I think there is some truth in what you say here, David. But I don't think it is the whole truth.
You are right that the people themselves in their everyday interactions are no better or worse than they have been before. However, their attitude to government, to the State, is a problem.
"It's awful. They should do something about it!" is a cry that is heard all too often. Most British, and indeed Western, people seem to have mostly lost interest in what the government is actually doing. They want the problems they see around them to be sorted out, but usually don't see their own part in the solutions.
You yourself slipped into this, talking about children's use of mobile phones. Do you really want the State to try and regulate that? Would that not be yet another example of the State usurping the role of parents? And what happens when the socialists (with their new name of "technocrats") note that adults are damaged in the same way by overuse or inappropriate use of their phones?
I do think there is a corrosive national cynicism in Britain, and Starmer is simply reflecting that.
Take net zero as another example. It's utterly mad. But most people seem to just accept it because they are too lazy to challenge it or investigate for themselves whether it is true.
Yes, the State is progressively shutting down democracy. But how many people actually care about that?
As they say, every country gets the government it deserves.
One has to be careful about arguing oneself into a position of extremism. Nobody realistically argues there should not be a State at all. The argument is ultimately about what it is unambiguously necessary for the State to do. I think it is unambiguously necessary for the State to prevent children from accessing pornography - like, say, heroin, or guns. Perhaps that would 'usurp' the role of parents, but only in the same way that the criminal law always 'usurps' public morality in the round.
I agree entirely that there is a 'corrosive national cynicism' afoot, but that is a learned habit which has itself been cultivated by long over-reliance on the State, fostered by the State's own size. That can be unlearned.
I completely agree with your last point, about the over reliance on the State. I also agree that the State does have legitimate tasks.
I can see the argument about phones - but not in relation to pornography. If you take their phones away, they will access pornography on their PCs. And surely social media is causing them more harm in practice than pornography.
So this is really about access to the internet. And stopping kids accessing "unsuitable" content means a requirement for digital id - for everyone. The State is absolutely itching to go down that road.
This is a genuinely complicated subject and it’s important not to jump to conclusions without thinking things through. Are there things which the state should seek to prevent children doing through the criminal law? If we grant that there are (for example, having sex) then we accept that the state has a role in policing morality. Is viewing pornography one of the things that the state ought to police? I think it is. You may differ - but it’s not really credible to stake out an absolutist position on the matter. The sensible question to me is how we restrict children’s access to pornography (and social media in general) while striking a healthy balance with the competing imperatives of freedom and autonomy. Nobody should pretend that is an easy thing to do!
I agree with you about digital ID. It's clear now that those who wish to monitor and control us see 'protecting children' as the path to bringing it it in, which is why we must oppose it utterly.
It surely should be parents and not the state who are responsible for preventing children accessing pornography. The state has destroyed family life because it is families who are the biggest threat to state power.
Totally agree up to the last paragraph. The inauthentic Tory party will do no such thing. The only goal it cares about is its own destruction which it shows spectacular aptitude for. We all just witnessed five years of self sabotage, culminating in a surprise GE that was timed to maximise the impact of its losses.
Demoralisation of the UK population is the name of the game. The colour of the rosette ‘in power’ is irrelevant.
The 'Tory Party' is a vehicle - the men and women in it can change (or change their minds). It may happen, or it may not, but it's still the most realistic proposition.
The Tories are overwhelmingly Blue Blairites who are fully signed up to the idea of a technocratic state. The idea they will support the fight back for a constrained limited state should have vanished the day Truss was defenestrated for challenging the technocratic orthodox even slightly. If after 14 years of Tory failure to roll back what Blair did (this is the party that picked Blairites like Theresa May & Rishi Sunak as leader), what will it take to convince you the Tories are a write-off? They are not in any meaningful sense the opposition. Until the Conservative Party is burned to ash to make room for an actual small-c conservative party, the gallop towards collapse and/or some kind of unpredictable 1642 moment will continue.
They will indeed talk the talk, but talk is cheap. I voted Tory since 1979. Never again & I simply don't care what they say as I don't believe them. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame me.
I would only argue with your use of the word “society”. It is a nebulous, almost meaningless grab bag term. Thatcher was right, I suspect. Better to say communities - families, friends, neighbours, villages, towns. Which have largely, if not quite yet completely, been destroyed by the State. That process goes back a long way, but it has been catastrophically accelerated in the past few decades by a concatenation of forces and events. The great challenge is, how can we restore power and agency to individual communities (not “the community”, which is as empty a term as “society”), so that we can really push back against the ignorance, arrogance and suffocating complacency of the State?
