereignty stem from his continuous polling of focus groups and his findings that the bulk of voters lean to the left on the economy and the right on culture. The problem with this is that it like Boris’s views on cake: I like having it and eating it. If popular sovereignty is supposed to look like Aristotle’s Polity then maybe that would work, but one would have to surmount the basic flaw in democracy which is that whilst it provides for equality of voice it makes no provision for equality of contribution. This is the cake problem from another angle: I like cake providing someone else pays for it.
I don’t discount the possibility that a new political force could emerge, make headway and gain power with the sort of prospectus necessary to break the current paradigm and effect change. However, such a movement will require a leader who combines the three critical elements for success: vision, charisma and confidence. I can see only one person like this on the global landscape at present and that is Milei in Argentina, and whether he succeeds or not is still very much in the balance. But it could be done.
Excellent analogy. He does have a tendency to hyperbole. In this article he’s touching on something that, rather than lending itself to prophecy, requires a degree of courage and hard-headedness that his words don’t quite capture. For all that, a useful addition to the dialogue as we approach perhaps the most moribund general election in British political history.
Actually it isn’t. This article misses the most dangerous event possible – Net Zero and the destruction of the UK grid. AND that in the next parliament IF Starmer doesn’t drop his commitment to decarbonising the grid by 2030.
There is a reason Russia occupies the Zaporizhzhia nuke plant in Ukraine and why it targets thermal power plants. Modern economies cannot run without power. Starmer & the Greens with Net Zero insanity will ensure that outcome in the UK. Better not be a city dweller if the grid fails for very long. You have only ONE vote to stop that.
I am starting to think that the idea that the British are “already poor and angry, will be poorer and angrier than we have known in many decades” is itself a luxury belief held by depressed Millennial journalists.
We are richer and happier than ever and I see no reason for that to stop. Our wage growth has outpaced inflation ever since the pandemic and GDP growth is currently the second highest in the G7 (double the EU figure). The recently published World Happiness Report 2024 put the UK as the happiest of the large countries ahead of the USA, France and Germany. This also tallies with my experience of living here for 50 years.
Our problems are minimal and our advantages huge: temperate climate, no dangerous animals, no guns and low crime rates, high-trust, law abiding culture, low unemployment and easy business formation, taxpayer funded health service and welfare state, reasonable taxes, cheap and abundant food, easily defensible homeland etc.
We could do more: reduce immigration numbers to bring them in line with housing availability and infrastructure capacity, frack our own natural gas, rein in the wokerati in our public institutions, select fewer wrong-uns as MPs.
But to suggest that we are in some period of steep decline is nonsensical.
All these benefits are a legacy from the past. The heat emitted by a garden wall as the sun is setting.
The Romano-British might have had such an optimism.
The claim that taxes are reasonable is strange given we are the most highly taxed people who have ever lived in the British Isles.
Surely everything is a legacy from the past.
Taxes were higher in 1948 and 1949. The high taxes were caused by the massive public spending on the war just as the current higher tax take is due to the massive public spending on the pandemic. By 1958 the tax take had fallen from 37.2% of GDP in 1948 to 28.9%. The same thing will happen now.
The same is true of NHS waiting lists – they spiked due to lockdowns and will fall back to pre-pandemic numbers in due course.
I don’t believe that there is anything fundamentally wrong with the economy. I see full pubs and restaurants. I was at Badminton last weekend and it was heaving. I went to the Isle of Wight the weekend before and the ferry and all the bars and cafes were packed. The FTSE 100 is at all time highs. Inflation is falling, the banks are cutting mortgage rates, unemployment is almost non-existent.
I don’t think this doom and gloom story is accurate. Personally I don’t lose sleep about border wars between the Ukraine and Russia, Jews and Arabs going at it hammer-and-tongs in the middle east or China imposing itself on Taiwan. All of these things have been going on since I was a boy and none of them really affect England.
I find the global warming hysteria very unconvincing (it has rained non-stop since mid-September). I think wokery is dying a death due to being complete nonsense (and the attention of the activists moving from trannies to Palestine). I don’t believe national pride, patriotism or love of British history and culture has ever diminished among normal people and will assert itself whenever the need arises (as seen at the Queen’s funeral and the Coronation)
I think eventually the government will get control of immigration numbers. I think all western governments will eventually stamp out illegal immigration. I think the Net Zero commitments will end up being quietly shelved. I don’t think the Muslims will take over Britain or grow as a % of the population. I think AI will be a boon. I marvel that scientists in the 1970s were able to increase harvests to be able to make food abundant and cheap and scientists in the 2020s seem to be able to fix the major downside of cheap food – obesity with this new set of Ozempic drugs.
All in all, I think things are pretty good and getting better.
The one big problem you seem to have overlooked is the UK public debt, standing at £2.6 Trillion and rising and the public deficit at £131 Billion.
The deficit not such a problem, but with sky high taxes and rising debt of over 100% of GDP we are in a precarious position going forward.
The level of welfarism is unsustainable
Did you know that Starmer is committed (so far) to ‘decarbonising’ the grid in the next parliament? That means you have ONE vote to stop it. Do you know what destroying the grid by that insanity will do to a modern economy and society?
Here’s Doomberg on what has happened in the Texas and in the US so far.
https://newsletter.doomberg.com/p/inverted-priorities
We in the UK will close another coal & a nuke generator this autumn. Here’s data – IF it doesn’t frighten you, it should.
https://davidturver.substack.com/p/wait-for-the-blackout
Only Reform is NOT committed to Net Zero.
A
The one big problem you seem to have overlooked is the UK public debt, standing at £2.6 Trillion and rising and the public deficit at £131 Billion.
The deficit not such a problem, but with sky high taxes and rising debt of over 100% of GDP we are in a precarious position going forward.
Try being rich and happy IF the lights go out for any length of time. OR the Greens just stop oil. The first is a distinct possibility.
How is it that when I get an article like this and read all the way down I find that loads of posts have been recommended apparently by me? I KNOW I have not recommended any comments under this article before taking the time to read it.
Although I don’t know much about anything, except perhaps which antibiotics to use for which bacteria and a few other moderate level medical snippets; I do wonder about the number of writers who seem to know so much about everything that they can foretell the future so confidently. Even the much hyped “superbugs resistant to antibiotics will take over the world” has largely been just that- hype. Antibiotics and improved medical technologies in general, still save far more lives than not. Mr Roussinos may be right, we may have an impoverishing economic contraction ahead, or more unwinnable military battles, but equally some combination of new technologies and a resilient human spirit may still shine through in pockets at least. And again, all these prophets of doom seem to know what the problems are but not very willing to come up with workable solutions. They just keep criticising everything without proposing anything. Being responsible to your editor to write eloquent prose is a bit different to being responsible to your voters to improve their lives.
Excellent comment, including the points about antibiotics.
Try creating any of them without energy. And that is what the Greens are promoting. Ironically I didn’t see a single reference to that in the article. Doomberg is better for reality, go to its Doomcasts and listen to the Doomcasts with Metals and Miners parts1 and 2 to understand the US Politicians’ death march. Then try this
https://newsletter.doomberg.com/p/cooking-the-books
Drax in focus.
But the politicians are only responsible to the voters in that they may not get elected; the improving lives bit doesn’t figure in the real world.
Politicians spend a great deal of time and effort denying the electorate what they want.
I’m with you on the antibiotics. We’ve been waiting for Superbug-ageddon since about 1999 and nothing’s happened.
We don’t fight antibiotics in **anything like** the same way we did in the 1970s or 80s, yet it’s an assumption that we do fight them like that, that is at the heart of the Superbug fear.
I certainly sympathize with your desire for workable solutions.
They are going to be hard to find. But unless the alarm about the current course is sounded, will anybody search? In other words, I don’t dismiss “the prophets of doom” just because they don’t already offer solutions; it’s still a valuable first step.
How frequent has it been in medicine for reliable diagnosis to precede the development of effective treatments, sometimes by quite a time? Were the first diagnoses worthless unless they came with a working treatment from the start?
If Macron was serious about the possibility of civilization dying he would hold a press conference in Tours and announce a total ban on Muslim immigration and a range of coercive, illiberal measures for integrating the existing population. Shared values are the a priori of liberalism. Unrestrained liberalism is corrosive of shared values.
And also define ‘saving Britain’? If Reform achieved the former, that would create a path dependent future more in line with the past and head off at least one more disjunctural future in the form of the emergence of a whole series of urban caliphate fiefdoms in the heart of Albion. That would qualify as a ‘save’
How do you integrate a moderate, but historically nationalistic Catholicism, and charcuterie and wine, with France’s migrants?