I'm not a great believer in conspiracy theories, preferring the cock-up theory or in this case a class-companion theory. The class-companion theory being that class-companions converge on a similar set of beliefs without conspiring.
You see it at various levels of government. You don't need to coordinate teachers (say) if they have been through the same training process - they all belief the same beliefs. At national level the technocratic bureaucrats don't need 'leading' if they are all going the same way anyway At international level there may be 'international treaties' but they are only set in place when all the class-companions are in agreement.
In the UK the class-companions (Labour MPs, Conservative MPs, the Blob) all share the same beliefs - the flock need to be managed because they are not class-companions. Political policies are often window dressing. So I'm sorry to say that wishing for a Conservative win at the next General Election is just wishing for the class-companion beating to continue.
Unless the future unfolds differently. And that will involve rolling back the attitude and size of the state - I hope it can be achieved without bloodshed (although a new set of class-companions will arise). Could it be that the much maligned 'populism' is a sign of change?
If the economy has gone off the rails, it is due in no small part to the crazy wasting/spending of taxpayers cash during the lockdown era (PPE fraud, Nightingale hospitals, test and trace, unused vaccines, loan fraud etc etc). Starmer wanted more of it - faster sooner harder. He was responsible as much as the Tories. Never mentioned during the election campaigns. No-one held to account. Brush under the rug. The political class did this, and won’t admit they did anything wrong, or are responsible for the whole raft of knock-on effects.
Labour have no motivation to represent the people. Why should they?
Labour were elected by a tiny proportion of the British people - 13% (20% of the electorate). The lowest vote for a government party in the history of universal suffrage.
In 1931 under universal suffrage the government was elected with 11.7 million votes from a population two-thirds the size of today’s.
In 2024 Labour attracted only 9.4 million votes.
The fact that this tiny vote achieved a ‘landslide’ victory in the House of Commons for Labour should raise a few questions about British ‘democracy'.
Starmer knows he doesn’t represent the British people. He never set out to do so. He was selected by the WEF to be their colonial administrator ruling a conquered people. Let’s be clear it is the WEF he answers to.
The WEF is just an international quango that reflects the priorities of the international elite. I don't think Starmer "answers to" them. He is just a rather boring guy with no answers.
The key question is this: how many people actually care about the lack of democracy in the system that, as you rightly say, has given him such power with so little mandate?
Well he is on record as saying that Davos is more important than Westminster, so I think the international elite ARE his priority, not the people of this country, who he quite obviously despises.
I think it must have seemed to people throughout history, when they are on the cusp of change, that everything is wrong and nothing will ever go right. However, we are viewing events through the relatively small window of our own lifespans. The so-called democracies that are currently believed to be our bastions of liberty are increasingly being seen as nothing of the sort.
More and more people are waking up to the fact that the general population is in fact trapped in a slave system that benefits a tiny elite. The idea that we vote for a colour and that translates into a society regulated to our benefit is increasingly being seen for the fraud that it is. The truth that we are being farmed for our labour and our taxes is becoming ever more apparent. It cannot hold.
The entire system of ‘government’ & ‘democracy’ that we have been conditioned to accept as the best system available must be scrapped. It is & always has been a rich man’s con.
My grandparents lived for most of their lives in a village in the Midlands and were what is known as "stalwarts of the community". Over the years (they were born in the 1920s) they participated in amateur dramatics, set up the local newspaper, helped organise the village fete, cleaned the church, volunteered with girl guides, ran the Mothers' Union, participated in the local cricket club (including making the teas), as well as visiting the sick and elderly, and so on. They were not saints, just ordinary, gregarious people who liked to get involved, cared about their community, and were motivated by an old-fashioned Christianity and Toryism (they happened to be lifelong conservative voters, but weren't politically active, and would probably have lived in much the same way had they been staunch socialists). I suppose that none of these activities were state funded and took place with very little state oversight and regulation. Call this a rose-tinted nostalgia if you like (John Major's much mocked evocation of spinsters bicycling to evensong...) but it represents an England that really did exist, not all that long ago, and which was a pretty good place, certainly a better place than today's England, and which has been attacked from without and is rotting from within.
This sort of community activity isn't entirely dead, of course, but it is declining, we can all see it. Why? The reasons are various and open to debate. Off the top of my head I would point to: more heterogenous and atomised communities that do not feel a strong sense of kinship and connection; the growth of technologies that enable people to communicate remotely and to gratify their social needs on on-line platforms, obviating the need to gather together and experience things communally; the decline of Christian belief and practice; the growth of dependence on the state and of state interference in practically every aspect of life; the tawdry, superficial, demoralising culture of hyper-capitalism. Take your pick or add your own.