The French love Moroccan food; true Christianity is very close to Islam; but yes, Muslims will.mot drink the wine.. oh wait, they will if it’s non alcoholic.. a few will sneak in a glass of the real stuff. My friend Aziz sneaks in a pint of larger occasionally!
Look up the word stereotype will you?
I fear that the blob will still be clinging on to its luxury beliefs as the new Russian Commissar/Iranian Ayatollah/Chinese Panjandrum (choose any one from three) is installed at Westminster Abbey/Mosque/ Temple.
Check under the bed for Reds!
The Right’s new parties? If only the “Right” had a party.
Something to conserve what is good for society; what made Britain great.
Some sort of a conserve-ative party.
“A cynic would suggest that Europe’s actual strategy in Ukraine is to buy time, at Ukraine’s expense, for our continent’s own rearmament”
Which is what Chamberlain did for Britain in 1938…
Well, if anything. Chamberlain hoped only to buy a specific period of time.
He was worried that by 1940, Germany might well be capable of fighting on a Western and an Eastern Front.
So after March 1939, he seems to have resisted even at the cost of war (and even hoping for it) whereas prior to Munich he’d pursued resistance short of war.
It’s not an entirely analogous situation. In 1938 Germany got what it wanted at little cost. The cost for Russia in Ukraine is much bigger, which may be enough to prevent Russia progressing further with its plans.
Why? Russia hit back at NATO expansion AND the Nazi Azov brigade’s assaults on Russian speakers in the Donbass. Ukraine backed by US (ironically Dems – Victoria Nulands speaking in Maidan Square – imagine Putin at the Capitol Fancy Dress day out the US thinks was an insurrection!) Russia will occupy the Donbas and iF Ukraine doesn’t sue for peace, may just take ALL of Eastern Ukraine. IT will NOT invade Europe. It may even agree an extension to the deal with the West of Ukraine that lets them currently pipe gas across the Ukraine to Hungary, Slovakia, Austria and Italy.
Yet there is at least one modest victory we can console ourselves with before we crash the barriers: the destruction of the Conservative Party, at whose door half the blame for our current state of crisis can be laid.
So, who is responsible for the other half of the blame? It appears that the UK is suffering from the same two changes that afflict the American political system, both of which have emerged in my lifetime: 1) far too many people in govt, elected and appointed, believe we work for them instead of the other way around. The concept of the civil servant is a quaint relic of a bygone era, replaced by a self-serving blob, or Deep State, beholden mostly to its donors and its own enrichment.
2) Far too many citizens believe that every single issue, problem, question, or concern that arises demands govt action. No, it does not. Govt struggles as it is to handle its basic obligations. Attempting to assign it responsibility for climate management or child care or things well outside of its purview is a disservice to the public sector and the taxpayer. No one expects Apple to start making furniture and no one expects Ford to enter the semi-conductor space. The same dynamic applies to govt. It is built to do specific things, not ALL things.
I was a civil servant for many years, sometimes at pretty high level, yet I never ran into this Deep State folk talk of.
IF you don’t recognise them, you are probably one of them. 😉
“Living standards in Britain have been battered by the war in Ukraine” This is an all too common scapegoat. It certainly hasn’t helped, but it’s easy to forget the steady rise of oil prices before war broke out. I suspect the crippling (and more concealed) cost of Britain’s unbridled rush to “Net Zero” is a much greater culprit, not to mention the devastating legacy of Covid lock downs, or the seeming inability to manage immigration levels to match the supply of affordable housing.
Similar alarmism exists in the US – the war is costing too much. However the war effort monies constitute less than 1% of our budget. The problem with the Ukraine war is that Europe’s will to win it seems to be absent. What are they afraid of ? Being bombed ? I have news – Israel’s Iron Dome is a game changer. Rather than hammer Israel for it’s war in Gaza, which is unlike any other war fought in history, Europe should be supporting them 100% and collaborating with them in the interest of proliferating defensive weapons. Why does no one see the brilliance in the shield which protected Israel from Hamas and Iranian rockets ?
You mean the shield that consisted of US, UK, French and Jordanian arms, in addition to Israel’s own, and was conducted over the countries between Israel and Iran (a luxury Europe doesn’t have)?
I also get the distinct impression that Iran wasn’t really trying and a surprise attack might have had a very different outcome.
No it isn’t. Israel’s Nukes were. BUT I agree, we should be supporting Israel to the hilt. They win, and the West has a chance, they lose, and the Islamists will be bombing more innocent young girls in another city in the west. There is no such thing as a phobia re Islam. The fear is rational and real.