I feel that it's important for us to actually make things happen in our local communities. Spend less time doomscrolling online. Join groups. Found groups. Put on plays. Coach a football team. Campaign to keep the local library open. Volunteer with deserving local causes. Pick litter. Befriend the elderly. Read to children. Whatever fits your interests and skills. These things are real, they help to make things better and to stave off the despair.
It is indeed the State, a.k.a. government (local or national) which pushes Society into a Black Hole. One blatant example: the propaganda for '15-minute-cities'. Well, from my "lived experience (local)", I know that we had just that, until about 20 years ago this was successively dismantled by the State in the name of 'progress', of 'centralisation'.
As for having a Bandstand - yes, we also had that, together with a Park Ranger's cottage and even an open-air swimming pool ... dismantled, neglected, demolished and filled in because maintaining it was 'too expensive', by the same ideologues who are now sitting in No 10 ...
A 'societal blackhole' is Starmer's justification for every tyrannical policy his government will pursue/ make legal. What is a 'blackhole' but something dark and bottomless...his government will always never quite manage to make it 'go away', 'disinfect it'..any other similar descriptor.
What his government could do is expand the 'societal black hole' so that the economy and society are 'sucked in' to an irreversible spiral of decline. It assumes a 'magnetic force', a 'pull' that no Party can nullify.
We can see the 'drag' now, it becomes ever more visible and unviable. It proceeds in some form of rhythmic 'lockstep' with other parts of the West. People will either accept and adapt to being 'sucked in'/'swallowed up' or they will resist and form communities from which a bulwark of sorts is created beyond the reach of the 'blackhole'. Or, the imagery of the 'societal blackhole' is replaced by something more palpable because it has lost its impact on society..in the UK at least.
[I think the mention of a 'black hole' mines quite dark thoughts!]
I think society is part of the problem because a majority have accepted the state propaganda. Hitler apparently told the German people - everything I am, I am through you alone. It is the same now throughout the west.
I think there is some truth in what you say here, David. But I don't think it is the whole truth.
You are right that the people themselves in their everyday interactions are no better or worse than they have been before. However, their attitude to government, to the State, is a problem.
"It's awful. They should do something about it!" is a cry that is heard all too often. Most British, and indeed Western, people seem to have mostly lost interest in what the government is actually doing. They want the problems they see around them to be sorted out, but usually don't see their own part in the solutions.
You yourself slipped into this, talking about children's use of mobile phones. Do you really want the State to try and regulate that? Would that not be yet another example of the State usurping the role of parents? And what happens when the socialists (with their new name of "technocrats") note that adults are damaged in the same way by overuse or inappropriate use of their phones?
I do think there is a corrosive national cynicism in Britain, and Starmer is simply reflecting that.
Take net zero as another example. It's utterly mad. But most people seem to just accept it because they are too lazy to challenge it or investigate for themselves whether it is true.
Yes, the State is progressively shutting down democracy. But how many people actually care about that?
As they say, every country gets the government it deserves.
One has to be careful about arguing oneself into a position of extremism. Nobody realistically argues there should not be a State at all. The argument is ultimately about what it is unambiguously necessary for the State to do. I think it is unambiguously necessary for the State to prevent children from accessing pornography - like, say, heroin, or guns. Perhaps that would 'usurp' the role of parents, but only in the same way that the criminal law always 'usurps' public morality in the round.
I agree entirely that there is a 'corrosive national cynicism' afoot, but that is a learned habit which has itself been cultivated by long over-reliance on the State, fostered by the State's own size. That can be unlearned.
I completely agree with your last point, about the over reliance on the State. I also agree that the State does have legitimate tasks.
I can see the argument about phones - but not in relation to pornography. If you take their phones away, they will access pornography on their PCs. And surely social media is causing them more harm in practice than pornography.
So this is really about access to the internet. And stopping kids accessing "unsuitable" content means a requirement for digital id - for everyone. The State is absolutely itching to go down that road.
This is a genuinely complicated subject and it’s important not to jump to conclusions without thinking things through. Are there things which the state should seek to prevent children doing through the criminal law? If we grant that there are (for example, having sex) then we accept that the state has a role in policing morality. Is viewing pornography one of the things that the state ought to police? I think it is. You may differ - but it’s not really credible to stake out an absolutist position on the matter. The sensible question to me is how we restrict children’s access to pornography (and social media in general) while striking a healthy balance with the competing imperatives of freedom and autonomy. Nobody should pretend that is an easy thing to do!