Correct AND Net Zero isn’t done yet. Unless Starmer recants, you have only ONE vote to save the UK from grid meltdown.
Have a look at the photo of Cummings under the headline…according to Aris, the country’s very best hope .
Anyone remember Alfred E. Newman from MAD magazine?
You do realise you are being played? They put that picture there to elicit precisely that reaction from people. So good job for doing exactly as expected and judging by appearances. It’s attitudes like this that have got us into the mess we are in. Instead of being concernd with how people look in a picture why don’t you instead be more concerned by the quality of their ideas, ability to execute and leadership?
And before you accuse me of defending Cummings, I don’t give a shit about the guy. More important is that we get away from how people look and be more concerned with what they can do.
Cummings’ own words and actions are enough to condemn him as unfit. Who needs a picture. Anyway, it isn’t going to matter IF Starmer gets in AND does what he says, the Labour party will sink as the grid/economy does. BUT it won’t be pretty. AND we won’t be fighting any foreign war. We may be fighting in the supermarkets for food mind you.
There is a fabulous Great War memorial in Worthing. It’s hundreds of names and its declaration of duty nobly done is itself a memorial to a dead civilisation. It’s worthies and ordinary people themselves summed up in its words and pathos. Our diminution an offence to the glorious dead.
It is a mercy that those who saw it unveiled did not know the folly at the highest levels in British government that was to cause its erection, vividly described by Douglas Newton in The Darkest Days.
Who today will wrap up their sins in one package and have them expiated in one noble act of battlefield sacrifice? Who will, like those men who are now only embodied in the jaunty figure atop the stone column, get out their Bibles and hold them while dying for God, King and Country? Who will die for the American Empire? And will Washington exchange Atlantic City for Clacton-on-Sea?
For ordinary people, the world has always been dangerous. Cholera, childbirth, the lack of food security. The globalism of the past thirty years was the danger, but no-one perceived it. Mr Sunak promises more security, but more liberty?
If the Russians ever look from Ukraine to the UK and from the UK to Ukraine and can only see UKraine – beware! Will Mr Sunak’s security amount to an Anderson shelter?
Destroy the World Wide Web
This author is quite correct. The USA may or may not prevail in its confrontation with China but whatever form the conflict takes, it will not be over quickly. The likeliest outcome is a stalemate much like the first Cold War, which will be fought through technology, economics, and proxy conflicts. Both sides have some advantages. The USA with its allies in Asia and North America have comparable mineral and energy resources to a Russia/China bloc, a disadvantage in manufacturing but not such a decisive one as the USA had over the Axis powers or the Soviets in the 1940’s. China has the same looming demographic problems that Europe does. Leaders can be replaced. Policies can change quickly. Luxury beliefs can and will fail in the face of real adversity. I suspect that we are in for a long slog, because both sides have the resources to sustain a low level conflict for a very long time.
The author has the score right. The US/China conflict is the bell that will truly sound the death knell of globalism. When, not if, China makes its move on Taiwan, the US will sanction it in a similar manner they did Russia and demand NATO do the same, and it won’t matter a lick whether Biden, Trump, or anybody else, is President. As much as Biden railed against Trump as a ‘threat to democracy’, he changed none of Trump’s anti-china measures. They didn’t actually come from Trump. They came from the Pentagon. Obama was an idealist and a pacifist and didn’t listen to the military. Trump was more easily manipulated than he and did, though he turned it into a trade war. Biden has consistently supported the military establishment his entire career. This will happen. Both sides are preparing for it in a totally obvious way. You’d have to be blind to not see it. China is firing missiles at targets designed to replicate American carriers. The US is using Ukraine and Israel to test the effectiveness of their missile defense systems and other weapons. We had all better prepare as best we can because the writing is on the wall for whoever isn’t too blind to see it. This is gonna happen and it’s going to change everything when it does.
The US will very likely endure in some form, and while all Americans will feel the shock from the fall of the globalist regime, the US is in a far better strategic position than others, doomsayers here and elsewhere notwithstanding. I feel bad for the UK and Europe. Europe will be caught in the middle of another superpower conflict with a weak military, little manufacturing capacity, a resource base depleted by earlier industrial eras, and widespread social problems from the importation of millions of Muslim immigrants. Their people are accustomed to ignoring defense budgets while spending extravagantly on luxury beliefs and social programs. Further, unlike the first Cold War, Europe won’t be the primary theater of conflict or be prioritized as such. There will be no Marshall Plan this go round. In a reversal of WWII, the real fight will be in Asia, while whatever happens in Europe is put on the back burner. In a hypothetical conflict with Russia/China, Europe can expect to get about what Ukraine is getting, whatever weapons the Pentagon thinks we can spare and/or we need to test in real combat.
Roussinos seems to be the one author on here who really sees the geopolitical strategic situation and understands the implications of what’s coming down the pipe. Whether the European people decide to keep riding whatever space is left for them on the USA’s coattails, accept the domination of Putin and Xi, or try to find some middle ground between the two, it’s going to require a lot of change and a lot of hard choices. It’s telling that even Macron is obliquely implying the end of the globalized era. For whatever his faults, and they are many, at least he isn’t a complete idiot or an insane zealot for globalist ideologies. I don’t envy his position, nor you folks across the ocean in general.
Yes I mainly agree, although I think the USA will become isolationist rather than confront China.
The USA is perfectly capable of doing very nicely alone… without having to be the world policeman.
Europe is effectively finished. The EU will linger on for some time causing much grief for its member countries but will eventually break up even more than it is already doing.
He says: “The United States, on whose military power our political settlement ultimately depends” …is a sad truth, especially if that power is to be exercised by a nutjob like Trump. The only reason Trump seems “not too bad” is that the Biden Administration is so appallingly bad. The UK is now firmly aligned with a Zionist dominated US: a derranged genocidal state now sets the agenda! The world will remember that I+USUK (pronounced, aptly I and You Suck) aided and abetted the genocide of a defenceless* population and as such will be pariah states for a generation.
If I+USUK were to be economically viable and militarily powerful going forward (they’re not) that might not matter so much but when you throw in the clear financial disaster looming on the Horizon for the dead and dying empires the future looks bleak indeed, not as bleak as the writer portrayed it.. no, far bleaker than that!
Given a choice between Zionists and Hamas, give me Zionists every time. So far I don’t remember any Zionists bombing young girls in Manchester, or abusing them in many UK cities, or bombing the tube. Then maybe Zionists have a better understanding of Geography and realise Manchester isn’t in Gaza or a suburb of Tel Aviv – and Hamas/Islamists don’t.
Hamas could have surrendered and left Gaza at any time in order to save their population. They are like AH in 45 in his Berlin bunker determined as much to have his own population pay. We often forget Hamas could stop all this today.
Not that I agree with all the approach of the IDF or many of the right wing settlers.
(I+USUK) will be pariah states for a generation.
That’s just wishful thinking, I’m afraid. Everybody wants the Hamas death cult gone. Especially the other Arab states in the region. Do you really think Israel would be doing what it is without the tacit endorsement of their neighbours? Of course not.
Halting and reversing mass immigration along with ending vassalage to The United States, getting out of NATO, etc would be a good starting point.
How do you think the exiting from NATO would help the UK? Would your economy support funding your own modern defense system on your own, or would you advocate that the UK not bother?
Excellent summary thanks Aris !
Whatever the problem the answer is never Cummings. A screaming zealot for regime science who was a driving mind for lockdown’s. A hypocrite who ignored the advice he encouraged on others, and despite histrionic posturing about the blob and centralisation wants to replace our sorry democracy with a surveillance tech state. No thanks.
Political leaders have very little power. It’s an illusion. Part of the problem is that the population believes the illusion. It has created unrealistic expectations of what a government can do.
I predict (and maybe hope for) a future where government abandons any involvement in major aspects of life: care for the elderly, education, health, planning, housing, broadcasting. Leaves people and communities to sort themselves out. It’s doing such a terrible job at such high cost, a fully private self-reliant, self-managed system could quite plausibly be better.
Leaving only defence, police and justice run centrally
It might be traumatic, if towns have to go back to organising their own power stations, hospitals or municipal waterworks, but would it be so bad for us to re-learn how to be self reliant?
Sadly, most UK political parties are authoritarian, favouring petty rules to govern our lives over personal responsibility. They believe the government should run or heavily regulate half the economy despite poor results over the last 80 years. Everything will be fine if we put someone more competent in charge or make minor changes.
The fallout of the pandemic on the economy and public services has again shown this approach’s deficiencies.
As a voter, this gives one little choice. As Dominic Cummings very much falls into this view, his party is unlikely to appeal.