I agree with you about digital ID. It's clear now that those who wish to monitor and control us see 'protecting children' as the path to bringing it it in, which is why we must oppose it utterly.
I agree but we’re probably already there with a set up akin to national surveillance that doubles as a digital ID.
It surely should be parents and not the state who are responsible for preventing children accessing pornography. The state has destroyed family life because it is families who are the biggest threat to state power.
Totally agree up to the last paragraph. The inauthentic Tory party will do no such thing. The only goal it cares about is its own destruction which it shows spectacular aptitude for. We all just witnessed five years of self sabotage, culminating in a surprise GE that was timed to maximise the impact of its losses.
Demoralisation of the UK population is the name of the game. The colour of the rosette ‘in power’ is irrelevant.
The 'Tory Party' is a vehicle - the men and women in it can change (or change their minds). It may happen, or it may not, but it's still the most realistic proposition.
The Tories are overwhelmingly Blue Blairites who are fully signed up to the idea of a technocratic state. The idea they will support the fight back for a constrained limited state should have vanished the day Truss was defenestrated for challenging the technocratic orthodox even slightly. If after 14 years of Tory failure to roll back what Blair did (this is the party that picked Blairites like Theresa May & Rishi Sunak as leader), what will it take to convince you the Tories are a write-off? They are not in any meaningful sense the opposition. Until the Conservative Party is burned to ash to make room for an actual small-c conservative party, the gallop towards collapse and/or some kind of unpredictable 1642 moment will continue.
Or the Party will reinvent itself. It has done it before.
They will indeed talk the talk, but talk is cheap. I voted Tory since 1979. Never again & I simply don't care what they say as I don't believe them. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame me.
The 49 days it took to oust Liz Truss says otherwise.
That was then. This is now. Everything to play for.
Exactly so
I would only argue with your use of the word “society”. It is a nebulous, almost meaningless grab bag term. Thatcher was right, I suspect. Better to say communities - families, friends, neighbours, villages, towns. Which have largely, if not quite yet completely, been destroyed by the State. That process goes back a long way, but it has been catastrophically accelerated in the past few decades by a concatenation of forces and events. The great challenge is, how can we restore power and agency to individual communities (not “the community”, which is as empty a term as “society”), so that we can really push back against the ignorance, arrogance and suffocating complacency of the State?
Yes, point taken.
I'm not a great believer in conspiracy theories, preferring the cock-up theory or in this case a class-companion theory. The class-companion theory being that class-companions converge on a similar set of beliefs without conspiring.
You see it at various levels of government. You don't need to coordinate teachers (say) if they have been through the same training process - they all belief the same beliefs. At national level the technocratic bureaucrats don't need 'leading' if they are all going the same way anyway At international level there may be 'international treaties' but they are only set in place when all the class-companions are in agreement.
In the UK the class-companions (Labour MPs, Conservative MPs, the Blob) all share the same beliefs - the flock need to be managed because they are not class-companions. Political policies are often window dressing. So I'm sorry to say that wishing for a Conservative win at the next General Election is just wishing for the class-companion beating to continue.
Unless the future unfolds differently. And that will involve rolling back the attitude and size of the state - I hope it can be achieved without bloodshed (although a new set of class-companions will arise). Could it be that the much maligned 'populism' is a sign of change?
If the economy has gone off the rails, it is due in no small part to the crazy wasting/spending of taxpayers cash during the lockdown era (PPE fraud, Nightingale hospitals, test and trace, unused vaccines, loan fraud etc etc). Starmer wanted more of it - faster sooner harder. He was responsible as much as the Tories. Never mentioned during the election campaigns. No-one held to account. Brush under the rug. The political class did this, and won’t admit they did anything wrong, or are responsible for the whole raft of knock-on effects.
Indeed.
Labour have no motivation to represent the people. Why should they?
Labour were elected by a tiny proportion of the British people - 13% (20% of the electorate). The lowest vote for a government party in the history of universal suffrage.
In 1931 under universal suffrage the government was elected with 11.7 million votes from a population two-thirds the size of today’s.
In 2024 Labour attracted only 9.4 million votes.
The fact that this tiny vote achieved a ‘landslide’ victory in the House of Commons for Labour should raise a few questions about British ‘democracy'.
Starmer knows he doesn’t represent the British people. He never set out to do so. He was selected by the WEF to be their colonial administrator ruling a conquered people. Let’s be clear it is the WEF he answers to.
The WEF is just an international quango that reflects the priorities of the international elite. I don't think Starmer "answers to" them. He is just a rather boring guy with no answers.
The key question is this: how many people actually care about the lack of democracy in the system that, as you rightly say, has given him such power with so little mandate?