Over the past 500 or 600 years, the West has expended significant energy dominating various continents through force and financial means. Historically, populations in regions like Africa and the Americas were vulnerable to Western technological advancements. This dominance was often accompanied by a sense of cruelty and pleasure in oppressing these groups, despite their historical non-interference and helplessness towards the West. Cruelty is sweet poison and we have been drinking for a long time! But there is no fear coming from Africa or Americas today (asking for equality is not hostility). That psychological enjoyment of being dominant over those helpless already is the Achilles heels of the west!
Currently, the West is encountering a formidable competitor in China, who ironically created by the same thinking of the west (we can also manipulate and dominate the Chinese ideas), whose technological and industrial advancements are challenging Western dominance. The West’s ignorance and underestimation of China’s potential have led to a situation where China is surpassing Western intelligence in tech and efficiency in industrialization (i.e. green energy). This fear of China’s rise is compounded by Russia’s quest for revenge following the collapse of its empire—a situation the West mishandled by ignoring/laughing rather than fostering stronger relations. Consequently, the rules of engagement have been completely redrawn, with China now holding the upper hand in this new phase of global power dynamics. As the Chinese calls us now, we have become Decadent!
The only way forward is to make a sincere effort to achieve peace with the populations we have overruled and oppressed at home, even if acknowledging this is icky factor. We must understand that the “divide and conquer” strategies we have practiced will no longer work for groups among us.
Where we lost power of machines of today, we may as well perfect our human relations and the amount of innovation and creativity sitting latent in us. Imagine, if we change the course of narrative to one of unity than division! Ask yourself, who benefits from the division? Not the average person.
Instead, we need to find ways to unify the fractured groups among us, offer reparations and reconciliation, and then come to the table to devise a strategy to withstand the impending economic catastrophe from China and Russia axis. What will not work is the notion that we can dominate our overseas with a divided home.
I do not see any articles taking this tone so that is the problem…China and Russia have been watching us for a long time and they can just sit back a tad longer as we eat our own tails.
Aris Roussinos appears to have a kind of sniffy disdain for culture war issues, which he thinks are far less important than issues of state capacity and a correct analysis and implementation of foreign policy, which are “his” issues. I think he’s fundamentally wrong on this. Both can be important. Ideology certainly is; the Christian takeover of the Roman Empire was not a minor matter of little importance to the world.
Eventually if you keep talking about your society as white supremacist, gammon, toxic, even male over and over again – consistently praising outsider groups over your own population, then people might actually absorb this message. Perhaps they will be more likely to think that British society is intrinsically rotten, or at least view it in a completely cynical way. Are those people going to champion or fight for their state or society in on any level? This is not a mistake the Chinese are making!
The Conservative Party is a winning machine so the task is to wrest back control for the Right. No populism will be affected directly in British electoral policy unless there is (a) another referendum (b) the voting system is changed.
And in the name of compromise, rather have some still slightly soft centre-right Tory government back than a Labour government playing lip-service to identity politics and, worse again, pro-China Net Zero policies that will impoverish the people.
At the core of the UK’s problems is a parasitic welfare state that has 6 million clients and 6 million employees. It is inexorably bankrupting the country, has created a culture which is conformist and anti/enterprise and which supports uncontrolled immigration)which creates more customers and solidifies labours control of the cities. Two interesting facts – Australia has three times as many stock exchange listed companies per capita as the United Kingdom and through the mandatory portable pension scheme has substantial retirement savings, receives dividends and is interested in enterprise and the economy. Is the result is a bias to fiscal conservatism and creativity. Second, 17.6% of British people live in social housing as compared with about 4% in other Anglo Saxon countries. The result is multi generational ghettos, hideous buildings and dependency. All these problems could have been fixed if the Conservatives had carried on with the progressive thatcher programme but they preferred the complacency and incompetence of macmillan and heath. Now it is too late to save the country unless lurking within labour are some courageous progressives who understand what is at stake. The Conservative Party must die.
Living on a diet of baloney is bad for your health. Eat fresh vegetables and plenty of them to remove the blockage. Your friends, if any, will be grateful.
A brilliant analysis. It is no wonder Nigel Farage hovers on the sidelines, content to make good money on TV and play some role in the Trump administration rather than sink beneath the waves in the hulk that is the Conservative Party. It might be time to encourage people to plant backyard gardens and raise rabbits for food as in WW2.
So glad I have my nitrogen cannister and exit bag!