Well he is on record as saying that Davos is more important than Westminster, so I think the international elite ARE his priority, not the people of this country, who he quite obviously despises.
I think it must have seemed to people throughout history, when they are on the cusp of change, that everything is wrong and nothing will ever go right. However, we are viewing events through the relatively small window of our own lifespans. The so-called democracies that are currently believed to be our bastions of liberty are increasingly being seen as nothing of the sort.
More and more people are waking up to the fact that the general population is in fact trapped in a slave system that benefits a tiny elite. The idea that we vote for a colour and that translates into a society regulated to our benefit is increasingly being seen for the fraud that it is. The truth that we are being farmed for our labour and our taxes is becoming ever more apparent. It cannot hold.
Agreed.
The entire system of ‘government’ & ‘democracy’ that we have been conditioned to accept as the best system available must be scrapped. It is & always has been a rich man’s con.
Don’t take my word for it re the WEF controlling governments.
Here’s Klaus Schwab 7 years ago boasting about ‘penetrating cabinets’
https://youtu.be/uOuLQDRCexs?si=Wg9aVjUr2bYHCrOj
My grandparents lived for most of their lives in a village in the Midlands and were what is known as "stalwarts of the community". Over the years (they were born in the 1920s) they participated in amateur dramatics, set up the local newspaper, helped organise the village fete, cleaned the church, volunteered with girl guides, ran the Mothers' Union, participated in the local cricket club (including making the teas), as well as visiting the sick and elderly, and so on. They were not saints, just ordinary, gregarious people who liked to get involved, cared about their community, and were motivated by an old-fashioned Christianity and Toryism (they happened to be lifelong conservative voters, but weren't politically active, and would probably have lived in much the same way had they been staunch socialists). I suppose that none of these activities were state funded and took place with very little state oversight and regulation. Call this a rose-tinted nostalgia if you like (John Major's much mocked evocation of spinsters bicycling to evensong...) but it represents an England that really did exist, not all that long ago, and which was a pretty good place, certainly a better place than today's England, and which has been attacked from without and is rotting from within.
This sort of community activity isn't entirely dead, of course, but it is declining, we can all see it. Why? The reasons are various and open to debate. Off the top of my head I would point to: more heterogenous and atomised communities that do not feel a strong sense of kinship and connection; the growth of technologies that enable people to communicate remotely and to gratify their social needs on on-line platforms, obviating the need to gather together and experience things communally; the decline of Christian belief and practice; the growth of dependence on the state and of state interference in practically every aspect of life; the tawdry, superficial, demoralising culture of hyper-capitalism. Take your pick or add your own.
I feel that it's important for us to actually make things happen in our local communities. Spend less time doomscrolling online. Join groups. Found groups. Put on plays. Coach a football team. Campaign to keep the local library open. Volunteer with deserving local causes. Pick litter. Befriend the elderly. Read to children. Whatever fits your interests and skills. These things are real, they help to make things better and to stave off the despair.
Great comment.
It is indeed the State, a.k.a. government (local or national) which pushes Society into a Black Hole. One blatant example: the propaganda for '15-minute-cities'. Well, from my "lived experience (local)", I know that we had just that, until about 20 years ago this was successively dismantled by the State in the name of 'progress', of 'centralisation'.
As for having a Bandstand - yes, we also had that, together with a Park Ranger's cottage and even an open-air swimming pool ... dismantled, neglected, demolished and filled in because maintaining it was 'too expensive', by the same ideologues who are now sitting in No 10 ...
You are right.
A 'societal blackhole' is Starmer's justification for every tyrannical policy his government will pursue/ make legal. What is a 'blackhole' but something dark and bottomless...his government will always never quite manage to make it 'go away', 'disinfect it'..any other similar descriptor.
What his government could do is expand the 'societal black hole' so that the economy and society are 'sucked in' to an irreversible spiral of decline. It assumes a 'magnetic force', a 'pull' that no Party can nullify.
We can see the 'drag' now, it becomes ever more visible and unviable. It proceeds in some form of rhythmic 'lockstep' with other parts of the West. People will either accept and adapt to being 'sucked in'/'swallowed up' or they will resist and form communities from which a bulwark of sorts is created beyond the reach of the 'blackhole'. Or, the imagery of the 'societal blackhole' is replaced by something more palpable because it has lost its impact on society..in the UK at least.
[I think the mention of a 'black hole' mines quite dark thoughts!]
Indeed!
I think society is part of the problem because a majority have accepted the state propaganda. Hitler apparently told the German people - everything I am, I am through you alone. It is the same now throughout the west.
Vale Park.